chance to go back to the subject which was plainly uppermost in his mind.

As for Miss Susan, remembering her one experience in love-making, recalling Donald's quiet, matter-of-fact affection, his tranquil yielding to circumstances, she felt this intensity on the part of Joseph with a certain quickening of the heart. "Oh, I wish he would n't," she said to herself, "for this will spoil everything, though we've been friends all these years." She was almost ready to cry with the trouble and worry of it; and indeed, when at last, damp and tired, she reached home, and sat down in the dining-room to her solitary cup of tea, the tears really did stand in her kind eyes. In her thoughts she went over Mr. Lavendar's looks and words in the coach, and the result of her meditations was that another Saturday afternoon's practice passed, and "Miss Susan was a little under the weather, and could n't come." That the robust Susan Carr should be indisposed began to be food for comment in Old Chester. Alicia Drayton, as she walked down to the church to go over the hymns for the next day with Mr. Lavendar, wondered a little about it. "Why, this is the third time she's missed the practicing!" said Lyssie to herself; and then an absent look came into her eyes, and she thought no more about Miss Susan.

The rain of the day before had washed the July dust from the roadside weeds and grasses; the trees, all in a shining rustle with the fresh wind, made pretty shadows on the path, and the lines of moss between the flagstones were like stripes of green velvet. The very air seemed washed and shining and full of the Saturday afternoon feeling, — the feeling of order and cleanliness and readiness for the morrow.

Alicia, with her green singing-book under her arm, glanced along the river road. "Will he come before we begin to practice?" she said to herself. Ah, what chance have elderly ladies with

headaches for sympathy when such questions come into a girl's mind? She stood a moment on the threshold of the church, looking out at the sunshine, and hearing Mr. Lavendar up in the organ loft pulling out the stops and running his fingers along the keys.

"Miss Susan is not very well, Mr. Joseph," she said, as she pushed open the little baize door of the loft, "and she can't come this afternoon, so you and Mr. Tommy and I will have to practice by ourselves;" and then she nodded pleasantly at the other member of the choir, who, with his spectacles on, was poring over a manuscript of music.

"Dear, dear, I am sorry to hear that she is indisposed," said Mr. Joseph; "exceedingly sorry. Will you be so kind as to say so to her, Lyssie, if you see her this evening; say I had meant to call, but, as she is indisposed, I will not intrude?" But he sighed as he spoke, and then he pivoted round on the long wooden bench to his organ; his feet, searching for the keyboard, made a muffled sound in the listening silence of the church. Down below, the cheerful red cushions on the seats were all turned over to preserve their color, and the chancel was ghostly with white covers on the altar and the reading-desk; there was the scent of Prayer Books and dust, with strange, wandering hints of flowers which had lain here with the dead all these years, or denied death on Easter mornings.

From a little round window high in the wall behind the organ a bar of yellow sunlight shot down into the dusk : it threaded its noiseless way among the singing-books upon the benches; it struck a sudden sparkle from the ring on Mr. Tommy's thin veined hand as he held his music-book close to his eyes; and it shone through the soft hair about Alicia Drayton's forehead, turning it into a delicate aureole of light around the shadowed seriousness of her face. She had been listening for a hand on the outer

door of the church, a step on the graveled path, and she had even suggested timidly to Mr. Lavendar that-that perhaps the church door was locked, and perhaps some one was trying to get in? Mr. Lavendar said mildly, "You came in last, Lyssie; did you lock it? Then of course it is n't fastened. Miss Susan can get in, if she changes her mind and wishes to come."

found something new. But he said to himself that he was not in love with her. Certainly, his appreciation of her sweet young womanhood was of the nature of his appreciation of a limpid morning in spring, or of a star, or of the pathos of innocence and happiness in a child's face, rather than that more selfish appreciation which comes when a man is falling in love. Roger Carey was profound

Yet when Roger Carey did slip in, closing the door gently behind him, and starting the muffled echo of the empty church, Alicia, singing, the sun making that powdery halo around her head, did not hear him, and he looked up and saw her, and the young fellow's clear, positive, honest eyes filled suddenly with a reverence which the church itself had not brought into them.

When Lyssie saw him, there was a tremor in her pretty voice, which is natural enough in any nice girl's voice when she finds that somebody is listening to her. This, not being a conceited man, was the explanation Roger Carey made to himself while he waited for the practicing to end. He sat in one of the square pews, which had a straight, uncomfortable back covered with prickly red cloth, and a door whose lifting brass catch had doubtless invited many of those idle fingers for which Satan, even in Old Chester, finds some mischief still. Roger Carey's fingers began to lift it now, and then to let it fall with a clatter, while he wished Mr. Lavendar would not try "We praise thee, O God!" for a fifth time, and while he thought, smiling to himself, of this or that which Miss Alicia Drayton had said to him. Her quaint truthfulness, her enchanting modesty in matters of opinion, her wisdom unto that which was good, her simplicity concerning evil, had delighted him as he had come to know her better. When he watched her or listened to her, it was with the pleasure of the man who has VOL. LXXIII. NO. 436.

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He was impatient for the practicing to cease; he liked to hear her pretty voice, but he liked better to see her and to hear her talk. As he sat waiting for her, smiling now and then at some thought of her, and playing with the little brass catch on the pew door, he read the inscriptions on the two or three tablets on the walls, and that upon the brass plate in the chancel, in memory of the first minister of the church, his name, his virtues, and the exhortation to "mark the perfect man," and after that those two dates which bound with solemn meaning the weakest or the meanest of lives, the dates of birth and death. The empty church, the silent tread of the light from the window in the organ loft up the aisle and across the chancel, the moving shadows of the leaves outside, and, through all, Alicia's voice, "O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded," - all these things, the scene, the waiting, the old and beautiful words, fell into the young man's heart with a strange touch of melancholy, and his face was serious when he met Lyssie at the door and they went out into the

sunset.

It was pretty to see these two young people together, and to mark the change that each produced in the other. Lyssie's shy anxiety, the anxiety that a girl just beginning to fall in love feels, and does not understand, - a desire to seem her best, to please, to win, all the little humility that, when she is alone, makes

her sigh and say to herself that she means to try to improve, all that was gone in a flash, and instead there was a soft arrogance, a charming girlish imperiousness, and such joyousness!

Roger Carey seemed to have acquired all that Lyssie put aside; his impulsive dogmatism and careless good nature and frank criticism were lost, and in their place was a humbleness which was new to him, and an enchanting sense of delight in the sweetness of this young creature; he wanted to hear her talk, to see her smile, to protect her, to care for her. It was rather the feeling of the discoverer than the more serious joy of being himself discovered.

They did not go home at once, but wandered about in the churchyard and talked to each other. Once they grew so earnest that they stopped, and Lyssie sat down on an old tomb that stood like a low granite table under the shadow of a tulip-tree. She wore a little grayand-white-striped gingham, and she had a bunch of laburnum in her belt. She took off her hat, and sat leaning her open palm on the lichen-covered name, looking up at Roger Carey with candid eyes of that color which lies on distant hills, and is neither blue nor violet. The

sunshine touched her face and dress; a leaf shadow back and forth across swung her hand, and over the assertion of endless love and grief on the old stone; and there they talked and listened, and looked and lived.

It was the usual talk: the girl's tentative expressions of opinion on great subjects; the man's instant acquiescence in them; the mutual astonishment at their unity of thought.

"You think so, too? Why, how strange! I've always felt that."

“You would rather see Egypt than any other country in the world? Why, how odd that is! Do you know, I've always said I'd rather go to Egypt than any place else."

"You really feel that a lie is the only thing you could n't forgive, Mr. Carey? Well, if I could n't forgive everything, - forgiveness is n't hard to me,— why, I think I should draw the line at a lie!"

Ah, well, well, it is the old, beautiful story. We laugh at the conviction of the glorious and harmonious future; the two souls and the single thought, built up in a moment, because views of Shakespeare and the musical glasses coincide; but all the same, it is a divine time and a true time, and it does survive!

Margaret Deland.

EDWIN M. STANTON entered President Lincoln's Cabinet in January, 1862, on the retirement of Mr. Cameron from the war office. He had previously been a member of the Cabinet of Mr. Buchanan, and continued in that of Mr. Johnson after Mr. Lincoln's death, until driven from it by the President in his quarrel with Congress over the results of the war. Although he was conspicuous in each of these Cabinets, still his fame and place in history will rest upon

his course and conduct in that of Mr. Lincoln, which covered substantially the entire period of the war.

The call of Stanton to office by Mr. Lincoln was a surprise in politics, and a departure from all precedent. He was a lawyer, not a politician, having attained prominence in his profession as a man of learning and power, with only two months' experience in the administration of public affairs, and that the limited experience of law officer in Mr. Buch

anan's Cabinet. He was not in political affiliation with those who had placed Mr. Lincoln in power, and on the stump had opposed his election with some bitterness, while he had given no evidence of a change of views. Why then was one called into the council of the President, at that critical moment, who was neither his political nor personal friend, nor yet distinguished for long public service? He was summoned to take up the work of this very important department of the government, in the most serious crisis that had yet overtaken it, because he was a Union man, who had shown great energy, power, and courage in its behalf, regardless of personal or political consequences, during his brief service in the demoralized and paralyzed Cabinet of Mr. Buchanan. Mr. Lincoln needed and commanded the help of every Union man, wherever found. He had met and had been associated with Mr. Stanton professionally before his election, and had had occasion to note his great energy and will power joined with large. capacity and brain force. He knew, too, that this man had been called into Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet to meet an emergency when it was in extremis, at the solicitation of Mr. Black, who, while attorney general, had employed him in some of the most important litigations in which the United States had been involved. What Stanton had done and had shown himself capable of doing had justified his appointment in President Buchanan's Cabinet, and was likewise President Lincoln's justification in summoning him to like service in his. ther Lincoln nor Stanton thought of politics in the invitation or acceptance.

Nei

As a personal friend of Mr. Stanton, and a political friend of Mr. Lincoln, I had taken the former by the hand, on the night after he had accepted place under Mr. Buchanan, and had thanked him for having done so. I called upon Mr. Lincoln as soon as it became known that Stanton had accepted an appoint

ment in his Cabinet, and congratulated him on having secured so valuable a coadjutor. Mr. Lincoln replied that it was an experiment which he had made up his mind to try, and that whenever a Union man was willing to break away from party affiliations, and stand by the government in this great struggle, he was resolved to give him an opportunity and welcome him to the service. He remarked that he had been warned against this appointment, and had been told that it never would do; that "Stanton would run away with the whole concern, and that he would find he could do nothing with such a man unless he let him have his own way." The President then told a story of a minister out in Illinois who was in the habit of going off on such high flights at camp meetings that they had to put bricks in his pockets to keep him down. "I may have to do that with Stanton; but if I do, bricks in his pocket will be better than bricks in his hat. I'll risk him for a while without either."

There had been much criticism of the management of the War Department before Mr. Cameron had left it, and a committee had been appointed by Congress to investigate its doings. The retirement of Mr. Cameron was so closely connected, in point of time, with these criticisms freely made in Congress that at first it was generally supposed they had had much to do with it. Although there was no foundation for this suspicion, yet two members of the committee having this investigation in charge, Elihu B. Washburn and I, received from Mr. Stanton an invitation to call at the War Department the next morning after his appointment. We found him with his coat off, busy, and surrounded with papers, endeavoring to bring into his notions of order the somewhat demoralized condition into which things had fallen. "I want a little conference with you, gentlemen, before I begin," was the direct and rather abrupt salutation we received almost as soon as seated. "I am surrounded with the as

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sistants and employees of the régime I am called upon to succeed. Their experience will be valuable to me; the aid of some of them seems now indispensable. But before I move I want to know from you if there is anything the matter with any of them." He then went on to speak of certain men in particular. "That gentleman in the adjoining room I have known myself for many years; he has no equal in his specialty. I cannot spare him unless I must. My own confidence in him would suffice, if I alone were to be consulted in this matter. But it is not enough that I do not doubt his honesty. The public must have confidence in him, also. I have no time to spend in vindicating him against false charges. It is as important that the public believe in him as that I do; and if they do not, he must go before I begin, for I am to open new books. Now, gentlemen, what do you say? Does anything appear against this man, in your investigations?" And so on with several others holding prominent positions in the department. This was Stanton's ideal of fitness and usefulness in the public service. He left all past disputes behind him, and left behind him, too, all debatable characters.

He was of as strange a make-up as Mr. Lincoln himself, and yet no two men were more unlike in all that enters into the character of men. The one was gentle-mannered, tender-hearted, trustful, hopeful; the other was brusque in his intercourse and stern in his dealings with others, on his guard at all times, and prone to despond. The one sorrowed over the calamities of the war; the other sorrowed that more was not achieved by it. Yet these two men, so wholly unlike in ways of work and thought, walked together arm in arm, each sustained in the load he carried by the arm he leaned on, and helped on his way by the caution and counsel of him who walked by his side. Still, there never was a moment when official rela

tions were lost sight of, or command and obedience forgotten. There were doubtless occasions when there were sharp differences of opinion on points of administrative policy, in which sometimes the chief yielded to the subordinate; but it was yielding to the force of reason and argument, and not to that of an imperious will. These occasions were greatly exaggerated, both in numbers and importance, by the gossip of the day, and perhaps not a little by Mr. Lincoln's own playful remark that he "had no influence with this administration,". -an administration whose history has demonstrated that he was in truth its master, from the first to the last of its existence. But his standpoint and that of the Secretary were not in the same angle of vision, and consequently the relations of different objects to each other could with difficulty be seen in the same proportions. Mr. Lincoln was commander in chief not of the army alone, but also of the political forces which controlled the republic; and the guidance of the one was as necessary to success as that of the other. On the other hand, Mr. Stanton knew nothing of politics and would have none of them, and in the study of a campaign took no account of public opinion. It was inevitable, therefore, that often considerations not to be ignored by Mr. Lincoln had no weight with his Secretary in determining the policy of the war office. Hence, at times there were short antagonisms; but Mr. Lincoln, when he could not be convinced, always in the end won a cheerful acquiescence. Such an occasion was that when the President, yielding to special political considerations, had issued an order allowing the officials of a particular congressional district, short of its quota of men, to fill it out by enlistments of such rebel prisoners as, desirous of abandoning the enemy, were willing to take the oath of allegiance and enlist in our army. Stanton, looking at it solely from a mili

Mr.