peers. For once medievalism and modernism had a common stand-point. The lanceolate windows, the time-eaten arch-stones and chamfers, the orientation of the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed. The defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire.

To-day the large side-doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers' operations, which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick oak, black with age, and polished by the beating of flails for many generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion. Here the shearers knelt, the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms, and the polished shears they flourished, causing them to bristle with a thousand rays strong enough to blind a weak-eyed man. Beneath them a captive sheep lay panting, increasing the rapidity of its pants as misgiving merged in terror, till it quivered like the hot landscape outside.

This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The citizen's Then is the rustic's Now. In London, twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in Paris, ten years, or five; in Weatherbury, three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase. In these nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity.

So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in harmony with the barn.

The spacious ends of the building, answering ecclesiastically to nave and chancel extremities, were fenced off with hurdles, the sheep being all collected in a crowd | within these two inclosures; and in one angle a catching pen was formed, in which three or four sheep were continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without loss of time. In the background, mellowed by tawny shade, were the three women, Maryann Money, and Temperance and Soberness Miller, gathering up the fleeces, and twisting ropes of wool with a wimble for tying them round. They were indifferently well assisted by the old maltster, who, when the malting season from October to April had passed, made himself useful upon any of the bordering farmsteads. Behind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men, to see that there was no cutting or wounding through carelessness, and that the animals were shorn close.

A Thunder-storm.

Bathsheba's property in wheat was safe for at anyrate a week or two, provided always that there was not much wind. Next came the barley. This it was only possible to protect by systematic thatching. Time went on, and the moon vanished, not to reappear. It was the farewell of the ambassador previous to war. The night had a haggard look, like a sick thing; and there came finally an utter expiration of air from the whole heaven in the form of a slow breeze, which might have been likened to a death. And now nothing was heard in the yard but the dull thuds of the beetle which drove in the spars, and the rustle of the thatch in the intervals.

A light flapped over the scene, as if reflected from phosphorescent wings crossing the sky, and a rumble filled the air. It was the first arrow from the approaching storm, and it fell wide.

The second peal was noisy, with comparatively little visible lightning. Gabriel saw a candle shining in

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Bathsheba's bedroom, and soon a shadow moved to and fro upon the blind.

Then there came a third flash. Manoeuvres of a most extraordinary kind were going on in the vast firmamental hollows overhead. The lightning now was the colour of silver, and gleamed in the heavens like a mailed army. Rumbles became rattles. Gabriel from his elevated position could see over the landscape for at least half-a-dozen miles in front. Every hedge, bush, and tree was distinct as in a line engraving. In a paddock in the same direction was a herd of heifers, and the forms of these were visible at this moment in the act of galloping about in the wildest and maddest confusion, flinging their heels and tails high into the air, their heads to earth. A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink stroke on burnished tin. Then the picture vanished, leaving a darkness so intense that Gabriel worked entirely by feeling with his hands. He had stuck his ricking-rod, groom, or poignard, as it was indifferently called-a long iron lance, sharp at the extremity and polished by handling-into the stack to support the sheaves. A blue light appeared in the zenith, and in some indescribable manner flickered down near the top of the rod. It was the fourth of the larger flashes. A moment later and there was a smacksmart, clear, and short. Gabriel felt his position to be anything but a safe one, and he resolved to descend.

Not a drop of rain had fallen as yet. He wiped his weary brow, and looked again at the black forms of the unprotected stacks. Was his life so valuable to him, after all? What were his prospects that he should be so chary of running risk, when important and urgent labour could not be carried on without such risk? He resolved to stick to the stack. However, he took a precaution. Under the staddles was a long tetheringchain, used to prevent the escape of errant horses. This he carried up the ladder, and sticking his rod through the clog at one end, allowed the other end of the chain to trail upon the ground. The spike attached to it he drove in. Under the shadow of this extemporised lightning-conductor he felt himself comparatively safe. Before Oak had laid his hands upon his tools again, out leapt the fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend. It was green as an emerald, and the reverberation was stunning. What was this the light revealed to him? In the open ground before him, as he looked over the ridge of the rick, was a dark and apparently female form. Could it be that of the only venturesome woman in the parish-Bathsheba? The form moved on a step; then he could see no more. 'Is that you, ma'am?' said Gabriel to the darkness. 'Who is there?' said the voice of Bathsheba. 'Gabriel. I am on the rick, thatching.'

'O Gabriel! and are you? I have come about them. The weather awoke me, and I thought of the corn. I am so distressed about it; can we save it anyhow? I cannot find my husband. Is he with you?'

'He is not here.'

'Do you know where he is?'

Asleep in the barn.'

'He promised that the stacks should be seen to, and now they are all neglected! Can I do anything to help? Liddy is afraid to come out. Fancy finding you here at such an hour! Surely I can do something?'

'You can bring up some reed-sheaves to me, one by one, ma'am; if you are not afraid to come up the ladder in the dark,' said Gabriel. 'Every moment is precious now, and that would save a good deal of time. It is not very dark when the lightning has been gone a bit.'

'I'll do anything!' she said, resolutely. She instantly took a sheaf upon her shoulder, clambered up close to his heels, placed it behind the rod, and descended for another. At her third ascent the rick suddenly brightened with the brazen glare of shining majolica; every knot in every straw was visible. On the slope in front of him appeared two human shapes, black as jet. The rick lost its sheen-the shapes vanished. Gabriel turned

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his head. It had been the sixth flash which had come from the east behind him, and the two dark forms on the slope had been the shadows of himself and Bathsheba.

Then came the peal. It hardly was credible that such a heavenly light could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.

'How terrible!' she exclaimed, and clutched him by the sleeve. Gabriel turned, and steadied her on her aerial perch by holding her arm. At the same moment, while he was still reversed in his attitude, there was more light, and he saw as it were a copy of the tall poplar tree on the hill drawn in black on the wall of the barn. It was the shadow of that tree, thrown across by a secondary flash in the west.

The next flare came. Bathsheba was on the ground now, shouldering another sheaf, and she bore its dazzle without flinching-thunder and all—and again ascended with the load. There was then a silence everywhere for four or five minutes, and the crunch of the spars, as Gabriel hastily drove them in, could again be distinctly heard. He thought the crisis of the storm had passed. But there came a burst of light.

'Hold on!' said Gabriel, taking the sheaf from her shoulder, and grasping her arm again.

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realised, and Gabriel could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south. It was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones-dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green.

Behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. In the meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain, and into the earth. Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand-a sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.

Oak had hardly time to gather up these impressions into a thought, and to see how strangely the red feather of her hat shone in this light, when the tall tree on the hill before mentioned seemed on fire to a white heat, and a new one among these terrible voices mingled with the last crash of those preceding. It was a stupefying blast, harsh and pitiless, and it fell upon their ears in a dead, flat blow, without that reverberation which lends the tones of a drum to more distant thunder. By the lustre reflected from every part of the earth, and from the wide domical scoop above it, he saw that the tree was sliced down the whole length of its tall straight stem, a huge riband of bark being apparently flung off. The other portion remained erect, and revealed the bared surface as a strip of white down the front. The lightning had struck the tree. A sulphurous smell filled the air: then all was silent, and black as a cave in Hinnom. We had a narrow escape!' said Gabriel.

BRET HARTE,

The American humorist and painter of wild life in the West (see ante, page 479), has recently produced a novel-his first complete novel-in the regular three-volume shape, entitled Gabriel Conroy (1876). It is not skilfully constructed either as to plot or dialogue, and has less originality than the earlier sketches. It opens with the following description:

A Snow-storm in the Californian Sierras. Snow everywhere. As far as the eye could reachfifty miles, looking southward from the highest white peak-filling ravines and gulches, and dropping from the walls of cañons in white shroud-like drifts, fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of a monstrous grave, hiding the bases of giant pines, and completely covering young trees and larches, rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edges of still, cold lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the distant horizon. Snow lying everywhere over the California Sierras on the 15th day of March 1848, and still falling.

It had been snowing for ten days; snowing in finely granulated powder, in damp spongy flakes, in thin feathery plumes; snowing from a leaden sky steadily, snowing fiercely, shaken out of purple black clouds in white flocculent masses, or dropping in long level lines, like white lances from the tumbled and broken heavens. But always silently! The woods were so choked with it, the branches were so laden with it-it had so permeated, filled, and possessed earth and sky; it had so cushioned and muffled the ringing rocks and echoing hills, that all sound was deadened. The strongest gust, the fiercest blast, awoke no sigh or complaint from the snow-packed rigid files of forest. There was no cracking of bough nor crackle of underbush; the overladen branches of pine and fir yielded and gave way without a sound. The silence was vast, measureless, complete.

Perhaps the best of all Bret Harte's producoriginal. The camp is one of Californian goldtions is his Luck of Roaring Camp-so vivid, so diggers-a rough wild crew, but not devoid of tenderness. One wretched woman is among them, and she dies after giving birth to a child. The child is brought up by the men, and becomes the Luck' and favourite of the camp.

In that

'Strange to say, the child thrived. Perhaps the invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for material deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. rare atmosphere of the Sierra foot-hills-that air pungent with balsamic odour, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating-he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted asses' milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. "Me and that ass," he would say, "has been father and mother to him! Don't you," he would add, apostrophising the helpless bundle before him, never go back on us."

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All went on prosperously till winter came with its floods, and then the 'luck' and light of the Roaring Camp perished:

Death and Destruction at the Diggings.

The winter of 1851 will long be remembered in the foot-hills. The snow lay deep on the Sierras, and every mountain-creek became a river, and every river a lake. Each gorge and gulch was transformed into a tumultuous water-course that descended the hill-sides, tearing down giant trees, and scattering its drift and débris along the plain. Red Dog had been twice under water, and gold into them gulches,' said Stumpy. It's been here Roaring Camp had been forewarned. 'Water put the once, and will be here again!' And that night the North Fork suddenly leaped over its banks, and swept up the triangular valley of Roaring Camp.

In the confusion of rushing water, crushing trees, and

crackling timber, and the darkness which seemed to flow with the water and blot out the fair valley, but little could be done to collect the scattered camp. When the morning broke, the cabin of Stumpy nearest the riverbank was gone. Higher up the gulch they found the body of its unlucky owner; but the pride, the hope, the joy, the Luck of Roaring Camp had disappeared. They were returning with sad hearts, when a shout from the bank recalled them.

It was a relief-boat from down the river. They had picked up, they said, a man and an infant, hausted, about two miles below. Did anybody know them, and did they belong here?

It needed but a glance to shew them Kentuck lying there, cruelly crushed and bruised, but still holding the Luck of Roaring Camp in his arms. As they bent over the strangely assorted pair, they saw that the child was cold and pulseless. He is dead,' said one. Kentuck opened his eyes. 'Dead?' he repeated feebly. Yes, my man, and you are dying too.' A smile lit the eyes of the expiring Kentuck. Dying,' he repeated; 'he's a-taking me with him-tell the boys I've got the Luck with me now; and the strong man, clinging to the frail babe as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw, drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea.

The Chinese emigrants now form a large element in Californian society; and Bret Harte presents us with a type of the colony:

John Chinaman.

The expression of the Chinese face in the aggregate is neither cheerful nor happy. In an acquaintance of half a dozen years, I can only recall one or two excep- | tions to this rule. There is an abiding consciousness of degradation, a secret pain or self-humiliation visible in the lines of the mouth and eye. Whether it is only a modification of Turkish gravity, or whether it is the dread Valley of the Shadow of the Drug through which they are continually straying, I cannot say. They seldom smile, and their laughter is of such an extraordinary and sardonic nature-so purely a mechanical spasm, quite independent of any mirthful attribute--that to this day I am doubtful whether I ever saw a Chinaman laugh. A theatrical representation by natives, one might think, would have set my mind at ease on this point; but it did not. Indeed, a new difficulty presented itself—the impossibility of determining whether the performance was a tragedy or farce. I thought I detected the low comedian in an active youth who turned two somersaults, and knocked everybody down on entering the stage. But, unfortunately, even this classic resemblance to the legitimate farce of our civilisation was deceptive. Another brocaded actor, who represented the hero of the play, turned three somersaults, and not only upset my theory and his fellow-actors at the same time, but apparently ran amuck behind the scenes for some time afterward. I looked around at the glinting white teeth to observe the effect of these two palpable hits. They were received with equal acclamation, and apparently equal facial spasms. One or two beheadings which enlivened the play produced the same sardonic effect, and left upon my mind a painful anxiety to know what was the serious business of life in China. It was noticeable, however, that my unrestrained laughter had a discordant effect, and that triangular eyes sometimes turned ominously toward the 'Fanqui devil;' but as I retired discreetly before the play was finished, there were no serious results. I have only given the above as an instance of the impossibility of deciding upon the outward and superficial expression of Chinese mirth. Of its inner and deeper existence I have some private doubts. An audience that will view with a serious aspect the hero, after a frightful and agonising death,

My acquaintance with John has been made up of weekly interviews, involving the adjustment of the washing accounts, so that I have not been able to study his character from a social view-point or observe him in the privacy of the domestic circle. I have gathered enough to justify me in believing him to be generally honest, faithful, simple, and painstaking. Of his simplicity let me record an instance where a sad and civil young Chinaman brought me certain shirts with most of the buttons missing, and others hanging on delusively by a single thread. In a moment of unguarded irony I informed him that unity would at least have been preserved if the buttons were removed altogether. He smiled sadly and went away. I thought I had hurt his feelings, until the next week when he brought me my shirts with a look of intelligence, and the buttons carefully and totally erased. At another time, to guard against his general disposition to carry off anything as soiled clothes that he thought could hold water, I requested him to always wait until he saw me. Coming home late one evening, I found the household in great consternation, over an immovable celestial who had remained seated on the front door-step during the day, sad and submissive, firm but also patient, and only betraying any animation or token of his mission when he saw me coming. This same Chinaman evinced some evidences of regard for a little girl in the family, who in her turn reposed such faith in his intellectual qualities as to present him with a preternaturally uninteresting Sunday-school book, her own property. This book John made a point of carrying ostentatiously with him in his weekly visits. It appeared usually on the top of the clean clothes, and was sometimes painfully clasped outside of the big bundle of soiled linen. Whether John believed he unconsciously imbibed some spiritual life through its pasteboard cover, as the prince in the Arabian Nights imbibed the medicine through the handle of the mallet, or whether he wished to exhibit a due sense of gratitude, or whether he hadn't any pockets, I have never been able to ascertain. In his turn, he would sometimes cut marvellous imitation roses from carrots for his little friend. I am inclined to think that the few roses strewn in John's path were such scentless imitations. The thorns only were real. From the persecutions of the young and old of a certain class, his life

was a torment. I don't know what was the exact philosophy that Confucius taught, but it is to be hoped that poor John in his persecution is still able to detect the conscious hate and fear with which inferiority always regards the possibility of even-handed justice, and which is the key-note to the vulgar clamour about servile and degraded races.

WILLIAM BLACK.

WILLIAM BLACK, a native of Glasgow, born in 1841, has produced several original and highly successful novels. In 1868 appeared In Silk Attire; in 1871, A Daughter of Heth; in 1872, The Strange Adventures of a Phaton; in 1873, Kilmeny and Princess of Thule; in 1875, The Maid of Killeena and Three Feathers; in 1876, Lady Silverdale's Sweetheart, and other Stories; Madcap Violet, &c.

Scene in the Hebrides.-From 'Princess of Thule?'

On a small headland of the distant island of Lewis, an old man stood looking out on a desolate waste of rain-beaten sea. It was a wild and a wet day. From out of the louring south-west, fierce gusts of wind were driving up volumes and flying rags of cloud, and sweeping onward at the same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the shore. Far as the eye could reach, the sea and the air and the sky seemed to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapour-as if beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and water, and the confused and awful voices of their strife.

The short, thick-set powerfully built man who stood on this solitary point, paid little attention to the rain that ran off the peak of his sailor's cap, or to the gusts of wind that blew about his bushy gray beard. He was still following, with an eye accustomed to pick out objects far at sea, one speck of purple that was now fading into the gray mist of the rain; and the longer he looked the less it became, until the mingled sea and sky shewed only the smoke that the great steamer left in its wake. As he stood there, motionless and regardless of everything around him, did he cling to the fancy that he could still trace out the path of the vanished ship? A little while before, it had passed almost close to him. He had watched it steam out of Stornoway harbour. As the sound of the engines came nearer, and the big boat went by, so that he could have almost called to it, there was no sign of emotion on the hard and stern face-except, perhaps, that the lips were held firm, and a sort of frown appeared over the eyes. He saw a tiny white handkerchief being waved to him from the deck of the vessel; and he said, almost as though he were addressing some one there: 'My good little girl!'

But in the midst of that roaring of the sea and the wind, how could any such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his own-as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be broken-were now trying, through overflowing and blinding tears, to send him a last look of farewell.

The gray mists of the rain gathered within their folds the big vessel, and all the beating hearts it contained; and the fluttering of that little token disappeared with it. All that remained was the sea whitened by the rushing of the wind, and the thunder of waves on the beach. The man who had been gazing so long down into the south-east, turned his face landward, and set out to walk over a tract of wet grass and sand towards a road that ran near by. There was a large wagonette

of varnished oak, and a pair of small powerful horses waiting for him there; and having dismissed the boy who had been in charge, he took the reins and got up. But even yet the fascination of the sea and of that sad farewell was upon him; and he turned once more as if, now that sight could yield him no further tidings, he would send her one more word of good-bye. poor little Sheila !' that was all he said; and then he turned to the horses, and sent them on, with his head down to escape the rain, and a look on his face like that of a dead man.

My

As he drove through the town of Stornoway, the children playing within the shelter of the cottage doors, called to each other in a whisper, and said: That is the King of Borva.' But the elderly people said toeach other, with a shake of the head: 'It is a bad day, this day, for Mr Mackenzie, that he will be going home to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila is gone away, and there is nobody-not anybody at all-left in the island to tek the side of the poor folk.'

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to many of the people-as he drove away from the town into the heart of the lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain had considerably lessened; but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the dreary wastes of moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was that which lay before and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence to break the monotony of the long undulations of moorland which, in the distance, rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down from these mountains, ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes, with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere around were the traces of the glacier drift-great gray boulders of gneiss fixed fast into the black peat-moss, or set amid the browns and greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of rock and morass, was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether; but the mountains in the far south had grown still darker; and to the fisherman passing by the coast, it must have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the louring clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for the first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along the lonely route sometimes cast a glance down towards this threatening of a storm; but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the horses; and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of water-the Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the Fine Sand, and so forthto measure the distance he had traversed; but he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was with a glance of surprise that he suddenly found himself overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Garra-na-hina. At the door, muffled up in a warm woollen plaid, stood a young girl, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

'Mr Mackenzie,' she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in the schools; it was Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she said I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help to you in the house.'

Ay, my good lass,' he said, putting his hand gently

Edinburgh on a Summer Night.
From Strange Adventures of a Phaton.

In the gathering darkness we approach Edinburgh. How long the way seemed on this the last night of our driving! The clear twilight faded away, and the skies overhead began to shew faint throbbings of the stars. A pale yellow glow on the horizon told us where the lights | of Edinburgh were afire. The road grew almost indistinguishable; but overhead the great worlds became more visible in the deep vault of blue. In a perfect silence we drove along the still highway, between the dark hedges; and clearer and more clear became the white constellations trembling in the dark. There lay King Charles's wain as we had often regarded it from a boat at sea, as we lay idly on the lapping waves. The jewels on Cassiopeia's chair glimmered faint and pale; and all the brilliant stars of the Dragon's hide trembled in the dark. The one bright star of the Swan recalled many an evening in the olden times; and here, nearer at hand, Capella shone, and there Cepheus looked over to the pole-star as from the distance of another universe. Somehow it seemed to us that, under the great and throbbing vault, the sea ought to be lying clear and dark; but there were other masses we saw before us, where the crags of Arthur's Seat rose sharp and black into the sky. We ran in almost under the shadow of that silent mass of hill. We drew nearer to the town; and then we saw before us long and waving lines of red fire-the gas-lamps of a mighty street. We left the majesty of the night outside, and were soon in the heart of the great city. Our journey was at an end.

We sat down at the window of a Princes Street hotel. What in all the journey was there to equal the magic sight that lay before us? Beyond a gulf of blackness the old town of Edinburgh rose with a thousand points of fire into the clear sky of a summer night. The tall houses, with their eight or nine stories, had their innumerable windows ablaze; and the points of orange light shone in the still blue shadow until they seemed to form part of some splendid and enchanted palace built on the slopes of a lofty hill. And then beyond that we could see the great crags of the castle looming dark in the starlight, and we knew, rather than saw, that there were walls and turrets up there, cold and distant, looking down on the yellow glare of the city beneath. What was Cologne, and the coloured lamps of its steamers--as you see them cross the yellow waters of the Rhine when a full moon shines over the houses of Deutz-or what was Prague with its countless spires piercing the starlight, and its great bridge crossing over to the wooded heights of the Hradschin-compared to this magnificent spectacle in the noblest city of the world? The lights of the distant houses went out one by one. The streets became silent. Even the stars grew paler, but why was that? A faint light, golden and soft, began to steal along the Castle-hill; and the slow mild radiance touched the sharp slopes, the trees, and the great gray walls above,

which were under the stars.

'Oh, my dear,' says Tita, quite gently to Bell, 'we have seen nothing like that, not even in your own country of the Lakes!'

ANNE ISABELLA THACKERAY.

MISS THACKERAY, eldest and only surviving daughter of the great novelist, has distinguished herself in the same department of literature.

Her principal works are-The Story of Elizabeth, The Village on the Cliff, Old Kensington, Miss Angel; To Esther, and other Sketches; Toilers and Spinsters, Five Old Friends, Bluebeard's Keys, &c. Miss Thackeray is a consummate artist. She makes no pretension to deep plot or sensation.

Her novels are studies of character within rather confined limits, and with a certain kind of teaching or moralising which may have been derived from her gifted father, but is modified in passing through a truly womanly temperament. She is a student: you see the influence of books, and can follow her methods and see them repeated so exactly that you can predict the results. This was apparent in The Village on the Cliff, notwithstanding that Reine was original in conception; and it characterises her novel, Old Kensington, which is a resetting of the story of Angelica Kauffmann, the unfortunate painter, the friend of Reynolds and the rest of the distinguished people of that day, to many of whom we are here introduced. Miss Thackeray has succeeded remarkably in serious yet half-playful restorations of the old nursery tales, bringing out their purpose and moral by means of present-day characters skilfully chosen. Some of these have been collected into a volume under the title of Five Old Friends with a New Face. As her first work, The Story of Elizabeth, had appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, and was republished in book form in 1863-the year of her father's death-she may be said to have just made her advent in literature as he passed away from among us. The careful and exquisite finish of her works-even the slightest of them-is likely to render them lasting as well as popular.

An English Country Sunday.

The ideal Sunday should be spent at a country-house not many miles from London. We will call it Pleasance. You should come to it through fresh country lanes and commons, and across broad fields where the cows are which the garden might shew, and from which the doors browsing. Pleasance should have a great hall through should lead into a library, a dining-room, a drawingroom, all with windows looking across the lawns and fields and green distant slopes and acres far away, gently rising and falling. There should be scattered here and there flocks and herds to give life and animation to the green pastures and the still waters, and close at hand a few great trees under which one or two people are strolling and enjoying the early spring. All the mists and shadows of London life are left behind, and lie in wait for them when they cross the river; here is only a bright winter's morning, the song of birds piping among the bare branches and bushes, with sudden notes and house there should be a farm-yard, with live toys for cadences of exceeding sweetness. grown-up children: cocks that crow, hens sitting with their little bead-eyed yellow brood nestling round them. There should be cows that moo and shake their heads, them in the meadow; or stand meekly in their stalls and crop the grass with a pleasant crunch as you watch when milking-time has come, with their names, such as Cowslip, Daisy, Bluebell, painted over each pair of horns.

In the ideal country

In the morning, instead of hurrying through the streets and past the closed shops and gin-palaces, to a crowded church with high square pews and dingy windows and dust, and a fierce-looking pew-opener in a front, you wend your way quietly across the fields, where the air is sweet with coming spring, and you pass by narrow swinging gates and under the elm-trees to