Nancy Lane sank back in her chair, and covered her horror-stricken eyes with her hands. ""T ain't pleasant news to have to tell," Sister Elton went on mildly, yet with evident relish and full command of the occasion. "He said he seen Jerry the morning he came away. I thought you ought to know it. I'll tell you one thing, Nancy: I told the skipper to keep still about it, and now I've told you, I won't spread it no further to set folks a-talking. I'll keep it secret till you say the word. There ain't much trafficking betwixt here and there, and he's dead to you, certain, as much as if he laid up here in the burying-ground."

Nancy had bowed her head upon the table; the thin, sandy hair was streaked with gray. She did not answer one word; this was the hardest blow of all. "I'm much obliged to you for being so friendly," she said after a few minutes, looking straight before her now in a dazed sort of way, and lifting the new coat from the floor, where it had fallen. "Yes, he's dead to me, worse than dead, a good deal," and her lip quivered. "I can't seem to bring my thoughts to bear. I've got so used to thinkin' No, don't you say nothin' to the folks, yet. I'd do as much for you," and Mrs. Elton knew that the smitten fellow-creature before her spoke the truth, and forbore.

Two or three days came and went, and with every hour the quiet, simplehearted woman felt more grieved and unsteady in mind and body. Such a shattering thunderbolt of news rarely falls into a human life. She could not sleep; she wandered to and fro in the little house, and cried until she could cry no longer. Then a great rage spurred and excited her. She would go to Shediac, and call Jerry Lane to account. She would accuse him face to face; and the woman whom he was deceiving, as perhaps he had deceived her, should

know the baseness and cowardice of this miserable man. So, dressed in her respectable Sunday clothes, in the gray bonnet and shawl that never had known any journeys except to meeting, or to a country funeral or quiet holiday-making, Nancy Lane trusted herself for the first time to the bewildering railway, to the temptations and dangers of the wide world outside the bounds of Walpole.

Two or three days later still, the quaint thin figure familiar in Walpole highways flitted down the street of a provincial town. In the most primitive region of China this woman could hardly have felt a greater sense of foreign life and strangeness. At another time her native good sense and shrewd observation would have delighted in the experiences of this first week of travel, but she was too sternly angry and aggrieved, too deeply plunged in a survey of her own calamity, to take much notice of what was going on about her. Later she condemned the unworthy folly of the whole errand, but in these days the impulse to seek the culprit and confront him was irresistible.

The innkeeper's wife, a kindly creature, had urged this puzzling guest to wait and rest and eat some supper, but Nancy refused, and without asking her way left the brightly lighted, flaring little public room, where curious eyes already offended her, and went out into the damp twilight. The voices of the street boys sounded outlandish, and she felt more and more lonely. She longed for Jerry to appear for protection's sake; she forgot why she sought him, and was eager to shelter herself behind the flimsy bulwark of his manhood. She rebuked herself presently with terrible bitterness for a womanish wonder whether he would say, "Why, Nancy, girl!" and be glad to see her. Poor woman, it was a work-laden, serious girlhood that had been hers, at any rate. The power of giving her whole self in unselfish, enthusiastic, patient devotion

had not belonged to her youth only; it had sprung fresh and blossoming in her heart as every new year came and

went.

66

One might have seen her stealing through the shadows, skirting the edge of a lumber-yard, stepping among the refuse of the harbor side, asking a question timidly now and then of some passerby. Yes, they knew Jerry Lane, - his house was only a little way off; and one curious and compassionate Scotchman, divining by some inner sense the exciting nature of the errand, turned back, and offered fruitlessly to go with the stranger. "You know the man?" he asked. "He is his own enemy, but doing better now he is married. He minds his work, I know that well; but he's taken a good wife." Nancy's heart beat faster with honest pride for a moment, until the shadow of the ugly truth and reality made it sink back to heaviness, and the fire of her smouldering rage was again kindled. She would speak to Jerry face to face before she slept, and a horrible contempt and scorn were ready for him, as with a glance either way along the road she entered the narrow yard, and went noiselessly toward the window of a low, poor-looking house, from whence a bright light was shining out into the night.

Yes, there was Jerry, and it seemed as if she must faint and fall at the sight of him. How young he looked still! The thought smote her like a blow. They never were mates for each other, Jerry and she. Her own life was waning; she was an old woman.

He never had been so thrifty and respectable before; the other woman ought to know the savage truth about him, for all that! But at that moment the other woman stooped beside the supper table, and lifted a baby from its cradle, and put the dear, live little thing into its father's arms. The baby was wide awake, and laughed at Jerry, who laughed back again, and it reached up to catch at a

handful of the curly hair which had been poor Nancy's delight.

The other woman stood there looking at them, full of pride and love. She was young, and trig, and neat. She looked like a brisk, efficient little creature. Perhaps Jerry would make something of himself now; he always had it in him. The tears were running down Nancy's cheeks; the rain, too, had begun to fall. She stood there watching the little household sit down to supper, and noticed with eager envy how well cooked the food was, and how hungrily the master of the house ate what was put before him. All thoughts of ending the new wife's sin and folly vanished away. She could not enter in and break another heart; hers was broken already, and it would not matter. And Nancy Lane, a widow indeed, crept away again as silently as she had come, to think what was best to be done, to find alternate woe and comfort in the memory of the sight she had seen.

The little house at the edge of the Walpole marshes seemed full of blessed shelter and comfort the evening that its forsaken mistress came back to it. Her strength was spent; she felt much more desolate now that she had seen with her own eyes that Jerry Lane was alive than when he was counted among the dead. An uncharacteristic disregard of the laws of the land filled this good woman's mind. Jerry had his life to live, and she wished him no harm. She wondered often how the baby grew. She fancied sometimes the changes and conditions of the far-away household. Alas! she knew only too well the weakness of the man, and once, in a grim outburst of impatience, she exclaimed, "I'd rather she should have to cope with him than me!"

But that evening, when she came back from Shediac, and sat in the dark for a long time lest Mrs. Elton should see the light and risk her life in the

evening air to bring unwelcome sympathy, that evening, I say, came the hardest moment of all, when the Ann Floyd, tailoress, of so many virtuous, self-respecting years, whose idol had years, whose idol had turned to clay, who was shamed, disgraced, and wronged, sat down alone to supper in the little kitchen.

She had put one cup and saucer on the table; she looked at them through bitter tears. Somehow a consciousness of her solitary age, her uncompanioned future, rushed through her mind; this

failure of her best earthly hope was enough to break a stronger woman's heart.

Who can laugh at my Marsh Rosemary, or who can cry, for that matter? The gray primness of the plant is made up of a hundred colors, if you look close enough to find them. This same Marsh Rosemary stands in her own place, and holds her dry leaves and tiny blossoms steadily toward the same sun that the pink lotus blooms for, and the white rose. Sarah Orne Jewett.

THIRTY-FIVE years ago, like many a wiser moth before and after me, I set my face for London. What I knew of it was what any American boy of English descent knows: "London cries," Dick Whittington, something of the town's history and as much of its geography, and the young Queen, she seemed young always, because as a child I remember hearing of the Princess Victoria and her coronation. But to me there was a more potent attraction than even old London. I had been reading and re-reading with enthusiasm that first volume of Modern Painters. I had in a weak and blind way begun the study of art in a country town, where there was no instruction and very little help, and the glowing eulogies of Turner, the splendid fallacies and witching rhetoric of the Graduate of Oxford, had woven a spell around me which left me with one overruling purpose in life, to go to - to go to London, see the pictures of Turner, and learn the great secret of my art.

Dick Whittington was scarcely more naive, if more fortunate. I had sold a picture for thirty dollars, and decided to go to London and stay as long as it lasted! I had never been away from home. I

knew little more than a child of the value of money, had never paid for a lodging or a dinner, and thirty dollars, I calculated, would keep me six weeks. I had all the unquestioning faith of utter ignorance of the highways or byways of the world. I would follow the sun when he was visible, and the moon when he was not, and determined, without taking counsel of any one, what was to be done. The question of a passage troubled me no more than it did the Israelites fleeing from Pharaoh. I felt that I should get across, and the proverbial New York merchant was my deus ex machina. Thomas Tileston offered me a passage on one of his liners to Liverpool, and the old Garrick, splendid sailing ship of eight hundred tons, Captain Asa Eldridge, wafted me across. The captain took kindly to me, and eased my obligations to the hotel-keeper in Liverpool, so that I got to London with half of my thirty dollars in my pocket.

I had left New York at the end of December; the Hudson was filled with floating ice, the Jersey hills were covered with snow. I found the shores of England green, and the fields like ours in early spring. I arrived at Euston

Square late in the afternoon of a mild and smoky day of January, a third-class passenger, with my luggage, a tiny leather valise, under my arm, which, with a Spanish cloak, was all my impedimenta; and fearful of further expense and of pillaging landlords if I trusted my three sovereigns to their sheltering roofs, I bought a two-penny loaf and walked the streets all night. I had a letter of introduction from G. P. Putnam, the publisher, to his correspondent Thomas Delf, and, inquiring my way across London to his office in Paternoster Row, I was sitting by his doorway on my valise when he came in the morning. He directed me to a quiet lodging-house in Bouverie Street, kept by an honest landlady, and I installed myself in a bedroom, which was also to be my studio, at six shillings a week, including the cooking of my breakfast.

In the years which have since passed I have many times returned to London, and am as familiar with it as a Londoner born, so that to find a new thing in it would indeed surprise me; but there come now and then days, or rather moments, in the winter, when the smoke settles down and fills the streets with its dusky veil and shadowless mystery, when the yellow sky even at noon of a quiet day hardly allows a red sun to be seen at odd moments, and when both unite with the pungent odors of the coal smoke to recall this first visit, and I cannot describe the witchery and delight of that dreamy and weird recollection, which is like that of a past existence, formless, indefinable, but a part of my very life.

I write from a new home in a quarter of the great city which at the time in question was the country. We speak of the rapid changes in our American cities, but nothing like the changes of London can exist with us. Growth is not a change of this kind. Paris alone, in certain respects, can show such metamorphoses as London. But on the

whole, Paris, as I saw it at this first visit to the Old World, was more like the Paris one sees now than was London of 1850 like the London of to-day. The mere question of growth is a minor matter. London was not the metropolis of the world in 1850, and now it is. Then it was only a huger provincial town. The Londoner in general measured nothing but himself, and nobody came to London for anything but hardware, good walking-boots, saddles, etc.; now it is the entrepôt of the civilized world. The World's Fair of 1851 and succeeding similar displays of what cosmopolite industry can do, the common arrival of ocean steamers, rare at the time I am writing of, have changed the entire character of London life and business and the tone of its society. It is not merely in the fact that 48,000 houses were built in the capital in the last year, or that you find colonies of French, Italians, Russians, Greeks in it, but that the houses are no longer what they were, inside or out, and thus the foreigner is an assimilated ingredient in its philosophy. All this has come since 1850.

Sitting by my coal fire, which flames ruddily and flickeringly, and fills the room with the smoky aroma all know who have once been in any English city, the meditation my subject provokes runs to melancholy and a regret, sentimental certainly, but pathetic, for the days when this veiled sunshine and pungent atmosphere first became familiar to me. I shut my senses close to go back, as only old men can, when the new fact fades and the first impression comes out like an old picture over which some bungler has badly painted a new one.

Between my quarter, which was then a straggling hamlet and is now a continuous part of London, and London itself there was then a wide stretch of green fields and kitchen gardens. The whole quarter of South Kensington, Earl's Court, Baron's Court, and Raven's Court has grown up and continued London to

Hammersmith; but there was a green expanse with hawthorn hedges, where one heard the lark and rook, and saw far away the faint blue of the hills of Norwood, Clapham, and Wandsworth, where now, as far as the towers of the Crystal Palace, is an almost unbroken mass of houses. With very few exceptions the men I then knew are gone; and when I walk out, as I used to, by the road that runs still from Brompton to Hammersmith, the stately houses that line the streets are little more than tombstones to me.

Amongst the very few letters I had to people in London was one from Mr. Putnam to S. C. Hall, then editor of the Art Journal, who gave me another to a now dead and forgotten landscape painter, J. B. Pyne, one of the most consummate of his craft that England has produced, and who lived within a pistol shot of the site of my present residence, on what was a country road; and every Sunday afternoon I walked from my lodgings to his house, measuring the distance by the milestones as I went along, six miles, of which half were amongst the fields. He used to keep in baronial style a place at his dinner-table for every comer, and there one met a society wholly devoted to art. Pyne was an admirable talker, and few men whom I have met had larger ideas of his art, or greater generosity in imparting his instruction to learners. As an artist he was never popular: his art was far too refined and averse from the qualities that catch the uneducated eye. He had not great genius, but a talent which came near it, and he was surpassed in general power by no one of his contemporaries except Turner, of whom he was an ardent admirer and to a certain extent a follower. There was in his art a certain dash of the artificial, and a limitation in method of treatment which is invariably the concomitant of talent when unaccompanied by genius. Talent alone, be it great or little, runs in grooves, be

trays its identity in every movement, is always recognizable. Talent with imagination that is, real creative power, the capacity to make new things and find new paths is genius. Though Pyne's talent ran always in a groove, it was a large and noble one, and it is safe, I think, to predict that his pictures will, when another century is half gone, rank amongst the very best his generation has left. He was too much led by theory, but this is a common defect of talent when coupled with intellect only, which makes overmuch account of the instruction that cost it so great labor; while genius, aware that the best in what it does is a gift of its peculiar inspiration, does not plume itself on the lower excellences. Pyne had caught from Turner the greater landscape motives, the appreciation of light and space, which, with a subtle feeling for the harmony and play of color and grace in his composition, allied him more closely in style to the great master than to any other contemporary, and to careless observers caused him to be esteemed a mere imitator of Turner, which he was very far from being. His executive power was very great, and, being proud of it, he was sometimes ostentatious of it; but he never, like some of his most successful contemporaries, descended to tricks of execution or vulgar bravura. He sometimes painted imitations of the great landscape masters, partly as studies and partly as tours de force, and, being accustomed to travel in his own groove, he proceeded very well in any other painter's when once he got into it. I have no doubt that some of Pyne's recollections of Turner's pictures, which were never copies but emulations, will sell for original Turners when their centennial comes round; and as he was more careful in the method of painting and painted with fewer alterations than Turner, it is possible that these imitations will then be so much better preserved that they will be taken for the best ex