gods, and offered wine and frankincense to your likeness, which I had caused to be placed among the images of the gods for this very purpose, and if they also cursed the name of Christ, I considered that they ought to be let go. They say, however, that those who are truly Christians cannot be coerced into doing any one of these things. There were those who admitted that they had once been Christians, some three years ago, and some more, but none so many as twenty; and these did curse the Christ. How ever, even these protested that the sum and substance of their offense had been that they were accustomed to meet together on a certain day, before light, and sing a hymn to Christ as it were to a god, and take a sort of oath (sacramentum), not for any wicked purpose; but that they would never commit theft, or adultery, or violence of any kind, or break their word, or abuse a trust; and that after the ceremony I have described they separated, meeting together only to take their food at a common table, quite promiscuously, but without any improprieties; and that they had desisted from doing even this after that edict of mine, issued in accordance with your command, for the suppression of hetairias. I thought it the more needful on this account that two female slaves, who were called ministræ, should be examined by torture; but even so I found no proof of anything more than an insensate and depraved superstition. I therefore suspended the inquiry, and hereby refer the matter to you."

victims for sacrifice has also become much more brisk, and on the whole it seems to the optimistic governor that everything is ready for a great revival, if only a locus penitentiæ be offered to the erring.

No one can fail to detect the resemblance between Pliny's tone with reference to Christianity and that in which a modern conservative statesman, of a mild disposition, might speak of Nihilism, or any other secret and presumably dangerous organization of to-day. Is there anywhere, at this moment, a reigning sovereign at once philosophic and secure enough to emulate the temperance and magnanimity of Trajan's concise reply?

"I fully approve, my dear Secundus, of the course which you have pursued toward those who were accused before you of being Christians. It is not possible to lay down a rule which shall be applicable to every case; but, in general, it is not advisable for you to seek out these men. If they are actually accused before you, and the accusations established, they must be punished, of

course.

But if they deny that they are now Christians, and substantiate their denial by invoking our gods, then, whatever suspicion may attach to them in the past, they are, by all means, to be pardoned. Anonymous accusations are not to be received in the case of any offense whatever. They furnish the worst possible precedent, and are not in harmony with the spirit of our time."

It is very difficult to understand, in view of these candid and perspicuous letters, how the story can ever have been started that Pliny himself became a Christian in Bithynia. Anything more profoundly, artlessly, sincerely, and, so to speak, righteously pagan it would be impossible to imagine. It was exactly seventy years after the death of our Lord. Verginius and Cæcina Pætus, even Thrasea and the elder Pliny, were contemporary with Him.

Yet the fruits of the spirit" ripened richly in many of those pagan souls. Who dare deny it? The most enlightened Christian benevolence could not well have.devised anything more wise and noble than the benefactions which Pliny made in his lifetime to his be loved native place, and the bequests by which these were supplemented. He gave a public library to Como, and the interest of a large amount for its maintenance. He established a school of rhetoric there, agreeing to pay a third part of the salary of the professor, provided the rest were subscribed by the citizens. He also pledged a considerable sum, secured by a sort of mortgage upon landed property of his along the lake, the interest of which was to be applied to the education of the children of poor gentlemen and to providing dowries for the girls. He left money for the establishment of public baths at Como, and there may still be seen, in the Brera at Milan, a mutilated stone containing a fragment of the inscription in his honor, supposed to have been set above the entrance to the building. There was yet another sum of money, the interest of which was to be divided among a hundred of his own freedmen, so long as any of these survived; and when they were all gone it was to be applied to an annual public festival for the entire population of Como. It is plain that he thought out the conditions of his charities as carefully as the most scrupulous philanthropist of modern days could do. To his slaves he was, in the best sense of the word, a paternal ruler watching them in illness; mourning their loss; remitting their burdens if the crops were bad; encouraging them to make wills, and seeing that the provisions of these testaments were carried out; sending one of his freedmen to Forum Julii (Fréjus) on the Riviera, in the hope of curing his cough, with as many injunctions to his friend Paullinus, to whose care he recommends him, as if

he were introducing an invalid of the greatest consequence. And what shall we say of the letter to Geminius, in which he so gracefully expounds his refined and almost transcendental theory of "motes" and "beams"? "I consider him the most excellent and admirable of all men," he writes, "who overlooks the errors of others, on the ground that he himself sins every day, and yet strives as earnestly to abstain from sin as if he never overlooked a fault in any one. Let us all endeavor, at home, abroad. in every situation of life, to be implacable to ourselves, but merciful to others, even to those who never pardon any but themselves. Let us never forget the word of that gentlest, and for the selfsame reason that greatest, of men, Thrasea, He who hates vices hates men.'

And there is another letter to the same Geminius, with whom he seems to have been fond of discussing the higher ethics, in which he speaks of some one whom Geminius had praised for his liberality to certain persons. “And I praise him, too," replies Pliny, “provided he has not been liberal to these alone. I would have a man generous to his country, his neighbors, his kindred, his friends, and most of all his poor friends. Not like some who are most lavish with those who are able to give most to them."

The last of Pliny's letters to Trajan announces the death of his wife's grandfather, Calpurnius Fabatus, his own townsman and highly valued friend, who had done something toward filling the place in his life left void by the deaths of Verginius and Corellius, eight years before. Pliny explains that, uuder the circumstances, he has broken over his hitherto invariable rule, and sent Calpurnia back to Italy under an imperial safe-conduct, that she may arrive as early as possible; and Trajan answers graciously that the step, though irregular, was quite justifiable. This is

literally the last we hear of Calpurnia, and there are only the most meagre subsequent allusions in the classical writers to Pliny himself. It was probably the second and last year of his ad ministration in Bithynia, and he was then forty-three years of age. All the authorities are agreed that he died under fifty, but it cannot have been, as one writer maintains, while still abroad, since we have a letter, dated ten years after the death of Verginius, that is to say in 106, in which he writes, with warm indignation, of the laziness and bad faith of the person who had been charged with the erection of the great man's monument. Pliny left no children by either marriage.

All the more, perhaps, because the place, time, and manner of his death are uncertain, because his familiar name vanishes without flourish or warning from the records in which it occupied for a time so interesting and conspicuous a place, do we seem to feel his

genial presence beside us in every spot with which that name is associated; most of all in those whose beauty, by intense appreciation and affection, he has made peculiarly his own. As we loiter along the shores of Como, we always fancy him sitting in the shade, high up on some wooded hillside, lost, for the time being, to all outward sights and sounds in his beloved book, while airy huntsmen follow their prey along the sylvan reaches. Or, haply, we are threading the enchanted solitude of the mysterious pineta upon the Ostian shore; and as we stoop to add to our gathered clusters of pale pink heath a little pale blue rosemary, "for remembrance" of him, we hear the tapping of an elastic footstep upon the mossy flag-stones of the path behind us, and an outstretched hand waves gayly and invitingly toward a glade in the dim forest, through which we see gleam, for a moment, in all their pristine glory, the sunny colonnades of the Laurentine villa.

Harriet Waters Preston.

heathen Raedwald, the

I.

THE May day was so soft and warm that Dr. John Valentine flung himself on the ground, at the edge of the pond. Alder and oak bushes shaded his head. Swamp lands rose just above the surface of the water, and with their wet greenness hid from his eyes the current of the river, whose gentle ripples defined its course through the smoother waters. Valentine's boat was moored near him, its keel well aground in the shallows. Behind him a steep bank rose to the level of the fields, which sloped away to the village. The river changed its direction when it left the pond, and cut the village in halves; then turned again, and sought the southern tide waters.

Valentine stared a moment at a robin which stood with an erect head near his feet, and then took out a block of paper and began to write. He was a wealthy youth, and neglected his office hours to scribble. Failure had not yet seared his faith, and he believed that what he so ardently longed to say some one must really need to hear.

An unuttered

thought seemed to him like a seed that does not germinate, something wasted. He came of a country family of good standing in an inland Massachusetts district. His people were the "best people" of the neighborhood, and the lad had grown up among kinsfolk who read good books and exercised a generous social spirit, although they lived simply, and kept a healthy interest in the soil, in seed-time and harvest, in cattle and in trees. Thus between the influences of nature and culture, he grew refined, sensitive, emotional, and well-bred. had had enough town life to perfect, but not enough to wear away, the outlines of his character. Noble manners and real thoughts had held such authority in the

He

life with which he was familiar, that the rules by which conventional people govern themselves seemed chiefly amusing to him. An inheritance of antislavery blood contributed to render easy his disregard of trammels. He had never learned to be afraid of his own individuality, but his sweet nature had hindered him from thinking it necessary to assert that individuality by being disagreeable. A self-analyzing tendency was the one thing in him which endangered his growth in sunny and vigorous manhood. Here lay the germ of possibly morbid action or ruinous introversion.

The robin sped away, and Valentine wrote on through the May afternoon, till steps sounded from the narrow path which led along the bank half-way up the slope, and a girl's voice, odd and sweet, broke upon the quiet. Valentine perceived that she was speaking Canadian French. Suddenly, there was the noise of some one slipping, tearing at the bushes, and then a man came crashing down and fell headlong, muttering an oath, at Valentine's feet. The girl gave a quick cry and darted after him.

"Jack and Jill," said the doctor, rising in amazement. But the girl had not fallen, although she was already on her knees beside the man. Valentine lifted the fellow up and set him against the bank, and looked at him with disgusted interest.

"He drunk," said the girl in a matter-of-fact tone.

The man did not seem to be hurt, but very much dazed.

"What you bring me such a place for, Rose Beauvais?" he asked, accusing her stupidly in French. "Course I fall."

"Well, you sit still now," she answered calmly. "Don't you go home