letting a doubt come near my mind. You will forgive me my disorder, and I will go and trim myself. After the night I have passed I must appear like a savage.' "And you will tell me of your happiness when it is fully secured ?" said May, as they parted; and she watched him stride away, big and glad, towards the house. Your six-feet men have not always giant intellects, but they often carry very tender hearts. May did not tell Katherine the chief news of her aunt's letter. She could not speak again to Miss Archbold about Paul; she only made known her aunt's wish that she should go home, and after no little difficulty she was suffered to depart. How small and simple her home looked after Camlough, and how wholesome Aunt Martha, in her clear-starched kerchief and fair white cap! Paul was coming in the evening. He had taken up his quarters in a farmer's house a couple of miles away. As May took off her bonnet at her own little dressing-table, she saw her face looking charmingly brightened up. In spite of Katherine's judgment, she was not quite a fright. What a glorious thing was joy which could thus burnish people's looks! She dared not look long enough to assure herself that beauty had actually taken possession of her face. Katherine had told her that it was all mock-modesty for a young woman not to think of her appearance. But Katherine lived in the world. Fine ladies had, perhaps, little time for selfrespect, but people who were not fashionable had a great deal of leisure to perceive when they were going wrong. So May bustled about her room, briskly putting herself and the chamber into the order which her fancy approved of. She was wiser than she had been a month ago, inasmuch as she had got a lesson in coquetry for life; she was now going to profit by the lesson. A month ago she would innocently have dressed in her prettiest to meet Paul, without thinking why she did it, or that she ought not to do it. Now, it could not be done without taking away her ease. This was not Camlough, so she need not change her dress because it was evening. She kept on the thick white wrapper which had been fresh at breakfast-time that morning; a crimson rose was already fastened in the bosom, and that might stay. Nice braids of hair were nothing unusual, and there could not be any vanity in a pair of newly-washed hands. And so she took her way to the parlour, as on the 66 most ordinary occasions, such as the long, silent, uneventful summer evenings of last year; as if no sound were going to disturb the mute monotony of the hours but the click of her aunt's knitting - needles, the ticking of the clock, the distant piping of some cow-boy in the valley, the wail of a sleepy plover shuddering in at the open window, or the sound of her own voice reading a chapter of Thomas à Kempis aloud to Miss Martha in the dusk. A great glare had flashed over the hills, and down the paths, and through the open door into the hall. As May reached the door, a long shadow and a quick step came out of the blinding red glow, and stopped at the threshold. Here then, of course, was the visitor arrived: but not the lad whom May remembered. This was not May's merry friend. But it was Katherine's handsome lover, without a doubt. 66 "Mr. Finiston!" said May, giving her hand. She could not say Paul to this important-looking gentleman. Miss Mourne !" said Paul, uncovering his curls. He could not say "May" to this dignified-looking maiden. But he held the proffered hand as tightly as if he had got at last what he had been in want of all his life. And May was regarding him with sympathetic curiosity, wondering if he had heard as yet the report of Katherine's approaching marriage: and if so, how he was bearing it. Miss Martha stepped out of the parlour, where she had been setting forth her dainties on the tea-table. you "So have been walking over your property all day," said she to Paul. "May, you go in and pour out the tea. I have had to do it for myself during the past three weeks. I have just got her home, and I intend to make her work. She has been living like a fine lady among the magnates of the land." She Paul thought she looked a fine lady in the finest sense of the word; excellently fit for household work like the present, as her quick hand flitted about the board, and her sweet face smiled at him and dimpled above the tea-pot. It was nectar and not tea which she handed him in a cup. had a love-philter in her cream-ewer, this witch-maid of the mountains. Paul had, until now, held three images in his mind, now they paled away and became faint for evermore. A little grey pelisse making purchases in Dublin; a maiden with outstretched hands upon a bridge; a gracious young gentlewoman holding parley with a pedlar. These three young people had been, successively, his loves; now let them vanish, for their day had gone past. They could not bear comparison with this radiant tea-making creature, who could not hide her gladness that her friend had come home. Not a word was spoken about the miser of Tobereevil. Paul shirked the subject, and the evening was given up to his own adventures abroad. The three friends sat all through the sunset, and far into the dusk, while Paul poured forth his recitals, and the audience drank in every word he spoke. The little parlour with its queer fittings seemed paradise to this love-sick and home-sick wanderer. May sat opposite to him on a bench along the window. Two huge jars filled with roses and sheaves of lavender stood between them, making a bank of scent and colour across which their eyes and words travelled. Miss Martha sat in her straight-backed arm-chair before the two, with her hands folded in her lap, no knitting being tolerable on this particular evening. The window was open, to the utmost folding back of its latticed panes, and the climbing roses were dipping over the strong brown framework, and lying along the lintel. As Paul told his foreign adventures, he felt himself to be only some lucky Othello, or less savage Feramorz. He forgot that he was a Finiston, and the heir of Tobereevil. May's eyes glowed towards him through the fading light, and he saw in her an embodiment of all the fair hopes that had withdrawn him from the influence of his dreads and difficulties, that he might sit here at this hour in delicious peace at her side. He saw in her here present all the beauties with which his fancy had ever gifted her in absence; besides a tender paleness of cheek when thrilled by grave interest, and a spiritual abstraction of the eyes at times, out of which he gathered for himself the assurance that she could search far with him into whatever mysteries might trouble him. And yet he delighted to discover-he could call back the merry smiles and the laughter-loving dimples. All these satisfactions he did not note on the moment, while he lingered in the dim atmosphere of the parlour among the cloisters; but they were duly recalled and gloated over as he walked home to his farm-house under the moonlight. While sitting by her side, within reach of her hand and the sympathy of her face, he could not analyse the charm which had so swiftly mastered his fancy; her presence, then, had been only the nearness of a lovely and luminous soul and body, full of kindred warmth and dreams. It was after he had left her that he remembered the strong breadth of her brow with all its girlish fairness, the deep fire in her eyes, the sweet curves of her mouth, the tender firmness of her softly-moulded chin. It was then that she seemed to show herself to him in the many changeful attitudes that her character could assume, without losing a line of strength or a curve of grace. On that warm July night Paul was deeply dipped in love. He had been parched in his exile, and he had brought himself to drink; but he was only the more athirst after this first spicy draught. Miss Martha and May had walked a little way with him through the field-paths towards the moor. The twilight blurred and blended the ghostly outlines of the ruins, and garden and graveyard were wreathed together in one gleaming, fragrant acre. The warm wind swept over the uncut grass, which had already the breath of hay, and the river glinted in the hollow, under its bending rows of trees. The moonlight hung like a faint silvery veil along the moorland, and the lights in distant farmhouses shone like will-o'-the-wisps in a marsh. The weird watch-note of some sleepless wild-bird came floating up at intervals from the meadows. The sweet, mild summer beat in every pulse of the night. Very slowly, and with few words, the three friends had sauntered along. At the gate that parted the farm-lands from the open hills they touched hands, and said good-night. you "Well, my dear, and what do think of him?" asked Aunt Martha, as the women returned homeward. May did not answer for a few moments. She was pacing a little in advance, with her arms crossed on her breast, a trick she had from childhood when in musing humour. Two or three times her feet fell on the grass as if to the rhythm of some music that was solemn, but passing sweet. "Eh, Aunty?" she said at last. "Did you speak to me?" "I was asking you what you thought of him, my dear." "Don't ask me to-night, then," said May, stopping suddenly, putting her hands on her aunt's shoulders, and looking frankly and smilingly in her face; moonlight makes people mad, you know, and I might 66 "Well, well, my love!" said Miss Martha, "I am not going to bother you. Let us now get into bed." But as May went into her bedroom she thought of Katherine. And she remembered that for some hours she had forgotten to pity Paul. FEATHERS AND IRON. be too enthusiastic. To-morrow we shall noon in Fleet-street, to see the wooden see him better as he is." giants on the tower of old St. Dunstan's church strike the hour with their clubs. I remember when Trafalgar-square and its sculptural atrocities had no existence, and when the King's Mews stood on the site of the National Gallery. I remember when members of the Houses of Lords and Commons did not think it beneath their dignity to fight duels, and when the late John Black of the late Morning Chronicle challenged the still living Mr. Roebuck to settle, or attempt to settle, a personal quarrel, arising out of a political discussion, by the same illogical method. I remember when the rate of postage varied according to distance, and when a letter to the Land's End or John o' Groat's House was charged two shillings or half a crown for conveyance; and when people well to do in the world, rather than pay such a rate, gave themselves a vast deal of trouble to hunt up members of parliament to badger or coax them out of their signatures, which, written on the corner of letters, franked the documents to any part of the British Isles. I remember when the only pen that man, woman, or child could write with was the goose-quill, or the more delicate wing feathers of the crow; when pen-mending was an art and an accomplishment that employed much time, and needed much patience on the part of the inexpert or the hasty. I need scarcely add that I remember the old mail-coaches, with their jaunty red-coated drivers and guards clad in the royal livery, and their gallant, almost triumphant departure every evening from Lombard-street and St. Martin's-le-Grand, in days when railways, though spoken of and recommended by the far-seeing few, were condemned by the short-seeing many as very dangerous experiments, and when the agency of electricity for the conveyance of messages was utterly unsuspected, except by a poet or a stray visionary or two. for the old semaphore, that worked its ungainly arms on the top of the ugly old Admiralty at Whitehall, to signal its fellow at Greenwich, it seems but yesterday that, its vocation being gone, it was removed from its airy eminence, perhaps to be preserved as a relic of the past, or more probably to be chopped up for firewood. I AM on the sunny side of fifty-five; not that the fact is of the slightest importance to any one but myself and my friends; but I mention it to show how comparatively young a man may be, who remembers things that to those who have not yet arrived at middle age might seem to reach into a remote antiquity. I remember old London Bridge. I remember shooting the particularly dangerous arch in a wherry. I remember the Thames watermen, with their badges and their quaint medieval costume. I remember when there was neither a cab nor an omnibus plying for hire in the streets of London, and when the lumbering old vehicles called hackney - coaches, with two horses, did heavily and expensively the duty now performed lightly and cheaply by the hansom. I remember the wretched old watchmen, or "Charlies," who crawled along the streets at night from twilight until dawn, and called out the hour and the state of the weather and the moon, and who when off their beats took refuge in crazy old sentry-boxes, set up for their use by the parishes that employed them, and which it was the especial glory and pleasure of the fast young men of the day to overset and carry off. I remember the time when flint, steel, and tinder-box afforded the only available means of procuring a light or a fire, unless by borrowing from a fire or a light already kindled. I remember the first feeble attempt at the lucifer-match, when the match, instead of being drawn over a rough surface to be ignited, had to be dipped into a little bottle or phial, which you kept in your waistcoat-pocket. I remember when snuffers were indispensable to the burning of candles, when women wore pattens in bad weather, and goloshes were things unknown, and india-rubber, of which they are now made, was only used for rubbing out pencil-marks from paper. I remember the crowds that used to collect every day at As The men to whom the world is indebted for inland and ocean telegraphy and for the penny post, still live, and long may they flourish to receive the gratitude of their countrymen! He to whom we owe the apparently little, but in reality great, boon of the steel pen, without the aid of which Rowland Hill's immense social reformation -the penny post-would have been restricted and comparatively valueless, has just passed away, having attained the allotted span of seventy years, which few are permitted to overpass. Joseph Gillott, of Birmingham, whose pens are known all over the civilised world, died early in the year, at the age of seventy-two, in the possession of a handsome fortune, which he had accumulated in his business, and leaving behind him the reputation, not only of a kindly and upright man, but of the pioneer of a great manufacture and of an intelligent patron of art. factory-the number which he since employed, the writer cannot undertake to specify-and produced between one hundred and fifty and two hundred millions of steel pens annually. It would be an interesting little sum in arithmetic, to calculate how many geese would have to be reared, and fed, and afterwards robbed, for the supply of such a vast consumption of quills as is represented by Mr. Gillott's figures. When he first began to manufacture steel pens, he had great and manifold difficulties to contend with. People did not approve of steel pens, and would not write with them. Social conservatives, such as bankers, great merJoseph Gillott did not invent the steel chants, lawyers, authors, and others, would pen, any more than James Watt invented not admit them into their offices or studies, the steam-engine, or George Stephenson looking upon them with as much distrust, the railway. He only did, in his own surprise, and aversion as the domestic peculiar way, what those illustrious men servants and paupers of the present day had done before him; he perfected that look upon that wholesome Australian beef which he found already in existence, but and mutton which they have not learned inchoate and inoperative, and rendered to appreciate. So great and long-continued available and cheap that which before his in certain quarters was the prejudice entertime was either unavailable or costly. The tained against steel pens, that it is recorded steel or iron pen is as old as history, and, of a late master in one of the Superior under its classic name of stylus, was the Courts at Westminster, so recently as eight medium of introducing into modern years ago, that he took so much to heart language that which we call the style the introduction of the objectionable article, or manner of a writer. Not only iron in lieu of the quill, into the sacred precincts and steel, but gold and silver pens were of the Queen's Bench, that he became manufactured for the dainty before the firmly convinced of the approaching and days of Gillott. But all of these were inevitable downfall of British liberty and expensive articles. Gillott was employed the British nation-which he thought he as a grinder in the manufacture of steel could distinctly trace to this daring and pens, which were made by hand, and sold sacrilegious innovation. The worthy man at the rate of about three shillings and six-like the love-sick lady in the ballad-is pence each. The correspondence of the world-its business, its loves, its friendships, and its quarrels-were all carried on by the aid of the quill, called by the Germans feder, by the French plume, and by ourselves pen, from the Latin penna, a feather, so that the people of these great nations, unaware of the solecism, inaccurately and habitually speak of steel feathers, whenever they mention those little implements for the transmission of thought which the people of this latter half of the nineteenth century are compelled to use. If no substitute for a goose-quill had been discovered, it is evident that the world could not have maintained a tithe of its present correspondence, unless geese and other fowls had been bred in extraordinary numbers for the pluckage of their wings. Twenty years ago Mr. Gillott employed six hundred girls and young women, besides machinists, in his manu said to have drooped his head and died, in consequence of this cruel blow, which was aggravated, to his sensitive mind, by the fact that his lordship on the bench, not only actually used the pernicious implement, but publicly declared it to be an improvement upon the time-honoured feather of the goose! This blow was too hard to bear, and the good man never entirely got over it. But the unreasonable prejudices of the public, which at this early period of his career were still more formidable, did not discourage Mr. Gillott. After awhile, though in a small way, he introduced the agency of steam into the manufacture, by which he was speedily enabled to supply a much cheaper and an infinitely better article. After a very few years he began to accumulate wealth, and it was reported of him that he was fearful of opening a banking account, lest the fame of his earn ings should attract rivals into the business, but kept his sovereigns in earthen jars-as if they were pickles-or sewed them into old stockings, or into the mattress of his bed. By degrees, however, the demand for steel pens increased so much that he was unable to supply it, although he largely extended his factories and the number of his workpeople. The secret of his wealth and its sources could be preserved no longer, and rivalry and improvement went hand in hand, until the steel pens of Birmingham became known and approved all over the world. By the time that the penny post came into operation in Great Britain, and afterwards in other countries, the steel pen was ready for the millions of people who had scarcely ever written letters before, and who could not have profited by the beneficent boon if the goose and the crow had continued to be their only providers. A visit to Mr. Gillott's or any other great pen factory in the "toy-shop of the world" (for "toy" in the trade phraseology of Birmingham is a word that designates not only pens, but pins, needles, buckles, corkscrews, nails, hammers, and every conceivable tool that can be manufactured of metal), is one of the things which every traveller who comes to England from a far country must "do," just as he "does Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, or the Trosachs. The sight is exceedingly interesting, and includes a far greater variety of processes than a spectator, previously uninformed, might imagine. From the unrolling of the finely tempered sheets of steel, not thicker than cardboard-from which the first rude body of the future pen is pierced by the delicate but all-powerful agency of steam-to the several processes of curving, slitting the nib, polishing, drying, and packing, the little implement undergoes a long series of manipulations and transformations. Men are only employed in the care of the engines and the reparation of the necessary machines by which the several results are obtained. All the rest of the work is performed by women, whose deft fingers are better suited than those of men for the dainty operations required. The work is light-pleasant in itself-and unlike the labour employed in the manufacture of artificial flowers and grasses, and many others where women and children are employed, involves no detriment or even danger to the health, while the wages are much higher than can be obtained by needlework, or other forlorn occupations to which unskilled workers of the softer sex are compelled to resort to earn a bare subsistence. The pen-makers as a rule are well paid, and when out in the streets of Birmingham in their holiday costumes on Sundays or other days of leisure, present not alone a highly respectable, but so gay and showy an appearance, as to prove that the prosperity of Birmingham must react very considerably on that of Coventry, Manchester, Derby, and Paisley, and all others that grow rich by providing finery for the ladies. The The quantity of steel pens annually turned out of the factories of Birmingham, judged by the number produced by the one firm of Gillott and Company, cannot fall far short of a thousand millions. actual business of the world in buying and selling, and keeping accounts, employs, it must be supposed, about three-fourths of them-leaving some two hundred and fifty millions, or thereabouts, for love and idleness, for friendship, acquaintance, and politeness, and last, not least, for literature. What becomes of them all when they are worn out?-for the steel pen is too cheap to be worth mending. The same question has been asked about pins and needles, and can only receive the one reply: that like the men and women who make and use them, they return, when they have served their purpose, to the earth from which they came; and out of which nothing can be taken without ultimate restoration. ECHO VERSES. MUCH ingenuity has been shown by rhymesters some of them not merely poetasters, but real poets in their hours of merry relaxation-in the construction of what are designated Echo Verses. These are lines in which the last word is given as a question, and the answer to it is the same word repeated as an echo; or there may be a group of words so treated, instead of a single word; or the echo may be a sort of corroboration instead of a direct answer to a question; or it may involve a kind of verbal pun, such as those much used in the construction of conundrums. Some languages lend themselves more readily than others to this kind of inventive pleasantry, but examples are to be met with in most European tongues. There is an old Latin echo verse, rather solemn than humorous in its character, in |