II. The Towers of St. Nicholas. By Mary Agatha Gray. New York: Kenedy & Sons. (Price 75c.) This story, dealing with the period of the religious persecutions under Queen Elizabeth, is told in a pleasant style, and the interest well kept up throughout. The character drawing is good, and the tone of the book thoroughly Catholic. Cedric Franklin obtains possession of his elder brother's estates of Ethendene, in reward for having denounced him as a recusant," and the heir, his nephew, as a priest. The brother has died in prison for his faith-his widow and daughter remain at Ethendene. Cedric Franklin comes to live there, too, with his wife and his young son, Walter, who have remained staunch Catholics. Father Franklin is hidden in the ruined towers of St. Nicholas by a faithful gipsy, whose life he had saved. By night he contrives to minister to the Catholics of the neighbourhood, and gets to Ethendene by a secret passage to see his mother and sister. His perils form the matter of many exciting chapters. The book is well turned out with clear print and good paper, and the cover is artistically designed. 12. Vox Angelica. A New Collection of Catholic Hymns. By F. C. Kemble-Wood. Dublin: Fallon & Co. (Price 1d.) The forty-six hymns-the airs of which are given in the Tonic Sol-fa notation-are set, some to familiar traditional hymn tunes, others to less-known airs from old German sources, and from Bach, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Palestrina, Dykes, and F. E. KembleWood. Many of these would be a welcome addition to the usual repertoire of Catholic hymns. 13. Messrs. Washbourne have sent us a copy of the first number of Roma: Ancient, Subterranean and Modern Rome in Word and Picture, which is being issued by them in eighteen parts, each part costing Is. 3d. net. The elaborate plan of the publication, and the excellence of the printing and illustration, will make the complete publication a most valuable guide to and Souvenir of the Holy City. The frontispiece is a fine portrait in colour of our Holy Father Pope Pius X. The whole is issued under the Editorship of the Rev. Albert Kuhn, O.S.B., D.D. 14. At Our Lady's Altar. Compiled by a Sister of the Presentation. Dublin: Fallon & Co. (Price, leather, Is. ; cloth, 6d.) This is a new edition of a manual of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin revised and augmented by Rev. G. O'Neill, S.J., M.A., and contains an attractive selection of prayers and devotions in honour of Our Lady. The little book is well printed and bound, and will be valued by members of the Sodalities and others. THE IRISH MONTHLY FEBRUARY, 1914 FRING By JOHN AYSCOUGH I OR twenty years Miss Fring had lived at Burnham Abbey, FOR and she could no longer imagine herself living anywhere else. All the same, she had only come for three or four months, and the reason of her coming at all was like this:Lady Julia Fitzrupert, whose husband, Sir Rupert Fitzrupert, owned Burnham Abbey and Burnham Village, and all the lands that had long ago belonged to the Abbess of Burnham, was, as we all know, sister of Lady St. Blazey, down in Cornwall; and Lord St. Blazey suddenly resolved to economise. It had never occurred to any of his family for several generations; and it might not have occurred to him had not the inventor of Pearl Soap been seized with a strong desire to live at Blaze Castle. He offered (through the family lawyers) such an enormous rent that it seemed, said Lady St. Blazey solemnly, a duty to accept. "You know, Babbo," she argued with a sudden sense of financial insight, "we have always spent more than we had ; that must mean debt. If we let this place to the Soap Man we shall be actually getting more than we spend" (her husband shook his head, not as impeaching the justice of her position, but dazed by it)," and that must mean getting out of debt. If you get ten pounds a day and spend twelve pounds ten, you get in debt two pounds ten every day. If you get fifteen pounds a day and only spend ten, you're getting out of debt at the rate of five pounds a day. You can't deny it." Lord St. Blazey knew he could not. 5 "But, Totey" (her Ladyship was christened Giralda), he asked dubiously, "where are we to live? where are we to live? We can't live in London all the year round. No one could. Even if 16 wasn't a tight fit for us, with all the girls grown up." When anyone at Blaze Castle talked of sixteen, he meant 16 Buccleugh Square, as proper a place for a poor peer to live as any in London, though the houses were thin-" Tall and squeezy, like Aunt Carlotta," the young St. Blazey ladies called them. "No," agreed Lady St. Blazey, "no one could expect us to live all the year round at 16; not if we owed millions. But we needn't. There's Melbourne." No one at Blaze Castle meant by Melbourne the capital of Victoria, but a small property of that name belonging to her Ladyship. It, a set of fine emeralds, two silver soup tureens (one of which didn't leak), five bedroom candlesticks of the same metal, and nine or ten family portraits, had been her dowrythough an Earl's daughter she had so many sisters. "Melbourne ! observed her husband, without enthusiasm. "It's small," she conceded cheerfully. "About as big as this room," said Lord St. Blazey, less cheerfully; but then the White Saloon at Blaze Castle was one hundred and twenty-four feet long, and no fires on earth would ever warm it in an east wind. "It's small," continued her Ladyship, "but it isn't ugly; and it's a Grange: there's no harm in living in a Grange-one's notepaper wouldn't disgrace one. I shouldn't care to live in a tiny Hall-that would be vulgar; a Hall should be ENORMOUS or it's nothing. It's smallness will be our salvation. If we let the Soap Man come here, we not only get the rent (and to refuse that would be like evading Providence), but he will have this place to keep up instead of us. And at Melbourne we can't spend much." "I could if I tried," said her husband, with gloomy candour. "I could spend thirty thousand a year in a-Chambers. De Broke did." "De Broke is a ninny, and so's she. I'm not, and you're not. Come, Babbo! here's our chance: live on here, and we can't cut down anything; the place won't let us. But now there's this new departure opened up, let's do it; for the children's sakes; and oh, Babbo, I'm sick of bills!" "So am I!" said the Viscount, whose legislative duties sometimes bored him; all the same, he was touched. He dearly loved his wife and his children, and his home; and, for the sake of all three, he would let a rather vulgar stranger come and live in the house that no one but the St. Blazeys had ever lived in yet. Lady St. Blazey wrote to Lady Julia Fitzrupert, in her large, sanguine, happy-go-lucky, good-natured handwriting, that used up reams upon reams of note-paper every year : "BLAZE CASTLE, 'Dear Judie,—That man who makes Pearl Soap (it smells like Ratafia Pudding, and I can't stand it) is going to take this place, and we shall live at 16 and Melbourne. So we shall congedier two footmen, and two kitchen-maids, and four housemaids, both scullery-maids, and some of our own maids. We're going abroad first, for three months, and it would be quite absurd for each of the girls to have a maid to herself. Of course Flunce will come (no one else ever could make me wake in a morning) and Button. They've been with us ten years, and would break their hearts without each other to quarrel with. But Lacy and Ribb are new, and we must get rid of them. While we're abroad Flunce and Button will have to manage for the girls between them. Then there's Fring. You say your creature must go at once or there'll be bloodshed in your halls, and implore me to find you some one. Take Fring as a loan, she's excellent; most honest, civil, and respectful (but not too dreadfully. She doesn't say 'My Lady,' at every comma), very well-conducted (a Roman Catholic), and been in good places. She can dressmake very well, and is not talkative. Our neighbours, the Polwellians, have a chapel in the house, and she goes there do let her go to Mass if you can. Babbo has a cold in his head, and sends his love. Your affectionate, "TOTEY." Lady Fitzrupert sent a telegram-she never had any stamps, and the telegrams went into the butler's book: 'Send your treasure and I'll pay her back. Honour bright. JUDIE." II So Fring went to Burnham Abbey and liked it. At first she didn't, because she came as a stop-gap, and the housekeeper, butler, and valet (like Miss Nipper), suspected temporaries. Miss Fring, they found, leant to permanence, and was gentility personified. Mrs. Stumger, the housekeeper, liked to talk (and so had the late lady's maid); Miss Fring preferred listening. Mrs. Stumger confessed to her own conscience, though not elsewhere, that she "had never lived higher than a baronet," whereas Miss Fring's lowliest place till now had been a Viscount -there had been a Marquess, and a Duchess (though Italian), and yet she never bragged of them. Here was true restraint and gentility. Sellars, the butler, never wearied of the Earl (and only a Scotch one) that had been his last place. Sellars and Bracer (the valet) conceived a high opinion of Miss Fring, because they could not in the least perceive that she was a favourite with her Ladyship. Sir Rupert was "short" with his butler, and not sweet with his valet, whereas Tucker (the late lady's maid) had been for ever quoting the intimate and jocular sayings of my Lady to her. Miss Fring never had much to tell of Lady Fitzrupert, and Sellars and Bracer cheerfully concluded that it was because her Ladyship only took her on sufferance. And they were not altogether wrong. Lady Fitzrupert thought Fring dullish; and, as she had only come for three months, it was hardly worth while making out if there was anything particular behind. Fring was plain; and her manner was plain too. Demure, sober, not shy, but self-contained; at five and twenty she was as staid as a woman of forty. Lady Fitzrupert liked to say queer things, and Tucker had thoroughly enjoyed them, and loved to repeat them. Fring heard them with a subdued air of refusing to be surprised, and didn't even laugh. "Will your Ladyship wear any ornaments to-night?" she would ask, almost absent-mindedly, a moment after her mistress had said something funny, which would have filled Tucker with impatience to be off to "the room" and retail itwith (imagined) improvements. And not a soul in all Burnham Abbey would have guessed why Fring was absent-minded. "She's all Totey promised," Lady Fitzrupert would admit to herself; "as respectable as a hearse and six horses, honest, clean, tidy, careful, a wonderful dressmaker, respectful, goodtempered-and no more idea of a joke than a stone ball on a lodge-gate." But the positive good qualities were so undeniable that Fring stayed twenty years. When the St. Blazeys returned to |