out with brightness and consolation. "What will all our losses matter if Stephen gets well?" she went on beginning to cry. And Miss Jane rose up hastily, and went away with a tremulous harshness, shutting her lips up tight, to the other side of the room, to get her work, which she had been neglecting. Miss Jane was like a man in this, that she could not bear tears. She set her face against them, holding herself in, lest she too might have been tempted to join. Of all the subjects of discussion in this world, Stephen's recovery was the only one she could not bear; for she loved her brother like a poet, like a starved and frozen woman who has had but one love in her life.

The old mother was more manageable to Mr. Burton's mind than Miss Jane. Her tears and gratitude restored him to what he felt was his proper place,—that of a benefactor and guardian angel. He sat for half an hour longer, and told Mrs. Haldane all about the favour he was willing to confer. "It is close to the gates of my own house, but you must not think that will be an annoyance to us," he said. "On the contrary, I don't mean to tell my father-in-law till he sees you there. It will be a pleasant surprise for him. He has always taken so much interest in Haldane. Don't say anything, I beg. I am very glad you should have it, and I hope it will make you feel this dreadful calamity less. Ah yes; it is wretched for us; but what must it be for my poor cousin? I am going to see her now."

"I don't know her," said Mrs. Haldane. "She has called at the door to ask for Stephen, very regular. That I suppose was because of the friendship between- but I have only seen her once or twice on a formal call. If all is true that I hear, she will take it hard, being a proud woman. Oh! pride's sinful at the best of times; but in a time like this"

"Mother!"

"Yes, Stephen, I know; and I am sure I would not for the world say a word against friends of yours; but

"I must go now," said Mr. Burton, rising. "Good-bye, Haldane. I will write to you about the house, and when you can come in. On second thoughts, I will not prevent you from mentioning it to Mr. Baldwin, if you please. He is sure to ask what you are going to do, and he will be glad to know."

He went out from Victoria Villas pleased with himself. He had been very good to these people, who really were nothing to

staunch Churchman, and had no sympathy for the sick minister. What was his motive, then? But it was his wife who made it her business to investigate his motives, and we may wait for the result of her examination. All this was easy enough. The kindness he had offered was one which would cost him little, and he had not suffered in this interview as he had done in that which preceded it. But now he had occasion for all his strength; now came the tug of war, the real strain. He was going to see Helen. She had been but three days a widow, and no doubt would be in the depth of that darkness which is the recognised accompaniment of grief. Would she see him? Could she have seen the papers, or heard any echo of their news? On this point he was nervous. Before he went to St. Mary's Road, though it was close at hand, he went to the nearest hotel, and had a glass of wine and a biscuit. For such a visit he required all his strength.

But these precautions were unnecessary. The shutters were all closed in St. Mary's Road. The lilacs were waving their plumy fragrant branches over a door which no one entered. Mrs. Drummond was at home, but saw no one. Even when the maid carried his message to her, the answer was that she could see no one, that she was quite well, and required nothing. "Not even the clergy man, sir," said the maid. "He's been, but she would not see him. She is as white as my apron, and her poor hands you could see the light through 'em. We all think as she'll die too."

"Does she read the papers?" said Mr. Burton anxiously. He was relieved when the woman said "No." He gave her half-acrown, and bade her admit none to the house till he came again. Rebecca promised and curtsied, and went back to the kitchen to finish reading that article in the Daily Semaphore. The fact that it was "master" who was there called "this unfortunate man” and "this unhappy wretch," gave the strongest zest to it. "La! to think he could have had all that on his mind," they said to each other. George was the only one who considered it might be "a made-up story," and he was believed to say so more from "contrariness," and a desire to set up for superior wisdom, than because he had any real doubt on the subject. "A person may say a thing, but I never heard of one yet as would go for to put it in print, if it wasn't true," was Rebecca's comment. "I'm sorry for poor master, all the same," said Jane the house

maid, who was tender-hearted, and who had put on an old black gown of her own accord. The servants were not to get mourring, which was something unheard of; and they had all received notice, and, as soon as Mrs, Drummond was able to move, were to go

away.

For that matter, Helen was able to move then-able to go to the end of the earth, as she felt with a certain horror of herself. It is so natural to suppose that physical weakness should come in the train of grief; but often it does not, and the elastic delicate strength of Helen's frame resisted all the influences of her sorrow. She scarcely eat at all; she slept little; the world had grown to her one great sea of darkness and pain and desolation and yet she could not lie down and die as she had thought she would, but felt such a current of feverish energy in all her veins as she had never felt before. She could have done anything-laboured, travelled, worked with her hands, fought even, not like a man, but like twenty men. She was conscious of this, and it grieved and horrified her. She felt as a woman brought up in conventional proprieties would naturally feel, that her health ought to have been affected, that her strength should have failed her. But it had not done so. Her grief inflamed her rather, and set her heart on fire. Even now, in these early days, when custom

decreed that she ought to be incapable of exertion, "keeping her bed," she felt herself in possession of a very flood of energy and excited strength. She was miserable, but she was not weak. She shut herself up in the darkened house all day, but half the night would walk about in her garden, in her despair, trying to tame down the wild life which had come with calamity. Poor little Norah crept about everywhere after her, and lay watching with great wide-open eyes, through the silvery half-darkness of the summer night, till she should come to bed. But Norah was not old enough to understand her mother, and was herself half frightened by this extraordinary change in her, which affected the child's imagination more than the simple disappearance of her father did, though she wept and longed for him with a dreary sense that unless he came back, life never could be as of old, and that he would never, never come back. But all the day long Mrs. Drummond sat in her darkened room, and was not able to see any one." She endured the vigil, and would have done so, if she had died of it. That was what was called "proper respect:' it was the conventional necessity of the moment. Mr. Burton called again and again, but it was more than a fortnight before he was admitted. And in the meantime he too had certain preparations to go through.

-THE King sat in the winter-house in the ninth month, and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. . . When Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife.

That seems to be a pleasant and home-like picture from a not very remote period-less than twenty-five hundred years ago, and many centuries after the fall of Troy. And that was not so very long ago, for Thebes, in the splendid streets of which Homer wandered and sang to the kings when Memphis, whose ruins are older than history, was its younger rival, was twelve centuries old when Paris ran away with Helen.

I am sorry that the original-and you can usually do anything with the "original"does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant picture. I should like to believe

I.

that Jehoiakim-for that was the singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone-had just received the Memphis Palimpsest, fifteen days in advance of the date of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read. I should like to have seen it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis, and Necho was organizing his campaign against Carchemish. If Jehoiakim took the Attic Quarterly, he might have read its comments on the banishment of the Alcmæonidæ, and its gibes at Solon for his prohibitory laws, forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with contributions from two rising poets—a

to the date of the paper. When I found it was printed in July, I need not say that I lost all interest in it, though why the trivialities and crimes and accidents, relating to people I never knew, were not as good six months after date as twelve hours, I cannot

say.

THE FIRE-TENDER. You know that in Concord the latest news, except a remark or two by Thoreau or Emerson, is the Vedas. I believe the Rig-Veda is read at the breakfast table instead of the Boston journals.

THE PARSON. I know it is read afterward instead of the Bible.

MANDEVILLE. That is only because it is supposed to be older. I have understood that the Bible is very well spoken of there, but it is not antiquated enough to be an authority.

OUR NEXT DOOR. There was a project on foot to put it into the circulating library, but the title New in the second part was considered objectionable.

HERBERT. Well, I have a good deal of sympathy with Concord as to the news. We are fed on a daily diet of trivial events and gossip, of the unfruitful sayings of thoughtless men and women, until our mental digestion is seriously impaired; the day will come when no one will be able to sit down to a thoughtful, well-wrought book and assimilate its contents.

THE MISTRESS. I doubt if a daily newspaper is a necessity, in the higher sense of the word.

THE PARSON. Nobody supposes it is to women-that is, if they can see each other. THE MISTRESS. Don't interrupt, unless you have something to say; though I should like to know how much gossip there is afloat that the minister does not know. The newspaper may be needed in society, but how quickly it drops out of mind when one goes beyond the bounds of what is called civilization. You remember when we were in the depths of the woods last summer how difficult it was to get up any interest in the files of late papers that reached us, and how unreal all the struggle and turmoil of the world seemed. We stood apart, and could estimate things at their true value.

THE YOUNG LADY. Yes, that was real life. I never tired of the guide's stories; there was some interest in the intelligence that a deer had been down to eat the lilypads at the foot of the lake the night before; that a bear's track was seen on the trail we crossed that day; even Mandeville's fish stories had a certain air of probability; and

how to roast a trout in the ashes and serve him hot, and juicy, and clean, and how to cook soup and prepare coffee and heat dishwater in one tin-pail were vital problems.

THE PARSON. You would have had no such problems at home. such problems at home. Why will people go so far to put themselves to such inconvenience? I hate the woods. Isolation breeds conceit; there are no people so conceited as those who dwell in remote wildernesses and live mostly alone.

THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I feel humble in the presence of mountains, and in the vast stretches of the wilderness.

THE PARSON. I'll be bound a woman would feel just as nobody would expect her to feel, under given circumstances.

MANDEVILLE. I think the reason why the newspaper and the world it carries take no hold of us in the wilderness is that we become a kind of vegetable ourselves when we go there. I have often attempted to improve my mind in the woods with good, solid books. You might as well offer a bunch of celery to an oyster. The mind goes to sleep: the senses and the instincts wake up. The best I can do when it rains, or the trout won't bite, is to read Dumas' novels. Their ingenuity will almost keep a man awake after supper, by the camp-fire. And there is a kind of unity about them that I like; the history is as good as the morality.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I always wondered where Mandeville got his historical facts.

THE MISTRESS. Mandeville misrepresents himself in the woods. I heard him one night repeat "The Vision of Sir Launfal—”

(THE FIRE-TENDER. Which comes very near being our best poem.)

as we were crossing the lake, and the guides became so absorbed in it that they forgot to paddle, and sat listening with open mouths, as if it had been a panther story.

THE PARSON. Mandeville likes to show off well enough. I heard that he related to a woods' boy up there the whole of the Siege of Troy. The boy was very much interested and said "there 'd been a man up there that spring from Troy, looking up timber." Mandeville always carries the news when he goes into the country.

MANDEVILLE. I'm going to take the Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer; it's the nearest to anything like news we've had from his pulpit in ten years. But, seriously, the boy was very well informed. He'd heard of Albany; his father took in the Weekly Tri-bune, and he had a partial conception of Horace Greeley.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I never went so far out of the world in America yet that the name of Horace Greeley didn't rise up before me. One of the first questions asked by any camp-fire is, "Did ye ever see Ho

race?"

HERBERT. Which shows the power of the press again. But I have often remarked how little real conception of the moving world, as it is, people in remote regions get from the newspaper. It needs to be read in the midst of events. A chip cast ashore in a refluent eddy tells no tale of the force and swiftness of the current.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I don't exactly get the drift of that last remark; but I rather like a remark that I can't understand; like the landlady's indigestible bread, it stays by you.

HERBERT. I see that I must talk in words of one syllable. The newspaper has little effect upon the remote country mind, because the remote country mind is interested in a very limited number of things. Besides, as the Parson says, it is conceited. The most accomplished scholar will be the butt of all the guides in the woods, because he cannot follow a trail that would puzzle a sable (saple the trappers call it).

THE PARSON. It's enough to read the summer letters that people write to the newspapers from the country and the woods. Isolated from the activity of the world, they come to think that the little adventures of their stupid days and nights are important. Talk about that being real life! Compare the letters such people write with the other contents of the newspaper, and you will see which life is real. That's one reason I hate to have summer come, the country letters set in.

THE MISTRESS. I should like to see something the Parson does n't hate to have

come.

MANDEVILLE. Except his quarter's salary, and the meeting of the American Board.

THE FIRE-TENDER. I don't see that we are getting any nearer the solution of the original question. The world is evidently interested in events simply because they are

recent.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I have a theory that a newspaper might be published at little cost, merely by reprinting the numbers of years before, only altering the dates; just as the Parson preaches over his sermons.

THE FIRE-TENDER. It's evident we must have a higher order of news-gatherers. It has come to this, that the newspaper furnishes thought-material for all the world, actually

prescribes from day to day the themes the world shall think on and talk about. The occupation of news-gathering becomes there fore the most important. When you think o it, it is astonishing that this department should not be in the hands of the ablest men accomplished scholars, philosophical observ ers, discriminating selectors of the news of the world that is worth thinking over and talking about. The editorial comments fre quently are able enough, but is it worth while keeping an expensive mill going to grind chaff? I sometimes wonder, as I open my morning paper, if nothing did happen in the twenty-four hours except crimes, accidents. defalcations, deaths of unknown loafers, rob beries, monstrous births-say about the level of police-court news.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I have even noticed that murders have deteriorated; they are not so high-toned and mysterious as they used to be.

THE FIRE-TENDER. It is true that the newspapers have improved vastly within the last decade.

HERBERT. I think for one that they are very much above the level of the ordinary gossip of the country.

THE FIRE-TENDER. But I am tired of having the under-world still occupy so much room in the newspapers. The reporters are rather more alert for a dog-fight than a philological convention. It must be that the good deeds of the world outnumber the bad in any given day; and what a good reflex action it would have on society if they could be more fully reported than the bad. I sup pose the Parson would call this the Enthusiasm of Humanity.

THE PARSON. You'll see how far you can lift yourself up by your boot-straps.

HERBERT. I Wonder what influence on the quality (I say nothing of quantity) of news the coming of women into the reporter's and editor's work will have.

OUR NEXT DOOR. There are the babyshows; they make cheerful reading.

THE MISTRESS. All of them got up by speculating men, who impose upon the vanity of weak women.

HERBERT. I think women-reporters are more given to personal details and gossip than the men. When I read the Washington correspondence I am proud of my country, to see how many Apollo Belvideres, Adonises, how much marble brow, and piercing eye and hyacinthine locks we have in the two houses of Congress.

THE YOUNG LADY. That's simply because