together the one had led and dominated, while the other copied and followed in slavish acceptance of the elder's word and example. A host of affectionate recollections crowded into her mind, remembrances all darkened now by the dread of separation, by the dread, too, that Marion might find no real happiness in this step she seemed so firmly determined to take. It was almost the deepest moment of emotion in Isabel's passive life.

"No, I am not in love with him," said Marion calmly, "but I have brought him crawling and begging to my feet, and he can give me money and position and social power. Why shouldn't I take it all? One can't have everything. I refused of my own free will to marry the only man I could ever have cared for, and now he is dead." She caught her breath and held it for the moment while she mastered the sob that threatened to shake her. "I am not rushing blindly into this marriage, Isabel. I know what I am doing, and I think it is worth doing. I don't mean to allow my own past folly to spoil my life. If Tom had come home and asked me again to marry him I think I should have done it, and gone back to India a more humbleminded person than I left it! As it is, there is a great deal to live for still, from my point of view, and I might as well live for it. I suppose I may consider myself lucky to get the chance!" Isabel only cried.

Marion came and sat beside her sister on the bed. "Don't, Isabel, dear. What's the matter?"

"Oh! supposing he is unkind and horrid to you!"

Marion laughed. "I'm not at all afraid," she said confidently. "I am much more likely to be unkind and horrid to him, though I shall try not to be.

Listen, darling-" she kissed Isabel tenderly, "there is no need whatever to be miserable. I'm going

to enjoy life as far as possible. Perhaps if I had married Tom Gray I shouldn't have been happy, and there would have been no riches or luxury to fall back upon by way of consolation. I don't fear the future for myself at all. But there is something that worries me that has worried me ever since that horrible evening when Mother brought the Pioneer Mail into the drawing-room and I realized what Tom's dying meant to me."

Isabel was tearfully interrogative.

"It is the feeling that I influenced you all wrong, Isabel, about Arthur Dakin. Long ago, if it hadn't been for me, you might have married him and been happy in your own kind, unselfish way. I only saw what I had done that night when-”

You

"Oh! Marion, dearest, don't! only wanted to save me from trouble and hardship and anything disagreeable. And there was really nothing between us, he never really said anything-."

Isabel's quiet weeping turned into shattering tears and sobs. The sisters held each other tightly.

In a little while Marion withdrew herself from Isabel's convulsive embrace. "Isabel," she said, “you must stop crying. Mother will hear you. Besides I want to tell you something else."

In the enforced calm that followed Isabel listened to a scheme unfolded by her sister, that when the living at Beach fell vacant, which it was to do this autumn, Sir Rowland should offer it to the Rev. Arthur Dakin. Marion in the meantime would write to him, tell him of her approaching marriage, and sound him on the subject of accepting the living that was in the gift of her future husband.

"That is, if you'd like him to have the living, Isabel. Of course he would jump at it. I believe it's a very good living as livings go nowadays."

and ruffianly violence. The young prince had ascended the throne as a stranger, a foreigner ignorant of his subjects, their language and customs. Russia had thought him a helpless puppet in the hands of Russian ministers, civil officials and loaned military men, but he had inexplicably won the love of his subjects. It was unpardonable. He was seized in his bed, bundled into a carriage, thrust down into a ship's cabin, and landed, still in his pyjamas, at a Russian port, whilst hireling gangs began abortive insurrections at Rustchug, etc., in favor of annexation to Russia. But Bulgaria stood stiff and demanded her prince, and Russia discovered, or the stupid and brutal bully who ruled her discovered, that there are things which even a Czar cannot do. This was in 1886. Prince Alexander returned to his capital a changed man. Had an insidious drug been administered to him in Russia? Some say so; others deny it. Anything is possible east of the Pruth. He who had been alert, debonair, gallant, was now a listless, hopeless dreamer, intent only upon abdicating his throne. I stood by his tomb last week. It is heaped with garlands and wreaths sent by every crowned head in Europe. He was a gentleman of winning personality and noble presence. Upon his abdication Russia thought her path clear; a man after the Czar's own heart, General Kaulbars, was sent to bully the Bulgarians into petitioning for annexation; but the ex-prince's Premier, M. Stambouloff, had assumed the regency and was scouring Europe for a suitable constitutional ruler. The Kaulbars conducted himself so arrogantly that his name became a byword in Germany, and an editor was fined for describing the conduct of an official as "Kaulbarsch." He stumped the country convening meetings of peasants to listen to his threats and promises. The Bulgarians are no fools. They ascer

tained from the general's coachman each night his next day's route, and packed every meeting he addressed with silent, respectful auditors who voted against the proposals he recommended. After a year of interregnum a prince was found prepared to accept the risks. Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, a nephew of England's Queen ("my aunt," he always called her) and a grandson of Louis Philippe, some time King of the French, was twenty-six, plausible, tenacious, politic, acute, patient, far-sighted and silently ambitious. He is one of the two or three really able rulers of our time, and, considering his opportunities and materials, quite the most successful. Royal by descent, a man of science by bent, an actor to the tips of his fingers, he glided to the stage from the wing at a moment when the company were at sixes and sevens, and half the pit pelting orange-peel; he improvised plot, dialogue and business, and for fiveand-twenty exciting years has kept his realm and himself in the centre of the stage: a long run for a King! From the first he determined to be royal; whatever the issue of his daring experiment, he would be a monarch whilst it lasted, would house himself in a palace, surround himself with the trappings and insignia of his house, and impress his personality upon his subjects, the Ports, and Europe at large. For years it was a desperate game. The Mujik Emperor loathed him and gave a free hand to the Asiatic Bureau, a gang of the most unscrupulous blackguards that even Russia could produce. From 1897 to 1904, seven long years, every artifice of corruption, chicane and violence was exhausted. Neither the life of the Prince nor those of his ministers was safe for a day. This sounds extravagant, but is well within the mark. Millions of levs (francs) were expended in corrupting officials, tampering with regiments,

suborning and screening assassins. Every penniless politician, disappointed courtier, jealous subaltern was sounded, bought, made welcome at Odessa and furnished with roubles and a part to play in the drama. Some worked from Stamboul, some from Adrianople, others along the Danube from Kalafat, Turna, Giurgevo or Kalarasi, corresponded with the Bulgarian messes on the opposite bank from which they had deserted. (The brother of one of the conspirators has described to me their methods. I shook the hand of another to-day, loyal long since, but then one of the fiercest, bent upon using the knife!)

There were risings organized north, south, all over the little realm. A limited monarchy protected by the ordinary law must have succumbed, for Russia stuck at nothing, but Prince Ferdinand was served by the greatest man-take him all round-that the Bulgarian race has produced. Stambouloff, the son of a nobody, who had run the streets a penniless, barelegged boy, resigned his twelve months of regency to be the First Minister of Ferdinand, as he had been of Alexander. Hero, patriot, statesman, brute, this man would have been a prime force in any age and in any nation. Without any question he saved his master; he saved the State from the clutches of Russia. Himself he could not save. He would have claimed that he only played the game. Whilst M. Hitrovo, Russia's minister at Bucharest, was organizing armed gangs and despatching them across the Danube, was he to maintain the Habeas Corpus? When his friend and colleague Beltcheff fell dead in the street at his side, riddled with bullets, when M. Petroff, another minister, was knifed in broad daylight, was it a time to be squeamish? He struck right and left, and hard and often: he established fear. He filled the prisons with

suspects and flogged and tortured a good many Russian secrets out of the Czar's emissaries. It was one way. It may have been the only way. But what Europe permits a Romanoff to do she will not countenance in a Stambouloff. Confronted with alternative risks, his master, very wisely, dismissed his great but terrible servant. This was in 1903. Alexander III., still implacable, still refusing to “recognize" Prince Ferdinand, died the next year, a young and less Tartar-like Czar had ascended the throne, and the tension might be supposed to be relaxing, and many breathed the more freely, but not Stambouloff. He knew well that the Asiatic Bureau, whom he had outwitted and defied, never pardons.

A

The ex-Premier desired to go abroad, and applied for a passport. It was refused. This was ominous, and almost at once Russia got her revenge. gang of miscreants hacked their victim to death with yataghans in the street, and escaped under the very noses of the police! A royal personage, not a Bulgarian, nor in Bulgaria, is credited with the mot that la mort de M. Stambouloff c'était une nécessité politique. Well might an English publicist, who knew the minds and morals of European statesmen, say that the late Lord Salisbury, at the Congress of Berlin, must have shuddered at the company in which he found himself. Stambouloff dead, the bureaucrats of the Asiatic section permitted Nicholas II. to "recognize" Ferdinand as Prince of Bulgaria, and the era of alarums and excursions was closed, and that of peaceful progress begun. The last of the New Nations which had clambered painfully out of the pit of slavery and massacre only to find itself betrayed by its "friends," and enmeshed in war, conspiracies, assassinations and the police methods of Moscow, settled down to educate itself, civilize itself,

build, plant, beautify itself, and to master the difficult art of representative government under the responsible ministers of a constitutional sovereign (an art at present unlearned by Germany and undreamt of upon the Neva). Three of the Powers had found by this time that the Bulgarian meant to be master in his own house, and could defend the same at need. Abdul Hamid remodelled his army and fortified his frontier. The new Czar was aware that his oaf father had played the fool, and attempted to regain Bulgaria's confidence. The "good brown land" between the Danube and the Egean will never be a Russian province, as Nicholas knows. So does England, somewhat slow at the uptake, and has laid aside the Disraelian jealousy of Bulgarian expansion. Not so Vienna:

The British Review.

when Ferdinand assumed the kingly style Austria hotly resented his pretensions. When at King Edward's funeral Bulgaria's monarch, no longer a prince, rode among kings as a king, and the Archduke, representing the aged Emperor Franz Josef, was placed behind him, there was a pretty to-do. The insulted Austrian refused to eat or sleep in Great Britain: it was ho! for special train and boat for a deeply offended Serenity, and off he went in dudgeon the same afternoon-which may have consequences anon. But there was one happy man at Windsor, for by that day's ceremonial Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Bulgaria had been recognized as king by the eldest reigning House in the world, and a king he remains. What next?

H. M. Wallis.

I.

But

The pilgrim in search of popular festivals may well be tempted to make comparisons between the annual celebrations at Rothenburg and at Stratford-on-Avon, especially if-as in the present year of grace the opportunity has fallen to him of witnessing both within a month of one another. he must resist the temptation; for the comparison is short-lived, superficial, and altogether barren. Of course, all local festivals have a certain atmosphere in common; a desire to commemorate somebody or something that ought not to be forgotten in a particular neighborhood, an ambition to widen the circle of interest around the central object of veneration, and an intention to carry out the festivities with as much attention to detail and expenditure of public and private funds as shall appear requisite to attract an ever-growing audience and to

achieve a result worthy of the occasion.

But, having said so much, and adding thereto that both Rothenburg and Stratford are now in the second generation of their existence as festivalgivers, the comparison is at an end. Stratford, a placid, lavender-scented, imperturbable English country town, celebrates Shakespeare-a national hero and a household word. Rothenburg, rugged, war-worn and embattled, does honor to a local worthy of the early seventeenth century who, although he was forced to consent to surrender his native city to the overmastering forces of the Catholic League, saved it by his prowess from a fate so dire as the wholesale massacre at Magdeburg. The festival at Stratford is one of poetry and peace; the pageant at Rothenburg revives memories of siege and heroism and sacrifice. Shakespeare lives, a master of deathless words: Nusch, the senator of