and it was at length broken by Faulkner, who said :

In that talk between your cousin and myself something was said as to which of us should finally gain you over. I then told her that it was a game in which I might surprise her with the winning card.'

'Well,' whispered Pauline, with another smile, 'you held it. It was your letter, you know.'

Faulkner took her hand and raised it gently to his lips. That is not strong enough,' he said, a little brokenly. 'I want you for my wife. Is it asking too much, Pauline?

The words were quite loudly spoken, for neither dreamed but that they were alone together. In the adjacent room, however, and seen between opened folding-doors, there was a great black screen, covered with golden Japense figures; and from behind this screen, while she appeared shaken with uncontrollable laughter, Mrs. Jones now emerged.

Faulkner and Pauline both started. The latter flushed to her eyes and then grew pale as ashes. Mrs. Jones came forward somewhat staggeringly. She was holding both her sides, as though expectant that her great fit of mirth might produce sad physical consequences. She at once began to struggle with speech, jerking forth several words and then threatening to collapse from an extreme sense of the ludicrous. What she said was somewhat after this fashion:

'Dear Pauline, you must excuse me, but . . . wouldn't Mr. Faulkner like the assistance of a rug or a stool or something if-if he means actually to get down on his knees? Of course his-his . . . . vigorously youthful state makes such a thing almost needless. . . but then you know

even the merest boys are subject, sometimes, to-to rheumatic troubles, my dear Pauline. going to answer?

What are you I do hope you'll show a―a proper respect for age . . and—and that beautiful white

beard. Oh, dear!' finally gasped Mrs. Fortescue Jones, still holding her sides in a very convulsed attitude, 'it's the funniest thing that I have heard in years. It makes makes one think of those dreadful old patriarchs. who got married, you know, anywhere from .. from one to two hundred!'

Faulkner had risen on Mrs. Jones' appearance and stood, perfectly tranquil, exceedingly pale, watching not her but Pauline. And Pauline, for her part, seemed literally to writhe under all this frivolous ridicule. The old influence of cousin Lydia was at work; Faulkner clearly saw that; he could not help remembering how the other Pauline had been a mere slave in the hands of her cold-blooded mother; the immense force of early education is something that the best of us are often baffled by. A kind of sickening fear came over him lest some utter surrender on Pauline's part would show him his own recent good work in shattered ruin. He hurriedly went toward the door as Mrs. Jones dropped lifelessly into an arm-chair. As he opened the door he cast one backward glance at Pauline. Her face was scarlet; she had clasped both hands nervously together and was staring at her cousin with a strange look, half of shame, half of entreaty. 'I am conquered,' thought Faulkner, while he shut the door. A few moments later he was being driven home. While the drive lasted his mind seemed to him in a very disordered state. Some words from the writings of John Stuart Mill-words which he had never deliberately committed to memory, made an odd iteration through his mind:

The power of education is almost boundless there is not one natural inclination which it is not strong enough to coerce, and, if needful, to destroy by disuse.'

When Faulkner got home he found his physician waiting for him in the hall. The solemnity on this gentleman's face made Faulkner laugh as he took his hand.

-a

You're just in time to help me upstairs, doctor,' he said; and a moment later he had caught with heavy grasp the doctor's arm. Feebly enough he ascended to his room, but he had scarcely reached it when a most distressing hemorrhage attacked him feature that scarcely surprised the doctor. That night, and all through the next day Faulkner's life hung by a thread. He was, during this time, in a sort of stupor. On the second day, however, he awoke from sleep with a clear mind and a perfect understanding of his case. On his asking what friends had called, the servant in attendance showed him several cards. A sweet light seemed to touch his face when he discovered that Pauline Hamilton's was among them. 'She knows how sick I am,' he murmured to himself; she will come again today.' And he gave most positive orders, in the face of his physician's express command, that Miss Hamilton, did she call that day, should be at once shown to his bedside.

It was not a very long while before she entered his room. As she glided toward him and seated herself quite near, Faulkner gave the brightest of smiles and stretched out his hand. Why did you come yesterday?' he asked, in very low tones.

She did not answer. She merely looked at him with her mother's starry eyes, and while her mouth quivered, pressed his hand most fervently. He understood; she could not speak without utterly breaking down, just then

. . . and so there followed many moments of silence between them.

But at last Pauline found a very tremulous voice:

'I wish you had not gone so soon,' she said. A little later I was saying dreadful things to cousin Lydia. You must believe (and I have been so fearful lest you should not)! that the moment my senses came back, so to speak, I saw Mrs. Jones' insolent vulgarity in its true light. I slept at Aunt Margaret's that night, and am living

'Never mind the nurse or the doctor,' Faulkner broke in, very weakly. 'I am past their help now, dear Pauline. you can do me more good than they. Look closer into my face And and you will see what I mean.

so you're not ashamed, after all, that an old man should fall in love with you? I know it was wrong for me to ask you to be my wife; if it had been only the mere repression of feeling I could have kept silent enough. But I saw that woman's power still threatening to drag you back amid that hollow falsity of life, and I, Pauline, your mother's old friend-her old lover, if you choose-could discover no way of lifting you among loftier aims, nobler chances of action, broader, wiser and better surroundings, than . . . than by. . . .

'Than by giving me your precious self as a guide-as a redeemer,' Pauline here interrupted, while his feeble voice for the moment utterly failed him. And then the girl, shaken with intense emotion, caught his hand between both her own, and while lifting it to her lips in a strange blending of reverence and passion, sank upon her knees at the bedside.

'You must not leave me now,' she burst forth, just as I have grown to love and honour you as I did not dream it was possible for me to love and honour anyone! Let me stay here and nurse you; my infinite care, my surpassing tenderness, will bring you back to life! I will watch you night and day; I will. . . .'

>

But Pauline falteringly paused, here, for a white unmistakable change had already touched Faulkner's face. Once more the smile re-illumined it, however, as in a voice but faintly audible he said:

Thanks, thanks.

It is too late

dear Pauline.' And then his eyes closed in a tired way; but not long afterward they re-opened and dwelt, exquisitely wistful and deep-blue as a glimpse of morning heaven, upon Pauline's face.

'When you see your cousin,' he said, 'you must tell her that I held the winning card, after all.'

Then, while Pauline gave a great sob and bowed her head over the hand she was so tightly clasping, his eyes. closed again. They had closed for the last time. It was not surely known when his painless and easy death came; but some time before evening it was a certainty that he no longer breathed.

A few people, who know the one episode of romance that has thus far briefly marked the life of Pauline Hamilton, hope in years to come that she

will sufficiently outlive it to make somebody the fortunate possessor of a most beautiful and charming wife. She is still young, and though she rarely appears in fashionable society, she has made herself somewhat conspicuous in a quieter, highly cultured circle, where, if the least senseless follies are tolerated the worst ones are surely not worshipped, and where gossip and scandal, in their more depraved forms, do not find many conversational openings. Pauline smiles very brilliantly, and sometimes laughs with much musical freshness; but the depth of any consolation can ill be told, as we know, from this sort of surfacesign. Time is believed a skilful physician for all emotional ailments; but most probably, as in the case of other celebrities, we hear more often of his permanent cures than his partial ones.

HE

HAVING, in two preceding ar

ticles, dealt briefly, but, mayhap, suggestively with the educational, governmental and economical aspects of the Nineteenth Century as compared with an earlier age, let us now turn to the purely intellectual or literary aspect of the modern period and see if it affords us any greater comfort or gratification. Our discussion, in this paper, as in the others, shall have the merit at least of brevity.

If the Nineteenth Century has any special intellectual note, it is that of Investigation. An age of Investigation is necessarily an age of Doubt and Uncertainty, just as an era of Experiment is an era of many Failures. And so the Nineteenth Century offers us less certitude than any previous age. Let us take, for example, some young man

with the conventional

'thirst for knowledge,' and send him to some of the leaders of thought of this age for advice, and what advice will he be likely to get? Take history, for example. Would our young man be advised to take his views of the history of France, say, from Guizot, from Michelet, from Thiers or from the school of De Maistre and Louis Vieullot? He has not the time to read them all; and yet it is necessary to get at the truth somehow. Is he to look on Louis the Sixteenth as a saint and martyr, or as a tyrant and fool; on the Revolution as a boon to Europe, or as a rising up of all that was base, -murder, robbery, disloyalty and vomissement du diable generally. Shall he hail it with the exultation of Fox,

the cooler approval of Mackintosh, or with the lofty indignation and noble scorn of Edmund Burke ? • What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate; and he did. not wait for an answer!

Shall our young student take his. views of English history, the least satisfactory of all written history, from. Clarendon, who wrote his volumes in. order that posterity might not be de-ceived by the prosperous wickedness of these times; or from Macaulay, who wrote for the greater glory of the Whig party-the party from which, in his old age, he was fast cutting himself away? Most histories of England are party pamphlets, fragmentary, passionate and incomplete. Hume executes. the Whigs; Macaulay executes the Tories; Froude writes as Mr. Whalley talks with an eye asquint at the Pope and the Jesuits. And Mr. Green, the latest and most brilliant adventurer into the historical field, acts in the impartial manner of Henry VIII. by executing a few on both sides for the sake of fair play, as if decimation were a divinely ordained form of criminal procedure! Suppose he wants to get a good, fair idea of Mary Queen of Scots, shall he accept Buchanan's. Mary, or the Mary of Walter Scott, or of Blackwood, or Mr. Froude's, or Mr. Hosack's Mary? I put out of sight the fleshly, offensive caricature of Mr,. Swinburne in Chastelard. Amid all these conflicting dissensions and claims,. the student becomes bewildered. The riddle of the painful earth is too much for him.

What is more important to the stu

dent than to get a good idea of the character of Elizabeth? And how is one to get it? The Cecils are dead and make no sign, and they knew her best.

My Lord of Burleigh wrote no history. The great Queen remains an enigma. Macaulay has not revealed her. Motley has not given us the real woman, though he has indicated a possible portrait. Scott did not love her. And Mr. Green's portrait is worse than them all. That flaunting woman with the morals of Athens, the manners of Alsatia, and the language of Billingsgate, cannot be the royal lady who retained the affections of a turbulent people and the services of the noblest figures in English history, in a time of storm and disturb

.ance.

How impossible, almost, to get a fair idea of the controversy over the career and cause of Charles the First and the Commonwealth. In thousands of books and papers, essays and reviews, articles and lectures, we are all asked, with more or less eloquence, to revere the cause for which Hampden died on the field and Sydney on the scaffold, and to find in the struggles of that period the source of all, or nearly all, our modern liberties and institutions. For my own part I believe that the cause for which Hampden died in the field and Sydney on the scaffold, was a cause in which there was no occasion that any man should have died, either on the scaffold or in the field; that English liberties were curtailed and delayed rather than advanced in and by that scoundrel struggle; and that neither Hampden nor Sydney presents as noble a figure as Hyde or as the 'incomparable Falkland,' as Clarendon calls him, 'a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious and ac

cursed civil war, than that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to all posterity.' But the chorus of literature is mostly of another tone, and it requires some courage to bear up against it and to protest.

Getting one's historical portrait gallery filled with pictures is as difficult as getting a good artistic collection. There are plenty of bad copies, but no or few originals. And the fancy pictures are most plentiful. One is at

a loss what to think or do. It is related in the veracious history of immortal Humphrey Clinker, written by that dignified and truthful historian Tobias Smollett, that an Englishman in Rome took off his hat to the statue of Jupiter, and said, 'Sir, if you ever get your head above water again, I hope you will remember that I paid my respects to you in your deepest adversity. One, then, is driven to do the like with all the good characters of ancient and modern history.

Are we to believe in Homer-not the poems but the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle, the man for whom seven mighty cities strove-when he was dead. Are we to believe in Romulus and Remus in spite of the German historians who tell us they are mere myths? Byron says: