THE ROCK AND THE CANDLE.

JEAN INGELOW (In'je lō) was born in Boston, England, in 1830. Her first book of verse was published anonymously in 1850. She is the author of several books of fiction, of which "Off the Skelligs" is, perhaps, the most widely known. She wrote also a number of attractive stories for children. Her verse is musical in movement and it reveals oftentimes a deeply religious spirit. Among her minor poems is the 'High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." It is a vivid and thrilling picture.

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She died in London, July 20, 1897.

The first sail in a boat was a pleasure which can never be forgotten. It was a still afternoon when we stepped into that boat-so still that we had oars as well as the flapping sail. I had wished to row out to sea as far as the rock, and now I was to have my wish.

On and on we went, looking by turns into the various clefts and caverns; at last we stood out into the middle of the bay, and very soon we had left the cliffs altogether behind.

We went out into the open sea, but still the rock was far before us; it became taller, larger, and more important, but yet it presented the same outline, and precisely the same aspect, when, after another half hour's rowing, we drew near it, and I could hear the water lapping against its inhospitable sides.

The men rested on their oars, and allowed the boat to drift downwards towards it. There it stood, high, lonely, inaccessible. I looked up; there was scarcely a crevice where a sea fowl could have built; not a level slip large enough for human foot to stand upon, nor projection for hand of a drowning man to seize upon.

Shipwreck and death it had often caused; it was the dread and scourge of the bay, but it yielded no shelter nor food for beast or bird; not a blade of grass waved there; nothing stood there.

We rowed several times round it, and every moment I became more impressed with its peculiar character and situation, so completely aloof from everything else; even another rock as hard and black as itself, standing near it, would have been apparent companionship. If one goat had fed there, if one sea bird had nestled there, if one rope of tangled seaweed had rooted there, and floated out on the surging water to meet the swimmer's hand — but no; I looked, and there was not one.

The water washed up against it, and it flung back the water; the wind blew against it, and it would not echo the wind; its very shadow was useless, for it dropped upon nothing that wanted shade. By day the fisherman looked at it only to steer clear of it; and by night, if he struck against it he went down. Hard, dreary, bleak! I looked at it as we floated slowly towards home; there it stood rearing

up its desolate head, a forcible image, and a true one, of a thoroughly selfish, a thoroughly unfeeling and isolated human heart.

Now let us go back a long time, and talk about things which happened before we were born. I do not mean centuries ago, when the sea kings, in their voyages plundering that coast, drove by night upon the rock and went down.

I am not going to tell of the many fishing boats which went out and were seen no more; of the many brave men that hard by that fatal place went under the surging water; of the many toiling rowers that made, as they thought, straight for home, and struck, and had time for only one cry, The Rock! the Rock!'

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The long time ago of which I mean to tell, was a wild night in March, during which, in a fisherman's hut ashore, sat a young girl at her spinning wheel, and looked out on the dark driving clouds, and listened, trembling, to the wind and the sea.

The morning light dawned at last. One boat that should have been riding on the troubled waves was missing her father's boat! and half a mile from his cottage, her father's body was washed up on the shore. . . .

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She watched her father's body, according to the custom of her people, till he was laid in the grave. Then she lay down on her bed and slept, and by night got up and set a candle in her casement, as a

beacon to the fishermen and a guide. She sat by the candle all night, and trimmed it, and spun; then when day dawned she went to bed and slept in the sunshine.

So many hanks as she had spun before for her daily bread, she spun still, and one over, to buy her nightly candle; and from that time to this, for fifty years, through youth, maturity, and old age, she has turned night into day, and in the snowstorms of winter, through driving mists, deceptive moonlight, and solemn darkness, that northern harbor has never once been without the light of her candle. .

Fifty years of life and labor - fifty years of sleeping in the sunshine-fifty years of watching and self-denial, and all to feed the flame and trim the wick of that one candle !

But if we look upon the recorded lives of great men, and just men, and wise men, few of them can show fifty years of worthier, certainly not of more successful labor. Little, indeed, of the "midnight oil" consumed during the last half century so worthily deserves the trimming. Happy woman— and but for the dreaded rock her great charity might never have been called into exercise!

JEAN INGELOW.