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boards. Some of us will never forget the celestial quality of her voice in "He shall give his angels charge over thee," and in the Holy, holy" of the "Elijah." Nothing in the least like it has been heard since. She seemed to become divinely impersonal, the one angelic presence in the orchestra. No saintly aureole could have added any glory to her head when she sang, the heavens were opened her companions felt awed yet inspired.

In her retirement at South Kensington she continued to take a vivid interest in the singing schools of the Royal College of Music, and taught the pupils herself. She was also a constant working member in the Bach Choir. Never will a chorister of mine who was at a rehearsal there forget how on one occasion, not many years before her death, the soprano who was to have taken Mendelssohn's "O for the wings of a dove" failing to appear, Madame Lind-Goldschmidt at once volunteered -and the breathless wonder of the chorus in listening thus unexpectedly once more to her incomparable rendering of that

sublime burst of melody which Mendelssohn wrote especially for her voice. But such occasions were rare indeed. Rare as when I was privileged to hear her sing "The three Ravens, "which made one see ghosts, and "Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, "which made one feel in heaven. This was at Moscheles' last concert in London.

From first to last Jenny Lind was a being apart, she was most truly in the world but not of the world. Her life was not as other lives. She had no regrets, no sad retrospects, no bitterness at retirement or loss of power. She used her unrivalled gifts as long as she couldbut not for herself-she was simply the handmaid of the Lord. She had no disappointments; no craving for this world's applause. She retired willingly, even eagerly, from the blaze of publicity, but she never left off working for the good of others. She was happy in the love of her husband and children, and she was at peace with God. - Contemporary Review.

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A SHORT mile from this hospitable roof, under which it has often before been my good lot to stay, in the middle of a stony road, the passer-by finds himself fronted by a couple of entrance gates. Entrance gates are usually very characteristic objects in Ireland. The history of their owners-more often, perhaps, of their former owners-is apt to be written large upon them, in characters so distinct that he that runs may read. Who that knows that country, even casually, does not know the formidable castellated gateway, with its frowning portcullis, its towers with windows only adapted for the convenience of archers, its crenellated copings, the whole surmounting an apparently impassable barrier of iron, enough. to strike terror into the heart of any harm less passer-by, unless, he knows-as he probably does that only three steps away he will come to a hedge, through the gaps in which the cows are wont to saunter out so as to enjoy an illicit mouthful now and then upon the Queen's highroad.

Again, who does not know the elaborately decorated gingerbread style of entrance, all twisted shamrocks and gilding -tarnished gilding, as a rule. The entrance flanked with the enormous architectural lodge, large enough to accommodate any reasonable family, and giving rise to wild anticipations as to the sort of palace we are about to approach, anticipations which only fade away when we learn that but one wing, or portion perhaps of one wing, of the intended palace was all that the owner was able to accomplish before "bad times" or other hindrances supervened, and that therefore this solitary wing, rising forlorn in its grandeur, is all we are destined now to find above ground.

The two entrances of which I was about to speak do not come under any of these categories. One of the two is simply a large, plain, well-kept gateway, supported by a large, plain, well-kept lodge, leading up to a large, plain, well-kept house, that for anything specially characteristic about it might as well be in Norfolk or York

shire as Ireland. The other is different and is highly characteristic, but its characteristicness is not due to anything specially erratic in its architecture or pretentious in its intention, but simply to the depth of decay, a decay long-continued and melancholy even for Ireland, which has overtaken it, and to an even greater extent the house up to which it leads a house which we approach along an avenue greener than many grass fields, green with that peculiarly clinging vegetation which grows upon deserted roadways, and where in spring-time certain delicate flowering weeds, otherwise rare in the district, may be found by the curious in such matters. Sir Thomas and Lady Barrington are at present the occupants of the larger and more prosperous of these two houses, but they have nothing to say to my story. The Barringtons are, in fact, quite newcomers into the county of C- Bally brophy House having been only bought by Sir Thomas's father at the death of the late Lord Ballybrophy, who died here a bachelor, and at whose death the title accordingly became extinct.

Mount Kennedy, the other and dilapidated house, belongs also to Sir Thomas Barrington, and it has often been a matter of wonder, especially to strangers, why he should like to keep anything so forlorn and eye-afflicting in its ruinousness so close to his own, rather noticeably spick-and-span abode. Probably the explanation is to be found in the fact that, being uninhabited for nearly a century, it had long before his time reached a stage of dilapidation which rendered any hope of letting or otherwise disposing of it hopeless; while, on the other hand, there is a well-understood reluctance, strongly felt in Ireland, against pulling down and so utterly abolishing and rooting out the memory of those who have once lived and reigned' on any given spot, a reluctance naturally increased by the peculiar circumstances under which this house of Mount Kennedy passed out of the hands of its former owner.

A small but delightful little stream, rapid, babbling, confidential, ending in a dancing, tossing imp of a waterfall, is only to be reached down this green approach and through a portion of the neglected shrubberies which cover this part of the Barrington property, and this circumstance has several times lately brought me

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within sight of the derelict house. time it did so I was alone, and curiosity induced me to approach nearer to it than I had ever hitherto done. On doing so I discovered that a piece of one side of the once solid entrance-porch had, apparently recently, fallen in, doubtless from the sudden rotting of some of the timbers beneath, and that though the front door still remained rigidly bolted and barred, one could now easily peep in, and little by little distinguish nearly the whole of the entrance hall, from one of the mouldering walls of which a couple of huge elks' horns still branched colossally; while beyond, through a half-open door, I could see a corner of what had evidently been one of the living rooms, with part of an enormous fireplace, black, or rather greenish gray, with that insidious mouldiness which in this climate inevitably overtakes and makes its own everything that has been submitted to it. There was something, I thought, peculiarly piteous in the suggestion thus called up of what had doubtless once been a warm hearth, lit as Irish hearths in this neighborhood are wont to be, by a mountain of red glowing turf, warmed, too, as I could not doubt, with other cheering elements, such as friendship, hospitality, family love and jollity, now forever blackened and extinguished, given over to darkness, emptiness, and the gloom of a long dead, nay, almost forgotten and abolished past. Where I stood the air was warm and comforting; the trees, just beginning to change color, were soft with greenish yellows and dusky reds; an old disused graveyard a little way below the house sent up its quota of appropriate melancholy to the scene, and I lingered a little while, supping, halfluxuriously as one sometimes does, upon that sense of all-pervading decay which, when it does not come home too pressingly to one's self and is not too intrusive in its moralizing, is rarely without charm. That there were deeper chords than such mild moralizings to be touched in connection with this scene I was, however, aware, though my impressions as to what those chords were had grown not a little vague and blurred; and this sense of an exceptional gloom and tragedy was naturally deepened by the tale told at my request in ampler detail than I had before heard it, by my hosts the same evening over the dinner table. I will take it up for

the reader's benefit at what may be called its most dramatic moment, thereby sparing him those preliminaries which are apt to be the bore of such recitals.

Lord Ballybrophy was dreadfully disturbed! He was standing beside the sundial which formed a central ornament of his deer-park, looking down a long bracken glade, on one side of which lay a small triangular-shaped wood, across which the sun was just then shaking its last rays. He had dined, for it was al. ready seven o'clock, and four was the fashionable dinner-hour a century ago in Ireland. He had dined liberally, with that leisurely discrimination so important for digestion, and had strolled forth to enjoy an hour's saunter over the grass previous to settling down for the night to cards. All this was customary and as it ought to be, and yet his mind was most unaccustomarily disturbed, and the cause of that disturbance is what you are about to be informed.

It was a year when a good many minds in Ireland were disturbed-the still unforgotten year of 'Ninety-eight. For months the whole country had been ringing, first with alarms, then with the actual details of Rebellion in all its horrors. It was not that any pains had been spared by the Executive of the day to hinder the misguided island from rushing upon its destruction. For months past an indefatigable soldiery had been allowed full discretion, and in their zeal for the cause of loyalty had spared no means, however painful to their own feelings, to coerce recusants into the paths of order. The Commander-in-Chief was a man known to entertain the largest and most liberal ideas in this respect, and as such to be fully worthy of the confidence reposed in him by his superiors in England. At the time. of which this story treats, the first scenes of the rising were already over, but the fire still in places burned fiercely, and that same system of energetic and not always too fantastically discriminating discipline was still held to be absolutely indispensable.

These larger public matters were not what at that moment were chiefly disturbing Lord Ballybrophy's mind. It was a smaller and more personal one. Throughout his youth and early manhood his most intimate friend and ally had been

Eustace Kennedy, son and heir of the owner of the neighboring property of Mount Kennedy, whose entrance gate stood, as we know, nearly opposite to the Ballybrophy one. The two young men had been at College together; had stood by one another in not a few duels; had seen together the bottom of more bowls of punch than it would be possible at this hour to enumerate; and when upon his father's death Lord Ballybrophy had succeeded to the family estates, it had been an added satisfaction in the lot to which a kind Providence had called him that his friend Eustace, whose father was also dead, would be his nearest neighbor, and would be able no doubt to support him in carrying out not a few local reforms upon which his own energetic mind was already actively engaged.

But alas for these anticipations! "Constancy lives in realms above, and life is thorny, and youth is vain," and before many years had gone over their heads, the two men had quarrelled bitterly, and the cause of this quarrel had been no other than that wretched little piece of triangular-shaped woodland, at which Lord Ballybrophy was at this moment gazing! To begin with, it was a "Naboth's vineyard," a fragment of the smaller property which had got enclosed as happens sometimes, in Ireland as elsewhere, in the larger one. Lord Ballybrophy would willingly have purchased it at many times its value. Eustace Kennedy, who was always more or less in want of money, would probably as willingly have sold it. Unfortunately it was impossible. A strict entail barred him from doing so, added to which at the farther end of the wood, and actually touching it, lay a graveyard, still used by the Kennedy family, and as such inalienable.

It was not the mere fact of the existence of this Naboth's vineyard so much as certain circumstances which arose out of its ownership which had caused the breach. Lord Ballybrophy, as already hinted, was a man of strict principles; a disciplinarian; one to whom the belief in a natural hierarchy was almost a matter of religion; an intense believer in the inherent difference between-let us say pewter and silver

and the duty, nay, obligation of the latter in all things to direct, control, and if necessary coerce the former. Now upon all these points Eustace Kennedy was de

plorably lax; lax" as his friend had more than once told him in the measured language of the day" to the verge of licentiousness." He was emphatically what we call "easy going." No doubt he had always been so, but it was only when he became a neighboring proprietor that the trait revealed itself to Lord Ballybrophy in all its heinousness. Not being a game preserver, for instance, he did not sufficiently concern himself with the game rights of others. In this and in all respects he allowed the Mount Kennedy property to drift along in a comfortable, happy-go-lucky time-immemorial fashion. His tenants did as they liked; their rents were never raised; their wives might rear as many chickens and pigs as they chose; their children were allowed to pick sticks through all the Kennedy woods, and if a stout gossoon knocked over a hare or a rabbit, and carried it home under his rags to his mother's pot, Eustace Kennedy was quite capable of winking hard, and declining to prosecute the offender, even if the deed was brought home to him in the clearest and the most unmistakable light.

Now all this was acutely painful to his friend, the rather that-owing to the position of the two properties, especially owing to the position of that unlucky little Naboth's vineyard-the Kennedy belongings, their wives, children, chickens, pigs and families generally, were continually trespassing upon the Ballybrophy property. No matter what leg-breaking man-traps, no matter what hand, knee or foot-destroying fences were put up, under, over, or round those fences, the Kennedy "tinints" would manage to crawl or otherwise get. Walking across his fields, or strolling in his woods, Lord Ballybrophy would continually come upon a hundred traces of recent depredations; the marks of bare feet upon the poached mud of a gap would stare him in the face; broken twigs from his young plantations would litter the ground; worse still, there had been yet darker suspicions, in the form of rabbits or hares believed to have been trapped, and always, as his gamekeepers were ready to take oath, by "thim owdacious divils" from

the other side of the fence !

At last the fire, long smouldering, burst into open flame. A boy was caught redhanded with a rabbit in his possession

which he was taking home to his grandmother. He was not actually captured upon the Ballybrophy estate, but upon the limit of that wood and graveyard which, as already explained. broke like a splinter through the centre of it and grievously maired its symmetry. This being the case, it was clear as the sun in the sky that the rabbit in question was a Ballybrophy rabbit, and as such Lord Ballybrophy was only within his rights in demanding, nay peremptorily insisting, that his friend Eustace Kennedy should prosecute the offender.

This Eustace Kennedy equally peremptorily declined to do. As it happened, the boy was the grandson of an old pensioner and former servant of the Kennedy's, one Thaddeus or Thady O'Roon, a privileged old being, united to his master by one of those odd ties, half-feudal, halfpersonal, of which our more advanced civilization has well-nigh forgotten the existence. With that disproportionate vehemence which was one of his failings, Eustace Kennedy swore, and swore moreover before witnesses, that rather than break old Thady's heart by sending his grandson to jail, possibly to the gallowsfor the game laws were no joke in those days-every rabbit in the county of C- might, for aught he cared, be killed and eaten.

Lord Ballybrophy's patience, long tried, fairly broke down under this unexpectedly unneighborly conduct. Mr. Kennedy, he retorted with that formality which characterized him in moments of displeasure, must choose between the O'Roon family and himself. If his regard for those interesting persons was of so excessively tender a nature that he preferred it to his duties as a landlord and the ordinary courtesies of a neighbor and a gentleman, Lord Ballybrophy regretted the circumstances, but could not, in duty to himself, continue to hold further friendly relations with one whose views of the becoming stood in such painful and diametrical contrast to his own He repeated that he regretted the matter, but at the same time that his decision was irrevocable.

The quarrel, thus handsomely inaugurated, grew and deepened as it is the custom of quarrels to do. Eustace Kennedy made one or two efforts at a reconciliation, but since nothing would induce him to yield in the main point, his efforts

made matters rather worse than better. The close propinquity of the once friends, now foes, added fuel to the fire. Perceiving how matters stood, the underlings on both sides naturally made haste to pour oil upon the flames; in short, it was as pretty a quarrel as the county of Chad enjoyed for many a year past.

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So matters had gone on nearly up to the time at which this little history is laid. In the interval both gentlemen had married, but neither of those events had produced the slightest relaxation in their mutual attitude. The ladies, consequently, were all but strangers to one another, and no intercourse of any sort was kept up between the two houses, although so near were they that the graveyard belonging to the Kennedy family actually constituted an inconveniently conspicuous object from the windows of the "Great House, Lord Ballybrophy's ugly but commanding residence was called in the neighborhood. If private affairs were stationary, public ones meanwhile had been moving rapidly, and the unhappy country had been drifting nearer and nearer to that vortex of rebellion into which it was the destiny of a large part of it to plunge. Then it was that that laxity of principles so long and painfully obvious to his neighbor and quondam friend began to be generally observed in Eustace Kennedy. It was not that he shared in those revolutionary sentiments with which so many of his countrymen were at that time saturated; far less that he took any personal part in the rising. It was that as a magistrate and a local magnate he was again deplorably "lax," and it was this laxity which proved his ruin. Even the fierce heat of a religious and social panic could not turn the too mild milk of his nature to any thing resembling gall. He even, contrary to his customary indolence, went the length of remonstrating with some of the local military authorities against what seemed to him their excess of zeal, especially as to their mode of extracting evidence, which he went so far as to assert was contrary to the dictates of ordinary humanity. That these uncalled-for observations produced no result beyond causing him to be regarded as a firebrand and a probable favorer of rebels goes without saying. Human nature, it has been ob served, being so constituted that only one violent sentiment can, as a rule, be con

veniently contained in it at a given time. Nor had Mr. Kennedy the prudence, when he discovered the impression produced, to at once change his tactics, and distinguish himself by a greater degree of zeal than his neighbors. On the contrary, when every other gentleman in the county either fled from home, or implored to have troops sent into his house for protection, be did neither, declaring that he felt no fears upon his own account, and with regard to the troops in question repeating those uncomplimentary remarks as to their character and discipline which had already produced so strong and natural a feeling of resentment against himself.

Had he stated publicly that His Majesty King George III. had no right to the throne upon which he then sat, it would have been a less hazardous proceeding at the moment ! Not only every soldier but every official in Ireland was in arms against him. He became a marked man, and it was openly declared in all official circles that Mr. Kennedy of Mount Kennedy either already was a rebel, or would shortly be proved to be one.

Nor, as events turned out, had the prophets long to wait. The Rebellion broke out; its leaders being by this time mostly in prison, the command fell into any hands willing to take it up. A thousand wild schemes were suggested and acted on, and among others it came into the heads of a portion of the rebel force that nothing would be easier or more satisfactory than to make a sudden descent upon the neighboring county town of T and take it by storm. No sooner proposed than carried into execution! The original plan, so far as there was any plan at all, had been to divide the forces into four detachments, and for each detachment to march separately upon T———, arriving there at the same monent. might have been expected, some other and still more delectable idea had meantime suggested itself, and the result was that only one of those four detachments did actually appear upon the scene.

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The military had meanwhile concentrated themselves in and about T-, being fully informed of these proceedings. At Ballybrophy House there was also a strong detachment, as in most of the other important houses in the neighborhood. There being no military at Mount Kennedy, it and the lawn in front of it was