boasted an admirable proficiency. A gavotte of Gluck's set Mr. Hawley in mind of a volume by a young and little known composer-a Mr. Mozart. He had brought the book with him as a present to his hostess; if she would excuse him for a moment he would bring the gift to her.

The music, he recollected, was in his bedchamber in the locked valise. Whilst he was searching for it he caught the unmistakable sound of a snowball striking the window of the dressing-room adjoining. He found the book, and without pausing to lock the valise, went to the dressing-room window. This he flung open. Outside in the snow-covered courtyard he saw little blue-eyed Celia Stayne. In her hand was a second snowball, which, with marvellous accuracy for a child of eight, she aimed at Hawley. In a moment Mr. Hawley replied, collecting the snow from the window-sill, and a brief battle ensued. In no time, however, his ammunition ran out, and he withdrew.

"Ah! you coward, Mr. Hawley!" he heard her calling; "come down and fight it out."

As he passed through his bedroom, he caught sight of the valise lying shut, apparently exactly as he had left it, with the keys in the lock, and he turned the key without opening it. Little did he think that in so short a space of time Master Horace had been there, curiously searching for the birthday present he had so foolishly mentioned to him. This the child had not found, but a pistol and a wonderful scarlet coat had instantly struck his fancy, and calmly extracting these from their hiding-place, he had slipped out of the room with them.

Mr. Hawley returned to the drawingroom. Lady Stayneyard was not there, The room was quite empty. On her ladyship's escritoire lay the programme of the concert for that evening. was written in a fine, clear hand, and inscribed with many curls and flourishes. He read twice, "Song—Mr. George Hawley," and he tried to make

It

came.

Here a curious sight met him. Four steps from the top of the flight, leaning against the wall just under the famous stood Laughton Zucchero, Lady Stayneyard, with a look of the But greatest amusement in her eyes. on the landing at the top, the winter sunlight, through the great west window, showed Hawley a figure which, for a moment, made him feel almost faint.

There stood little fair-haired Horace, dressed in a faded scarlet coat which trailed, on the ground, and over his face he wore the crape mask he had found in the pocket of it.

Hawley recognized the coat in a

flash, though it was many months since

he had seen it by daylight, and he set himself down for lost.

"In the king's name you will deliver to Captain Scarlet!" cried Horace to his mother, not noticing Hawley's presence. And with that he raised રી cocked pistol-Hawley's smaller weapon-and pointed it at his mother, who with well-assumed fright was fumbling in the pocket of her dress.

Hawley saw the danger at once. The pistol, he remembered, was loaded. As

like as not this child would kill his mother as she stood there laughing at him.

With this recollection came to him that strange mental clearness and sense of strength which the sight of danger always provoked in him, and a recklessness that was somewhat more unusual.

Quick as thought he shouted, "Captain Scarlet, by your leave I am here

to defend this lady.

You will shoot me first." And he raised his right hand, pointing the forefinger at Horace and snapping the others in a makebelieve fashion.

Instantly the action had the desired effect. Horace, noticing Mr. Hawley for the first time, turned the barrel full on him.

"I wait for no man!" cried the little boy, "unless mamma hands me her jewels. I shall count three and fire."

The inartistic lapse of "mamma" for "this lady" did not, you may be sure, escape George Hawley. In the seconds which followed his grave eyes for a moment met those of Lady Stayneyard. With a faint smile of irritation he noted that she smiled a little. How slowly Horace counted! At "two," Lady Stayneyard held her hands to her ears. A cold sense of calm, almost triumph came to him.

"Three!" said Horace. There was a click, and he knew that the pistol had flashed in the pan. He thought how unlike the great highwayman such a mistake was. Then to his horror he

heard Lady Stayneyard say:"Horace, where did you find the wonderful coat? What a formidable pistol, too! Almost like a real one." "I found them in Mr. Hawley'sthe child began.

But Hawley cut him short. "You little rascal!" he cried, seizing him by the arm and quickly taking the pistol from him. "You have disclosed my secret."

"Captain Scarlet is all the rage, and in all men's minds."

“And you will do it quite admirably, too," Lady Stayneyard continued, greatly pleased with the idea. "Why, Mr. Hawley, you are a born actor. I Vow you went a shade paler when Horace pointed his pistol at you."

"Really?" said Hawley, smiling. suppose it was the recollection of the horrible things you told me of your local terror. What a heartless ruffian he is, and how merciless!"

"Fate send we may never meet him," she said, with a little shudder.

"He would not harm you for the world."

"Why do you say that?" she asked suddenly.

"Because we have the rascal now," he explained, somewhat illogically, holding Horace by the collar of the coat. But we will be lenient with him and pass sentence on him that he keep our secret until this evening, and in the mean time be compelled to listen to a rehearsal of my songs. It will be a great trial for him, I assure you. Shall we come to the music-room?"

So they divested Horace of the coat and mask, and carried him a captive to the rehearsal.

Lady Stayneyard's

entertainment

was, as usual, a vast success, Mr. Hurdlestone sang "When to her lute Corinna sings," with much taste, and Miss Dorothea Sutton's execution on the harp was greatly admired. But the event of the evening was undoubt

"Why," said Hawley, and he was himself once more, "I wished it to be a surprise. I had a notion to sing a couple of songs in this costume which I had made on purpose, at your entertainment this evening. Topical, you know. 'Gentleman all, in the name of the king," and "What, ho, there, my gallant spark!' style of affair. They would not fail in this particular neighborhood and among the tenantry to be popular."

"How clever of you to think of such a splendid idea!"

Hawley as "Captain Scarlet." His second song, of which one verse ran:

What ho! The ruddy guinea clinks;
A cry! A pistol crack!
Your gallant loves the dark, methinks,
With Bow Street on his track.
The shadows creep; the world's asleep,

was almost universally popular.

Miss Goodchild, however, vowed that Mr. Hawley was not near so handsome as the real Captain Scarlet; and the critics were unanimous in agreeing that, though the performance was very

spirited, the coat was scarcely of the correct shade.

ARTHUR STUART.

From The Nineteenth Century. SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL

NEWMAN.

When first I made acquaintance with Newman I was young and impressionable, and for that reason all the more able to appreciate at least a portion of what was most remarkable about him. It was late in 1838, and Oxford, apart from its illustrious inmate, would have well repaid me for my journey from Ireland, not then a short one. The sun was setting as I approached it, and its last light shone brightly from the towers, spires, and domes of England's holy city. Such a city I had never seen before, and the more I saw of it the more deeply was I touched. Its monastic stillness is not confined to its colleges; much of the city besides, in spite of modern innovations, wore then an aspect of antiquity; and the staid courtesy of those whom I met in the streets contrasted delightfully with the bustle, the roughness, and the surly self-assertion encountered in the thor-. oughfares of our industrial centres. I had often to ask my way, and the reply was generally an offer to accompany me. It reminded me of what I had heard respecting Spain, viz., that every peasant there is a gentleman. As I walked I recited to myself Wordsworth's sonnet on Bruges, and wondered why the most patriotic of poets had not rather addressed it to Oxford. There seemed a rest about that city, bequeathed to it by the strength of old traditions, which I have nowhere else enjoyed so much except at Rome.

"While these courts remain," I said to myself, "and nothing worse is heard than the chiming of these clocks and bells, the best of all that England boasts will remain also." "Nothing come to thee new or strange," is written upon every stone in those old towers, which seem to have drunk up the sun

sets of so many centuries and to be quietly breathing them back into modern England's more troubled air. How well those caps and gowns harmonize with them! Certainly Oxford and Cambridge, with all their clustered colleges, are England's two anchors let down with the past. May they keep her long from drifting from the regions dedicated to piety and learning into those devoted but to business or pleas

ure.

The ancient spirit is not dead: Old times, I said, are breathing here, In Oxford there then abode a man, himself a lover of old times, and yet one who in fighting his way back to them had in the first place to create an order of things relatively new-John Henry Newman. I had left for him a letter of introduction from an eminent Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, the Rev. J. H. Todd, to whose learning, liberality, and patriotism Ireland has owed much. Early in the evening a singularly graceful figure in cap and gown glided into the room. The slight form and gracious address might have belonged either to a youthful escetic of the Middle Ages or a graceful and high-bred lady of our own days. He was pale and thin almost to emáciation, swift of pace, but, when not walking, intensely still, with a voice sweet and pathetic both, but so distinct that you could count each vowel and consonant in every word. I observed later that when touching upon subjects which interested him much he used gestures rapid and decisive, though not vehement, and that while in the expression of thoughts upon important subjects there was often a restrained ardor about him, yet if individuals were in question he spoke severely of none, however widely their opinions and his might differ. As we parted I asked him why the cathedral bells rang at so late an hour. "Only some young men keeping themselves warm," he answered. "Here," I thought, "even amusements have an ecclesiastical character." He had asked me to breakfast with him the next morning

some one who expressed surprise at Milnes's holding any opinions upon such a subject. "Oh, he holds none; but he took a fancy to write a philosophic essay on the subject of the day; so he wrote what he thought a philosophic mind like Thirlwall's might think." It was a very brilliant essay. The stir made by "Tract 90" gave it an immense circulation, with the proceeds of which Newman bought a library, now included in that at the Edgbaston Oratory; but though he bore with a dignified self-control what his friends regarded as a persecution, yet a tract generally regarded as one that explained the Thirty-nine Articles by explaining them away could not but increase the distrust with which he had long been regarded both by the Evangelical and the Establishmentarian party in the Church of England. Several recent occurrences, on the other hand, had impaired Newman's confidence in her position, especially the "Jerusalem Bishopric," which he regarded as a fraternization of that Church with a German non-episcopal community, and also as a hostile intrusion into the diocese of an Eastern bishop possessing the "apostolical succession and primitive doctrine." Against that measure he and Dr. Pusey had solemnly protested, but in vain. Their interference had given great offence in high ecclesiastical quarters; and not a few made themselves merry at the war between the bishops and their chief supporters, while a story went round that the wife of some dignitary had openly stated that she could not approve of the indiscriminate study of "the Fathers" among the clergy, because it tended to "put thoughts into the heads of young curates." Newman was then "quadraginta annos natus," yet even he apparently had not escaped this danger: for, though his mastery of "the Fathers" was almost as much an acknowledged fact as his mastery of Holy Scripture, their teaching no longer, as once, seemed to him much to resemble that of the Established Church. He wished to be at liberty, and he resigned his Oxford preferment

and retired to Littlemore. That voice the "solemn sweetness" of which, as Mr. Gladstone described it, had pierced all hearts at St. Mary's, was heard there no more except in sad memory and sadder anticipation. Men remembered that the pathos so much more powerful than any vehemence could have been, that insight which made his gentleness so formidable a thing, those dagger-points of light flashed in upon the stricken conscience, and, most of all, that intense reality which sent a spiritual vibration over the land, with the warning, "Words have a meaning whether we mean that meaning or not." These things men remembered, perhaps the more because they saw the man no more.

Littlemore was but three miles from Oxford. He had retired there to a hermitage stiller even than Oxfordthat Oxford described by "Wulfstan the Wise" as serener than the summit of Olympus, the Olympus which he thus describes.

final casting up of an account is a more difficult process than the preliminary ranging of the figures one beneath another. Newman's long and arduous studies had collected a vast mass of philosophical and theological materials; and the details were doubtless arranging themselves in his mind and pointing towards the sum total. That sum total, perhaps, looked daily less like what he had contemplated in his youthful anticipations-a Church of England triumphant here below, pure as the earliest day-dawn of the Faith, venerable as the sagest antiquity, cleansed from mediæval accretions, enriched by modern science, daily rising up out of the confusions of the sixteenth century, and delivering itself from secular bonds at no loss but that of diminished revenues; one with a gradually increased colonial extension, making her the inheritor of a second "orbis terrarum;" and ultimately a reunion with the earlier one. Such ever since my boyhood had been my aspira

said

That letters by the finger of the priest Writ in the ashes of the sacrifice Remained throughout the seasons un

effaced.1

To Littlemore I walked alone through the fields from Oxford. The little hermitage had been changed into a little monastery by the addition of some small rooms which sheltered a few young men who, like those that accompanied Plato in the gardens of Academe, walked with him that they might learn from him. One of these youths was afterwards well known as Father Ambrose St. John, who, but for his premature death, would have been Newman's biographer. Another was Father Dalgairns. I asked one of them whether they recited the "Canonical Hours" of the Breviary, and understood that they did so. I was deeply interested that day by my interview with Newman, though he seemed to me more reserved than when I had first made his acquaintance, and very grave, if not actually depressed.

1 Edwin the Fair, by Sir Henry Taylor.

The

his! Yet that day as we walked together for he was good enough to accompany me most of the way to Oxford -those aspirations did not seem to smile upon him amid the summer field flowers as they had smiled four years previously that night when the cold Christmas winds blew the cathedral chimes over us. Newman's mind, however, was not like Mr. Ward's which always saw with a diamond clearness what it saw at all; it included a large crepuscular region through which his intelligence had to pass before its dawn broadened into day. No one could appreciate better than he the subtlety of illusions, or their dangerous consequences; no one could feel more profoundly the pain of severing old ties; but he has told us that he could never see why any number of difficulties need produce a single doubt as regards matters of faith; and perhaps he might have added that he could never see why any amount of suffering need paralyze action in matters of duty, when at last certainty had emerged from the region of doubt. Daily I