George Tressady" has failed, with all its brilliancy and power, to attain that rank as a political novel to which the genius of its author might otherwise have raised it.

H. D. TRAILL.

From Blackwood's Magazine.
OUT OF THE NIGHT,

The post-office was a little bit of an iron house, a police-hut dating perhaps from troubled times. There was a piece of deal across it for a counter, and behind that shelves and pigeon-holes for the stamps and the modest supply of stationery and post-cards which the village of Gurtnalacken required.

The postmistress was a brown-eyed, clear-skinned woman. She was very short-sighted; and that gave her eyes a look of question, a look of wonder, which made her face youthful and innocent, though she was no longer a young woman. Her eyes seemed to ask constantly "When? when?" and any one coming towards her at a little distance made her pale with expectation. She would peer at you with parted lips as you came up her way, and then when she recognized you as a Tom or Larry of her daily life, her air of excitement would settle to a dull languor, as if it were but one of many disappointments.

She lived in a cottage in the village, which after all was not so far, once you rounded the turn; but from the postoffice, looking down from its rough hillpath over acres of stones and boulders to a little rust-colored rivulet in the ravine, there was no sign of human habitation.

The postmistress had stayed late at the office. She liked the loneliness of her glen, and was sorry that she could not make her home there; but the iron hut was only provided for a sentry on duty, and there was no sleeping accommodation within its four grey walls. She picked her scanty bit of dinner there, taking scarcely more than would keep a bird alive; but her breakfast she

had at her lodgings in the village, and Ler supper when she returned at night. She would not have been afraid to walk back to the village alone-not she. There was nothing more terrible to be met with than the black-faced mountain sheep. The dark shadows cast by the boulders did not trouble her. She was innocent and unafraid. To-night Larry, the boy, who used to run with the bag over seven miles of brown bog twice a day to intercept her Majesty's mails at Mulla Cross, had come to escort her home, but she had not needed him.

She looked tired as she set the place in order, took the key from an upper shelf, and turned out the light. It was no wonder she was tired. So many years she had been waiting for a letter that never came. Every day when the bag came in, her heart would begin to beat with dull, heavy throbs, foreseeing its own disappointment. Every night ere she slept she would whisper courage to herself, since no one knew what the new day might bring; every morning she awoke a little blithe because of the same expectation. Many years of disappointment had not taught her hopelessness.

She turned the key in the door and locked it, and stepped into the dark night. Larry was trotting along companionably on his bare feet. There was light up in the castle yonder over the wood and the sea. Old Lady Conyers was dying there-a proud, insolent old woman who had held that the world was for her caste and her Creed, and who now, perhaps with amazement, found herself called upon to die like any clown of them all.

A man was stepping up the mountain road towards them. It was too dark to see his face, but his step stirred in Mary's heart a wild irrational hope. A moment more, and his shoulders loomed darkly, shoulders wider than most men's; and the man stopped. Mary stopped too, with a sudden quietness now that the thing she had been expecting all these years had happened. "Mary!" he said, in a low voice. "It is you, Geoffrey, at last." "It is I at last, Mary."

a good lady, God bless her, an' no come. She never allowed herself to Conyers at all."

"But there is a son," Mary ventured at last.

think that he had come and gone; he had said he would see her again. To that promise she held greedily, despite

The gossip looked at her with a smile the years of his silence before. of compassion.

"Sure, where are your wits wanderin' to at all? Sure, he was gone to Australy an' lost in it years ago, when you an' me was girls."

Mary said no more. She knew better. For some reason or other they were keeping Geoffrey's return a secret, or else the news of it had not reached the village. The Castle and the village had little kindly contact. Old Lady Conyers was not the Lady Bountiful sort; and the way through the village led nowhere. The servants at the Castle were English. Except when Larry brought the post-bag to the Castle gates, there was not direct communication.

But Geoffrey had said they would meet again, and Mary never thought of doubting his word. She spent all her days at the post-office now, not daring to be absent for a minute, lest in that minute he should come, and not finding her should go away, perhaps for another quarter of a century. She stayed late at the post-office. It was after eleven that night when she met him. He might choose the same hour to come again. All day the sound of a foot on the road brought her heart into her mouth; and so many times she had to endure the sickness of disappointment. Every night as she slowly made her preparations for returning to the village, her heart listening in her ears for his foot, she thought that when she went out into the dark she would again see his figure stepping up the mountain road towards her. She grew pale and scared-looking with the constant strain; but still he never came.

The days turned round and round, and Lady Conyers had been two months in her grave. The gossip about it was dying out now,. though Mary, whenever a neighbor dropped in for a talk, stealthily turned the conversation that way. She had not dared again to hint at Geoffrey; yet it was strange that none of them had heard that he had

His sister was still at the Castle, had indeed been seen in the village, where she stole like one ashamed to offer help and comfort. She was likely to stay in the Castle. The English cousin was not anxious to dispossess her; and what I would she do in the world, who had always been as a little child under the heavy hand of her mother? Freedom to fly out in the world was of as little use to her as it would have been to an unfledged bird. Her only gain was that now she might minister to the poor and the sick, after whom her heart had yearned all those years. Scraps of gossip about her came to Mary's ears. "She's as shy as a birdyeen, and if a bit of a gossoon even looks into her face she's all one blush." Or, ""Tis she has the compassionate heart; an' where did she get it at all, at all? The tears is ready to her eyes for the laste bit of a tale o' distress. Sure, 'tis a fairy changelin' she must be, for it isn't in the Conyers' breed."

Mary listened avidly to such things. Sometimes on a Sunday, when the postoffice was closed, she would climb the hill and wander through the Castle woods, hovering on the skirts of them, where she could get a glimpse of the Castle itself, and the winding roadway up to its great doors. But no such figure as she looked for ever came forth. She saw the lady of the Castle pacing the terrace with her dogs, and reading from an open book in her hands. She saw that the lower rooms were all shuttered, and from the chimneys the faintest, thinnest thread of smoke issued; the house might have been uninnabited. The horses had been sent away to be sold, all except Miss Eva's shaggy old pony, which she drove in a low basket-chaise about the roads. The place surely had no sign of a man's presence.

One day Miss Eva herself called at the post-office. It was the busy time of day, and the people were all out in the

Miss Conyers looked at her curiously, almost shrinkingly.

fields. She and Mary had never before He talked of many things, things of been face to face; but as Mary looked long ago." at her she recognized with a sharp pang the sweet and handsome mouth and the fine thin nostrils. The eyes, too; his eyes had been gay and coaxing, and the light in his sister's faded eyes was not of earth, yet once the hue must have been the same, and the dark curling lashes were still the same.

Mary felt herself growing paler, and the perspiration came out thick and cold all over her face. Her lips went blue, and a mist hid from her the lady's face. She heard the sweet, appealing voice:

"I am afraid you are ill. Pray sit down, and I shall fetch you some water."

"I am not ill," she answered, dragging herself back to earth, yet her hand held on by the counter to keep her from falling. She was nerved all at once by a sudden wild resolution.

"Miss Conyers," she said, "I humbly beg your pardon for asking the question. Is it true that Mr. Geoffrey has come home?"

The lady looked at her with an air of shocked surprise.

"I am afraid you are very ill, my poor woman. What can you know of my brother?"

"I did not know he knew any one in the village. But if you knew him, be glad that he is dead. It is better to think of him in the hands of God, than as a lost sheep caught in the thorns of sin."

"I tell you he is not dead."

Miss Conyers looked at her mournfully, and turned away.

"What a strange delusion!" she said to herself. "Poor woman she is evidently a little crazy! She must have been a very pretty girl once."

A slow flush crept over her still fair and soft skin, and she walked with her eyes downcast.

"No," she said to herself again. "I pray he may not have that to his account. There are too many women to witness against him before the.

bear

Throne."

And then her thoughts took another turn.

"My mother raved of him when she was dying. Question and answer; it was as if there was some one we could' not see or hear present, and speaking: with her. Her eyes always gazed the one way, as if some one stood by her

"Is it true, miss? I heard he was bed, towards whom she looked." home, and I wanted to know."

There was an anguish of appeal in the voice to which Miss Conyers responded, "It is not true." Her voice fell, and the ready tears came into her eyes.

"If you ever knew him you must pray for him. He is dead."

"Dead! he is not dead. I spoke with him two months ago,-the very night your mother was dying,-at the door there, not a yard from where you stand."

"My poor woman, it was a delusion. He died in Melbourne on Christmas eve. Pray for him; he needed all your prayers."

"He said he had come home to-tosee his mother, who was dying

"He died on Christmas eve."

"It is a mistake. He is not dead. He hurried away to be with his mother.

But Mary, still trembling from the shock Miss Conyers's words had been to her, sat in her wooden chair wiping her clammy face, and smiling faintly.

"How could he be dead?" she said, "when he talked with me there for a quarter of an hour, and little Larry waiting all the time. He neither kissed me nor touched my hand, but I saw him and spoke with him. And he said he would come. I waited twenty-five years before to see him; and it's not in two months my patience is giving out this time."

Yet still her hands were cold and clammy, and still the perspiration came out on her face in great chilly drops. About three o'clock Larry came for the bag.

"Larry accushla," she said coaxingly, "you remember the night old Lady Con