her in sparing her husband, and promising | the Achæan League, the Macedonian every comfort. But Chelonis did not hesi- stranger was called in, and after a fatal tate. As Cleombrotus rose to go, she battle Cleomenes had to flee. During the gave him one of her children, and, taking course of his struggles his noble wife Agithe other in her arms and kissing the altar atis died and was bitterly lamented. His of the goddess, she walked out with him mother, Cratesicleia, was always ready to to degradation and poverty. Justly does help him, and stood by him to the last. Plutarch add the remark that if Cleom- At one time he required the alliance of brotus had not been entirely corrupted by Ptolemy, king of Egypt, but Ptolemy vainglory, he would have deemed exile would not agree to it unless the Spartan with such a woman a greater blessing king sent his mother and child as hostages. than any kingdom. The fate of pure- Cleomenes did not venture to mention this minded Agis was worse than that of Cle- proposal to his mother, but the mother's ombrotus. No mercy was shown him, and keen eye observed that he was keeping he was put to death by strangulation. His some secret from her. At last she premother Agesistrata waited to hear what vailed on him to disclose it, and on hearwas to become of him. The officer, who ing it she laughed loudly and said, "Will knew that Agis was dead, delusively told you not send immediately this body where her that no violence would be done him. it is likely to be most useful to Sparta, She wished to see him and take her old before it is dissolved by old age?" After mother with her. Permission was granted. she had gone to Egypt she heard that CleThe two women entered the prison. The omenes was afraid to take certain measures doors were shut. The grandmother was because Ptolemy held his mother and child requested to go into the chamber where as hostages, and she at once wrote to him, Agis was. She went in and was strangled." Do what is proper, and never mind what Then Agesistrata entered, and saw her becomes of an old woman and a little son lying on the ground and her mother child." hanging by a rope. She calmly helped to take the dead body down, and, stretching her alongside of Agis, laid both the bodies out and covered them; and falling upon her son and kissing him she said, "O my son, it is your gentleness and goodness that have ruined you.' "If that is your opinion," said the officer, “you had better go the same way." She bravely held out her neck, and said, "May this turn out for the good of Sparta!" And thus was stamped out the first effort for the reformation of Sparta. The second is also remarkable for the nobility of the women who aided it. Cleomenes, a man of great vigor and capacity, the son of Leonidas mentioned above, came to the throne. His father had compelled him to marry Agiatis, the widow of Agis; but he soon began to love the noble and gentle lady. They talked much to. gether about Ágis and his projects, and Cleomenes at length resolved to carry out the projected reforms. Again the young prince was helped most effectively by his mother, Cratesicleia, who supplied him with resources and even married again for his sake, for she thereby secured the sup port of one of the most influential men in Sparta. But again destiny was too powerful for the reformer. He did indeed succeed in introducing his reforms into Sparta and in again giving her the foremost place in Peloponnesus. But he awoke the jealousy of Aratus, the head of And The fate of Cleomenes was as tragic as that of Agis. He had sought shelter in Egypt, but found a prison there instead of a home. He and his companions determined to overpower the sentinels, break through the place of confinement, and rouse the inhabitants to assert their liberty. They easily broke_through_their place of confinement, but they could not rouse the inhabitants, and so they resolved to die. Each one killed himself except Panteus, the youngest and most beautiful among them. He had been ordered by the king to wait till all had killed themselves. so he did. He went round all the bodies to see that they were dead, and then, kissing Cleomenes and throwing his arms around him, he also killed himself. The Egyptian king ordered the execution of all the women connected with the Spartans. The mother was brought forth and stabbed. Other women also were put to death. But most touching of all was the end of the wife of Panteus. She was still very young and exquisitely beautiful, and she was still in the raptures of first love. When her husband left Sparta for Egypt, her father had refused to let her go with him, and confined her. But she found means of escape. She mounted a horse and rode to Tænarus, and then embarked on a vessel sailing for Egypt. Now she moved about the women encouraging and consoling. She led Cratesicleia by the hand to the place of execution. She decently laid out the bodies of the women who were slain. | ing to invade their province in order to And then, adjusting her own robe so that gather fern-seed to tell you where to she might fall becomingly, she offered her- find the biggest foxgloves in the pass. self to the executioner without fear. But I am afraid Lady Jean is a little too Thus ended the second effort at Spartan late. Even the foxgloves are nearly over reformation, and henceforth autonomous for the season." Sparta and her women disappear from history. We may well conclude the story with the closing words of Plutarch, who, thinking of the dramatic contests that were held in Greece, says, "Thus Lacedæmon, exhibiting a dramatic contest in which the women vied with the men, showed in her last days that virtue cannot be insulted by fortune." JAMES DONALDSON. THE BRIDE'S PASS. BY SARAH TYTLER, AUTHOR OF 66 WHAT SHE CAme through," "LADY BELL," ETC. CHAPTER XI. "" THE MIST'S ON THE BRAE." FRANK TEMPEST came a willing messenger to the manse one morning later in the week. English guests of special distinction, including a bishop and a secretary of state, with their spouses, were expected to pay a passing visit to Castle Moydart. The earl and Lady Jean were bent on welcoming them in Highland fashion, and it was Lady Jean's special business to see that the floral decorations of the house were in keeping with the general design. She would have liked to have had miniature lochans covered with water-lilies to light up the abounding heather. But water-lilies are long past blossoming in September; the only substitute was great piles of white foxgloves. "And she has used up all the white foxgloves that she can come at within miles of the castle," announced Frank cheerfully. "She wishes to ask if you can get her a further supply, Miss Macdonald? She is sure that neither Oberon, nor Titania, nor Puck himself, knows such banks' in Fearnavoil as you know. I was not going to shoot this morning, so she has commissioned me to secure the spoil, and bring it over to her, if you will lend us your help." "Oberon and Titania with their trains 1 are not Highland fairies," said Unah, more slowly and shyly than she had spoken to him for many a day, "and so I dare say they are not very well acquainted with our glens. I may venture without presum "I thought you would perhaps come with me," said Frank, his animated countenance falling, speaking in a low tone of reproach, and with the boyish pout of his mouth. "I hoped that you would come out and let me see the places where the things grew thickly, and where there is the greatest chance of flowers still. Have you been walking already to-day? Are you too tired?" "Unah has hardly been out of doors for several days," broke in Mrs. Macdonald; "the child is getting lazy, or else she is wedded to her foolish messy leather-work, or her declocomanie. Which is it, Unah ? and when are you to make leather look like wood, or glass like china?" Mrs. Macdonald spoke quite good-naturedly, even caressingly. But Unah looked down with a vexed air. "I was trying to do neither, mother; I was hemming towels for Jenny." "Then put them aside and go and get a little fresh air," said Mrs. Macdonald decidedly; and her aquiline nose looked finer and sharper, her dark eyes keener, her grey ringlets more perfect spirals while she spoke. "Jenny is too good a housekeeper to let her stock run so low as to be in great need of your help. Unah, don't you think that there will be plenty of foxgloves yet in the little birch wood just after you have passed Lochbuy Farm, going up Ben Voil? That is a higher latitude, to use long words, and the summer is later there." "Yes, do let us try for it, Miss Macdonald," pleaded Frank eagerly. "I have never been up Ben Voil, I have had so much to do. Soon the mists and frosts will be upon us, when Aulay Macgregor has the coolness to tell me, that none save a Highlander can ascend the mountain. But even to climb half-way up would be something, if I am to be baulked of the great feat." "I am sorry you have not been on the top of Ben Voil," admitted Unah in her kind manner as it were a little absently; "from the summit you would have seen another world. But Lochbuy is not nearly half-way," she corrected him with a halfsmile, "and at the same time it is too far to go in doubtful weather. I don't like the look of the sky," she said, glancing out on one of those dim grey days when the sereness of autumn forces itself on peo- | is a Highland country house more bound ple's notice. "The Ben has had his head than any other to do the little it can to enwrapped round, and even his chin tied up, tertain strangers, you must think for yourlike a dead man's, with a band of cloud, self it is the manse. since six in the morning." "But those who read his predictions are not infallible. I don't imagine you will assert that," said Mrs. Macdonald sharply now. "There is no science shall I call it?-more in its infancy, and none on which men's opinions differ more widely, than that of meteorology. I hold that these cool grey days at the end of the season always keep up till nightfall. So get your hat, Unah, go with Mr. Tempest, and do not fail Lady Jean." Unah had no resource save to comply with her mother's injunctions. But it was evident enough in so unsophisticated a girl a girl who thought so little of herself, who was so ready to oblige her friends, and to whom an open-air expedition in all circumstances was always more than welcome- that she complied reluctantly. Neither on the evening of the party at the manse, nor in the interval, had Donald Drumchatt said anything to her in the shape of angry complaint. But something in his look and manner had vaguely moved and scared her, since that mute accusation was met by the dawning consciousness of a change which had come over herself. She shrank back, candid as she was, from such a revelation, with all it implied. A fear of herself and others took possession of her. Thus she had stayed at home, fain to creep out of sight and cower in a corner, if that would extinguish the gleams of unwelcome light which came flashing across her inexperience during these last days. "Mrs. Macdonald," exclaimed Frank abruptly, when Unah left the room to get her hat and jacket, "how good you are to me! How shall I ever thank you for all your kindness!" The lad spoke warmly, almost with emotion. Mrs. Macdonald was taken aback; surely her conscience smote her. "My dear Mr. Tempest," she said hastily, "I have done nothing. I could not have acted otherwise. Hospitality is a duty in which I trust we poor Highlanders are not on the whole found lacking. And if there Mrs. Macdonald had recovered her presence of mind before she put in this clause about the manse. But she was in earnest; and it did not strike her that the strangers whom she entertained belonged to the upper ten thousand. It appeared to her that necessity went without saying, for it had to do with the obligations of her station in life. "But you are my friend," insisted the young fellow strenuously. "I may look upon you in that light, may I not?" He did not really like Mrs. Macdonald much for herself. He did not like her by any means as he liked the minister, only there was a wonderful charm thrown over her by the fact that she was Unah's mother. And he was even feverishly alive to the advantage of having her support in his raid on another man's territory. He clung to her favor in the exciting uncertainty of his prospects. 66 Certainly I am flattered by your wish," she said, cordially giving him her hand, and imagining in her egotism and rashness that she fathomed the extent of the alliance to which she pledged herself. 66 Mother," said Unah as she re-entered the room, "I believe we shall get all we want by the feal-dike" (wall built of turf) " 'opposite Malise Gow's cottage." "Well, well, do whatever you think best," acceded Mrs. Macdonald, a little annoyed by her daughter's unusual pertinacity in having a mind of her own with regard to the state of the weather, and the locale of the foxgloves of which she her self knew little and cared less. Indeed, though Unah was to be married next year at the farthest, she had hardly done so much for herself yet, as choose the road for a walk in opposition to the suggestions of her mother. Unah and Frank Tempest set out with an intuitive, palpitating, almost painful sense of restraint and awkwardness, which had suddenly taken the place of what had been, to the girl at least, their easy, happy boy and girl freedom and good fellowship. The new element reduced the former enviable intercourse between the two friends to forced conversation, carried on in jerks and by spasms, or what was still worse, to absolute silence positively terrifying, it was so totally unlike the inexhaustible flow of frank yet confidential talk, which had gone before it. The day was not inspiriting. Over every to go so far, in recounting to Frank, with the circumstantiality of a true and willing witness, the difficulties he would meet, the novelties he would find, above all the marvels he would discover, if he were to be standing victorious, with the wind in his hair, on the crest of the mountain. First he would find the beaten track come to an end, and have to wade deviously as when he was following "the birds" ankle deep in heather. thing, blurring each outline, hung an impalpable dull haze, through which the greengrey smoke from the uncouth chimneys of the cottages in the village rose straight into the air for several feet, and floated there in a faintly visible suspension which was so full of peat reek that the pungency became an acute oppression. The smell of "smush," as the natives termed it, without as well as within the houses, was as when the scent of the seaweed loads the air at the seashore, with this difference, He would have to avoid carefully the that the effect of the sharp peat reek was clearings covered with emerald-green moss irritating, while that of the salt seaweed that seemed to promise less heavy walkwould have been soothing. The feal-dike, ing, but which might yield in an instant to running up between a little pasture field the pressure of his foot and engulph his and the moor, was reached. But though smartest knickerbockers in bog water. its green bulging sides and top waved yet He would reach in time rocky tracts, grey with seeded grasses and late harebells, the stony wildernesses strewn with bones, but row of tall foxgloves like miniature trees not those of unlucky pedestrians, only of by the boundary, stood erect exhibiting belated sheep or victimized lambs, for the an after-growth of dark-green seed-vessels foxes' earths were there, and there was with ridiculously long threads - vestiges generally a flock of crows either right overof stamens and pistils-springing from head, or speckling with black the silverthem, as all that was left of the long, droop-grey stones. That was the place to sit ing white and purple bells of the flowers. down, and if one had ability and breath Unah hesitated, she was loth to disappoin: Lady Jean. She did not know how to displease her mother. She had already become in a degree accustomed to being with Frank Tempest in the new conditions of their connection. For that matter, the strange unspoken trouble between them had given way a little and relapsed to some extent into the old secure friendliness, as they hunted up and down the feal-dike, and compared notes on their mutual failure in the pursuit upon which they had been sent. They were both so light of foot that Unah was persuaded they could go up to Lochbuy Farm, and come down again in no time. And of course Frank Tempest when he saw that she was debating the point, was still more convinced of their capacity for the pedestrian feat. Unah suffered her better judgment to be overborne - not in sheer wilfulness not even in the strong obligation to gratify Frank Tempest - rather in her slowness to think any evil, her comparative ignorance of herself and her companion, her long maintained girlish habit of deference and submission which, unless it received a rough check, threatened to become an amiable weakness in the woman. Frank Tempest and Unah decided to push on to Lochbuy. As they walked along briskly, winding up among the bracken and heather, both of which looked withered and shrunk -"singed" Unah called it with the first frost, under the grey light, she half forgot her unwillingness left, to sing the ballad of the "Twa Cor- legends in every tongue; or he might feel abashed like a fly who had somehow succeeded in crawling up to a pinnacle of the globe itself; or he might simply feel like a man with an immortal soul. and weird colossal shapes, as they rolled and whirled in the wind, and advanced stealthily and swiftly like ghostly legions. rushing to battle. Frank Tempest, thinking of the appearance afterwards, remembered a wild picture by a great German painter in which he attempted to represent the spirits of the warriors of two rival hosts contending over the field where their mortal bodies had fallen. Behind the marching mist wreaths, dimly visible, was a white surging mass of vapor, which might have been the Red Sea when it reared its waves and remained arrested-a wall of waters on each side of the Israelites, till they crossed its sandy bed but broke down foaming and roaring to swallow up the Egyptian taskmasters in pursuit of their fugitive slaves. What was called Lochbuy Farm was no more than a sheiling made of turf and heather, a bothie which was only occupied in summer by woodcutters, shepherds, and herds. It was deserted when Frank Tempest and Unah mounted to it, as they found when they sought to procure a draught of milk there. In an improvidence which was more unaccountable in Mrs. Macdonald than in either of the two who were likely to suffer from it, they had quitted the manse without any provision for luncheon. Frank had even left his flask behind him. "Never mind," said Unah; 66 we shall be at home presently. We can go down in a few minutes. One "Don't stay to look," besought Unah might run down, only there would be more urgently than before, and with a danger of the speed increasing, in spite of panic in her accent that was doubly sug us, beyond our power of breath or of re-gestive in so hardy and experienced a straining ourselves at any obstacle; and mountaineer. "It may not yet be too late however hungry or thirsty we may get, we to get far enough down, and be beyond all should not quite like to make the descent danger of losing our way, before it catches headlong." Frank Tempest did not feel hunger or thirst, in spite of his healthy young appetite. He did not care about going down. If it rested with him he would willingly range the whole mountain and remain without food and drink from breakfast to supper. But Unah and he had merely climbed the heights of the mountain in imagination. They were only beyond the last belt of birch wood, and there, on its "It is not that," she answered without border, grew an abundance of foxgloves, stopping. "I don't mind the wetting, still in the stately pride of their flowers. though we might pass through the Fearn Their gatherers had no difficulty in select-in flood, and reach the bank with drier hair. ing huge bunches of white queens to encumber the young man. "I think even Lady Jean would say we had got enough," said Unah, adding a last flower to the collection. She rose from her stooping posture and looked round. "Oh, come away!" she cried in a tone of sudden alarm; "the mist is coming down." He turned to look up at the mountain towering far above him. All the morning Ben Voil's head had been partially hidden in a swathing of cloud, which had occasionally rent and lifted a little, only to close and sink down again with a certain sullen darkening and increase of density in the veil. But now, between them and the cowled mountain, there were white wreaths of vapor, which, if the spectators had found time to watch them, would have been seen to assume the most fantastic us." "I don't understand." He sought an explanation, partly puzzled and partly with the desire of reassuring her. He himself was impressed, but totally undaunted. He was, on the contrary, fired by the prospect of a new hostile experience. "We are not far up; it was not steep coming here. What are you afraid of? Is it very wetting?" 66 It is not the wetting, it is the blinding and bewildering. I know the mountain; but the mist is worse than a snowstorm, and once in a snowstorm my father got so dazzled and confused that he turned his back on the way he ought to have gone, and walked in the opposite direction, till a rock, with which he was acquainted, warned him in time that he was on the verge of a precipice. We are not far up, thank God! but there are old, forsaken quarries close to Lochbuy, between us and the foot of the mountain. Have you never heard, though you are an Englishman" she asked with a little impatience, the result of her distress at having brought him into this strait, and at his insensibility to the peril "how our shepherds sometimes perish in the mist on the mountains? And who are so weather-wise, skilled, and brave as the shepherds?" |