capital wife to somebody, and I wish you had got her.'

Aylmer said nothing; he had a secret to keep; but he wondered in a dreamy way what the Doctor would say when he, too, learned that Madge was married. He packed his portmanteau that night, and before breakfast on the following morning he had ordered a trap to be at the door in time to enable him to catch the 9 p.m. train for London.

The

The party in honour of the Doctor's birthday was to consist simply of the family. Madge was late; Mrs. Humphreys was very nervous. drawing-room was cold, and the Doctor proposed that they should at once go into the dining-room, where there was a blazing fire. There were only four of the party, but after being a few minutes in the room, the Doctor observed that the table had been laid for five.

'Why, who is our guest?' he said. 'I thought there was to be nobody here but ourselves?'

Mrs. Humphreys fidgeted, looked confused, and was relieved by the opening of the door, and the entrance of Madge, accompanied by the finelooking fellow the Doctor had seen in the photograph album.

'It's Jack-my son !'

And the old man took him in his arms, with a low muttered-'Thank God!'

'A birthday present,' said Madge, quietly, and we ask your forgive

ness.

had not gone away as a soldier, but as one of the medical staff appointed to attend the army in Abyssinia; he had earned distinction in the campaign, and he had won the right to come back, having fulfilled his father's angry demand that he should do something to prove himself capable of work. But before going he had induced Madge to become his wife. They both asked forgiveness, and it was given.

Jack was the hero of the evening; Alymer was very silent, although he tried to appear cheerful. When he spoke, however, they all noticed a curious hesitation in his speech, as if he were trying to keep down something that was rising in his throat. He gave Jack a hearty grasp of the hand, which meant plainly, 'You are a lucky fellow.' He seldom looked at Madge, and when he did speak to her it was with an effort to appear cheerful which was painfully evident to those who understood the position of the two.

The Doctor was happy beyond measure, and his wife was proportionately happy. The reconciliation was complete, and she felt that now her home would be glad indeed.

After dinner, Madge was asked to sing, and she chose the old song, 'Hame, hame, hame;' but there was a lightness in the touch, as if the final couplet was uppermost in her thoughts.

'Yet the sun through the mirk, seems to promise to me, I'll shine on ye yet in your ain countree.'

And when the last lingering notes of the pathetic but now pleasant air were hushed, Alymer hastily said 'Good-bye' to all. He took her hand very gently in both his own, and there was a fervent God bless you' in his eyes, although he could not speak. In her expression there were respect, regret, and gratitude.

They all stood at the window to watch him as he mounted the gig: he waved his hand, and said again faintly, 'Good-bye.'

As he was driven to the station he

realised the meaning of what he had called Madge's conundrum :

'There are so many things which

we fancy ought to come that do not: and so, we go on in periods of un finished chords.'

IN

N the early ages of Christianity and till long after the days when St. Francis embraced Poverty as his beloved bride, beggary was far from being looked upon as the disgraceful mode of life it is now considered. The parable of Dives and Lazarus was understood in the most literal sense, and the representatives of Lazarus profited accordingly. It was only natural that when alms-giving was held to be the greatest of virtues and the surest passport into Paradise, the sins and shortcomings of those who gave opportunity for its exercise should be complacently regarded. In the sixteenth century, in the Netherlands, the revolted nobles did not disdain to assume the title of Les Gueux, and to carry the beggar's wooden dish as their badge. It is a popular tradition in Scotland that James V., called the King of the Commons, and said to be the author of the ballads of 'The Jolly Beggar' and the Gaberlunzie Man,' used to wander among the common people in search of adventures, disguised as a beggar. Similar traditions are to be found in every land. Old ballads tell us that lords and ladies of high degree have concealed themselves beneath the mendicant's tattered garb, and mystical legends teach that those who have charitably entertained beggars have sometimes found them transformed into celestial visitants. The

legend of the mysterious beggar, with whom St. Martin divided his cloak, the ballad of 'The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green and his Pretty Daughter Bessie,' the story of that barefooted beggar maid more beautiful than day,' whom King Cophetua made his queen, and Tennyson has placed among the immortals of poetry, are well-known examples. Nor is the craft destitute of classical associations. There is the story of Belisarius begging an obolus, and Augustus Cæsar's strange custom of sitting one day in every year at his palace gate in the dress of a mendicant to receive alms from the passers by. Above all, has it not been suggested that Homer was a beggar?

Even in practical and matter-of-fact England, long after the Catholic faith had ceased to be the dominant form of worship there, and the example of the Brethren who wore the cord of St. Francis ceased to give an odour of sanctity to mendicancy, a prestige of mingled piety and romance still lingered round the poor pensioners of charity and commoners of air in the eyes of fanciful and unconventional natures. 'There was a Yorick once,' says Charles Lamb, whom it would not have shamed to sit down at the Beggars' Feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ave, and his mite, too, for a companionable symbol.' What

reader does not know that delightful essay, 'A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars?' Yet who could write about beggars without quoting some of its exquisite bits of humour? In tale or history,' says Lamb, 'your beggar is ever your just antipode to your king. Rags, which are the reproach of comparative poverty, are the beggar's robes and insignia of his profession, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind He is not required to put on court mourning. He is the only man who is not obliged to study appearances.'

it.

'He that is down need fear no fall,'

sang John Bunyan, who, it has been surmised, may have had gipsy blood in his veins; and Charles Lamb, though never suspected of any hereditary vagrant taint, dilates in his whimsical and inimitable manner on the freedom from all the cares and responsibilities of respectable people enjoyed by him who takes his stand on the lowest rung of the social ladder, or rather on no rung at all, but on the bare ground. The ups and downs of the world concern not him; the price of stock or land affects him not; no man goes to law with him; he is not expected to become bail or surety for any one; no man troubles him with questioning his religion or politics; he is the only free man in the universe. There is a dignity springing from the very depth of his desolation, as to be naked is so much nearer to being a man than to go in livery.' And in that vein of playful mockery, which in Lamb so often reminds us of Cervantes, he declares, 'If I were not the independent gentleman I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led captive, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the true greatness and delicacy of my mind, to be a beggar !'

Scotland tolerated beggars much longer than England. Burns, with

makes them turn the scale in its favour. No doubt a certainty that precluded any farther struggle with fortune would have a grim attraction for Burns, harrassed as he continually was with the dread of social defeat and downfall. The Jolly Beggars' is his only attempt at dramatic representation, and in it he depicts the vagrant crew whom he had often seen at Poosie Nansie's, in the midst of their reckless revels, with a vigour and vividness which have made some critics consider it the most perfect of all his poems. Walter Scott, who, like Burns, had sympathy with every phase of human nature, looked with no unkindly eye on the 'auld gaberlunzie man,' who was in bondage to no master, and took his alms as a loan which God Himself had undertaken

to repay with interest. The genial portrait of Edie Ochiltree sufficiently shows this.

In Goldsmith's exquisite picture of the village preacher, his kindness to the well-remembered beggar and to all the vagrant train, is given a conspicuous place. But Goldsmith was an Irishman, and had some vagrant propensities and experiences of his own, and perhaps it was only as a

concession to the prejudices of the English public, for whom he wrote, that he made his model pastor chide the wanderings with which it is to be feared he sympathised in his heart.

Ireland, almost to the middle of this nineteenth century, was, in truth, a land of beggars. Half the population, at least, were, more or less, mendicants. When the old potatoes had given out, and the new ones had not come in, many of the peasant holders of small lots of land habitually shut up their cabins, and, with their wives and children, turned out to beg for 'a bit and a sup and a night's lodging' from those who were somewhat better off. These poor travellers, as they were called, were regarded with peculiar sympathy, and when the new crop of potatoes was fit to dig they went back to their homes, having lost neither their own respect nor that of their neighbours by their temporary lapse into beggary. Where it was religiously believed that the privations of poverty in this world render lighter the penitential fires of Purgatory in the next, and that the luxuries of wealth, on the contrary, require a prolonged period of expiation, which copious charities are supposed to abridge, alms were asked for without hesitation, and given with cheerful alacrity. 'Poor travellers' made but a small part of the great body of mendicants which overspread the land. It was composed chiefly of the large host of professional beggars, brought up to the trade from infancy, and the crowds of amateurs who, from old age, idleness or infirmity, were constantly swelling its ranks. This great fraternity of unprofitable parasites included every age, from the old crone of ninety odd years to the babe just born, and every degree of rags and wretchedness from those who kept up some remains of decency in their apparel to 'Paddy the Patch' or 'Moll Tatters,' whose garments were little more than bundles of rags fastened with wooden skewers and tied together with ropes

of straw; from the rosy, healthy'slip' of a girl or boy to the old man or woman on crutches, dragging palsied limbs painfully along In the towns, beggars were always to be seen crowding about public offices, hotels, shops and churches, craving charity from all who passed in or out; and when, as often happened, they became particularly noisy and troublesome, some servants or officials of the place, round which they were congregated, would rush out and, with many threats and great brandishing of cudgels, drive them away-to return again when peace and quietness seemed restored. They followed well-dressed strangers through the streets with impassioned prayers for sixpence, or a penny, or even a ha-penny, to buy milk for a starving babe, or a drop of whiskey to keep the life in some poor fellow down with the fever. Always quickwitted, they varied their begging tactics according to the appearance and manner of those they addressed, trying, when pathos failed to hit on some chord of humour in the victim they had chosen which might open his purse, and mingling tragedy and comedy together in a way that was at once pathetic and grotesque, till the bewildered stranger was driven into throwing a handful of coins among them, and in the scramble and free fight which ensued making his escape into the first place of refuge that presented itself.

Irish beggars, however, were seldom guilty of open robbery or any form of violence. As a rule, they practised the theological virtues' of charity, faith, piety and patience; the 'moral virtues' of justice, truth, temperance and prudence were unknown to them. Their vices were born of want, ignorance and idleness; lying and petty pilfering were their greatest offences. Lazy, ragged, filthy, storytelling they undoubtedly were, but decidedly religious in their own way, and with little but what they considered venial sins to trouble their careless consciences.

In the country the beggars always had their old time-honoured patrons, besides being sure of a meal of potatoes and buttermilk at any farm-house or cabin. They hung about wayside inns and public houses all the year round, and in summer gathered at the places visited by tourists and picnic parties, hovering at a respectful distance till luncheon was over, when, if no money was to be had, they would at least get the remnants of the feast. In those days a land-owner who shut his gates against the beggars was looked upon by the common people as worse than a Jew, a Turk, or an infidel. No one, indeed, except some recent English settler, or some travelled Irishman who had learned English ways, ever attempted to outrage public opinion so daringly. And such a churl, whatever his rank and position might be, was always declared to be no gentleman, the worst thing an Irish peasant could say of any one who, in his opinion, ought to have deserved the name. 'Sure there must be a dirty drop in his blood, wherever it came from, and them that looked into his pedigree would find it.'

6

That part of Ireland of which I now write is famous for the beauty of its lakes and glens. It is not very many miles from Dublin, and since the evil days of ninety-eight' its people have been noted for their peaceful and industrious character. The large landowners generally lived on their estates most of the year, but it was not then the fashion for employers to provide their workmen with model cottages, and the labourers usually inhabited miserable hovels, as much out of sight as it was possible for the gentry to keep them. The villages were supposed to be much superior to those seen elsewhere in Ireland. There was a straggling street putting itself forward openly,' en evidence,' as it were, containing the dwellings of half a dozen tradesmen and mechanics, a couple of pretty shops, and the inevitable public house, all with slated roofs,

white-washed walls, and doors and windows in tolerable repair. This was all that met the eye of the traveller on the public road, but hiding behind in dark nooks, and clustering in stony hollows were groups of wretched mud cabins, roofed with thatch, grown rotten from age and covered with moss and house-leek, walls black and grimy with age and dirt, doors kept in their places by ropes, windows stuffed with rags, and foul-smelling kitchen-middens' piled up at every threshold. Here the great bulk of the labouring population, living with their wives and children on tenpence a day, had their abodes, in close proximity to beggars, thieves, poachers, and other lawless inhabitants. It ought to be said that in the country the chapel (all Catholic churches were chapels then) was usually built in some lonely and often wild spot midway between two or three villages. Bare and shabby little buildings they were, without spire or belfry, or anything to mark their sacred character except the plain stone cross above the door. No bell was allowed to ring

the glad summons to the house of God,'

but no such summons was needed. On Sundays and holidays the chapels were always crowded to overflowing, and those who could not find entrance thronged the chapel-yards, kneeling bare-headed among the graves, telling their beads aloud, beating their breasts in penitential contrition,sighing, groaning, even weeping (the men as well as the women), with true Celtic effusion.

Not the least devout of these worshippers were the beggars, and far from being despised or avoided, they were always treated with the utmost kindness and consideration. Wholly supported by private charity, they were the licensed pensioners of the rich, the welcome visitors of the poor. A share of the homely fare on which the farmers and cabin-keepers lived was always at their service, with a seat by the fire in cold weather, and,