HILIP KALE'S occupation was that of a clerk in a city drug store; his appearance was dark, slight and prepossessing; his age twentythree; his manner reserved to the verge of taciturnity; his views of religion and life alike tinged with unhealthy morbidness, the consequence of an hereditary predisposition to dyspepsia. He believed devoutly in the theory that it was a most unfortunate thing to be alive, but that being alive nothing remained but to make the best of it; and he strove to adhere strictly to his idea of the highest plane of duty, which consisted, chiefly, in never complaining-that was a weakness; never mingling in society-that was a folly; and in throwing his whole heart into his work-that was a necessity if life was to be made endurable. Negative rules of conduct are comparatively easy to follow, but the positive decree that one shall throw one's heart into one's work-and keep it there is difficult to enforce. Philip found it so, at any rate, and he was struck with the added and melancholy fact that his occupation was one in which enthusiasm was not required, and absorbing interest little needed. It wanted a certain kind and amount of knowledge, with carefulness and despatch, but in return it refused to absorb his empty fears and perplexities, his ever-deepening depression of spirit. He began to think very little of himself and a great deal about himself, and to feel sorry for every one else. If they were unfortunate or miserable, he pitied them, because, poor fellows, they were as badly off as

he was; and if they were light-hearted and gay, because they were unconscious of the misery that was really their portion. With the first heats of summer came a time when he lost his appetite, and when the familiar sights and sounds of the city became exquisitely painful to him. His dogged resolution kept him up, but it could not prevent him from turning weak and pallid, nor keep his hands from trembling His employer noticed it.

'Why, Kale!' he exclaimed, one morning, taking the young man by the shoulder, 'you're sick.'

A little that way,' said Philip, with a wan smile; 'It's the warm weather, I suppose.'

two.

'Better take a holiday of a week or A run up in the country will do you good.'

Philip's first feeling was one of blankness. His home and friends were in the city. He knew no one outside of it. But stay-there was his Aunt Ruth, a widowed sister of his father's, whom he had once visited long years before; he could go and see her. He sent a telegram announcing his coming without delay, and prepared for departure with pleasanter emotions than he had ever expected to experience again. He reproached himself for not having yet outgrown the boyishness of being elated at the idea of change.

Mrs. Ruth Pinkney lived in solitary contentment, on a small place of two or three acres, several miles from the nearest railway station. Her estate was not large enough to be considered a farm, but it might properly be called

was ac

a garden, as within its borders grew almost every variety of vegetable and fruit with which its owner quainted. She was also blest with a faithful man servant and hand-maiden, who performed the heaviest of the outdoor and household labour. A row of stately trees near the fence screened the quaint, old-fashioned house from the gaze of passers-by, without depriving it of its daily portion of sunshine. The square, grassy front yard was cut into halves by a straight gravel walk, on either side of which bloomed flowers as sweet and odd and unworldly as their mistress.

When the stage containing her nephew stopped at the gate, Mrs. Pinkney, or rather Ruth Pinkney, as she would best like to be called-for she is a Quakeress- smoothed her thin locks of grey hair and the voluminous folds of her grey dress, neither of which required smoothing in the slightest degree, and, clasping her hands in a delicate, old-fashioned way at her waist, went down to meet her young kinsman with a sweet smile of welcome. She spoke little until the stage had rattled away again, and then, reaching up her two hands to his shoulders, she softly said:

'Dear boy, I am rejoiced to see thee once more. It was very good of thee to think of paying thy old aunt a visit.'

It is pleasant to be praised for doing what we please, so Philip Kale thought as he kissed the lovely old face uplifted to his, and expressed his pleasure at seeing it again.

But how poorly thee is looking,' continued his aunt, glancing at him keenly over her spectacles. Thee has done wisely to come into the pure country air. We shall see what fresh eggs and new milk will do for thee; we have them both in abundance.'

'Oh, dear Aunt,' said Philip, seating himself on the pleasant porch beside her, 'you have a very squeamish guest on your hands. I'm afraid I can't digest your nice eggs and milk.

I'd like to, but my stomach is very weak.'

Just like thy father,' murmured Ruth Pinkney. I see thee favours him in many ways. But he used to say that no one could cook for him but sister Ruth; so if it is thy stomach that is disordered, I'll engage to send thee back in improved health at the end of thy stay.'

Philip gave a trustful sigh of relief, and his hostess rose to show him to his room. It was not very large, but it had three windows; the walls were white-washed, and the floor covered with a sober-hued rag carpet. There were a great many green and climbing plants growing near the light. A single picture relieved the wall, representing broad-hipped maidens with their rustic swains attendant upon a flock of fine looking sheep. As a work of art it was not satisfactory, but it was in sweet and peaceful unity,' as Ruth Pinkney would have expressed it, with the general effect of the room. Beneath Philip's armour of defence, his hard and worldly exterior, there beat a sensitive heart, easily impressed by outside influences; and it yielded readily to the brooding spirit of peace that hovered almost in visible form over his aunt's abode. It gladdened him to think that, sick and unrestful and life-weary as he was, he could yet enter into blessed communion with the deep unworldliness of his surroundings. Looking from his western window he could see the same gnarled old pear trees and rows of gooseberry bushes that had delighted his boyish heart years before. The familiar scene made him almost willing to believe that he was a boy again, instead of a man, grown old, not with years, but with cares and doubts, and a deepening despondency. All his old troubles seemed to resolve themselves into a dark, distant cloud, and to float away out of sight, leaving his sky blue and serenely beautiful. The veriest trifles afforded him pleasure. He was even grateful that his slippers were not

gaudy carpet ones, and that they did not squeak.

He

Philip spent the days of his vacation in the way that best suited him. went to bed and rose early; he dug in the garden till his strength gave out, and then read Whittier to his aunt in the shady front porch, while she shelled peas for dinner; he picked berries in the same little tin pail in which he had picked them on his previous visit, and ran to empty it in the big pan under the apple tree, with almost the same light step. His out-door labours, combined with Ruth Pinkney's unapproachable cookery, gave him a slight but increasing appetite. He learned how to can' fruit, to make the best soups, and the lightest Graham gems, and he envied women their inalienable right to practise and perfect the culinary art. As a housemaid he was not beyond reproach. On one occasion, when he had been entrusted with the delicate task of brushing off the pantry shelves, he whisked down and broke a china mug, with the words, A Gift,' on it in gilt letters. He carried the fragments with a rueful countenance to his hostess, and she surveyed them with an air of mock severity and with a deeply-drawn sigh.

Thee is a reckless youth, nephew Philip,' said she, ' I fear I shall have to give thee an eldering.'

'An eldering, Aunt Ruth? Do you mean to chastise me with a branch of elder bush?'

'No, no, foolish boy! Whenever the giddy young people of our society misbehave themselves, the elders in the meeting are constrained to admonish them. That is what some among us call an eldering.'

6

Philip saw small signs of giddiness among the Quaker youth of the neighbourhood when he and his aunt went to 'Fourth day' meeting; yet neither young nor old had an air of dispirited solemnity. It appeared an odd thing to him to meet for worship on a weekday morning, and the deep hush that fell upon the assembly seemed to offer

him special opportunities for studying the quaint physiognomies of some of the Friends who sat facing the meeting, and to meditate upon this peculiar form of religious service.

'I don't like this method of dividing off the men and women into separate companies,' he said to himself. 'It is too forcibly a reminder of that text about the sheep being on one side and the goats on the other. How still every one is! Silence is golden, and I should think it might easily become as heavy and chilling and blunt as any kind of metal. I wonder what being 'moved to speak' really means. Aunt Ruth talks of it as if it were some heavenly injunction laid upon the soul of the speaker, which must be instantly obeyed; but I suspect it is oftener the prompting of duty which must come into the heart of every practised preacher to do his part toward keeping up the interest of the meeting. Yet nobody looks in the least anxious or responsible, and that does not accord with my theory.' Then his mind wandered to the dress of the women. 'I like those soft, grey patternless shawls, with the three folds at the back of the neck, but I can't admire the bonnets. Those silk crinkles in the crown are very unseemly, to say the least. What a grand face and figure that woman sitting at the head of the meeting has! She is immeasurably more striking and impressive than a score of stylish girls, with their fashionable gew gaws and gibberish.'

At this moment the woman who had won his admiration untied her bonnet with trembling fingers, and, falling upon her knees, gave utterance to strong and fervent supplication. The high intense voice praying that 'our hearts may be purified from every vain and wayward thought, and made fit for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,' smote upon Philip as if it had been a personal rebuke. He had risen with the rest of the congregation, and when he sat down again, he felt as if

her prayer had been answered. The service made a more forcible impression upon his mind from the fact that sounds reached them through the open door of mowers sharpening their scythes, and occasionally of a passing lumber waggon. The deep religiousness of everyday life came over him as it had never done before.

He talked this over with Ruth Pinkney on their way home. It was so easy to talk with her; and the sympathetic old lady-who, like most old people, liked to be confided in by her youngers, just as most young people like to be asked for opinions by their elders-felt more drawn towards him than ever.

When they reached home he lay down on the chintz-covered lounge, and Ruth Pinkney brought a pillow for him as downy and white as a summer cloud, and arranged the shutters, with a view to letting in the most air with the least light. Philip thought his Aunt Ruth almost an ideal of womanhood, and felt that it would be forever impossible for him to admire a dress on any female form whatever that was not grey in colour, and whose skirt was not of generous amplitude, and made precisely the same behind that it was before. She came and sat down beside him, and he twitched a fold of her gown between his nervous fingers.

'Oh, dear Aunt,' he said, 'I wish I could be still, and happy, and good, like you.'

The Quakeress mused much upon this saying, and the young man who had made it, as she laid the table for dinner.

I feel a call to do something for him,' she murmured to herself, 'but I can't see my way clear yet. Dear boy! my heart feels greatly tendered towards him.'

Not many days after, Philip went back to his work, strengthened and refreshed by the visit, but more discontented with his city life than ever. His Aunt mourned for him, and Thos. Shaw, the serving man, and Charlotte

Acres, the serving woman, saw him depart with real regret. He seemed to belong to them, and to the place, yet doomed to perpetual exile. Early in the succeeding winter Ruth Pinkney was stricken down with a sickness from which she never recovered. Philip was deeply grieved by the tidings, and begged her to let him know should she become worse. She continued in much the same condition until spring, when she suddenly and peacefully died. Her nephew had abundant proof that she had not forgotten him, for in her will, along with numerous bequests to surviving relatives, and her faithful servants, she bequeathed to him her house, with all that it contained, and the land surrounding it. Ruth Pinkney had ' seen her way clear' at the last.

It was not a dazzling fortune, but if anything could have consoled Philip Kale for the loss of his best friend, it was the fact of his new possessions. He threw up his situation-it was hardly a position-in the city, and came down to it at once. His sorrow was temporarily quenched by the joy and pride of ownership. He would live for himself, and by himself, and in precisely the way that best suited himself. He said, with an exultant throb of satisfaction, that he could not afford to keep help, and that the out-door and in-door work he would do would be light labour enough, even for a sick man. Thomas and Charlotte had long contemplated a matrimonial union, and, in accordance with their misstress's wishes, were united shortly after her death. They were to be Philip's nearest neighbours, and Charlotte was to come over once a week and do his washing and ironing, and give the house a thorough sweeping.

The young man felt perfectly equal to every other department of household labour, and his brain teemed with new experiments in hygienic cookery, and plans for living in luxury and gaining health and strength at the nominal expense of five cents per