he fell to play on his pipes, and all the children up and down followed him out of the town, to a great hill not far off, which rent in two, and opened, and let him and the children in, and so closed up again. This happened a matter of two hundred and fifty years since: and in that town they date their bills and bonds, and other instruments in law, to this day from the year of the going out of their children; besides, there is a great pillar of stone at the foot of the said hill, whereon this story is engraven. No more now, for this is enough in conscience for one time: so I am, Your most affectionate servitor, FLEET, 1st October 1643. J. H. EXERCISE V. EXAMPLE 13. THE RIDDANCE OF A PEST: THE PIED PIPER. In the Story of the Pied Piper, the main Problem is, How to get rid of a Plague; which presently resolves itself into two subordinate problems: How the citizens could avoid paying the Piper who helped them; and, subsequently, How the said Piper could revenge himself upon them. The Story is a fairy story; and a great many fairy stories are constructed -or grow-on these lines. Starting, as usual, from the main Problem, we note that many Solutions, many Subjects, many kinds of Treatment, are possible. The Biblical relation of the Plagues of Egypt provides us with an instance of another treatment; Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, with another. The particular Subject chosen for the Evolution of the Problem is, then: How the citizens of Hamelin, being plagued with rats (the particular plague selected) agreed to give a wandering Piper a great reward to free them from this pest; how he freed them accordingly; how they refused to reward him as they had agreed to do; and how he revenged himself upon them. The Invention displayed in the Treatment of the Subject makes the Piper a taking fellow in a motley jacket; coming from, and returning to, no one knows whither; makes the citizens a mean and stingy crew; makes the Piper take a diabolical and most romantic revenge. For all the children of the town follow his irresistible fluting that leads them into the hill; which closes upon the Piper and them all; and they are no more seen. The Selection (in Howell's account of the matter) shows an absolute restriction to the Action of the piece. The whole business of the Plague is described in a word-annoyed;' there is no circumstance about the Piper mentioned, save that he wore a pied coat; the lake (lough'), the hill, and the pillar of stone, are great-a detail of size, and that is all. The Disposition is straightforward. The Diction is excellent seventeenth-century narrative diction; there are no superfluous words; and it is both terse and musical. Nowadays, where Howell uses one long complex sentence, we should use three or four simple sentences; setting each part of the story in a separate sentence, for the sake of easy reading. Let the pupil take for his Problem;-the Riddance of a Pest; selecting his Subject from history, fiction, or experience, or inventing it. Let him, if he will, re-tell the story of one of the Plagues of Egypt— as Howell re-tells the story of the Pied Piper-or an episode from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. The Subject gives a wide choice-from a plague of rats to Border raids, from a pest of flies to guerilla warfare; from the circumstances of common life, in fact, to the great actions on the stage of history. It is sufficient to indicate to the pupil the possibilities before him, without limiting him to a definite subject. To leave him some scope of choice and invention, will call into action his latent powers of mind and imagination; which is a chief object in lessons upon composition. A MEMORY Robert Louis Stevenson. (1850-1894.) Memories and Portraits. THE little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west EXAMPLE 14 colourless, clear light of the early morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood upon it, in these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we went; and having taken stock of all possible accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations. For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor in the bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of access, and far from land, the work would be one of years; and my father was now looking for a shore station, where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor. I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and fro in the dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound of the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet. All about the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks; and to hear the singing of the Psalms, 'the chapters,' the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse prayer. In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a brace of wallowing stonelighters. The open ocean widened upon either board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine fire rising in the mid-sea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race, and growled in |