Can you understand that?-all settled that it was to end just so in misery, and confusion, and folly, before even we met." "I do not believe it," I cried. "There is no need that it should end so, even now; if—if you are unchanged still."

once

a moment with a sort of feverish, fierce | energy; then he began to laugh, low and bitterly, and walk about as if unable to keep still. My letter!" The room was scarcely lighted · one lamp upon the table, and no more; and the half darkness, as he paced about, made his appearchanged?" He laughed at this ance more threatening still. Then he more, but not so tragically, with suddenly came and stood before me as if sham ridicule of the foolishness of the it had been I that had wronged him. "I doubt. And then all of a sudden he beam a likely man to be a gay Lothario," he gan to sing-oh, it was not a beautiful cried, with that laugh of mingled mock-performance! he had no voice, and not ery and despair which was far more trag- much ear; but never has the loveliest of ical than weeping. It was the only ex- music moved me more "I will come pression that such an extreme of feeling could find. He might have cried out to heaven and earth, and groaned and wept; but it would not have expressed to me the wild confusion, the overturn of everything, the despair of being so misunderstood, the miserable sum of suffering endured and life wasted for nothing, like this laugh. Then he dropped again into the chair opposite me, as if with the consciousness that even this excitement was vain.

"What can I say? What can I do? Has she never known me all along? Ellen!" He had not named her till now. Was it a renewal of life in his heart that made him capable of uttering her name?

"Do not blame her," I cried. "She had made up her mind that nothing could ever come of it, and that you ought to be set free. She thought of nothing else but this; that for her all change was hopeless that she was bound for life; and that you should be free. It became a fixed idea with her; and when your letter came, which was capable of being misread

"Then the wish was father to the thought," he said, still bitterly. "Did she show it to you? did you misread it also? Poor cheat of a letter! My heart had failed me altogether. Between my failure and her slavery. But I never thought she would take me at my word," he went on piteously, "never! I wrote, don't you know, as one writes longing to be comforted, to be told it did not matter so long as we loved each other, to be bidden come home. And there never came a word not a word."

"She wrote afterwards, but you were gone; and her letter was returned to her."

"Ah!" he said, in a sort of desolate assent. "Ah! was it so? then that was how it had to be, I suppose; things were so settled before ever we met each other.

again, my sweet and bonnie; I will come Here he broke down as Ellen had done, and said, with a hysterical sob, I'm ill; I think I'm dying. How am I, a broken man, without a penny, to come again?'

66

Chatty and I walked with him to his room through the soft darkness of the Italian night. I found he had fever the wasting, exhausting ague fever which haunts the most beautiful coasts in the world. I did my best to reassure him, telling him that it was not deadly, and that at home he would soon be well; but I cannot say that I felt so cheerfully as I spoke, and all that John did was to shake his head. As we turned home again through all the groups of cheerful people, Chatty with her arm looped in mine, we talked, it is needless to say, of nothing else. But not even to my child did I say what I meant to do. I am not rich, but still I can afford myself a luxury now and then. When the children were in bed I wrote a short letter, and put a cheque in it for twenty pounds. This was what I said. I was too much excited to write just in the ordinary way.

"Ellen, I have found John, ill, heartbroken, but as faithful and unchanged as I always knew he was. If you have the heart of a mouse in you come out instantly don't lose a day — and save him. It may be time yet. If he can be got home to English air and to happiness it will still be time.

"I have written to your mother. She will not oppose you, or I am much mistaken. Take my word for all the details. I will expect you by the earliest possibility. Don't write, but come."

In less than a week after I went to Genoa, and met in the steamboat from Marseilles, which was the quickest way of travelling then, a trembling, large eyed, worn-out creature, not knowing if she were dead or alive, confused with the strangeness of everything, and the won

that old tyrant, invisible in his upper chamber, to die.

me? Dear young friends! But we were not all born yesterday. We did not all have your training or your delicate perceptions. And is not suggestion, even of a story (though I allow that is a poor thing enough), one of the graces of art?

derful change in her own life. It was one of John's bad days, and nobody who was not acquainted with the disease would I know it is a vulgar weakness to seek have believed him other than dying. He a story where one ought to be satisfied was lying in a kind of half-conscious state with pure art. Picture and song, have when I took Ellen into his room. She they not a far loftier attraction in their stood behind me clinging to me, undis-own beauty than any your vulgar narratinguishable in the darkened place. The tive can give them, my young friends ask flush of the fever was going off; the paleness as of death and utter exhaustion stealing over him. His feeble fingers were moving faintly upon the white covering of his bed; his eyelids half shut, with the veins showing blue in them and under his eyes. But there was a faint smile on his face. Wherever he was wandering in those confused fever dreams, he was not unhappy. Ellen held by my arm to keep herself from falling. 'Hope! you said there was hope," she moaned in my ear, with a reproach that was heartrending. Then he began to murmur with his almost colorless yet smiling lips, "I will come again, my sweet and bonnie; I will come-again." And then the fingers faintly beating time were still.

But no, no! Do not take up a mistaken idea. He was not dead; and he did not die. We got him home after a while. In Switzerland, on our way to England, I had them married safe and fast under my own eye. I would allow no more shilly-shally. And, indeed, it appeared that Mrs. Harwood, frightened by all the results of her totally unconscious domestic despotism, was eager in hurrying Ellen off, and anxious that John should come home. He never quite regained his former health, but he got sufficiently well to take another situation, his former employers, anxiously, aiding him to recover his lost ground. And they took Montpellier Villa after all, to be near Pleasant Place, where Ellen goes every day, and is, Mrs. Harwood allows, far better company for her father, and a greater relief to the tedium of his life, than when she was more constantly his nurse and attendant. I am obliged to say, however, that the mother has had a price to pay for the emancipation of the daughter. There is nothing to be got for nought in this life. And sometimes Ellen has a compunction, and sometimes there is an unspoken reproach in the poor old lady's tired eyes. I hope for my own part that when that eldest little girl is a little older Mrs. Harwood's life will be greatly sweetened and brightened. But yet it is she that has to pay the price; for no argument, not even the last severe winter, and many renewed "attacks," will persuade

From The Contemporary Review. AN AUTUMN RAMBLE.

THE dreary days of the protracted session came to an end at last, and we left England on a cloudless hot day, while the corn was being joyfully gathered in on all sides. The harvest was hardly more advanced in the north of France and Belgium, though the climate was so much better, as the peaches and grapes sold at all the little stations bore witness.

The waste of land in the innumerable hedges and ditches which divide the tiny properties in Picardy was very striking. In Belgium the fences had vanished, but the waste of labor was as great: three or four little ploughs, with two horses each, working at three or four little strips, the whole not so big as a small English field which would have been ploughed in a day with one pair each proprietor here doing his own work with no help or cooperation with his neighbor, the little corn-ricks looking as if out of a child's farmyard, and often so weak-kneed that they had to be supported by props.

The scattered villages lie very far apart, and Belgian villages are peculiarly wretched-looking, the dwellings onestoried and miserable, the isolated cottages few, often mere mud hovels; vegetables running close to the very door, with no path up to it, and not a single flower; the bare-legged, bare-headed women evidently too ground down by hard work in the fields, and anxiety for the bare life, to care for even a strip of garden. If flowers were to be seen, they were at a drinking-house or at the railway stations.

The distances for the owners to go to their bits of land are very great. There are few cross-roads, so they must tramp along the grassy, muddy paths between

the fields to reach their work- -no trees | years, but with a complete change in the were to be seen but the occasional rows central thought! And, final irony of fate, of hideous black poplars, with branches trimmed up for fuel and to prevent their overshadowing the soil. There was not room for a real tree anywhere in the economy of that world.

The bits of land were generally the size of a large allotment, about an acre or two (sometimes one man will own two or three of these), and the effect on the naked country is as of a patchwork quilt thrown over it; a small brown patch for the ploughed land, a light green for the mown grass, a dark green for the uncut clover, a yellow one for the corn, and then da capo, over and over again. A dull level of poverty everywhere; not a house as big as an ordinary farmhouse to be seen, particularly from Brussels to Verviers; everything skimped, cramped, uniform in ugliness and squalid wretchedness.*

We drank tea in the inner court of the Hotel at Brussels, al fresco, with an old French priest, who had come in to see the Exhibition and was very discontented with affairs at home. No wonder ! "Gambetta c'est un farceur, un buveur d'estaminets il y a dix ans; allez, c'est une fameuse dégringolade pour la France d'être gouverné par un homme comme ça." A more important witness declared he was biding his time for a war of revenge, when he would rise as the saviour of France and the restorer of the provinces wrung from her in '70-"and war even now is popular in France."

the Roman Catholic cathedral opened by a Protestant emperor, with its archbishop in exile and under a ban, and a ceremony comprising as little as possible of the Roman Catholic element! The great crane on the mighty unfinished tower is gone, and the devil, it is to be hoped, worsted, who, as is well known, objected to its removal, and sent a storm to prevent it. The plans for the building had been most meanly filched from him by the architect, all except a part of the middle, and the devil had vowed, only too successfully till now, that this should never be finished.

The lingering light was just touching the highest part of the high windows as we entered the transept, all below lying in deep shadow, which masked the rather bare walls of the lofty nave, enormously high in proportion as it soars into the air. It is finished according to the old drawings found after having been lost for a hundred or so of years, but the new part has an oddly cut-and-dried look compared to the old, which seems to have grown, and the statues on the retreating arches of the portals are strangely bad and vulgar "journey work," done evidently by the yard.

Next morning the enormous space was filled by the rather unlovely Rhineland race. Common-looking, good, quiet folk apparently, but "ordinary all," was the ceaseless comment as the ceaseless stream flowed on- the women ugly, illdressed, in colors hopelessly wrong, and an utter want of charm. A Frenchwoman with no more beauty would yet have made herself pleasant to look at; an Italian crowd would have been dirtier but more picturesque. The men were in curious

The bad coal burned on all the engines made the journey most unpleasant in the heat: we came into Cologne almost black. Even the cathedral felt hot. Its spires, the highest in the world, as the emperor declared proudly in his opening speech, were still veiled by the great scaffolding, which is a miracle of construc-preponderance at the service. A crowd tion, but will soon now be removed. That majestic building, begun with the idea of glorifying and pleasing God by the gift of all that is best in the powers of man, an offering to Heaven, is now completed with little reference to God at all, but as a patriotic tribute to the unification of Germany, to the honor of the German race, the work of men of all creeds, by a national instead of a religious enthusiasm. A strange crook in the lot of the great Dom-the design of the old builders at length carried out after six hundred

stood round au altar in the transept, and the responses to the priest were in such harsh gutturals that we thought some heavy metal was being dragged on the pavement, till we walked among them and heard our neighbors' voices come grating out of their mouths. No one had a book, but all joined, evidently knowing the service by heart.

A woman with a basketful of candles came up to me with an insinuating smile. My neighbor bought one and proceeded to set it on a spike, in company with two or three dozen more burning to the honor of a small statuette of the Virgin, in a crown and very fine brocade gown, over a crinoline. She was evidently much in

The Rhine steamers are a favorite resort for bridal excursions, and we had two pairs on board. One ugly fat girl was marching up and down the deck in a thick cloth jacket, in spite of the heat, with white mittens on the hands sentimentally clasped on her bridegroom's arm, and a proud look of serene consciousness of being the admired of all beholders, which was inexpressibly silly and droll: another sat with her arm round the neck of hers, or resting on his knee,

simple, tactless, tasteless worthy folk. The reign of ugliness in architecture is as bad here as in England — it is wonderful how every old building, both in town and village, is picturesque, rich in ornament and design, and every new one ugly and scamped in eaves and mouldings. As we passed up the river the black-andwhite half-timbered cottages, the woodwork in patterns, were all good; the towers of the churches, with their pierced stone parapets, round-headed windows, or pointed pinnacles-the pitch of the high roofs, the proportions of everything, were right, while the new pensions, etc., were as hideous as if from the hands of a London builder. The originality of each little district, too, was interesting; while the new work was everywhere all alike. The isolation of old days may account for each community having a pattern of its own, but not for the amount of imagination which they showed then and have lost now.

fashion, for a whole gallery of ex votos | it-hardly appealing to our English symhung under her. Presently, an old worn pathies. woman in black, with a heavy basket on her arm, sat down by me, and with a rapt look leaned back, closed her eyes, and began telling her beads, while a look of peace stole over the worn face. It was pleasant, too, to see how at home everybody seemed to feel, passing from altar to altar as they pleased, as if the place belonged to them, instead of to the sexton and the beadle, as in cathedrals at home. The great organ sounded like the articulate voice of the enormous building, and the single voices of the choir in the distance like the pleadings of earth with heaven, plaintive, weak, uncertain, full of sorrows and perplexities. And then came the answer of the Church back again, full, rich, powerful, unhesitating, infallible (if only you accepted it!). The extremely vicarious nature of the worship struck one, however, the more from the immense distances at which it took place. A tinkling bell rang, out of sight and a quarter of a mile away, telling us the host was being raised, and immediately everybody went on their knees, at whatever point of their devotions they were. You had only to follow your leader and do as you were bid, and you were washed "clean and done for " by the priest, in the lump, as it instead of the strictly individual relation of the soul to its Creator of real Protestant worship. Then the priest put the remains of our Lord into a box on the altar, the little choir-boys swung their incense-pots, and our adorations were over. The new painted glass, with a few ex- In the same way almost every bit of ceptions, is abominable. One window in costume has died out. The embroidered magenta and green looked like a faithful cloths and velvet bodices, the beautiful rendering of the last new carpet from stuffs which lasted for generations, are Shoolbred's or whoever the German equiv- supplanted by hideous lilac cottons; the alent of that worthy may be. Then came silver and gold ornaments, which dea glare of yellow and red, like a transpar-scended from mother to daughter, are all ency in oiled paper, with bright light blue at the top. Every variety but the variety of good was there, and of that harmony found in the old glass of even poor village churches, and an attempt at pictures, interfering with the effect which should be mainly of pure color-a glory which is, perhaps, more sensuous than that of form, but with as supreme a pleasure of its own, as may be felt in the rose windows of St. Maclou and the Cathedral at Rouen like melody, perhaps, as compared to harmony in the sister art.

were

swept into the gulf of commonplace which has inundated the world.

The effect of the vine terraces seaming the sides of the hills, climbing up slopes so steep that apparently the soil can hardly cling there, is always interesting; the tiny strips are supported by walls carefully built up, the earth often carried up in basketfuls. Here, too, the great distances the owners must come, to reach each little property, are very striking, and as there are no roads (the ground is too valuable) each must pass along hundreds of his "Offerings for the Holy Father, Leo neighbors' patches. The temptation is XIII.," were received at the door. Liv- too great for human nature when the ing on the alms of the whole world! an grapes are ripening, and a close time idea beautiful or not as your fancy takes | takes place when no man is allowed to

enter his own ground (which would hardly We stopped at Offenburg, a quiet little