ers are at work skinning it in a way which | for their supply, consist in gloves made goes to one's heart. The exquisite carv- to the hand, stays, the friseur, and the ing of the pulpit (1512), with a circle of dentist- they far outnumbered the rest. heads of the fathers of the church, has Of booksellers there were hardly any, been chipped and rubbed to a nice clean and these eked out a livelihood by selling surface, and what has been lost may be prints, photographs, and maps, to disguise seen by comparing them with the one still their unpopular wares. left untouched of the sculptor Pilgram, looking out ruefully from a stone window under them, at his defaced handiwork. We longed to throw down the men whose grinding and scraping resounded spitefully from their high scaffolds through those wonderful aisles. A little bit of bathos was disturbing. There were long spitoons before each of the carved seats! and at the altar, before which we sat, three women were kneeling devoutly to the heiliger Josef, who was entreated to "pray for us.' The original design included a second spire, which would hardly have been an improvement; the doubling of the point, which should aspire alone, always seems to weaken the effect. The architect, how ever, who had raised the church with the assistance, as usual, of the devil, had a misunderstanding with his master after the first spire was completed, and cast himself, or was thrown down from the scaffolding by the indignant Satan, for a breach of the promised conditions, and killed on the spot — after which the work was naturally stopped. This was one of the few cases where the devil obtained the soul for which he bargains and is defrauded of in so many like instances. The belief that knowledge and skill of all kinds come from the bad and not the good spirit, which originated the early legends of Faust - the idea that goodness and ignorance are concomitants seems to have beset the Middle Ages to such a degree that no great work, not even a church, could be carried out, apparently, without the assistance of the Father of Evil, who figures in all early building legends. The signs of the shops in the picturesque narrow streets are queer. "At the Eye of God," for an inn, sounded strange. "Mozart" looked uneasy over his Modewaren, while "Maria Hilfe" and "Jenny Lind" presided over furniture and shoes. The polyglot of languages, over some of the doors included sometimes six, Hungarian, Russian, Bohemian among them; and we saw a Hebrew superscription alongside one in French. The chief necessaries of life at Vienna, if one may judge by the number of shops Society is on what, to dwellers in London or Paris, sounds an impossible footing. The sixteen quarterings are as necessary as ever to be admitted at court, and exclusion from it does not mean, as here, the loss of a few balls and concerts, but that the doors of the upper class are completely closed to the intruder from below. And more, if a girl born of the "cream of the cream "marries one of the lower noblesse, much more a young officer or rising lawyer of the upper middle class, she is cut off irrevocably from all her friends. Even if her husband becomes a field marshal or a prime minister, and is received by reason of his office, his wife is not restored to the privileges she was born to, the separation is absolute. So that, under such a régime, Mrs. Disraeli would never have been admitted into society at all, while her husband was ruling the British Empire. At the evening parties all the young ones are put together, the young married people are in another room, and the elders by themselves, which must be extremely dull. The charmed circle is so small that it is like a great family party, everybody is on intimate terms with everybody else, a number of small jokes which no outsider can understand, petits noms, the sort of caquetage, and rather dull freemasonry which goes on in a large cousinhood at home, are generally the staple of the conversation. is The "Eastern question " does not grow any clearer by coming nearer in distance to the troubled waters. The extreme jealousy felt by all the other nationalities for the Sclavs complicates every attempt at its solution. The heritage of Prince Metternich's scheme for the government of Austria, "Divide et impera," still bearing its bitter fruits. Hungarians, Germans, Bohemians, and Sclavs hate each other as cordially as in the old days, when we remember quiet Austrian whitecoated soldiers in the Lombardo-Veneto stigmatized as "Croati," and suspected of running their bayonets into babies, and a regiment of Italians quartered at Prague, to keep Bohemia in order, utterly unable to communicate with any one, detested. and detesting, and spoken of as spies and | sible, on such mere scraps of land as we assassins. Until a greater fusion takes saw in Belgium and Germany, by the place Austria cannot be as strong as her position would entitle her to be. The Sclavs are said to be, as a race, so behindhand in civilization that they cannot govern themselves as yet, and certainly not other people, as they have an utter want of power of tolerating any form of thought in religion or politics than their own, but, on the other hand, it would be very unwise for Austria to add fresh provinces to her empire till there is a greater amalgamation of her old ones. The Bosnian insurrection was said to be mainly agrarian; the Christian peasants desired to take the land from the Mahometan landowners, and, as the Austrian government cannot permit this to be done, there is much discontent in her new acquisitions. Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate speech about Austria has done much harm, and rankles in the national memory. On the strength of it he is supposed to wish for war and to favor Russia, and his recantation was chuckled over in a way little pleasing to English ears. The extreme importance of a strict alliance between Austria and Germany, backed by England, even without any formal treaty, was insisted on as the greatest possible guarantee to the peace of Europe, against Russia on one side and France on the other. H- ended our Vienna stay by a visit to the hospital of two thousand beds, one of the largest in the world. The nurses did not bear a good character, and great efforts are being made for their improvement. H- saw one curious treatment for burns and skin diseases, patients who had been kept in warm water during months; one peasant for a year and a half. He seemed perfectly comfortable. The State lotteries were spoken of as a fertile source of misery to the peasants, who are much smitten with this dismal species of gambling. We inquired narrowly into the condition of the small proprietors again on our road home, and came to the conclusion that the day laborer and his family in England are better fed, better clothed, better housed, that the man has more time to himself, and the whole household is more civilized than these little owners of the soil. Compared to the men "north of Trent," the comparison is enormously to the advantage of England, but we would take even our southern counties and still contend that the scale is higher on this side the Channel. Existence is only pos protracted and incessant labor of the whole family without intermission. The man occasionally has a surcease by hiring out his labor; but the home life of the women and children is one of slavery and squalid misery, such as is not known with us. They submit also to a scale of diet unwholesomely low, and which I am thankful to say our people would refuse to endure. "Ah, on ne sait pas ce que c'est que de travailler, à la campagne en Angleterre," said the proprietor of such a little plot upon seeing English laborers at work. But it is said the possession of land has such an ennobling effect. Is it so? Is it a high ideal to be the owner of what en tails a degrading drudgery on the wife, old at forty from overwork, and the bad health, from neglect, of many of the children? an ownership dependent on the good pleasure of the money-lender, who may foreclose when a more than usually bad season prevents the payment of the always high interest? As one of our German authorities informed us, how can the peasant proprietor be out of debt? The expenses of cultivation are as great or greater - in a bad year as in a good one, on a small farm as on a large one; but in a bad season, when the corn, the fruit, or the vines fail, the small man has nothing to fall back upon for his daily bread; the large one has some resources husbanded. The English laborer, paying a fixed yearly rent for the allotments which are now to be found all over England, not able to mortgage, with a weekly wage, the two, and, in some counties, four, "harvests," as they are locally called, first the barking of oak, next the hay, corn, and lastly the acorns for pigs (which last brings in a very good assistance from the children while it lasts), is better off materially and morally than such merely nominal owners. His children go out into trades, into service, to the railroads, and form the backbone of the town populations, leav ing only enough at home to till the ground. In Germany, the discontent is often great among the peasants, and emigration takes place to a very great extent and seems to be increasing. Few, indeed, who have studied the condition of the small proprietors on the land and not in books, but will feel that the introduction of such a system here would be a fall, not From All The Year Round. VISITED ON THE CHILDREN. CHAPTER X. "IT WAS THE TIME OF roses." SYBIL was not in the schoolroom when Lion entered the small oak-panelled apartment where the girls used to "do their lessons" when they were younger, and where the cottage piano, on which their childish fingers had strummed, still stood, and Jenny kept her books, and microscope, and other properties; but on the table in the centre of the room stood a china bowl half full of fresh water beside a heap of newly-cut roses, mute witnesses of her late presence; and almost in the same moment a shadow darkened the French window, and Sybil came in, her hands full of ferns and green leaves with which to dress her flowers, and a very bright blush on her face at finding a visitor waiting for her. a rise, for the English laborer.* There is much to be done to ameliorate his position, but it will hardly be in this direction, here, where the value of land to buy is increasing and that of its hire is diminishing. In all other occupations, moreover, the small man is going to the wall: the hand-loom weaver at Coventry and Spitalfields cannot hold his own, the stockingmachines of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire have all been driven out by the large manufactories, the small kingdoms in Germany and Italy have followed the fate of the Heptarchy. It will be exceedingly paradoxical if in agriculture alone it should be found that the peasant proprietor, with his wretched instruments, his want of manure, his unskilled labor, can do better for the land than the men of capital and intelligence with the command of machinery. As to the good effect which the possession of land can give, this is better obtained by the allotment, nearer to the laborer's cottage than the Truth to tell, the girl was conscious of holdings abroad often miles away from having been rather cruel in cutting short the Bauer's dwelling-and not so large his confidence on the evening of the Ashas to induce him to depend upon its prod-leighs' dinner-party. It was not her habit uce for his living, as do the wretched to be cruel to any one in the ordinary way; families of whom we saw so many. she was at once too gentle and too little coquettish; but pride, and a slight touch of pique combined, had prompted the action on the occasion in question, and hardened her even against the look of pained disappointment in his face. And so ended our outward journey. The Austrian railways are exceedingly inconvenient; the Viennese travel very little, and the fast trains are either at night or at an unearthly hour in the morning. There is but one from Vienna Should he not have told them long beto Trieste, although it is the only port of fore of his engagement to Miss de Boonany size for the whole of Austria and yen, if that was what he was going to talk Hungary. Yet, when the directors were about; or, at least, havė given them some asked to put on a second, they replied hint of his attachment to the young lady? that, as there were only one and a half It was not that the actual fact of the enfirst-class passengers a day, this was im-gagement shocked or grieved her; though, possible! The Viennese weather is detestable, alternating between great heat with much dust, and bitter, biting winds and snow from the Eastern plains and we left Vienna in a thick fog, which lasted until we had quitted the Danube. Anx ious as we were to return home, there is always a certain sadness in having reached the limits of anything. "The end" is always a somewhat solemn word, even of an autumn ramble! F. P. VERNEY. The only point of superiority we could find was in the facility of obtaining milk which a system of stall-fed cattle gives to a cottager. The keep of a cow can thus be obtained from mere odds and ends of land. This might well be carried out in England, where difficulty of getting milk will increase as the large farmers send their milk to London and the great towns more and more. Cow-clubs might, perhaps, accomplish this reform the most readily. The average yield of wheat in France is rather less than half the amount in England, says Mr. Caird. considering it in the abstract, she might feel some gentle wonder at poor Horatia Maude having been capable of evoking such a sentiment in one of "their" friends. But there was something neither friendly nor loyal in Lionel's exceeding reserve on the subject. It was almost as if he felt that his engagement was an act of treachery towards those with whom he had been so intimate before; and his embarrassment and constraint that day in the wood, coupled with Jenny's really dreadful behavior, had pointed the moral, as it were, and made it sting. It was a comfort to her to reflect that she herself had behaved exceedingly well and with very maidenly dignity on the occasion; but she was stung all the same, and she knew it. Placid as she was, the idea that other people might take up the same idea as Jenny, and say out among themselves what even her impulsive sister was too truth, looking was easier than speaking delicately proud to put into words, brought just now; for the picture at which he a hot rush of color to her cheeks. It was looked was pretty enough to chain even a true that she had in a manner grown to less partial eye. look on Lionel as her own property, and to accept his devotion, as a matter of course, but then every one at home and at Dilworth was more or less devoted to her, with the exception of Mrs. Ashleigh and the Honorable Victoria, who were never enthusiastic over anybody; and, therefore, it was not so much the fact of his defection as the warmth of her loyal young sister's indignation about it which gave her a feeling of soreness and injury at her heart, and administered the first rude shake to her maidenly serenity and that unconsciousness which, as her lover rightly said, was one of her greatest charms. With all these thoughts in her mind the meeting between the two young people, who had so often laughed and chatted and idled in that very room before, was somewhat constrained. They shook hands across the roses, and then Sybil said something rather hurriedly about mamma, to which Lion made haste to answer that he had seen Mrs. Dysart already. He he rather thought she was engaged. At any rate, she had sent him to the schoolroom. He hoped Sybil didn't mind. "Of course I don't," Sybil said, making a great effort to answer with her usual easy gaiety; and, womanlike, succeeding all the better for her visitor's evident agitation. "Only you mustn't mind my going on with my roses while I talk. They wither so dreadfully soon at this time of the year; and that reminds me that I dare say clever people like you and Jenny could tell me why late roses always do fade so much sooner than the June ones. I never know the reason for such things myself. I am only stupid enough to be irritated by them. Look there now!" and she held out a great rose de Provence in her tiny pink palm, and then dropped it, a mass of crumbling petals, with a little petulant gesture, on the table. Lionel looked at it and her in silence. He did not attempt to answer. In his heart he was thinking how lovely and graceful she was, how far above him or any man, and how he could possibly find words to tell her of his admiration and presumption. It may seem very ridicuious in this age of loves light and fleeting and in an Oxford man, but it is a fact, that he had never made love to a woman before, even in jest; had hardly ever made a gallant speech in all his life; and in It was, as Sybil said, very late in the year for roses; but in that old-fashioned garden she had managed to find some of almost every sort and shade to deck her china bowl. Creamy, full-blown roses with a fragrance of fresh-gathered apples; roses with a delicate maiden's blush on them, and roses whiter than snow, or that same maiden in her first hour of death; yellow roses, bell-shaped, and turning to goldcolor at the heart; velvety deep-red roses of so intense a hue they seemed to burn in their own soft fire; cabbage roses, big, and round, and pink, and filling the room with their homely cottage-garden sweetness; and tiny, heart-shaped buds, deeply crimson as living rubies, and set in feathery emerald moss, all these and a dozen others of every shape and hue heaped together on the old carved table in a lavishness and a delicacy of color which would have turned the soul of a Fantin sick with envious impotence to copy. The room was lighted by one long, narrow window, and the sunshine pouring in through the upper part of it fell in a slanting strip of golden light across the darkly polished floor and brown walls, touching to even brighter color the radiant flowerpetals here and there; and now lighting, now leaving in shadow, the slim, girlish figure in its simple gown of sea-blue linen, and the fair, small head so absorbed at present over its graceful task that its owner barely looked at Lionel as she moved to and fro among her flowers; now arranging a purely white blossom against a tuft of maple leaves, just turned to vivid crimson by the September sun; now softening the juxtaposition of a haughty goldcolored Marshal Niel and a blushing rose du Barri by nestling delicate fronds of maidenhair and berberry-leaves, brown and glossy, between the rival beauties anon, throwing back the willowy curves of her slight figure, as she drew herself suddenly erect, brushing the soft, flossy locks from her brow with one little hand so as to better contemplate the effect of her work. A pretty picture, indeed! and Lionel stood and watched it in a silence too full for words; watched it with a growing passion of love and worship which at last grew too strong for his own containing; and he suddenly came nearer, and leaning both hands on the table, that he might better look into her eyes, said, "Sybil, I said the other night that I had a story to tell you. Can't you guess what it is? My darling, I do love you so -with my whole heart! I can't help it, even if I tried; and I don't want to try. I want you to come to me to be my wife. Sybil, do you think you could?" I think it must have been about twenty minutes later that Sybil opened the door of the drawing-room and went in. Mrs. Dysart and Jenny were sitting there hand in hand, and my impression is that they had both been crying, while that ridiculous Jenny went first pale and then scarlet as her sister entered, and turned her eyes shyly away; but the face of the latter, as she came towards them, was so bright and so rosy, with a sort of half-bashful, half-pleased consciousness, that neither could help smiling in welcome to it, and Mrs. Dysart held out her arms, saying, "Well, Sybil, where is Lionel ?" "Gone," said Sybil briefly; and then she knelt, and nestled her pretty head into her mother's lap. "I sent him away; but I think—at least, he said, he would come back in the evening. Oh, mamma! do you know it already? He loves me; and he wants me to marry him; and he says Mrs. Ashleigh and the Hall people all want it, too; and - and"-with a soft little smile of tranquil satisfaction at her sister, "it never was Miss de Boonyen at all, Jenny!" And so it was all settled; and if every love affair could be managed as smoothly and concluded as satisfactorily to all concerned, getting married would be a far easier and pleasanter achievement than it is in the generality of cases. Usually there is nothing, I grieve to say, over which people quarrel so rabidly, and make themselves so miserable, as this same god of love; and there are not many engagements, however prosaic, which have not been baptized in tears by some one or another. For even if Edwin and Angelina are blissfully content with one another which.is not always the case the likelihood is that one or both of their papas or mammas are not, and will either object to the match altogether, or fall to loggerheads with one another over the details of it; while, should the parent birds be exceptionally amiable, there is generally to be found some rich uncle or maiden aunt to make matters unpleasant by declaiming against "ne'er-do-well young men," or "artful girls" or, worse still, there is a previous Angelina-some to be got rid times a previous Edwin of, and pacified, or quarrelled with, as the case may be; a task not unfrequently of sufficient difficulty to cast a considerable chill over the new betrothal. But in this little love idyll at Chadleigh End all seemed to go as smoothly, as though the old proverb about the course of true love were for once to be disproved. There were no doubts, no hesitations, no difficulties on any side. When Lionel came in the evening he brought a note from his father to Mrs. Dysart, expressing his consent and approval of what had taken place, and thereupon Sybil's mother kissed the young man, and accepted him as her son, too, as pleasantly and affectionately as he himself could wish. Then Sybil was taken over to the rectory, to be kissed and welcomed as a daughter there; and after that, Lady Ashleigh and Adelaide, always more demonstrative in their cordiality, drove over to Hillbrow themselves, and there were more kisses and more felicitations; and Sybil's tranquil, modest grace won general encomiums, and quite made Adelaide envious; her own happiness having been of a much more excited and irrepressible nature, and shown in a good deal of flutter and agitation, very delightful to Captain Lonsdale, but, as her aunt teased her by telling her, wanting in that repose "which marks the caste of Vere de Vere." - There was not even any difficulty about money matters. The rector, as I have said, allowed Lionel two hundred a year in addition to his salary, and he now proposed to add another hundred to it; and though the greater part of Mrs. Dysart's income died with her, Sybil now heard that she had a small independence of her own the rector had been consulted about its investment long ago by her mother— something like a couple of thousand pounds, left her by her godmother, and which would at least suffice to dress her; while on her mother's death she would come into half of the money for which Mrs. Dysart had insured her life some time back. It was not a wealthy or brilliant match in any way; but at least there would be quite enough for the young people to begin on until that living fell vacant. Then the widow's cautious diplomatizing had had this good result, at any rate, that any dissatisfaction or objections from the other side had been made, and weighed, and got over before Sybil's peace of mind had a chance of being endangered, or Lionel had in any degree compromised himself. |