THE WORK-GIRL'S HOLIDAY.

BY J. E. CARPENTER.

COME away, for a day, from the whirl of the mill,
Leave the web and the warp in the loom,
There are flowers with colours more beautiful still
Where the woods far away are in bloom;
Our eyes may grow dim, and faces grow pale,
In the light of the factory's glare,

For it's little we know of the sunshiny vale,
Or the breath of the balmy fresh air!

Come away, for a day-hark! the whistle, the scream
Of the engine, nor longer delay;

Oh! its seldom we shout when they get up the steam,
For with us it says work and not play.

We're away-what a day!--oh, what pleasure to ride,
And to leave the tall chimneys behind!

See! there are the green fields-and there is the tide-
And the ships bearing down with the wind!
And there are the birds!-oh! how happy and free
Do they seem as they flit up and down,

Just as if they'd escaped from a city to see
What the world could be like out of town.

We're away-what a day!-how we merrily speed
As we seem to fly over the ground;

To-day the steam-engine shall work for our need,
For once be a merry-go-round!

Oh, how fast!-here at last!- -we are out in the grass-
See the hedges are covered with "May,"

There is Harry, there Dick, they have each got their lass,
And the fiddle's beginning to play;

There's kiss in the ring-ah! we never have that,

We have time but to eat and to sleep;

But here we can sing, we can dance, we can chat!
Come! our holiday gaily we'll keep.

We're away, for a day, oh! what joy to be free
From the whirl of the wheel and the glare,
Oh! how pleasant it is the green meadows to see,
And to breathe in the balmy fresh air!

VOL. L.

H

THE TAMING OF THE PYTHONESS;

OR,

BEATRICE BOVILLE'S REVENGE.

BY OUIDA.

I.

WHERE I SAW BEATRICE BOVILLE AGAIN.

I DON'T belong to St. Stephen's myself, thank Heaven. Very likely they would have returned me for the county when the governor departed this life had I tried them, but as I generally cut the county, from not being one of the grass countries, and as I couldn't put forward any patriotic claims like Mr. Harper Twelvetrees (who, as he's such a slayer of vermin, thought, I suppose, that he'd try his hand at the dry-rot and the red tapeworms, which, according to cotton grumblers, are sapping the nation), I haven't solicited its suffrages. The odds at Tattersall's interest me more than the figures of the ways and means, and Diophantus's and Kettledrum's legerdemain at Newmarket and Epsom is more to my taste than our brilliant rhetorician's with the surplus. I don't care a button about Lord Raynham and Sir C. Burrell's maids-of-all-work; they are not an attractive class, I should say, and if they like to amuse their time tumbling out of windows, I can't see for the life of me why peers and gentlemen should rush to the rescue like Don Quixote to Dulcinea's. And as for that great question, Tea v. Paper, bohea delights the souls of old ladies and washerwomen-who destroy crumpets and character over its inebriating cups, and who will rush to crown Lord Derby's and Mr. Disraeli's brows with laurels if they ever go to the country with a teapot blazoned on their patriotic banners-more than it does mine, which prefers Bass and Burgundy, seltzer and Sillery; and though I dare say Brown, Jones, and Robinson find the Divorce News exciting, and paper collars very showy and economical, as I myself am content with the Times and its compeers, and think with poor Brummel, that life without daily clean linen were worthless, that subject doesn't absorb me as it does those gentlemen who find "the last tax on knowledge" so grandiloquent and useful a finishing period. So I have never stood for the county, nor essayed to stand for it, seeing that to one Bernal Osborne there are fifty prosers in St. Stephen's, and to be bored, is, to a butterfly flutterer, as the young lady whose name heads this paper once obligingly called me, torture unparalleled by anything short of acid wine or the Chinese atrocities, though truly he who heads our Lower House with his vernal heart and his matchless brain, were enough to make any man, coxcomb or hero, oppositionist or ministerialist, proud to sit in the same chamber with him. But there are nights now and then, of course, when I like to go to both Houses, to hear Lord Derby's rich, intricate oratory, or Gladstone's rhetoric (which has so potent a spell even for his foes, and is yet charged so strangely against him as half a crime; possibly by the

same spirit with which plain women reproach a pretty one for her beauty: what business has he to be more attractive than his compeers? of course it's a péché mortel in their eyes!), and when Mrs. Breloques, who is a charming little woman, to whom no man short of a Goth could possibly say "No" to any petition, gave me a little blow with her fan, and told me, as I valued her friendship, to get an order and take her and Gwen to hear the Lords' debate on Tuesday, when my cousin Viscount Earlscourt, one of the best orators in the Upper House, was certain to speak, of course I obliged her. Her sister Gwen, who was a girl of seventeen, barely out, and whom I wished at Jericho (three is so odious a number, one of the triad must ever be de trop), was wrathful with the Upper House; it in no wise realised her expectations; the peers should have worn their robes, she thought (as if the horrors of a chamber filled with Thames odours in June wasn't enough without being bored with velvet and ermine!); she would have been further impressed by coronets also; they had no business to lounge on their benches as if they were in a smoking-room; they should have declaimed like Kean, not spoken colloquially; and-in fact, they shouldn't have been ordinary men at all. I think a fine collection from Madame Tussaud's, with a touch of the Roman antique, would have been much more to Gwen's ideal, and she wasn't at all content till Earlscourt rose; he reconciled her a little, for he had a grand seigneur air, she said, that made up for the incongruities of his dress. It was a measure that he had much at heart; he had exerted for it all his influence in the Cabinet, and he was determined that the bill should pass the Lords, though the majority inclined to throw it out. As he stood now against the table, with his calm dignity of gesture, his unstrained flow of words, and his rich and ringing voice, which could give majesty to common-place subjects, and sway even an apathetic audience as completely as Sheridan's Begum speech, every one in the House listened attentively, and each of his words fell with its due weight. I heard him with pride, often as I had done so before, though I noticed with pain that the lines in his forehead and his mouth were visibly deepened; that he seemed to speak with effort, for him, and looked altogether, as somebody had said to me at White's in the morning, as if he were wearing out, and would go down in his prime, like Canning and Pitt.

"Lord Earlscourt looks very ill, don't you think so?" said Leila Breloques.

As I answered her, I heard a sharp-wrung sigh, and I looked for the first time at the lady next me. I saw a delicate profile, lips compressed and colourless, chesnut hair that I had last seen with his pearls gleaming above it—I saw, en deux mots, Beatrice Boville for the first time since that night eight months before, when she had stood before me in her passion and her pride. She never took her eyes off Earlscourt while he spoke, and I wondered if she regretted having lost him for a point of honour. Had she grown indifferent to him, that she had come to his own legislative chamber, or was her love so much stronger than her pride that she had sought to see him thus rather than not see him at all? When his speech was closed, and he had resumed his place on the benches, she leaned back, covering her eyes with her hand for a moment, and as I said aloud (more for her benefit than Mrs. Breloques's) my regret that

Earlscourt would wear himself out, I was afraid, in his devotion to public life, Beatrice started at the sound of my voice, turned her head hastily, and her face was colourless enough to tell me she had not gratified her pride without some cost. Of course I spoke to her; she had been a favourite of mine always, and I had often wished to come across her again, but beyond learning that she was with Lady Mechlin in Lowndessquare, and had been spending the winter at Pau for her aunt's health, I had no time to hear more, for Leila having only come for Earlscourt's speech, bade me take her to her carriage, while Beatrice and her party remained for the rest of the debate; but the rencontre struck me as so odd, that I believe it occupied my thoughts more than Mrs. Breloques liked, who got into her carriage in not the best of humours, and asked me if I was going in for public life that I'd grown so particularly unamusing. We're always unamusing to one woman if we're thinking at all about another.

"Do you know who was at the House to-night, Earlscourt, to hear your speech?" I asked him, as I met him, a couple of hours afterwards, in one of the passages as he was leaving the House. He had altered much in eight months; he stooped a little from his waist; he looked worn, and his lips were pale. Men said his stamina was not equal to his brain ; physicians, that he gave himself too much work and too little sleep. I knew he was more wrapped in public life than ever; that in his place in the government he worked unwearyingly, and that he found time in spare moments for intellectual recreation that would have sufficed for their life's study for most men. Still, I thought possibly there might be a weakness still clinging round his heart, though he never alluded to it; a passion which, though he appeared to have crushed it out, might be sapping his health more than all his work for the nation.

"Do you mean any one in particular? Persigny said he should attend, but I did not see him."

"No, I meant among the ladies. Beatrice Boville was in the seat next me." I had no earthly business to speak of her so abruptly, for when I had seen him for the first time after he left the Bad when parliament met that February, he had forbidden me ever to mention her name to him, and no allusion to her had ever passed his lips. The worn, stern gravity, that had become his habitual expression, changed for a moment; bullet-proof he might be, but my arrow had shot in through the chain links of his armour; a look of unutterable pain, eagerness, anxiety, passion, passed over his face, but whatever he felt he subdued it, though his voice was broken, as he answered me:

"Once for all, I bade you never speak that name to me. Without being forbidden, I should have thought your own feeling, your own delicacy, might

"Have checked me? Oh! hang it, Earlscourt, listen one second without shutting a fellow up. I never broached the subject before, by your desire; but now I have once broken the ice I must ask you one question are you sure you judged the girl justly? are you sure you were not too quick to slan

He pressed his hand on his chest and breathed heavily as I spoke, but he wouldn't let me finish.

"That is enough! Would any man sacrifice what he held dearest

wantonly and without proof? She is dear to me now.

You are the

only living being so thoughtless or so merciless as to force her name upon me, and rake up the one folly, the one madness, the one crowning sorrow of my life. See that you never dare bring forward her name again!"

He went out before me into the soft night air, his carriage was waiting; he entered it, threw himself back on its cushions, and was driven off before I had time to break my word of honour to Beatrice Boville, which I felt sorely tempted to do just then. Who amongst the thousands that heard his brilliant speech that night, or read it the next morning, who saw him pass in his carriage, and had him pointed out to them as the finest orator of his day, or dined with him at his ministerial dinners at his house in Park-lane, would have believed that with all his ambition, fame, honours, and attainments, the one cross, the one shadow, the one dark thread in the successful statesman's life was due to a woman's hand, and that underneath all his strength lay that single weakness, sapping and undermining it?

"Did you see that girl Boville at the House last night?" Lady Clive (who had smiled most sweetly ever since her thorns had brought forth their fruit-her son would be his heir-Earlscourt would never marry now!) said to me, the next day, at one of the Musical Society concerts. "Incredible effrontery, wasn't it, in her, to come and hear Earlscourt's speech? One would have imagined that conscience and delicacy might have made her reluctant to see him, instead of letting her voluntarily seek his own Legislative Chamber, and listen coolly for an hour and a half to the man whom she misled and deceived so disgracefully!"

I laughed to think how long a time a woman's malice will flourish, n'importe how victorious it may have been in crushing its object, or how harmless that object may have become!

"You are very bitter about her still, Lady Clive. Is that quite fair? You know you were so much obliged to her for throwing Earlscourt away. You want Horace to come in for the title, don't you?" Which truism being unpalatable, Lady Clive averred that she had no wish on earth but for Earlscourt's happiness; that of course she naturally grieved for his betrayal by that little intrigante, but that had his marriage been a well-advised one, nobody would have rejoiced more, &c. &c., and bade me be silent and listen to Vieuxtemps, both of which commands I obeyed, pondering in my own mind whether I should go and call in Lowndes-square or not: if anybody heard of it, they would think it odd for me alone, of all the family, to continue acquainted with a girl whom report (circulated through Lady Clive) said had used Earlscourt so ill, and wrong constructions might get put upon it; but, thank God! I never have considered the qu'en dira-t-on. If constructions are wrong, to the deuce with them! they matter nothing to sensible people; and the man who lives in dread of "reports" will have to shift his conduct as the old man of immortal fable shifted his donkey, and won't ever journey in any peace at all. If anybody remarked my visiting at Lowndes-square, I couldn't help it: I wanted to see Beatrice Boville again, and to Lowndessquare, after the concert, I drove my tilbury accordingly, which, as that turn-out is known pretty tolerably in those parts, I should be wisest to