every day that he is gone. He is happier with his father than here. He says so in his letters."

"But I cannot bear to see you give yourself up in this way. Dr. Willis must come and talk you out of your fancy. Henry shall send you some of his good port-wine, and you must promise me to drink it every day, will you 1?

Mary promised, but the parson's good port-wine put no strength into her frame, and though Dr. Willis came and talked to her, he, and not she, was the convert. The experienced physician acknowledged that she was past his skill -he could not—no earthly medicament could-heal a broken heart.

It was of that old disease that Mary Hawthorne died.

X.

The wind comes sobbing at the lattice of Mary Hawthorne's room as the autumn reddens over the woods; she is not in the balcony any more where the crimson rose opens its heart to the morning sun; she is not in the old nursing chair plying her swift needle or reading her Bible; she is not to and fro in the house with careful hand and thoughtful eye, or in the shady garden tending her flowers. She is not on the steps watching to welcome her boys home from school-alas, there are no boys there to welcome any more! Mary has departed to the house appointed for all living. Her day-its work, pain, and patience are ended, and she is taking her rest in the green graveyard that slopes seaward on Arbon Cliffs.

Upon the headstone is this simple inscription :—

"MARY HAWTHORNE,

Died August the Fifth, 1809,
Aged Thirty Years.

'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'"

Occasionally there comes a rough down-looking man along the steep lane that skirts the churchyard where she lies, who whispers softly to himself as he stops to look over the fence, "There is poor Mary's grave."

Mark Brett remembers her when they were an innocent pair and sat side by side on the same bench like little lovers at the dame-school. Perhaps her most enduring memorial is in that man's heart.

The Manor House is very strange without her, though the

same regular course as went on under her, goes on still under a comely presiding housekeeper, who is already in imagination house-mistress. Cyrus, who was summoned to receive his mother's blessing, and arrived only in time to see her buried, has gone back to his father, and even Robert is away to Walton Minster. 'Tis easy to perceive that a new regime has been initiated at the Farm, and that the former one is past away for ever. Mary's room is shut up, and the sunshine hardly enters at the sullied glass, but what matter? None who loved it are there now to be hurt by the neglect. Old Simon Hawthorne comes of a race of philosophers whom the course of time and nature easily consoled.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

AT MESSRS. HAWTHORNE AND CO.'s.

"With devotion's visage

And pious action we do sugar o'er

The devil himself."-SHAKSPEARE.

I.

FIFTY years ago Walton Minster was, to all outward appearance, exactly the same as it is to-day, namely, a drowsy little city with a well-preserved cathedral church, a large marketplace having an 'ancient stone cross in the midst, and a network of confused, narrow streets and lanes radiating from it. The aristocracy of the town rallied round about the Minster, where steep gardens clustered green and shady under its walls, hiding from profane view the ecclesiastical retirement of dean and canons and the statelier abodes of a few remnants of old families, who still clung to the dim city houses with which their names were inseparably blent. It was edifying to behold these blue-blooded patricians erecting their heads above the common herd, and, if their monuments spake true, succumbing haughtily to the common lot. That the Leighs, Nugents, Mauleverers, Langdales, Howards, Percys, Fairfaxes could die-die, and go to dust like the plebeians who ministered to their base physical needs-was a humiliating proof that the great scheme of humanity had been formed on democratic principles without any special view to

them. There are more epitaphs than one left yet upon the hoary Minster walls, that seem to protest against this levelling conclusion to mortal grandeur at which modern sanctity glances aside with pharisaical reprehension: these dead men thank God from their tombstones that they lived virtuous lives, were kept in great honour and prosperity, and never evened with other sinners until Death deplumed them of their distinctions and laid them in the dust; and we thank God with our lips that we live in such pious times when the dark ages of our ancestors are past, and an illumination of private lights is blinking insolently in the eyes of the sun. Which is the better?-this or that. The darkness, or the Will-o'the-wisps abroad in the daytime ?

Close beside the market-cross, and giving that gray relic a picturesque beauty of light and shadow through their bowery branches, were three glorious oaks which tradition said were older than the town itself-sons indeed of the primeval forest that once clothed all the romantic valley of the Gled. The country-folks grouped round their enormous boles with their baskets of butter and eggs, fruit and vegetables, the old women wearing red-hooded cloaks and the young ones broad straw hats, made a lively scene under their grateful shelter on fine summer Saturdays; these holdings were the high places of the market, and thither wended all prudent housewives, secure of finding there the best rural produce for their money. There was one ancient dame, Nanny Brigget, as well known as the Cross itself, who never failed to inform new customers-such, for instance, as a young matron fresh to the town, or a gentleman's recently engaged housekeeper-that first and last she had sat under the same branch of the same tree every Saturday from ten till two for "better than fifty year," without missing once in all that time to anybody's knowledge.

At one side of the square was the Town Hall, and ranging from it all round the place were the dwellings of the more substantial shopkeepers. The professional men hung about the purlieus of the Minster, neither quite accepted nor quite rejected of its hereditary denizens, and a few old-fashioned respectables still stayed faithfully by the obscure and narrow streets where their progenitors had lived and laboured.

Of this latter class were Messrs. Hawthorne and Co., the Co. being embodied in the sole person of Mr. Reuben Otley, whose manufacturing premises were in the rear of their

houses, which adjoined each other, and looked out upon one of the narrowest, ugliest, dreariest streets in all Walton Minster.

The partners were both bachelors, and both elderly men, with each a housekeeper of grave repute; and it was to the home of one, and the careful supervision of both, that Robert Hawthorne found himself transferred in something less than a month after his mother's death. The change to him from the sweet flowery island to the dull sordid streets of a northern provincial town, was great indeed, and it is no exaggeration to say that, for a time, he loathed the place and all in it. The grandeur of the old Minster church scarcely impressed him; he had neither antiquarian nor historical lore to embellish it with poetical associations, nor an imagination. vivid enough to realize its past. The bit of the town that pleased him most was the market-day bustle round the Cross, though, to his unaccustomed ears, the harsh voices of the chaffering women were a drawback even there. Those who in a foreign land have experienced that sad heart-craving which we call home-sickness, may imagine what Robert Hawthorne felt when he was thus cast adrift from all beloved and familiar things, and exiled amidst the strange faces and strange ways of Walton Minster. He might look forward to no return-no pleasant periodical holiday-time: he had changed his country for good and all, and belonged henceforward through life till death to the firm of Hawthorne and Co.

II.

Finding that his young relative was already a fair reader, writer, and accountant, Mr. Joshua Hawthorne thought it fit to dispense with any further schooling, and exalted him at once to a stool in the clerks' office, where Robert was the youngest amongst six apprentices. A dingy place this office was, dark by nature, but darker still by art; a thick green curtain being stretched across the lower panes of the smoky windows, to exclude all view of the street; a precaution against youthful idling which might have been safely laid aside, for there was literally nothing to be seen, except relays of children making dust-heaps or mud-pies, according as the weather permitted. Upon the walls were stretched two or three discoloured maps, and in conspicuous places,

over the chimney-piece, on the panels of the door, and elsewhere, were wafered up little dark blue papers, with moral maxims printed on them in letters of gold-maxims exaltative of honesty, diligence, sobriety, discretion, punctuality, and other minor virtues, essential to the success of men in trade. To Robert's ingenuous mind these maxims sounded beautiful, and he experienced a grave shock when he heard how wittily the apprentice vivacity could parody them; he was a modest lad, fresh from the pure atmosphere of home, and blushed at a coarse or irreverent saying like any girl.

Mr. Reuben Otley, as might be expected from a man who ornamented his apprentices' room with trite moral sentences, was a person harsh and stern in aspect, and in practice a rigid disciplinarian. He was not so much disliked as he was feared; a glance from his eye was warning enough to any dilatory youngster; he was obeyed at a word, and he made it to be understood that his rules were as the laws of the Medes and Persians which altered not. He was well served, as a matter of course, and though the lads in his absence dared to laugh at and travesty his wise saws, yet in his presence it was who could be most emulous to put them in action. It was his boast that never since he entered the firm of Hawthorne and Co. had clerk or workman been discharged for dishonesty, idleness, or insubordination, and that his apprentices had all turned out diligent and successful men of business. There was some truth in this. Mr. Reuben Otley understood well the science of government, and impressed those under him with an assurance that the slightest breach of discipline, truth, or honesty, would draw down upon the delinquent the fullest weight of his vengeance. One favourite saying of his was this: "It is a capital crime against social order to pardon the smallest error;" and from time to time he would take occasion to deliver a sort of warning of judgment to the people in his employ, when some event had happened in the town sufficiently flagrant to point the moral.

Mr. Joshua Hawthorne, though nominally the head of the firm, took a less active part in the conduct of its business than Mr. Reuben Otley. He was a fine portly old gentleman, with enough resemblance to his elder brother Simon to mark their close family relationship; but commerce with the world had given him a more enlarged mind, and a natural benignity of temper made his manners suave and gracious. Perhaps his watchful mildness, consideration and help, did quite as much