oh, times! And, pa dear, now don't you go to being cross; it's of no sort of use to speak to them about it; and-and the fact is, I like Harry very much indeed, very much, and so does he like me, but there's somebody I like worlds, worlds, worlds better." "Oh, there is, is there?" And her father caught her shoulders in his two hands, and held her at arm's-length till the face drooped and the eyes veiled themselves, and the brazen thing was blushing and half crying. "And I know who it is!" he cried, releasing his hold and clasping the pretty head all at once into his breast, to the great damage of crimps and starch. "You don't suppose I've seen Dr. Bonnamy's gig waiting round these lanes so long for nothing? "You don't care, do you, pa?" she whispered, looking up from her restingplace. "I don't know about that," he answered, smoothing the soft hair in a reckless way. "What am I going to do?" "Threaten ma with a lunatic asylum, and make her behave herself." "No, no; ma has her rights. She believes in her principles thoroughly, and so do I. But the trouble is I never did have any backbone." "Nobody could have, or any other bone, living as we do." “I'm-I'm ashamed of it, but my senses are too much for me. Your mother ought to have married a better man." "If-if I dare to, my darling." "Well, I won't trouble you much; not till after it's all done, and can't be helped. I love John Bonnamy, and I hate the great future race "-and all of a sudden she burst out crying inextinguishably, and it was all her father could do to kiss her and soothe her into calmness before walking away with her, her little elastic step hardly crushing the grass, into the wood where John Bonnamy was waiting. It was an hour or two later in the day, just as the first tinge of sunset began to transmute all the summer world, when Mr. Morley came walking back alone over the brow of the hill, very quiet, very dazed, a little stunned it may be, a little wondering if nature were not on his side and requiting his wrongs after all. For what was this he had heard in the wood, as if Louie's story were not marvel enough? Harry Pearmain, Fanny Farwell those two children, he not a day more than twenty-one, she less than his Louie's age-just seventeen ; a dead secret that nobody dared to break. He didn't know how to believe it all-it was like a dream. He felt that he must have a night's sleep on it, and see if he dreamed it again, before he dared to think of it. He saw a great vista of release opening before him, if he could but find a sword to hew through the first hedge. There was a shorter cut down the hill, that took him round under the Pearmain windows-those pretty mullioned windows all opening on the ground; he followed it. And he never knew what fate it was that suddenly made him turn, and tiptoe toward a certain window of them all, and pause there, looking inwhether some arresting sight had caught his eye and directed his feet while his conscious thoughts were otherwhere, or whether it was simply perverse curiosity. Whatever it was, he delayed there some seconds, his eyes glaring out of his head, his nose flattened against the pane of the narrow pantry window till it shone leprously white and blue; and in that plight, as if magnetised by the fixity of his gaze, Mrs. Pearmain turned and surveyed him. "Oh, Mr. Morley! Mr. Morley!" she cried, as well as the circumstances al 66 lowed her to enunciate, don't, don't betray me!" Mr. Morley chuckled. It was а moment of glorious recompense. Here was his sword. He pushed up the sash. "I'll take a bite," he said. 66 Mrs. Pearmain stared in a sort of stupor a moment. "I-I can't help it, Mr. Morley," she stammered then, with pale and shaking lips. "It's very well done," said Mr. Morley. "It shows a good deal of experience "Oh, the doctor ordered it long ago, and the habit grew upon me, and although I gave up hope for myself, I've tried to keep the way straight for the others-" "Straight and narrow," said Mr. Morley. 66 Triflingly," said Mrs. Morley, drawing on her gauntlets. 66 My dear, if you saw Mrs. Pearmain standing behind her pantry door, holding in one hand part of a cold sausage, the rest of which was in her mouth, and in the other hand a pickled martinoe-" "Do talk common sense, Mr. Morley." "I call that very common senseon Mrs. Pearmain's part. As I was saying, in such case what should you think?" "I shouldn't think at all; I can't reason on impossibilities." "And I've talked and written about it, talked to everybody, argued with everybody-you know I have, Mr. Morley," she cried, breathlessly, the tears gushing -"talked to everybody, tried to convert everybody" Enough to strike a balance. I under-ingly upon her husband. stand-whited sepulchres, Pharisees, and all that. You've been like the hero of the ballad who sat in the corner eating his Christmas pie. You've been the means of starving me for nearly twenty years on oatmeal mush, while you've picked your bones and licked your fingers." "Do you believe it would make any difference as to your tyranny over me?" urged Mr. Morley, with a laugh. "Tyranny, George!" said Mrs. Morley, turning her still charming face wonder "Mr. Morley! you can still insult-" "Not at all, not at all. I don't wish to insult you. On the contrary, I think you've shown the first ray of sense I've seen in you for twenty years. Only," said Mr. Morley, lifting his finger impressively before his victim's eyes, now there's to be no backing down." A stormy half-hour afterward Mr. Morley might have been seen springing over the railing between the grounds as light as a boy, and he ate his supper of oatmeal mush with the relish of Jack sitting at the foot of the bean stalk he was about to fell; for he never meant to partake of that viand again in his life. The phaton was coming round to the door to take Mrs. Morley, in the long twilight, to one of her poor women whom she helped on certain vegetarian conditions. The pony was rather gay, and pranced a good deal as Thomas held the bridle. "It is wonderful the strength these animals get out of grains," said Mr. Morley, artfully. "I said it advisedly," replied Mr. Morley, with sudden austerity. "Is that tyranny to which your reason so fully consents?" asked Mrs. Morley, pulling off her gloves for a combat, in reverse of the custom of those knights who, before the fray, "pulled their ringing gauntlets on." 66 Teresa," said Mr. Morley, with a firmness that surprised himself, "I adore your principles, but I abhor your practice. Don't pull off your gloves, my love: that poor woman is famishing for her porridge. Go your ways, child; but if on your return you run over to Mrs. Pearmain's I think you may learn something to-shall I say your ?-no, to my advantage." And little Mrs. Morley went her ways, with her mind in a state of bewilderment, and shivering as she remembered that the ancients held high spirits to be a presage of sudden death. Louie," said Mr. Morley, when his wife was out of sight, "it is very wrong to disobey your mother." "Yes, pa." "But if your mother has given no orders, you can't disobey them.' "No, pa." "And it is equally wrong to disobey you father." "Yes, indeed, pa dear." "And if your father gives you orders, you can them." "Certainly, pa, of course." 66 do nothing else than obey Permit me also to remark that in future this acquaintance shall always be a welcome guest at our table, to whichwhile I accord you personally all liberty of groats-so help me Heaven I never mean to sit down again without a joint! I told you this afternoon that I admired your principles, my dear Teresa. If I had known Dr. Bonnamy earlier and better, I never should have made so foolish a speech, and we should have been spared some years of trouble. Let me see. You declare that I inject dead flesh into my veins when I partake of this delicious morsel," refreshing himself with a bit of the goose. "Do you, when you manure your hill of corn with barn-yard compost, inject that disgusting material into your ear of corn? No; the chemistry of sun and air absorbs from that compost only the proper constituents of corn. The stomach is a fine laboratory; it acts in the same way; it sends no dead flesh to the veins, but it separates that food into its elements, and sends merely the proper constituents of life along to their absorbents. Moreover," continued Mr. Morley, wiping his forehead, and amazed at his eloquence and temerity, "you urge me to live according to your ideas, because comparative anatomy shows that all animals with cellulated colons are herbivorous, and man has a cellulated colon-man and the ape. Is that right, Dr. Bonnamy? I am now convinced that the first ape that forsook his herbivorous diet and smacked his lips over some smoking flesh began to differentiate into man; and you may send your cellulated colon to Mr. Darwin as the missing link—” Very well, then, I order you to take a goose which you will find in the servants' larder, and tell Jane to dress it and roast it at once. And when that is done I shall have some further orders to give you." When Mrs. Morley returned from her visit the house stood dark, with open doors and windows, and the fragrance of the honeysuckles blowing all about it, but with nobody inside it. She remembered what her husband had said, and hastened across the lawn and up to Mrs. Pearmain's lighted mansion, arriving there just as Mr. Pearmain descended from the coach that had brought him to the end of a long journey. She spoke with the worthy man, looked up at him admiringly in the dusk, and yet paused one instant to think that her George, of whom no one stood in awe, was a pleasanter person for a husband after all. In the next instant a sound of revelry smote her ears, smote Mr. Pearmain's too, and they went in together. The sound came from the dining-room. What odour was this that never before had profaned that pretty room? what sight was this that saluted the outraged eye? There stood Mr. Morley, at one end of the freshly laid and glittering table, with his fork in the breast-bone of the goose and his knife in the air; there sat Mrs. Pearmain, pale, with traces of tears, daintily picking apart, but with no appetite whatever, a slice of the brown breast; there sat Fanny Farewell, blushing like a rose, with Harry's protecting arm just thrown across her shoulder; there stood Louie Morley at one side of her father, flourishing a drumstick, and her great black eyes dancing to the music of Dr. Bonnamy's merry laughter as he stood upon the other side. "Bravo, papa, bravo!" "And now, Mrs. Pearmain," said Mr. Morley, "shall I speak for you?" "I-I can't speak for myself," said Mrs. Pearmain, bursting into tears, and seeing twenty husbands with twenty valises all about to leave her for ever, and gazing at her with awful austerities of farewell. "Mrs. Pearmain, as Dr. Bonnamy will assure you," said Mr. Morley, "was ordered by that physician, in whom you all believe so heartily, to resume her pristine diet some years since. This she stoutly refused to do; but learning that her life depended on it, I have brought this bird over here, and, as I may say, have forced her to share it with us. 66 The rest," continued Mr. Morley, happier than he had been for years, I hope explains itself. Let me introduce this young lady "-as the little thing shrank closer and closer to her proud and defiant young husband-" formerly Miss Fanny Farewell, but for this three months past waiting an opportunity to confess herself Mrs. Harry Pearmain. And that done, let me present to you, my dear wife, Dr. Bonnamy, who became your son-inlaw an hour ago." And, quite out of breath, Mr. Morley sat down. The whole English language failed to do justice to the occasion. There was silence in heaven for half an hour-that silence echoed here for half a moment, perhaps, but it seemed longer. "I hope you will all be very happy," said Mrs. Morley, then, with majesty, but a tremulous voice. "And as you have shown yourselves so capable of it without me, "Now, mother, mother," said Mr. Morley, bending over the goose and waving his knife and fork affectionately toward her, "you know it would have A been of no sort of use to talk with you, and it was a great deal better to clear your skirts of all responsibility." Mr. Morley stopped and regarded the others. Mr. Pearmain, wide-eyed and openmouthed and silent till this juncture, had suddenly broken the spell, dropped his valise, and bent and taken his wife in his arms. "Emily, my darling," he was saying, "why didn't I hear of this before? Do you suppose I would have sacrificed your precious health, your life, for a whim?" And he kissed the weak woman tenderly before turning to the others. "And as for these children," said he. Editor's Easy Chair. MONG the forthcoming events recently announced in Paris in the department of art and literature, is the publication, in French, of Sterne's Sentimental Journey upon a scale of splendour almost unparalleled, even in that country of rich bindings and sumptuous letterpress. In England the Sentimental Journey can be bought at any railway bookstall for the modest sum of fourpencehalfpenny; and probably it is not often, in these days, that a more expensive edition is inquired for. It cannot be denied that in the land of his birth Sterne has gone sadly out of fashion. But in France he is always in vogue, and the stories of Maria, and Lefevre, and the Monk are as well known there as the French classics, while our Shakespeare is voted dull company in comparison. A few years ago every glove-shop in Paris used to display in its window a certain wellknown picture, representing a thin, elderly gentleman in eighteenth-century dress, trying on gloves in a shop: a pretty young woman was demurely holding the glove for him, while he looked down at her with evident admiration. Nobody needed to be told that this was Yorick and the grisette. Of late years the pictures have disappeared from the windows, but copies of Le Voyage Sentimental en France et en Italie were never more abundant in the book-shops, and now we have this fresh evidence of Sterne's increasing popularity. It is seldom that the French pay such honour to the work of any of their own authors as Le Voyage Sentimental is to receive at the beginning of next year; for not only is it to be printed on the most luxurious paper and clothed in the richest of bindings, but its illustrations will be correspondingly beautiful, and the work will be sold for three hundred francs the copy. What would the Yorkshire parson say could he come back and witness this fresh tribute paid to him in a foreign country, while England has never yet seen fit to print him in an édition de luxe. In his lifetime, after the early volumes of Tristram Shandy had made him a name, he was lionised to some extent in London, and was very fond of coming up to town to sun himself in fashionable society, en garçon, while his wife looked after the country rectory. But the attentions he received in London were nothing to the adulation paid him in the literary and fashionable circles of Paris. "My head is turned," he wrote from here to Garrick, in 1762, "with what I see, and the unexpected honour I have met here. Tristram was almost as much known here as in London, at least among your men of condition and learning, and has got me introduced into so many circles I have just now a fortnight's dinners and suppers on my hands." If Sterne was less appreciated in his own country than across the Channel there seems to have been good reason for it. His instincts, habits, and views of life were more French than English; in fact, one might almost consider him a Frenchman whom some strange accident of nature had kept out of his inheritance-a French soul born into an English body. Marlborough-for unhappily the lady who was so zealous in her exertions for the welfare of Ireland while her husband was LordLieutenant, has lost that husband by a frightfully sudden death-date from the commencement (so called, although it was in reality only a revival), of the lace-making in Ireland. Among these are some beautiful samples of "lacet," a fabric so silky and delicate as to remind us of the old French "blonde" now almost unknown. This kind of lace is not expensive, and it is singularly effective. For a few years it was a trade article, but it A VERY interesting and important exhibi- has long ceased to be of any commercial imtion of Irish lace, at the Mansion House, has portance; a fact that is much to be regretted. been one of the features of a London season A very interesting exhibit, not only for its of phenomenal activity in all artistic direc- grace and beauty, but for the story that tions. The result to the progress and pros-attaches to it, is the Pearl-Tatting, one of perity of this especially beautiful and lightest, most fairylike fabrics that can be deserving industry is likely to be satisfac- imagined. In the small town of Ardee, Miss tory, although the arrangement of the Sophia_Ellis, a daughter of the rector, comcollection is defective in many ways. The menced, with a shuttle and two spools of lace made at the schools of Carrickmacross ordinary sewing-thread, to teach a few poor -which were founded in 1847 by Mr. Tristam children to make what the French call Kennedy, to whose true patriotism Ireland "Frivolité." It consists of a thread, being owes the revival of the ancient art, with all looped after the manner of netting, into its civilising influences and bread-winning circles, having on each edge a "pearl." It power-is of extraordinary beauty, while is, in consequence, called Pearl-Tatting. In that made at Innishmacsaint-a poor village a very few years Miss Ellis distributed on the shore of Lough Erne-may fearlessly £5000, the amount she realised for the work, be compared with the stateliest Flemish, which materially mitigated the dreadful Venetian, or Spanish designs. To Youghal, effects of the famine. To this day pearlhowever, the city of Sir Walter Raleigh, and tatting gives employment to many poor to which additional interest has been directed persons. Its utility is thankfully acknowsince the publication of Sir John Pope ledged by the Poor-Law Guardians. Hennessy's Raleigh in Ireland, the palm of would seem as if a fine opportunity of doing elegance and lightness in the fabric of lace good to a country, for which much sympathy must be accorded. There are two kinds of is professed, had now arisen. The fact that taste in lace, one for the stately, the other Ireland produces lace of unsurpassed beauty for the flimsy textures, and each may be fully will be new to most English people, and a gratified by the beautiful specimens of pea- visit to the very interesting exhibition at sant women's and children's handiwork that the Mansion House will be to them a revelaare to be seen here. Anne of Austria wore tion. no finer trimming to that wondrous underlinen which her soul loved, the courtiers of the Sun-King bowed low before their master with jewelled hands laid on jabots of film no more delicate, and fantasy no more elegant than is the Irish lace that is made to-day in the convents and the lace-schools of Cork, Clones, Ardee, Youghal, and Innishmacsaint. The Carrickmacross schools are not so pros-gradually from the level of the shores, and perous as they ought to be; but it is to be hoped that this Exhibition, by enabling the fair wearers of beautiful things to see for themselves how truly the Irish lace deserves to be included in that category, and at how moderate a price they may be adorned with the loveliest work of women's fingers, may induce that wonder-working, mysterious power, "fashion," to summon the Irish lacemaking industry within its magic circle, and warm it with the life-lending rays of its smile. Some of the specimens lent by the patronesses of the Exhibition, among whom are the Princess Christian, the Countess Spencer, and the Duchess (Dowager) of It YEAR after year the people of New York and the neighbouring towns have accustomed their eyes to the growth of the Brooklyn Bridge slowly and silently rising into its perfect form. First the huge, lofty, massive piers or towers, from which the passageway was to be hung over the river, grew became the most commanding and far-seen structures in the two cities. Months and years passed while still the work proceeded, and at last a delicate line was visible stretching from one pier to the other across the river. Still silently, as if woven by elemental forces, the line multiplied and increased until many lines combined, and a delicate aerial path was drawn in the air from city to city. Week by week and month by month the forms became more plainly defined, but only now and then the figure of a man was visible, a mere moving object upon some part of the structure. At last the lapse of time was so long, and the general outline |