an effort to raise 1500l. more, which (with the money already collected for building, will secure the adjoining premises and permanently benefit the Mission). Curiously, the rebuilding on the present cramped site, which would necessitate a two-storied house, goes so against Chinese prejudice, that our excellent helper Professor Russel, says our doing this would compel him (as an employé of the Chinese Government) to resign all official connection with the Mission!

Christian Endeavour Societies in America.

C. G. C.

BETWEEN seventy and eighty thousand members of the Christian Endeavour Societies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, were in attendance at the annual convention held at Washington in the early days of July. For three days they were in possession of the capital city. Its long, wide and beautifully tree-shaded streets, avenues and boulevards were thronged all day with visitors. Services and meetings were held in many of the churches. Some of them commenced at as early an hour as half-past six in the morning. For the mass meetings three enormous canvas pavilions were erected, each capable of seating ten thousand people. Only two of them, however, were available, as one of them was wrecked in a storm of wind and rain which swept over the city on the eve of the convention. Statistics published while the convention was in session show that in 1896 there were 46,125 Christian Endeavour Societies throughout the world, with a total membership of 2,750,000. The great stronghold of the movement, is, of course, in the United States. There are five or six states in which there are over 1000 societies. Pennsylvania, at the time of the convention, had 3273; New York, 2971; and Ohio, 2311. In Canada, there are 3292 societies, of which 1817 are in the province of Ontario. For the United Kingdom the number of societies was given as over three thousand. In the United States, societies are most numerous among the Presbyterians, then in the order named among the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Methodists and the Lutherans. The President, Mr. Clark, delivered his address on the first day of the -convention, and dealt at length with the relationship of the Endeavour Societies with the churches. He insisted that the Endeavour movement had proved a reconciler of the irreconcileables, and that it had "married the idea of denominational fidelity with fellowship between the denominations." "More and more strongly every year," he affirmed, "is this principle of Christian Endeavour established-that each society owes allegiance to its own church." The United States is a country of conventions. Hundreds of them are held every year. But, excepting the National Reunions of the grand army of the Republic, when the old soldiers of the war live for a week under canvas in the neighbourhood of some large city, there has never been anything to compare with the enormous gathering of the Christian Endeavour Societies at Washington. The members of the Societies mostly travelled to Washington in special trains. Some of the societies from the more remote cities were three or four days on the trains going and returning. Thousands of the members carried their bicycles with them to Washington, and among the features of the convention were great cycle parades on the splendid asphalt avenue, for which Washington is famous.

AMERICANS pride themselves on giving Fresh Air for children, as they express it, 66 a good time,"

the City Children.

and they are usually indulgent towards them, especially in the way of pleasures. This fact helps to account for the large and constantly increasing amount of philanthropic work in behalf of children carried on in many of the American cities. Much of this work is directed towards making the lives of the poorer children easier and pleasanter during the trying hot months of July and August. At this season all the city families, who can afford it, go to the mountains, the sea, or the lakes. The exodus from the cities begins as soon as the schools are closed in the early days of June, and most of the well-to-do families are not back in their city homes until the schools re-open in October. It is impossible for the families of the working classes to leave the city in this way for the hot months. Ordinarily the streets and the parks would be the only playgrounds for the children of these classes. But much effort is devoted by philanthropic organisations to brightening the lot of children whose parents have no summer homes. In New York, fresh air missions for children are as well established and as well supported as in London; and in New York and in Boston excursions down the beautiful bays on which these cities stand are organised for the benefit of the children, especially of the smaller children in and out of arms. Spacious barges of the build peculiar to American harbours are covered with awnings and fitted up with seats and lounges, and on these, large parties of mothers and children, drawn from the tenement house regions, are taken for cruises down the bay. Two or three barges are often used for one excursion party. A tug-boat takes them in tow, and away they go at a leisurely pace for half a day's sail. Usually no landing is made. The object of these excursions is not sight-seeing, but to give the little excursionists the enjoyment of a cool sea breeze and a complete change of air and scene. The hospitals also send out their children in this way. Hundreds of these excursions are organised in New York during the summer. Many of them by the churches; others by philanthropic societies which direct their efforts to this kind of work; and others by the daily and weekly newspapers. Nor are the children who stay at home forgotten. For them the playgrounds attached to the schools are opened during the holidays. In some of them great heaps of sand are laid down for the amusement of the younger children, and in many of the school yards large spaces are covered over with awnings in order to protect the children from the fierce heat of the July and August sun.

Election.

THE General Election, which took place The Canadian in June, 1896, is the most important event in the history of Canada since Confederation in 1867. It brought an entirely new set of men into power at Ottawa. Sir Richard Cartwright among the new Canadian Ministers is the only one who occupied a prominent position in the Mackenzie Administration which was in power from 1874 to 1878, and which was the only Liberal Administration Canada had had prior to 1896. For the rest, the members of the Laurier Ministry are all men new to office at the capital of the Dominion. Sir Oliver Mowat was for twenty

years at the head of the Government of the province of Ontario. He has consequently long occupied the foremost place at Toronto, but has never been in office at Ottawa. Sir Wilfred Laurier, the new Premier, is a French Canadian, and a Roman Catholic. Quebec has always had its quota of members in the Dominion Cabinet t; but this is the first time that a French Canadian has been at the head of the Dominion Government. Mr. Laurier was a journalist and lawyer before he gave himself up to politics. Like all the older Liberal members, Mr. Laurier has had a long experience of opposition. He is, however, altogether untried as an administrator. He assumes office at a critical time in Canadian affairs. Business in the Dominion has long been depressed, so much so, that in Toronto the cry of the unemployed has of late been as persistent as ever it was in London. Two important problems were awaiting the new Administration. One concerned the Manitoba schools, and the other the tariff. Little will be done at Ottawa with regard to the schools until a Royal Commission has investigated and reported. On the tariff too, the new Government are likely to proceed with caution. As it now stands, the tariff is avowedly in the interest of protection. The election was a declaration against protection, but no sweeping changes can be made in the tariff for the reason that Canada raises most of its revenue by indirect taxation. The tariff duties now average thirty-five per cent. They have stood at that rate since 1879, and they can be reduced all round only by effecting great economies in the administration of the Government or by devising new sources of Dominion revenue. Before long, some action must be taken at Ottawa in regard to Newfoundland, which is now the only portion of our Canadian empire outside the Dominion. Some interesting changes may also be looked for in the Senate at Ottawa. As the Senate now stands less than one-tenth of its members are supporters of the new Government and all the members hold their places for life. Canada and its public life must always have an interest for English people at home. That interest under normal conditions can be never greater than just now, when a new epoch in the domestic history of the Dominion is being commenced.

The late Mrs. Stowe.

AT the time the late Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the Stowe family was living at Brunswick, Maine. Both Mrs. Stowe and her husband were of New England parentage; but before making their home at Brunswick, thep had lived for fourteen or sixteen years in the State of Ohio. Mrs. Stowe's father, Dr. Beecher, was at this time President of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati; and Professor Calvin E. Stowe taught Biblical criticism and Oriental literature in the same institution. Ohio was not a slave state; but Kentucky, from which it is divided by the Ohio River, was slave territory. When the anti-slavery agitation became acute, the Lane Seminary was broken up. The removal of the Stowe family back to New England took place in 1850. Mrs. Stowe was then thirty-eight years of age, and had achieved some success as a writer of stories and sketches. She had never lived in a slave State; but while at Cincinnati she had become acquainted with the facts and incidents of slave life, and had been strongly interested in the anti-slavery agitation. Her home in

Cincinnati had been a refuge for fugitive slaves; and Lane Seminary had been threatened by a pro-slavery mob. Doctor Gamaliel Bailey, a friend of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, was the editor of an anti-slavery paper published in Cincinnati. His office had been twice mobbed. A coloured boy, one of Mrs. Stowe's protégés, had been offered at a sheriff's sale as part of the assets of an estate in Kentucky. Mrs. Stowe, while at Cincinnati, had also ofter written letters for a servant in her own family to the woman's husband. He was still a slave, and would never break his promise to his master when sent on errands into a Free State and pledged to return. All these circumstances had prepared Mrs. Beecher Stowe's mind for complete absorption in the most exciting question of the day; and the passage through Congress of the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850 with its consequent agitations, brought the matter to a crisis in her mind. She read in an anti-slavery magazine the story of the escape of a slave woman and her child across the Ohio River on the ice, and the incidents of her story began to crystallise in her imagination. The faithful slave

husband to whom Mrs. Beecher Stowe had written so many letters for her servant at Cincinnati occurred to her as a suitable hero and the book which was to make her famous came rapidly into shape. One day while sitting in the little church at Brunswick there occurred to her the scene of Uncle Tom's death. It excited her so much, Mrs. Stowe afterwards stated, that she could not restrain her sobs. Returning home she wrote out the scene, and then read it aloud to her two boys ten and twelve years, and found them as much impressed by it as she could desire. She then began at the beginning, wrote two or three chapters, and arranged for its publication in the National Era, published at Washington, and edited by her friend Dr. Bailey. Publication began at once, and she was called upon for weekly instalments. From the moment of its commencement "Uncle Tom's Cabin," attracted the greatest interest; but publishers were not sure that the story would command success in book form. There was in fact some difficulty in getting a publisher who would take the book just as it stood. It finally appeared, however, on the 20th of March 1852, and hai a sale unexampled in the history of fiction. The sale increased as interest in the slavery issue became keener in America and in Europe, and within two or three years after the contending armies had left the field and slavery in the United States was no more, in 1868, it was authoritatively announced that 314,000 copies had been published. The story "roused the world's resentment against a mighty wrong." It was read the world over. At the British Museum there are now copies of it in twenty different languages.

The

Apocrypha.

IN reference to our article on the Apocrypha (March, p. 297), a learned correspondent writes to point out that the term "deutero-canonical," as applied to these books is due, not to the Council of Trent, but to Romanist theologians of later date. Being, however, compelled by the decree of the Council (at its fourth session, 1546) to regard these books as of equal authority with the rest, these critics are compelled to explain that "the term 'deuterocanonical' is not intended to imply any inferiority of authority, but only a later date of admission to the Canon."

THE

HE morning sky was lightening from chill grey into the warm, vivid blue that tells the sun is coming up. Already, the deadly shivers with which night and morning greeted each other were slipping into the background; the sun was stealing up to kiss the cold earth into warmth again. Already, the larks were jubilantly singing out the happy news that yet another day was born. In the copse that fringed the distant moorland beyond Springholm farm, a restless cuckoo was astir, startling the blackbirds out of their sleep high above in the oaks, while below, in the tangle of green, lush undergrowth, the sweet wild things lifted their flower-faces, on the watch also for the uprising sun.

At the farm the milkers were stumping about, and in their dark sheds the kine stirred uneasily

at the well-known clatter. A window, ivy-framed, in the straggling old homestead, was softly lifted to let a breath of the caller morning air into a sick-room.

"Ah-h!" came a long-drawn exclamation from the bed in the room's corner. "That's good, Steve! There's nothing that money can buy like fresh air, nothing. I'm thankful the day's come. The girls will be up and about soon, and they will make you a cup of strong tea; you need it sorely after the long night's watch, my lad."

"Never mind me, grandmother!" was the quick response from a tallish, broadly-built young man, who moved about deftly as any woman.

Old Mrs. Jennery, of Springholm, never had a daughter of her own, neither had her son, the father of the twin lads whom he left to his

mother's care when he died of the dwine, as the country-folk called it. This " "dwine was an heirloom that dodged in and out through each generation of the Jennerys, touching with its chill finger here a lass, and there a lad, but overlooking others entirely. The last farmer of Springholm, Mrs. Jennery's son, was one of those thus beckoned by the dwine-and so he died. In his stead were the twins, motherless from their birth. Granny herself, however, was the ruling power until the little lads attained their majority, and after. She was one of those feminine temperaments that have hardened from docile, plastic girls into steel-like women. Country bred, brace by winds and sun, she had a large scorn for the softer life and ways of the town dwellers.

As she had brought a handsome dower along with her bridal finery into the Jennery family, thereby setting the none-too-secure homestead firmly on its feet, not only as regards replenished stock, but also sundry long-standing mortgage claims, she had from the first been a little power in the land. She ruled her husband, and after him, her son, in turn, with the sceptre of her bank-book. As for the twin boys, she had had the uninterrupted bringing up of the pair. Of the two one was her pride, the other her puzzle. In Stephen, the elder twin, she recognised the vigour of her own strong character repeated. Even physically the lad resembled herself, in his wide-chested, straight-backed figure, his erect head, and straight, blue-eyed gaze.

66

My lad's a proper strong lad!" she woull mutter, with the nearest approach to vain glory of which she was capable, and the keen old eyes, in which the blue was still unfaded, would brighten as she noted the stalwart youth tramp up and down the lands. "Right so, my Robert walked and looked in the old days!"

The

Then, her gaze swerving to the other twin, to Cyril, grew cold, and all pride died out. languid, slenderly-built lad, with his mother's face, all lovely curves and vivid tints, his sleepy brown eyes and curling lashes, was an astonishing disappointment to the stern, self-repressed nature of his ancestress. The womanish ways and likings of Cyril were other sources of irritation.

For,

Did anybody ever hear of a Jennery who would sit fiddling half his days, and reading verses the other half-even in harvest time, which deepened the enormity of such unnatural idleness? talk about the dulness of country life, so much for the ignorance of town-folk! The daily rush of the year, with each season treading on the heels of its predecessor, culminates in the harvest whirl.

To think a Jennery could deliberately sit staring at a music-book and bowing away within a stone-throw of the absorbing excitement of reaping and stacking! It was an inscrutable

mystery.

In the brief lull of farm labour, when the New Year was young and shy, and Grandmother Jennery had leisure to replenish the family's socks, she travelled back in thought to the tune of her knitting-needles' clink. The shrewd old woman was a firm believer in heredity. There must be a cross somewhere, she decided. Cyril

was no thoroughbred soil tiller-not he. Yet his mother, fair and foolish though she might be, came of a good old yeoman stock. And there was Stephen. It might possibly be-Mrs. Jennery was not scientifically skilled enough to be sure— that the brothers, being twins, had shared unequally their due proportion of mental and bodily calibre. Stephen, maybe, had absorbed the physical strength, the nerve and muscle that ought to have been divided between the two, leaving to his weaker half the finer, subtler brain essence, the seeing eye, the hearing ear for all things beautiful in nature and art. That was as may be. The abstruse question was knitted into one sock after another, but never solved. There was one thing, however-both lads should have a good education; there should be no stint about that matter, seeing the crops were so fair at Springholm. There was even a spell at college, in spite of secret qualms as to its propriety, accorded the prospective farmers.

Then the lads came home, and, for all the world as though she had but held out on purpose, Grandmother Jennery failed abruptly; the human machine was worn-out. There was no disease, nothing but the wearing out of the powers that had been kept at full steam throughout a long, energetic life. The marching orders had come, and the gallant old woman was ready to rise up and depart.

"Sunshine and storm,'" she quoted, all unconsciously from the "verses" that Cyril so loved and she so despised. "Sunshine and storm' have been meted out to me same's to others, perhaps

more.

I've had my share of good things as well as of bad. Now I be done with both alike." Saying which Grandmother Jennery took to her bed, and Stephen, with more than a woman's tenderness, for it was a good man's, waited pa her hand and foot. She was not long about dying; she was energetic in that even.

"I wanted to see this day's sun rise, Steve, behind the uplands, because I've a feeling that my time will be come when it sets over the low meads to-night!" She broke the silence to say equably, when the maids at length were heard stirring below, and Stephen had come back to her, after his cold tub, to bring her the good tea she craved for himself.

All that high-summer day the dying woman lay watching the cloud-shadows stealing across the green slopes that made up the middle-distance between the farm and the far-away blue which everybody made believe was the sea itself. Now and again there stole up from below a low, sweet wail from the Strad that was to Cyril another self. The sounds crept into her ears but failed to stir up the old animus. What mattered it that the lad should idle thus? Perhaps God knew, and softer thoughts stole into the slowly-dying brain-perhaps Cyril's was, after all, the better part. His music was, maybe, the setting of a pæon of thankfulness rising straight from his heart-a gush of unalloyed gratitude for the joy of living such as pours out, spendthrift fashion, from the bird-throats in and about the copse yonder.

"Steve!" There was a hurried cry.

"I'm here, grandmother!" came the ready response from the window-seat, where tireless Stephen waited and watched the surely ebbing life.

"I've been thinking, my lad, about Cyril's future. Lawyer Groome has got the will safe under lock and key; after what's coming is over he will settle things as I've meant them to be at Springholm. You see it always worried me how two masters could bide here."

"That will be all right, grandmother. There's no need to worry over a trifle.”

""Tain't a trifle, my lad. Oh, Steve, you've always been my lad- -a chip of the old block-a true Jennery. But I've been a bit hard with Cyril, and it's all come home to me-now at the last; one sees so clear then. And, poor lad, Cyril's marked for the dwine, I make little doubt. There's always been a Jennery picked out in each generation. And and I'm sorry I did it, Steve!"

"Did what, grandmother?" gently questioned Stephen, coming over to the bedside and sitting down to stroke softly the bent fingers that were ceaselessly clutching at the flowered quilt.

"Bend down close, my lad, and I'll tell ye! The round, short-cropped, brown head came close down to the shaking lips, and a few words were whispered.

"You never did, grandmother!" Steve started

cried out the dying woman as the solemnly-spoken vow fell, clearly-syllabled, in the still, quiet room. "Take back such rash words, lad!"

"I have said them- and I mean to keep them!" was the terse reply. Then, as if his charge already was to begin, Steve drew his younger, weaker brother to the door, and pushed him outside.

"Better go downstairs, old man, and wait there until I come," he whispered.

Already Stephen had taken up the life-task built of the recent promises. He would stand between his frailer brother and all trouble, bearing its brunt for both. And Cyril, accepting the womanish role of the shielded, shrank away, out of sight and hearing of the last grim conflict.

A couple of hours later, Stephen, grave and set-faced, came downstairs to the living-room of the farmhouse, where Cyril waited, huddled in the cushioned depths of a huge arm-chair.

"Well, Steve?" With frightened gaze the younger brother looked up.

Well, Cyril?" came the answer, a little husky, a little solemn. "You and I are the only Jennerys left now. God helping us, we must do our level best for the old farm."

CHAPTER II.

pillow.

"I did so. And I'd the right. 'Twas my money that redeemed Springholm when I married your grandfather, though nobody outside knew it but Lawyer Groome. The Jennerys were always close-natured," she added superabundantly.

"But, grandmother," broke in Stephen, "what has poor old Cyril done?"

"Whisht! "Tis not for you to question my right, Steve!" There was a spurt of the old dominating spirit, and it proved to be the last.

As evening crept on the mistress of Springholm grew weaker and drowsy. Cyril nervously stole in to take his place beside Steve. There was an expectant hush in the quiet room, indeed, throughout the entire farmhouse. Outside, from the meads, came the impatient lowing of the cows waiting to be marshalled home. In the branches of a twisted, rheumatic-looking apple-tree close by the window of the sick-room a yellow-hammer was singing with the persistent industry of that bird.

"Cyril, come still closer. I can scarce see you. My lad, you may say that I've done you a hurt, but Steve will look after you-always. Say that you will, Steve? What I've told you will make no difference, promise me!" The bent fingers had stayed their clutches at the quilt to grip hard the slenderly-shaped hand-a true artist's hand that Cyril half-diffidently extended.

"I promise, granny; have no fear!" Stephen stood up, a human tower, to put his arm across Cyril's sloping shoulders. "In all things and at all times Cyril shall be foremost. It will be my life-task to further him-at any cost to myself." "Stay! Not that! 'Tis too much to promise!"

being the seasons that tread, with nature's unfailing punctuality, one upon the heels of the other. Counted by each harvest, the crown of the round, several years had slipped along since Grandmother Jennery abdicated in favour of the twin-brothers-years that had made a better man still of Steve Jennery, as years, perhaps, are meant to do for us all. Cyril, on the other hand, had distinctly slipped back, physically-speaking. His stamina had deteriorated.

"Rouse up, man," Stephen would say briskly, a thread of anxiety vibrating through his energetic words. "What have you got to say to this new machinery fad, eh?" He would persist in knowing.

"Oh, you know best, Steve!" was the indifferent answer, while Cyril's brown eyes, with their up-curling lashes, wandered off to note appreciatively a hit of vivid colour given by the low sun to the red-brown stems of a group of Scotch firs. Or, maybe, he would, bending his head, strain his ears to pick out the deliciously perfect notes of a thrush in a mad revelry of songs without words from all sorts and conditions of birds on high in the oaks and elms of Springholm. Such things made up Cyril Jennery's world. It was less than nothing to him that Stephen should pin his faith. on the steam-plough while neighbour So-and-so should cling to the old-world implement. There was no beauty to Cyril in the handy, humanlabour-saving appliances patented, week by week, after their birth in fertile brains. In him there was naught but a secret disdain for such practical matters as were only meant for the contemplation of minds of a lower plane than his own.

He