when the milkers came they could hardly stand still for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands above those of any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow, Angel Clare, who had been musingly observing her for some time as she milked, asked her if she would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and with her stool at arm's length, and the pail against her knee, she went round to where they stood. Soon the sound of Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few mainly the younger ones-rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield's habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on the far end of the meadow with the gaze of one lost in meditation. She was milking Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the milking side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form, and her white curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it dazzlingly keen, as a cameo cut from the dun background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat under his cow watching her. The absolute stillness of her head and features was remarkable; she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and Tess's pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, conveying the fancy that they were obeying a merely reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.

How very lovable her face was to him! There was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. Yet when all was thought and felt that could be thought and felt about her features in general, it was her mouth which turned out to be the magnetic pole thereof. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing at all to equal on the face of

the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him, that little upward lift in the middle of her top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind, with such persistent iteration, the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them offhand. But no; they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the intended perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many hours that he could reproduce them mentally with comparative ease; and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with color and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a cold breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would not show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like fixity disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the rosiness of her face slowly deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it was left.

The stimulus that had passed into Clare like an annunciation from the sky did not lie down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and, leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic cry.

“I

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth of hers, but he checked himself, even for tender conscience' sake. "Forgive me, Tess dear," he whispered. ought to have asked. I did not know what I was doing. do not mean it as a liberty at all I am devoted to you, Tessie, dearest, with all my soul."

I

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two people crouching under her where, according to immemorial custom, there should have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

"She is angry - she does n't know what we mean — she 'll kick over the milk!" exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned with the quadruped's actions, her heart more deeply concerned with herself and Clare.

"Let me lift you up- lean upon me.”

He raised her from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still encircling her. Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.

"O-I don't know!" she murmured regretfully. As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in, she became agitated, and tried to withdraw.

Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a curious sigh of desperation, signifying, unconsciously, that his heart had outrun his judgment. "That I love you. dearly and truly I need not say. But I-it shall go no further now it distresses you — I am as surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon your defencelessness — been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"

66

"I don't know!"

He had reluctantly allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the unpremeditated gravitation of the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few minutes later there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet, in the interval since Crick's last view of them, something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures whilst it should last; something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have despised, as a practical man, yet which was based upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward- for a short time or for a long.

AUGUSTUS JOHN CUTHBERT HARE.

HARE, AUGUSTUS JOHN CUTHBERT, an English traveller, the nephew of Julius C. and A. W. Hare; born in Rome, March 13, 1834. His father died early, and he was adopted by his uncle, Augustus William. He was educated at Harrow School, and at University College, Oxford. His first publication was "Epitaphs for Country Churchyards" (1856). Among his other publications are "A Winter in Mentone" (1861); "Walks in Rome" (1870); "Wanderings in Spain" and " Memorials of a Quiet Life" (1872); "Days Near Rome" (1874); "Cities of Northern and Central Italy" (1875); "The Life and Letters of Baroness Bunsen" (1879); "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily" (1882); "Sketches of Holland and Scandinavia" and "Studies in Russia" (1885); "Paris" and "Days Near Paris" (1887); "Northeastern France," "Southeastern France," "Southwestern France" (1890); "Two Noble Lives" (1893); "Sussex" (1894); "The Gurneys of Earlham" and "Northwestern France" (1895).

THE RUINS OF POBLET.

(From "Wanderings in Spain.")

No remains elsewhere impress the beholder with the same sense of melancholy as the convent of Poblet. An English ruin, softened and mellowed by time, fading and crumbling by a gentle, gradual decay, can give no idea of it. Here, it is the very abomination of desolation. It is all fresh; it might be all perfect now, but it is the most utterly ruined ruin that can exist. Violence and vengeance are written on every stone. The vast walls, the mighty courts, the endless cloisters, look as if the shock of a terrible earthquake had passed over them. There is no soothing vegetation, no ivy, no flowers, and the very intense. beauty and delicacy of the fragments of sculpture which remain in the riven and rifted walls, where they were too high up for the spoiler's hand to reach them, only make stronger contrast with the coarse gaps where the outer coverings of the walls have

been violently torn away, and where the marble pillars and beautiful tracery lie dashed to atoms upon the ground.

The convent was founded in 1149 by Ramon Berenguet IV., on the spot where mystic lights had revealed the body of Poblet, a holy hermit, who had taken refuge here during the Moorish Occupation. Every succeeding monarch increased its wealth, regarding it, not only in the light of a famous religious shrine, but as his own future resting-place; for hither, over moor and mountain, all the earlier kings of Aragon were brought to be buried. As the long line of royal tombs rose thicker on either side of the choir, the living monarchs came hither too, for a retreat of penitence and prayer, and lived for a time a conventual life.

The library of Poblet became the most famous in Spain, so that it was said that a set of wagons employed for a whole year could not cart away the books. As Poblet became the Westminster Abbey of Spain as regarded its kings and queens, so it gradually also answered to Westminster in becoming the resting-place of all other eminent persons, who were brought hither to mingle theirs with the royal dust. Dukes and grandees of the first class occupied each his niche around the principal cloister, where their tombs, less injured than anything else, form a most curious and almost perfect epitome of the history of Spanish sepulchral decoration. Marquesses and counts, less honored, had a cemetery assigned them in the strip of ground surrounding the apse; famous warriors were buried in the nave and ante-chapel; and the bishops of Lerida and Tarragona, deserting their own cathedrals had each their appointed portion of the transept; while the abbots of Poblet, far mightier than bishops, occupied the chapter-house.

Year by year the power of the convent increased, till, like autocratic sovereigns, the friars of Poblet issued their commands, and the surrounding country had only to hear and obey. He who failed to attend to the summons of their mass-bell had to answer to the monks for his neglect. Strange rumors began to float of peasants who, entering the convent gates, had never been known

to

come forth. Gradually the monks became the bugbear of neighboring children, and threats, which tampered with their names, were whispered by the lace-making mothers in the ears of their naughty little ones. At last came the wars of Don Carlos. Then political dissensions arose within the mystic circle; half the monks were royalists, half were Carlists, and the