among the debris of a dozen brokers' shops, always subject to the profane gaze of alien eyes, was an insult and disgrace; nevertheless, a sense of kinship and sympathy was established between us. With my reading of old plays-that most glorious portion of our literature-aye, of any literature-the portrait mixed itself up. I soon ceased to speculate on whence it had come, what should be its rightful place, and to pursue through all the endless windings of imagination the reality (once existent in the flesh, still existent under other conditions) of which it was the lingering phantom. I ceased to seek for its own meaning; I began to interpret it according to the impulses and needs of my own mind. Just as we listen to music and never trouble ourselves to discover what was the composer's aim and purpose, but read in it the occurrences of our own lives, our own joys and sorrows, heart-sinkings and aspirations; so I interpreted this picture. It mixed itself with my reading. The possibilities of the grey eyes became realized in a | thousand exquisite womanly traits stolen from a thousand delicate creations of that choir of old poets. It mixed itself, still more intimately, with my own life. In it I found the first revelation of my own incompleteness-the secret of the feverish dreams, the blind longings, the defeated sympathies, the lonely sadnesses. In it I read the promise of completion. Existent somewhere that missing half of myself-coming towards me from the unknown distance. I heard the echo of the advancing footsteps, I felt the tremulous vibration of the parted air. Coming, coming! the two halves rushing together with an increasing velocity as the distance grew less and the attraction stronger. withered, alas! like Ophelia's. Town was filling; handsome equipages rolled along the western streets; spring costumes of light and gay and tender colours glittered everywhere like changeful rainbows. Even my lodging-house maid donned a bright new ribbon, just as the imprisoned bird in my landlady's window beneath trilled forth a tiny, broken fragment, wondrous sweet, of a long-forgotten song. It was an idle day with me. Through the open window came real sunshine-came scents from a flower vendor's cart in the street-came the pleasant muffled roar of the Strand and fitful breezes from the river, suggesting the rustle of long grass by quiet streams. Turning over a book or two, in happy idleness, I hit upon the terrible marriage-scene in "The Maid's Tragedy." The appalling horror, the revolting sin, the damning discovery-coming as a sudden vision of blackest midnight on this sweet spring morning, struck me with a tenfold tragic shock. I remember every slightest incident of that morning. I linger over these trivial details. Issuing forth into the street, and mingling in the jostling crowds, thinking of nothing but the lost Evadne, I at length reached my destination, viz. my banker's. There was a carriage at the door. I was suddenly aroused from my reverie, by a change of the current of my thoughts. Before my eyes were conscious of seeing you, I became, in a moment, impressed with a vivid and vision-like recalling-the sudden presence, as it were, there in the midst of the bustle and the noise and the crush-of my unknown portrait. You had just let down the glass of the carriage. One hand was visible, ungloved. By chance you had assumed very much the same pose as that of the girl of the picture; so into you (framed in the open space of the carriagewindow) the startling impression of the presence of my painted lady realized itself. Your father came out of the bank-door at the moment. We spoke, and he introduced me to you. A few moments' conversation, an invitation to dinner for the next day, and the carriage rolled away. From your father, chief of the firm of that dingy banking-house by Temple Bar, I had before received other such invitations, and had uniformly declined them. What time lost! What cruel interpositions of destiny between me and you! It seemed to me that all the years of my life hitherto had been thrown away. All was a blank behind; all before, a tumultuous excitement. I did not acknowledge to myself, Mary, that this feverish eagerness was love. The marvellous likeness between you and the portrait was that which seemed to strike me most. I went to my rooms. From the sight of you, the portrait had gained new significance. The sound of your voice, the movements of your smile, your air and manner, were keys to the interpretation of it. I thought that I had much to say about this my first sight of you. What is there, after all? A London street, and a lady in a carriage! Words become powerless, in some casesdwindle down-die away. The very faculty of utterance fails; one's speech drivels into platitudes or incoherencies. Some things are not to be described; the face hidden in the mantle is the sole dumb sign we can get of the greatest passion. So let it be. Hovering about and about my love for you, I had a thousand fancies that rushed into ex pression. Coming to the time itself, what can I say? I can only repeat, I loved you-I loved you. There is nothing else to say. That contains all. That refrain, crooned for ever in the self-same tones, is all that memory can give. I suspect that really we never understood each other. We spoke different languages; we thought by different modes; we had need of an interpreter, mutually, whenever we conversed. The wall that was between us had no chink, and both Pyramus and Thisbe spent their breath on nothing but the cold stones. Every meeting had in it something of disappointment and repellency. I never felt so distant, so separated from you, as when I was by your side; and yet I could never keep myself away. A thirst, as of Tantalus, drove me to you; a thirst, never to be satisfied by living, sympathetic waters. As I felt more and more that bar between us, that wall of the incommunicable, I struggled only yet the more to break through it. Impossible struggles, O my Mary! To the last we never came together; that one cold kiss sealed our acknowledgment of the eternal antipathy between us. Your surroundings and mine, the native atmosphere in which each had learned to breathe, were different elements. Hood's "Miss Kilmansegg" comes into my head. You would not understand the satiric pathos of that piece; it is useless to quote to you. Wealth, not as a powerful means or as a happy accident, but as the one be-all and end-all, that had been from your babyhood impressed upon you in all ways. The curse of Midas lay upon you. All things before they reached you were transmuted, by a cruel alchemy, into gold. How well I remember the cold magnificence of that house by the river!-its conservatories, its picture-gallery, its banqueting-hall! Everything there was distorted from its real beauty and use. One ate gold at the sumptuous table and drank aurum potabile; the fruits came at unnatural seasons; the flowers were exotics. The pictures represented nothing in the world but so much money; a "Dead Christ," by Francia, so much; an "Immaculate Conception," by Guido, so much. The essence of each thing was its money-value. And so, my dear Mary, you too, among the rest of the costly gauds, had your money-value; and your price, under any circumstances, would have been too high for me. It is wonderful to me, how little you were spoiled by such surroundings. You moved in the midst of all that barbarous magnificence, a simple girl. It could not but be that you were influenced in your estimate of outward things by that system of money-rating, but in yourself you were unspoiled. While you could not conceive of the pleasures of milk-maids, of the delights of curds and cream and rural dainties, you were in yourself as simple as any milk-maid. You set no money-value on yourself; you were not impressed with the idea of your own wealth. I wonder that you were so little spoiled; for even I felt that golden influence. Having at first, from education and by habit, no respect for that banker-class; possessed of a very moderate, but sufficient private fortune; a little proud of an ancient name and a few ancestral acres ; I came to feel an admiration and awe of wealth, and a half-contempt for my own comparative poverty. How few can altogether resist the worship of the golden calf! Well, Mary, in spite of all differences between us-perhaps, on the contrary, by reason of them-I clung to you with a desperate tenacity. My soul hungered after you. No matter that I felt my tongue tied, my thoughts frozen, my sympathies repelled and turned aside in your presence. Absent from you, the real, the immoveable barrier between us vanished; only the distance of a few miles, not of all eternity and infinity, seemed to lie between us. Looking up at my portrait, reading those shadows of your eyes, penetrated by that fancied spirit of your face, the gulf between us vanished. You summoned me to you through those phantom signs. The eyes said "Come;" the girl-hand beckoned me-promised me all the warmth and tenderness of its lingering vas, until I could feel the eager breath of your clasp; you leaned towards me out of the canlips, and hear the pantings of your heart. And time after time I rushed to you-only to experience again and again that inexorable repellency. So, the end came. I saw you for the last time. You were wiser than I. Notwithstanding all my boasted subtlety of intuition and the secret which I sometimes cannot grasp to exquisiteness of sympathy, you had fathomed this day. That we two should become one was impossible. From my landlady I purchased the original, the pseudo-Vandyck, and it remains with me the sole substantial memento of that love-dream. Prophetic of you, reminiscent of you, it is a constant witness to the reality of that past of which I might, otherwise, sometimes doubt. All remembrances of you meet and centre here. Hence floats upward my Madonna-vision; hence descends that familiar figure of imperfect womanhood. mises of the immature hands, I interpret, as The possibilities of the grey eyes, the prosymbols, in many ways. In matter-of-fact moments, when I recall that the picture is in reality the portrait of a person other than you-or, maybe, but the impersonal dream of some artist-uneasy questions will arise within me. Then I doubt, Mary, whether within my heart, as upon my wall, I do not treasure the Portrait of a Lady Unknown. A WORD FOR AGE. BY THE AUTHOR OF “VOICES OF CHRISTMAS." In heading my paper thus I am not about to attempt a vindication of that which in itself cannot require to be vindicated; but, seeing that there hangs over these two words (Old Age) certain shadowy somethings which are apt to clothe them in the robes of a bugbear to our eyes, I would not shrink from those shadows, but turn the light upon them if I could, in order that we may see them as they are, and not as morbid fancy is wont to paint them. manhood had, to hang about that ceaseless ego. For we know that, if we sow the wind, we must reap the whirlwind; and even in this life we do eat of the fruit of our own actions. We are startled at times, perhaps, to feel that our lightest action cannot be without its consequences; but we do not sufficiently realize the fact, and it is soon forgotten; and though a fit of enthusiasm may stir us up now and then to some great piece of self-sacrifice, which probably, There is no necessity, certainly, for us to if we get no thanks for it, we indignantly wish think at all, in a morbid sort of way, about old undone again, yet the discipline of life is often age; we may never reach it: but as it is just rejected because it lies in little things; for we one of those things which we persist in doing, must acknowledge that it is as difficult often to would it not be better to look at the dreaded fulfil a trifling courtesy as it would be to do circumstances calmly and reasonably, than to some great thing. We cannot be troubled; we smother them up in a mist of gloomy presenti- are tired, or eccentric-which, being interpreted, ments and forebodings, sighing out to ourselves means conceited-or we do not like our neighthat "We suppose we must come to that some-bours; why should we be put out of our way? time"? First, then, there is a sort of pro- They are nothing to us! verbial shaking of the head, half mournful, half bitter, over something that we call "crabbed age." To this we would answer that there is no necessity for age to be "crabbed"; and if it be so, then crabbed youth has had a hand in its production. There comes before us in strange contradistinction to such a proverbialism"The hoar head is a crown of glory," with its condition-"If it be found in the way of righteousness." In these days, especially, few will refuse to acknowledge that "we are what we have made ourselves"; and there must be comfort to some -warning to others—in the reflection that old age will be what youth and manhood make it. If the whole thought of the boy, the youth, and the man has been self; his whole study the gratification of his own desires, no matter at whose or what cost, he must reap what he has sown. Himself shall help him in his hour of need. What we strive after in real earnest we shall have; therefore if he has made an idol of himself to worship it, it will be all he has when he is old and feeble. He helped none; why should any help him? The widow and the fatherless were nothing to him, and he turned from the prayer of the poor destitute. He loved none but himself; therefore himself alone will love him. Those who were given him to care for, his tyranny drove away, and they shrink from him still; for he has not altered, he is what he has made himself-a miserable, selfish, discontented man. His acquaintance pass by and will not see him, for his querulous talk is still "myself, my ailments, my troubles; how badly I am used"! as it ever was; but now he has lost what little grace his Well, then, if we will walk along crabbed paths, we shall bring upon ourselves the crabbed old age; for what we are now we shall be when we grow old, only without the grace to put a decent veil over our sourness. Only let us remember that, if we do come to that, we have ourselves to thank for it; the reverse of the medal is open to us if we would choose it. I do not mean that we are to propose to ourselves happiness on earth as our object in doing our duty. Our aim must be higher than that; nevertheless, we are promised that we shall find pleasure by the way. But then it is so hard to keep the aim always before us, and to be what we ought to be! It is very hard-so hard, that, as the full consciousness of the battle to be fought comes upon us, we are tempted to cry out despairingly, " if I might only be safe and die !" There can be but one answer to that. It is not to the idle that rest is promised; and if the battle is great, so is the exceeding and eternal weight of glory; and the head that refuses the cross can never wear the crown. Again: it is a common saying that age blunts the feelings and perceptions; that the old are no longer capable of any great enjoyment or happiness. To the first portion of this dogma we are ready, in some degree, to subscribe. When the limbs are stiffened and feeble, and hand and lip grow tremulous, we have no right to expect that the brain can continue in all the vigour of youth: yet we think this a hard saying: we do not like to hear it: we would turn away from it if we could. There seems but little comfort in the reflection, that if our joys are blunted our sorrows will be blunted too. We would rather have both in their intensity—at least we fancy so, in our ignorance. the hold upon earth, and hides away the beauty of things, earthly, from the spirit which is drawing near to its return! full vigour can feel the trembling and uncertain step and the stiffened joints which belong to age. I am not now speaking of the thoughts of very young people. Age looks so far off that it has no terror for them; they do not care to think about it, or to hear of consolation behind the Besides this, we cannot possibly understand hill which they have hardly begun to ascend, yet the nature of that state which we dread by and on which the sun seems to be always shin-anticipation, any more than our limbs in their ing. I am speaking of those who are not amongst the very young, and who are not yet old-who are tempted to do battle against the years as they come creeping on, and who dread old age with a causeless dread. Youth is not quite past, perhaps, but it is passing, and they cling to it, unwilling to feel that they have reached the hill-top, beyond which there is nothing to look forward to but decline and decay; no more pleasure, no more enjoyment only decay! We may well be reluctant to accept such a sentence as this; and surely there is no reason why we should do so. In the first place no one will say that age is in itself unlovely: bare instinct teaches us to reverence it. It often is, and might always be, very beautiful, when it is the calm sunset of a life spent not in self-seeking, but in earnest study to follow the great Pattern, and in doing good to all men. Besides, we are too apt to reckon up the troubles of a possible future as though they were all to be borne at once, instead of remembering that each unit of the heap will have its unit of time and strength given with it; and when we look so drearily into those years of feebleness and decline which may or may not be in store for us, we forget that we are striving to bear them before they come, and that our frames are not yet capable of feeling them, nor our minds of measuring their effect. In the next place, why should we suppose that age has no capacity for enjoyment? It certainly loses the strong feelings which belong to youth; it has no longer that keen appreciation of youthful pleasures and excitements; nor the brightness of faculty which delighted to busy itself in calculating the affairs of men, but when we look upon this change dismally, and skrink from it, surely we are shortsighted, for in wisdom and loving kindness it is ordained. We know that the young do die, but we know also that they are not looking for death, as the old are. These last not only know that it must come eventually, but that it must be near, even at the door. Think then how it would be with them if there were no change: if the heart were still clinging with the great strength and warmth of its youth to this life and its blessings; to this beautiful world-for it is beautiful-and its pleasures and comforts, while it feels that the parting from all is daily drawing nearer, and cannot possibly be far distant. Is it not a very merciful law that so gradually and gently loosens Will the old man, who has lived as he ought, tell us that he has no enjoyment? Does he complain that his affections are dim and cold? We, in our wisdom decide that it is so, and make it a subject for dismay and sorrow; but we do not find that it is a cause of unhappiness to him. If his affection is dull, we do not even know that he is conscious of it. And the mistake may be ours. The love which once clung to earth for the sake of the beloved, may be changed and spiritualized, not lessened; it may be turned into a living and tender prayer for union in the life to come, where parting shall be known no more. And there is one thing which never fails-I mean Hope. Even in youth our happiness was more in the future than the present, because there not be a meaning in this? We know the hope is more beautiful than possession. May beauty of hope-it is with us on earth, and it reaches to things beyond the earth; but we can is accomplished-till "this corruptible shall never know the full glory of possession till hope have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall second to hope in youth, fails and grows feeble have put on immortality." Memory, which is with the years, for earth bounds it; but hope cannot fail. It may change, withdrawing itself more and more from those things which shall pass away, to gather nearer the great centre of all hope; but that change can only purify and brighten it. For my own part, I have seen old age unspeakably beautiful and happy; and I have also making it a bugbear, would it not be better to seen it repulsive and miserable. But instead of think of it-if we must think of it at all-as something which shall grow out of what we are now? that every action of ours is laying in store for it either good or evil-pleasure or pain? Instead of that miserable, vain battle, against it, and the devices to hide its advances, which are common enough amongst us; and the peevish, repining submission when it can be fought off no longer, surely it would be better to accept it readily and lovingly as it creeps on, remembering-and taking comfort in the remembrancethat the future will be what we are labouring to make it; and that it rests with ourselves, with our use or abuse of the present, whether our age shall be, in its degree, happy or miserable. ENOCH READE; OR, THE DEER-STEALERS OF WOLMER FOREST. BY JOHN D. CARTWRIGHT. "Most men are sportsmen by constitution, and there is such an inherent spirit for hunting in human nature as scarce any inhibition can restrain."-WHITE'S "Hist. of Selborne." CHAP. I. ENOCH AND ALICE. you to prison; and yet, somehow, you like him all the while-he's so kind and hopeful, and he hardly ever finds fault. When he said I was suspected, I hid my head in the bush I was "But, Enoch, do promise me that you will pruning, and went on cutting away, the young not go ?" "I didn't say I was going, Alice." "But you said you should like, and didn't say you wouldn't. Oh do, do give me your word that you won't; for I know, I feel something will happen if you do." "Nonsense! I shan't come to any hurt: but there, I-I won't go. I can't abide tears, you know; but I don't see why you should be so frightened." "I have a presentiment." "Tut, Alice, what's a presentiment? I halfbelieve some of those gipsies have been frightening you. I've been to the forest lots of times before, and you were never so fearful. When we're married, Alice-and it don't want so very long to Michaelmas now-of course I shall give up my gun, and never think about the forest except as a pleasant place to go to on a Sunday in the summer. I do think you needn't make such a fuss about it this once, seeing it's the very last time I shall ever think of it." "I can't help it, Enoch, because I know something would happen. They're so strict now they've got this new law, and the rangers are out watching all over the forest. Think of what the Bishop said to you, and don't go. The Bishop is a good man, and likes you; surely you'll not forget what he said ?” "No, I'm not going to forget, Alice: it was very kind of him; and whenever he comes to me as I'm i' the garden, I feel more pleasure than ever in touching my cap to him, for I believe he's about the best man alive." "What was it he said, Enoch ?" "Only as it was rumoured that I'd joined the 'Blacks,' and he hoped it wasn't true, because he couldn't keep me if I took to deer-stealing; and then he told me about the Black Act,* and how they meant to make examples; but it wasn't so much what he said as the kind way he said it in. When he talks to you its worse than if he sent * Statute 9 Geo. I, c. 22. wood as well as the old, till he laid his hand on my shoulder, and said I'd better not work while he was talking to me." "And didn't you promise him never to go to the forest again?" "That would have shown that I had been but he would not let me promise anything, and as soon as he'd done speaking walked away." Well, you won't go after he's been so kind to you? What's the worth of the venison, or the skin and all, when put beside his good word and your own name?" "It ain't the money we go for, Alice; it's the sport. You can't understand that?" "I can't understand what will make you go miles and miles in the night, with a set of bad men, putting yourself in danger, and everybody who loves you in fear." "Well, there, don't cry, Alice; and I'll tell them I can't go to-night." * It was a calm autumn evening; the sun was resting on the hills, and filling the valley below with a rich golden light. The voices of children, shouting as they ran to and fro in their mirthful play, mingled with the lowing of kine from the farm homestead, and the sweet chiming of the bells of Winchester Cathedral, calling people to evening prayers. Here and there, across the valley, the corn was still standing in the fields; in others men were busy loading their waggons with the golden grain, and the gleaners were taking their way over the meadows to the villages, with the result of their day's labour poised upon their heads. It was one of those sweet, peaceful scenes so thoroughly English, so happily familiar to thousands of our countrymen. And Enoch Reade and Alice Farnham completed the picture. Broad-shouldered, stalwart Enoch, with his arm round Alice's waist, loitering through the meadows in that pleasant sunset-time, was a sight not to be forgotten. His manly bearing, and fine face and figure, had attracted the admiration of many a man |