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"If I get elected," said Rames. "Oh, you will get elected," replied Cynthia confidently, but there was no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. "They will call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense majority."

"I am very glad you think that," Rames returned imperturbably; and he leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of his face. He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage with the painted walls into the lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the smokingroom, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks the dim figure of the speaker under the canopy of his chair. Of what he saw in that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of

Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.

Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting before him clearly the risks which he would run.

"I don't want to advise you one way or the other," said Smale, "but it is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the House of Commons which it now claims."

"There are the barristers," objected Rames.

"The House of Commons is in their line of business," returned Henry Smale. "The highest offices of the law are reached through the House of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. Thus, the barristers come especially equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And here is a point for you, Captain Rames." Henry Smale turned with a warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. "The most distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there, and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his contribution. It does not ask for oratory; it is not content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judg ment in clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is sweeter than anywhere else; its recog

nition is so immediate. But, on the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with ambition, and to be left behind in the race-there is no destiny more galling."

"Yes," said Rames quietly, "I have thought over these things. There is that risk. I am prepared to take it."

"Very well," returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. "Let us suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well, even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you are out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here, and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else."

so many men in who during the whole of each session are extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal which his father. earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister-Industry without work, idleness without rest, that is how this House was once described, and believe me the description is not inapt."

Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.

"I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale," he cried, "I want to be in here.'

Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a kindly fashion on the shoulder. "I have done my duty," he said. "Come!"

He led Rames through a little doorway "You put the worst side of it all in front at the side of which sat three or four mesof me, Mr. Smale." sengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a door.

"No," replied Mr. Smale. "Visit the political clubs a couple of months after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham, and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which you have never heard."

Captain Rames smiled.

"I see a good many men in this lobby," he rejoined. "I do not notice that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very busy."

"That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons," Smale replied. "There are

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Come in," said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of pleasant adress and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed them.

"Hanley," said Henry Smale, "this is Captain Rames."

Mr. Hanley shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a chair.

"We shall be very glad to have you in the House," he said. He beamed. He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his happiness. "I think Ludsey was suggested."

"Benoliel suggested it," said Smale. "He's a good judge too."

"There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once.'

Smale and Rames left the room together. "I should think you might consider that settled," said Smale.

Rames thanked him and referred to Hanley's charm of manner. Smale's small eyes twinkled.

"That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip. Otherwise he is an ass," and shaking hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.

The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the receptionroom at the admiralty, and she listened with a growing interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man; ultimately to govern and exercise authority-the note of personal ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account. He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her eyes of darkblue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and even her voice shook ever so slightly.

"You have been very honest to me about it all," she said. "I thank you for that." Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had anything to conceal.

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'Good-night," she said as she rose, "I see my friend Mrs. Royle waiting for me." She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped. Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.

"I suppose," she said, "that your journey to the South really counts now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that work unfinished." It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.

"Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear them

spoken," he said with a smile. "It is true that I got all sorts of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel:"

Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.

"I wanted to ask of you a favor," said Rames. "Mr. Benoliel said that you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me. Will you?"

Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came into her cheeks in a rush.

"No," she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.

"I might have struck her," thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that brown-paper parcel.

None the less he walked home across St. James's Park treading upon air. Great people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance, and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked home, softly whistling under his breath.

Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost another illusion to-night.

(To be continued.)

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The Puritan Child

E owe it largely to Judge Sewall and Jonathan Edwards, that Puritan children have acquired such a bad reputation for priggishness, morbidness, and dolefulness. Thanks to these worthies, all the odd little boys and girls in skin-tight nankeens and box-pleated brocades, whose wooden portraits have come down to us, figure in our imagination as a set of insufferable young theologians. Who ever conceives of the little Puritans as romping, noisy, venturesome, quarrelsome, or (sotto voce) spoiled? Yet any one may read for himself how the Custis children were indulged with rich clothing from over-sea, and how bread-and-butter misses were allowed to take seven to twelve silk dresses to boardingschool. Any one may read those fond, affectionate letters addressing absent children as "My Indear'd Son," "My deare little Daughter," which Mrs. Earle and Mrs. Anne Wharton have preserved to us. Any one who is inured to the pharmacopoeia of our forefathers may see at first-hand how tenderly ailing children were dosed with those frightful concoctions of dried spiders, stewed vipers, and melted angleworms, which were then thought so efficacious; how pathetically parents tried, with spices and sugar, to make them palatable: and when, in spite of all, their darlings died, what wistful inscriptions were carved on little tombstones, with broken rosebuds, little lambs, and doves.

And indeed I think there was a good deal for modern children to envy in the lot of the Puritan child. There was plenty of romance and adventure in the virgin woods all round his home. Their depths were full of wolves, catamounts, and redmen. Children had all the romance of savage neighbors, with little or none of the shuddering fear that haunted their elders. "Father," of course, would take care of them. Within the range of "father's gun" Massasoit and Thayendanegea would fear to be seen. In place of the fairies, brownies, and sookas that made romance for his little English, Scotch, or Irish cousin, the colonial child had small dusky contemporaries miraculously learned in wood-lore, and living in strange houses, dressed in beaded skins, and

VOL. L.-73

"fed with curious meat." Tumbling little rivers swarmed with fish that could be caught in the hand, and the embossed and iridiscent wild turkey walked out of the woods in autumn with its gawky troop of young ones behind it, like an edible bird of Paradise.

It is safe to conclude that Puritan children were seldom lonely. They had, if anything, an embarrassment of playmates. Where families of a baker's dozen were usual, we may figure to ourselves the harvest of cousins! An only child's ideal of a large family is one "large enough to dance the lanciers." But these Puritan families were large enough to dance the farandole! That they never did so was, perhaps, for the same reason that Bostonians never visit Bunker Hill; because they always can. Among these swarming hives a boy might have a special crony among his brothers, or a little girl a "bosom sister." Their tasks were vastly lightened by companionship: Polly and Molly stringing the apples together, while Jimmy and Timothy husked the corn. In the event of visitors at a Puritan house, we may be sure the children were in an excited and hilarious state of mind. Much of the provisioning devolved on the little berry pickers and egg hunters.

"There was racing and chasing on Cannobie lea." When visitors came it was for more than a week-end. They had experienced many adventures and perils to come at all; stagecoaches had been mired, and they had been obliged to descend into the mud and tug and push to start them; inns had been crowded or cold, luggage had been rained on, Indians had, perhaps, attacked them.

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They stayed not for brake and they stopped not for stone:

They swam the Esk River where ford there was none."

Arrived safe after all these hardships, they were in no hurry to be off again. Jane Austen's heroines spent two or three months at the houses of comparatively new acquaintances; and indeed I think they would never have gone home at all but for some friend opportunely going the same way and offering to escort them. Three volumes of "Sir Charles Grandison" transpire during Harriet's visit to her "cousin Reeveses." What Puritan child could be of a

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sad countenance with ten or fifteen little cousins coming to spend the winter? How they were all stowed away in such modest houses we can only guess from the immensity of the old fashioned “tester bed." Perhaps, like the gentlemen in "Tomlinson," they were

"Sleeping three on a grid."

Attics, however, were excellent dormitories, and could be divided by hanging quilts into a multitude of sleeping-boxes open at the top to the midnight breezes sweet with locust, lilac, and apple blossom.

Sundays, it is true, were a seamy side in the free and exciting life of colonial children. The Puritan Sabbath may have been made for man, but it was certainly not made for boys and girls. They did not always endure it with meekness either. The most entertaining chapter of Mr. William Root Bliss's inimitable book, "Side Glimpses of the Colonial Meeting House," is that devoted to the "Wretched Boys." From the researches of Mr. Bliss it would seem that the desperate efforts of town and church authorities were all in vain to secure seemly behavior among the back benches relegated to the boys of the parish. Duxbury chose a special committee to curb "their disorder and rudeness in time of the worship of God." The deacons of Farmington were requested to "appoint persons who shall sit convenient to inspect the youth in the meetinghouse on days of public worship and keep them in order." John Pike of Dedham was paid sixteen shillings in 1723 for "keeping the boys in subjection six months"; but when he was hired a second time, as Mr. Bliss shrewdly remarks, he doubled his price. In a Cape Cod town one John King was unable alone to cope with the boys, and four men were added by town appointment to assist him to chastise them if found "playing and prophaning the Sabbath day." Parents were very long-suffering if they allowed town authorities to punish their sons. Or was Young America too much for his parents? It would seem hat herding the boys together on the back benches invited the "Rude and Idel Behavior" which a Connecticut justice of the peace itemized in his note-book as follows: "Smiling and Larfing and Intiseing others to the same Evil:

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The indignant selectmen, justices, and deacons who recorded these misdemeanors little thought what a comfort they would prove to those of us who have previously conceived of the Puritan boys as "too good to be wholesome." It takes a load of unavailing pity off our hearts, similar to the relief of finding that Fox was a little too zealous in describing the torments of the martyrs.

Another cheering sidelight on the strictness of our forefathers is the orthodox but convivial ordination ball of Connecticut. Dancing was, in fact, not so severely interdicted in Puritan days as a few generations later. Mrs. Earle has a list of picturesque and fascinating names for dances, such as the "Innocent Maid," "Blue Bonnets," and the "Orange Tree." Such ingenuity and variety of dances seem to prove that the most delightful of sports was not very uncommon. Children in Vermont schools three generations ago still amused themselves with "reels of four" and "reels of eight." Raisings, husking, parings, and, above all, quiltings, were shining instances of the Puritanic love of a "high old time" even when assembled together ostensibly for work. But I think the singing-school was the merriest of all the merry old-time parties. What a comedown it would be for a Puritan big boy or girl, to exchange the mirth and jollity of one of their "sings" for one of our afternoon teas, for example! I should like to have heard such a gathering inour valley sing the so-called "Ode on Science," with its resounding patriotism and glorious martial air. To be sure there is nothing about science in it except the assertion that: "She visits fair Americay [so pronounced to rhyme] And sets her sons an ong the stars!"

I should like to have seen some Puritan damsel advance to sing the "Worldly Song," while some bashful big boy held his candle over her book, and smiled at her tuneful warning:

"Of all false young men to beware!" Girls were probably more proficient at music than their brothers: they should have been so, when the principal branches taught them were music, embroidery, and "the globes." "I learn," wrote Eliza Southgate Bowne, with the proud consciousness of a complete education, "embroidery and geography." One supposedly self-respecting town in Connecticut voted that none of its money should be "wasted" in educating girls. Of an old seminary in our town it is still said that its troubles

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