bound in honour to follow her as long as I had a leg left. At the top of the hill we came to a row of buildings, with a chapel in the middle, quite imposing to look at, and the whole party filed into one of the houses, a big one, all over ivy.

But first Priscilla
There was a

turned round, and I am pretty sure she saw me. village close by, with a little inn, and I went there, and had a good long rest and some swipy beer. I found out that the name of the village is Oak Brook, and that the house I had seen Priscilla go into is a convent."

"A convent!" I repeated, greatly surprised, and scarcely able to realise the truth of what he told me.

"Yes, but not a Roman Catholic establishment."

"Oh,

one of our Anglican sisterhoods."

"No, not that either; it belongs to a set of people who were about the first dissenters from Rome, before Luther was born or thought of, and they retain a good many of the old customs, and have stuck on some of their own. Of course the village boors did not tell me all this, but I made it out from what they did tell me, and from afterwards inspecting the chapel."

"And what is the name of the sect?"

'Herrnhutters. A queer name, but I learnt it off correctly on purpose to repeat it to you."

And why are girls sent to their convents? For educational purposes?"

"That is just what I could not learn; there seems to be some mystery about these people, but I suppose that it is as you say, and that they take in the pretty dears and teach them how to spell, with twopence extra for manners and deportment. Priscilla really wanted some lessons, she was very backward and deficient, she has a chance of learning something, or we will hope Now that you are here, I want to engage you for the festival of St. Lawrence the Martyr, on the tenth of August; will you part in the celebration?""

and

so.

take

now

"It is not one of the church festivals," I objected.

"Excuse me, it is one, but it has fallen into disuse; I have an authenticated canonical account of his career and martyrdom, with all his credentials in full, which I will send you; it will not take long to look it over, and then you can let me have your

Law ford, have I not?"
Come, I have set your mind at rest about Priscilla

answer.

I asked myself the same question, that day and many succeeding days, and at last I am sure of the answer; my mind is not at rest about Priscilla. She appears to be placed with good and religious people, and she may be receiving the additional education that she wished for, and that she certainly required; but why should there

be this mystery about her movements, if she has only been placed at Oak Brook for purposes of education? Why should false statements be made and persisted in by her relations, and how does this life in a religious sisterhood agree with that other statement about an approaching marriage?

I have pondered over these things for many days, feeling for the time more at rest, and more willing to abstain from immediate action, now that I know exactly how she is placed, and where; but at last I have decided that it will be right for me to seek her out, to tell her what I know, and what I only suspect, and to hear from her own lips the assurance that I may hope, or the confirmation of my fears. I have only communed with my own heart, saying nothing to any one of my resolve, but it is fully taken.

CHARLES DICKENS.

In Memoriam.

BY NICHOLAS MICHELL.

THE brain, the active, subtle brain,
That from its secret, wondrous cells,
Sent forth a mixed and endless train

Of thoughts which, by strong spells,
Grew into beings full of burning life,
With all our frailties, tempers, passions, rife;
The brain that was a treasure-house cf dreams,
A fountain-head of many sunny streams;
That brain is still, with fancies never more
To enthral, delight; Wit's summer reign is o'er;
Relentless Fate the golden thread must sever,
That brain is still for ever.

Dark, undiscriminating, cruel Death!

Couldst thou not quench some star less bright?
Couldst thou not take some meaner breath,

And longer spare that sun to glad our sight?

Oh, at its setting, sorrow o'er our land

Fell in deep shade; the smile of Humour fled,
Pathos dissolved in tears, gay Fancy's band

Stayed in the dance, for Fiction's lord was dead!
Tell it unto the winds" He lives no more!”
The sad winds bear the wail round Britain's shore;
With cypress as with laurel wreathe his tomb!
Kindness, philanthropy, lament his doom!
The sad winds bear the dirge to other climes;
To Europe's cities Grief shall send the chimes;
Australian settlers hear it; far it thrills
Along Canadian lakes, and rocky hills;

Down through the "States" the wail of sorrow sweeps,
For him, as her own son, Columbia weeps.
Where'er the Saxon foot hath found a home,

And its great language speaks in fire,
Across the land, beneath wild ocean's foam,
That wail, along the electric wire,
Flies like a spirit, with a burst of pain;

Eyes he once filled with light now weep in vain;
Our image low in fragments death has hurled,
The heart is touched through all the Saxon world.

I see the peasant, bronzed by sun and gale,
Who reads and understands his vivid tale;
I see the high-bred lord, the thoughtful sage,
Charmed with the wisdom of his life-true page;
I see the maiden's lips with smiles apart;
Anon some touching scene dissolves her heart-
Scene where deep feelings mix with fancies bright,
Like weeping dews pierced through by Morn's
These hear the great magician's race is o'er;
The hand that penned, no pen again shall hold,
The charmer of light hours can charm no more,

gay light.

He who warmed hearts must now himself be cold;
These, though the living they had seen not, bend
In tearful grief, and mourn him as a friend.

DICKENS, thou lord of pathos and of mirth!
Thou wert in sunny moments giv'n to earth;

Thy wonder-working wand, for many years,

Hath ministered delight; in hour of sadness

Thy page hath scattered gloom, and called up gladness, And oft unsealed the fount of sweetest tears. Who hath not laughed o'er Pickwick, felt the spell Of Christmas Tales, and sighed o'er gentle Nell? Followed, enchained, a countless, varied train, Breathing of life, though children of the brain? Ah! what a boast is thine!

The alchemy which golden makes thy fame,
That thou hast writ no line

On which doth fall the poison-drop of shame;
The young, the old, the pure-souled maid may read,
No blush will rise at word, or scene, or deed.
'Twas thine a pleasantness, a joy to find
Through all the walks of being; humblest mind
Was still thy study; like the bee, thy powers
Not only gathered honey from rich flowers,
But could draw sweets with wholesome virtue rife,
From pools of squalidness, and lowest life.
Thy genius waketh echoes, but the sound
Dies into feebleness, while murmuring round;
None can usurp thine own peculiar throne,
None else can bend thy bow-thou reign'st alone.

O the far, coming ages! will they sweep,
With humbler labourers, to Oblivion's deep,
At last this honoured name?

And must grow faint, more faint, until it sleep,
The trumpet of his fame?

No, while our tongue shall live, or charms impart,
And Humour please, and Pathos melt the heart,
A DICKENS' name shall million bosoms thrill,
And all his bright creations ravish still.

THE LAST SMILE.

BY ALEC SLOAN.

WE have all seen in print, and most of us perhaps on real living lips and faces, what is called a sardonic smile. Not all of us may be aware of the alleged origin of that expression. The sardonic laugh

of the mouth, occasioned by a poisonous plant grown in Sardinia; and persons who died of this poison had a smile on their countenance,-whence came about the meaning of a forced, or affected, and grimacing smile.

To a mere muscular mechanical movement is referred, by physiologists, the smile, so sweetly the reverse of sardonic, which is to be observed so often on the faces of the dying, and of the dead. But under the spell of that suggestive aspect, one is inclined to scout a physiological reduction of it to its lowest terms, in the style of Horatio's objection to a certain post-mortem examination on the part of the Prince of Denmark, that "'twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Rather one suffers one's feelings to find scope, and devout expression, in Keble's teaching, that

No smile is like the smile of death,
When all good musings past
Rise wafted with the parting breath,
The sweetest thought the last.

Edgar Poe adverts somewhere to what he calls "that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death." Between a Poe and a Keble there is, in all things, a distinction with a difference. How differently from Gibbon would Keble have described the dying smile of that un-named hero and martyr-the quidam of Lactantius-who was burnt, or rather roasted, before a slow fire, for tearing down the edict of Diocletian, and upon whom the executioners, zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been offered to the emperors, exhausted every refinement of cruelty, without being able to subdue his patience, or to "alter the steady and insulting smile," so the historian of the Roman Empire calls it, "which, in his dying agonies, he still preserved in his countenance." For, such of the bystanders as sympathised with the sufferer had not to wait till that tyranny of pain was overpast, before the smile that sealed his bliss should be seen, and felt; it was there from the first, and it was there to the