laws which seem harsh to those who | which I had cultured my mind; and ask from its favour the services which had my intellect been as great as the World cannot tender, for the heaven ever gave to man, it would World admits favourites but ignores have been as vain a shield as mine friends. You did but act to me as the against the shaft that had lodged in World ever acts to those who mis-my heart. While I had, indeed, take its favour for its friendship."

"It is true," said Mrs. Poyntz, with blunt candour; and we continued to walk on silently. At length, she said, abruptly, "But do you not rashly deprive yourself of your only consolation in sorrow? When the heart suffers, does your skill admit any remedy like occupation to the mind? Yet you abandon that occupation to which your mind is most accustomed; you desert your career; you turn aside, in the midst of the race, from the fame which awaits at the goal; you go back from civilization itself, and dream that all your intellectual cravings can find content in the life of a herdsman, amidst the monotony of a wild! No, you will repent, for you are untrue to your mind!"

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I am sick of the word 'mind!"" said I, bitterly. And therewith I relapsed into musing.

been preparing my reason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and marvellous, as those by which tales round the winter fire-side scare the credulous child-a contrivance so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day passes but what some hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel-had wrought a calamity more dread than aught which my dark guess into the Shadow-Land unpierced by Philosophy, could trace to the prompting of malignant witchcraft. So, ever this truth runs through all legends of ghost and demon-through the uniform records of what wonder accredits and science rejects as the supernatural-lo! the dread machinery whose wheels roll through Hades! What need such awful. engines for such mean results? The first block head we meet in our walk to our grocer's can tell us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy The enigmas which had foiled my we ever aroused hurts us more than intelligence in the unravelled Sibyl the demon. How true an interBook of Nature were mysteries preter is Genius to Hell as to Earth! strange to every man's normal prac-The Fiend comes to Faust, the tired tice of thought, even if reducible to seeker of knowledge; Heaven and the fraudulent impressions of out- Hell stake their cause in the Mortal's ward sense; for illusions in a brain temptation. And what does the otherwise healthy, suggest problems Fiend to astonish the Mortal? Turn in our human organization which wine into fire, turn love into crime. the colleges that record them rather We need no Mephistopheles to acguess at than solve. But the blow complish these marvels every day! which had shattered my life had been dealt by the hand of a fool. Here, there were no mystic enchantments. Motives the most commonplace and paltry, suggested to a brain as trivial and shallow as ever made the frivolity of woman a theme for the satire of poets, had sufficed, in devastating the field of my affections, to blast the uses for

Thus silently thinking, I walked by the side of the world-wise woman; and when she next spoke, I looked up, and saw that we were at the Monks' Well, where I had first seen Lilian gazing into heaven!

Mrs. Poyntz had, as we walked, placed her hand on my arm, and, turning abruptly from the path into the glade, I found myself standing

by her side in the scene where a new | Parliament. He means to attend sense of being had first disclosed to regularly and work hard, but he my sight the hues with which Love, does not like Jane to go into the the passionate beautifier, turns into world by herself, and he wishes her purple and gold the grey of the to go into the world, because he common air. Thus, when romance wants a wife to display his wealth has ended in sorrow, and the Beau- for the improvement of his position. tiful fades from the landscape, the In Ashleigh Sumner's house, I shall trite and positive forms of life have ample scope for my energies, banished for a time, reappear, and such as they are. I have a curiosity deepen our mournful remembrance to see the few that perch on the of the glories they replace. And wheels of the State, and say 'It is the Woman of the World, finding we who move the wheels!' It will how little I was induced to respond amuse me to learn if I can maintain to her when she had talked of my-in a capital the authority I have self, began to speak, in her habitual, clear, ringing accents, of her own social schemes and devices:

"I shall miss you when you are gone, Allen Fenwick, for though, during the last year or so, all actual intercourse between us has ceased, yet my interest in you gave some occupation to my thoughts when I sat alone-having lost my main object of ambition in settling my daughter, and having no longer any one in the house with whom I could talk of the future, or for whom I could form a project. It is so wearisome to count the changes which pass within us, that we take interest in the changes that pass without. Poyntz still has his weather-glass; I have no longer my Jane."

"I cannot linger with you on this spot," said I, impatiently turning back into the path; she followed, treading over fallen leaves. And unheeding my interruption, she thus continued her hard talk:

won in a country town; if not, I can but return to my small principality. Wherever I live I must sway, not serve. If I succeed—as I ought, for in Jane's beauty and Ashleigh's fortune I have materials for the woof of ambition, wanting which here, I fall asleep over my knitting-if I succeed, there will be enough to occupy the rest of my life. Ashleigh Sumner must be a power; the power will be represented and enjoyed by my child, and created and maintained by me! Allen Fenwick, do as I do. Be world with the world, and it will only be in moments of spleen and chagrin that you will sigh to think that the heart may be void when the mind is full. Confess you envy me while you listen."

"Not so; all that to you seems so great, appears to me so small! Nature alone is always grand, in her terrors as well as her charms. The World for you, Nature for me. Farewell!"

"Nature," said Mrs. Poyntz, compassionately. "Poor Allen Fenwick! Nature indeed-intellectual suicide! Nay, shake hands, then, if for the last time."

"But I am not sick of my mind as you seem to be of yours; I am only somewhat tired of the little cage in which, since it has been alone, it ruffles its plumes against the flimsy wires that confine it from wider space. I shall take up my So we shook hands and parted, home for a time with the new-where the wicket-gate and the stone married couple: they want me. stairs separated my blighted fairyAshleigh Sumner has come into land from the common thoroughfare.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

THAT night as I was employed in collecting the books and manuscripts which I proposed to take with me, including my long-suspended physiological work, and such standard authorities as I might want to consult or refer to in the portions yet incompleted, my servant entered to inform me, in answer to the inquiries I had sent him to make, that Miss Brabazon had peacefully breathed her last an hour before. Well! my pardon had perhaps soothed her last moments: but how unavailing her death-bed repentance to undo the wrong she had done!

second century of the Christian era.* But in which, the questions raised by man in the remotest ages, to which we can trace back his desire "to comprehend the ways of the Most High," are invested with a grandeur of thought and sublimity of word to which I know of no parallel in writers we call profane.

My eye fell on this passage in the lofty argument between the Angel whose name was Uriel, and the Prophet, perplexed by his own cravings for knowledge:

"He (the Angel) answered me, and said, I went into a forest into a plain, and the trees took counsel,

"The thought of the wood was in vain, for the fire came and consumed it.

"The thought of the floods of the sea came likewise to nought, for the sand stood up and stopped them.

I turned from that thought, and, glancing at the work into which I "And said, Come, let us go and had thrown all my learning, metho- make war against the sea, that it dized into system with all my art, I may depart away before us, and recalled the pity which Mrs. Poyntz that we may make us more woods. had expressed for my meditated "The floods of the sea also in like waste of mind. The tone of supe-manner took counsel, and said, riority which this incarnation of Come, let us go up and subdue the common sense, accompanied by un-woods of the plain, that there also common will, assumed over all that we may make us another country. was too deep or too high for her comprehension, had sometimes amused me; thinking over it now, it piqued. I said to myself, "After all, I shall bear with me such solace as intellectual occupation can afford. I shall have leisure to complete this labour, and a record that I have lived and thought may outlast all the honours which worldly ambition may bestow upon an Ashleigh "I answered and said, Verily it is Sumner!" And, as I so murmured, a foolish thought that they both my hand, mechanically, selecting have devised; for the ground is the books I needed, fell on the Bible given unto the wood, and the sea that Julius Faber had given to me. It opened at the Second Book of Esdras, which our Church places amongst the Apocrypha, and is generally considered by scholars to have been written in the first or

"If thou wert judge now betwixt these two, whom wouldest thou begin to justify? or whom wouldest thou condemn ?

Such is the supposition of Jahn. Dr. author was contemporary, and, indeed, Lee, however, is of opinion that the identical, with the author of the Book of Enoch.

also hath his place to bear his the earth may understand nothing floods.

"Then answered he me, and said, Thou hast given a right judgment; but why judgest thou not thyself also ?

"For like as the ground is given unto the wood, and the sea to his floods: even so they that dwell upon

but that which is upon the earth: and He that dwelleth above the heavens may only understand the things that are above the height of the heavens."

I paused at those words, and closing the Sacred Volume fell into deep unquiet thought.

CHAPTER LXIX.

I HAD hoped that the voyage would produce some beneficial effect upon Lilian; but no effect, good or bad, was perceptible, except, perhaps, a deeper silence, a gentler calm. She loved to sit on the deck when the nights were fair, and the stars mirrored on the deep. And once, thus, as I stood beside her, bending over the rail of the vessel, and gazing on the long wake of light which the moon made amidst the darkness of an ocean to which no shore could be seen, I said to myself, "Where is my track of light through the measureless future? Would that I could believe as I did when a child! Woe is me, that all the reasonings I take from my knowledge should lead me away from the comfort which the peasant who mourns finds in faith! Why should riddles so dark have been thrust upon me?-me, no fond child of fancy; me, sober pupil of schools the severest. Yet what marvelthe strangest my senses have witnessed or feigned in the fraud they have palmed on me-is greater than that by which a simple affection, that all men profess to have known, "Are not the stars very far from has changed the courses of life pre-earth ?" she said.

mized its mechanism, as the tyro who dissects the webwork of tissues and nerves in the dead! Lo! it lives, lives in me; and, in living, escapes from my scalpel and mocks all my knowledge. Can love be reduced to the realm of the senses? No; what nun is more barred by her grate from the realm of the senses than my bride by her solemn affliction? Is love, then, the union of kindred, harmonious minds? No, my beloved one sits by my side, and I guess not her thoughts, and my mind is to her a sealed fountain. Yet I love her more-oh ineffably more! for the doom which destroys the two causes philosophy assigns to love-in the form, in the mind! How can I now, in my vain physiology, say what is love—what is not? Is it love which must tell me that man has soul, and that in soul will be found the solution of problems, never to be solved in body or mind alone ?"

My self-questionings halted here as Lilian's hand touched my shoulder. She had risen from her seat, and had come to me.

arranged by my hopes and confirmed "Very far."

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by my judgment? How calmly Are they seen for the first time before I knew love I have anato- to-night?"

"They were seen, I presume, as we see them, by the fathers of all human races!"

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Her reply was incoherent and meaningless. If a gleam of intelligence had mysteriously lighted my heart to her view, it was gone. But drawing her nearer towards me, my eye long followed wistfully the path of light, dividing the darkness on Lilian, by what sympathy do either hand, till it closed in the you read and answer my thought ?" | sloping horizon..

Yet close below us they shine reflected in the waters; and yet, see, wave flows on wave before we can count it!"

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CHAPTER LXX.

sense of life is wondrously quickened. With the very breath the Adventurer draws in from the racy air, he feels as if inhaling hope.

THE Voyage is over. At the seaport the brilliancy of the sky, in the at which we landed I found a letter lightness of the atmosphere, the from Faber. My instructions had reached him in time to effect the purchase on which his descriptions had fixed my desire. The stock, the implements of husbandry, the furniture of the house, were included in the purchase. All was prepared for my arrival, and I hastened from the then miserable village, which may some day rise into one of the mightiest capitals of the world, to my lodge in the wilderness.

It was the burst of the Australian spring, which commences in our autumn month of October. The air was loaded with the perfume of the acacias. Amidst the glades of the open forest land, or climbing the craggy banks of winding silvery oreeks,* creepers and flowers of dazzling hue contrasted the olivegreen of the surrounding foliage. The exhilarating effect of the climate in that season heightens the charm of the strange scenery. In

* Creek is the name given by Australian colonists to precarious watercourses and tributary streams.

We have reached our home-we are settled in it; the early unfamiliar impressions are worn away. We have learned to dispense with much that we at first missed, and are reconciled to much that at first disappointed or displeased.

The house is built but of logsthe late proprietor had commenced, upon a rising ground, a mile distant, a more imposing edifice of stone; but it is not half finished.

This log-house is commodious, and much has been done, within and without, to conceal or adorn its primitive rudeness. It is of irregular, picturesque form, with verandahs round three sides of it, to which the grape-vine has been trained, with glossy leaves that clamber up to the gable roof. There is a large garden in front, in which many English fruit-trees have been set, and grow fast amongst the plants of the tropics and the orange

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