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Mrs. Mason, comfortably somnolent at the entrance of the little kitchen, watches her daughter-comely, gravefaced Annie Mason-"our Annie," as she is called, who is already folding the table-cloths. A few belated customers linger in the partitioned loose-boxes which lend a certain small privacy to the tables, and often save a fight. They are talking in gruff, North-country voices, which are never harsh.

"Ay!"

"From the West Coast?"

"Ay," grumbles the man. He holds the handkerchief to his cheek and turns the herring tentatively with a fork.

"You'll find it's a good enough fish," says the woman bluntly. Her two hands are pressed to her comely bosom in a singular way.

"Ay!" says the man, again, as if he had no other word.

The clock strikes six, and the boy, more mindful of his own tea than his neighbor's ailments, slips on his jacket and goes home. The last customers dawdle out with a grunt intended for a salutation. Mrs. Mason is softly heard to snore. And all the while Annie

wholesome face-stands with her hands
clutching her dress gazing down at the
man, who still examines the herring
with a self-conscious awkwardness.
"Geordie!" she says. They are all
called Geordie in South Shields.

A man comes in, after a moment's awkward pause at the open door, and seeks a secluded seat where the gas overhead hardly affords illumination. He is a broad-built man-a Tynesider; not so very big for South Shields; a matter of six feet one, perhaps. He carries a blue spotted handkerchief | Mason-all the color vanished from her against his left cheek, and the boy with the pewter pots stares eagerly at the other. A boy of poor tact this; for the customer's right cheek is horribly disfigured. It is all bruised and battered in from the curve of a square jaw to the cheek-bone, which is broken. But the eye is intact; a shrewd, keen eye, accustomed to the penetration of a Northern mist-accustomed to a close scrutiny of men's faces. It is painfully obvious that this sailor-for gait and clothes and manner, set aside all other crafts-is horribly conscious of his deformity.

"Got a toothache?" inquires the tactless youth.

The newcomer replies in the negative and orders a cup of tea and a herring. It is Annie who brings the simple meal and sets it down without looking at the

man.

"Thanks," he growls in his brown beard, and the woman pauses suddenly. She listens, as if hearing some distant sound. Then she slowly turns-for she has gone a step or two from the tableand makes a pretence of setting the salt and pepper closer to him.

Three ships had come up with the afternoon tide-a coaster, a Norwegian barque in ballast, and a full-rigged ship with nitrate from the West Coast of South America.

"Just ashore?" inquired Annie economical with her words, as they mostly are round the Northern river.

"Ay, lass!" he answers shamefacedly. Annie Mason sits down suddenly-opposite to him. He does not look up but remains, his face half hidden by the spotted blue handkerchief, a picture of self-conscious guilt and shame.

"What did ye did it for, Geordie?" she asks breathlessly. "Eleven years, come March-oh, it was cruel!"

"What did I do it for?" he repeats. "What did I do it for? Why, lass, can't ye see my face?"

He drops the handkerchief, and holds up his poor scarred countenance. He does not look at her, but away past her with the pathetic shame of a maimed dog. The cheek thus suddenly exposed to view is whole and brown and healthy. Beneath the mahoganycolored skin there is a glow singularly suggestive of a blush.

"Ay, I see your face," she answers, with a note of tenderness for the poor scarred cheek. "I hope you haven't been at the drink."

He shakes his head with a little sad smile that twists up his one-sided mouth.

"Is it because you wanted to get shot of me?" asks the woman with a sort of breathlessness. She has large grey

blue eyes with a look of constant wait- | stinking like-like hell fire as it burnt.

ing in them-a habit of looking up at the open door at the sound of every footstep.

"D-n it, Annie. Could I come back to you with a face like this; and you the prettiest lass on the Tyneside?"

She is fumbling with her apron string. There is a half-coquettish bend of her head-with the grey hairs already at the temple-awakened perhaps by some far-off echo in his passionate voice. She looks up slowly, and does not answer his question.

I got a hold of the old man, and was fetching him out on my hands and knees, when something busts up and sends us all through the deck. I had three months in Valparaiso hospital; but I saved old Jack Rutherford of Jarrow. And when I got up and looked at my face I saw that it was not in the nature of things that I could ever ask a lass to have me. So I just stayed away and made believe that-that I had changed my mind."

The man pauses. He is not glib of

"Tell us," she says slowly. "Tell us speech, though quick enough at sea. where ye've been."

"Been!-oh, I don't know, lass! I don't rightly remember. Not that it matters. Up the West Coast, trading backwards and forwards. I've got my master's certificate now. Serving first mate on board the Mallard to Falmouth for orders, and they ordered us to the Tyne. I brought her round-I knew the way. I thought you'd be married, lass. But maybe ye are?"

As he takes up the little teapot and shakes it round wise, after the manner of the galley, his great brown hand shakes too.

"I would not have come back here," he goes on after a silence; "but the Mallard was ordered to the Tyne. And a chap must do his duty by his shipmates and his owners. And I thought it would be safe-after eleven years. When I saw the old place and smelt the smell of the

"Maybe I'm daft," puts in Annie old woman's frying-pan, I could not get coolly.

"I greatly feared," the man goes on with the slow self-consciousness of one unaccustomed to talk of himself. "I greatly feared I'd meet up with a bairn of yours playing in the doorway. Losh! I could not have stood that! But that's why I stayed away, Annie, lass! So that you might marry a man with a face on him. I thought you would not know me if I held my handkerchief over my other cheek!"

There is a strange gleam in the woman's eyes-a gleam that one or two of the old masters have succeeded in catching and imparting to the face of their Madonnas, but only one or two. "How did you come by your hurt?" she asks in her low voice.

"Board the old Walleroo going out. You mind the old ship. We had a fire in the hold, and the skipper he would go down alone to locate it before we cut a hole in the deck and shipped the hose in. The old man did not come up again. Ye mind him. Old Rutherford of Jarrow. And I went down and looked for him. It was a hell of smoke and fire, and something in the cargo

past the door. But I hung around, looking to make sure there were no bairns playing on the floor. I have only come in, lass, to pass the time of day and to tell you ye're a free woman."

he is not looking at her. He seems to find that difficult. So he does not see the queer little smile-rather sadder, in itself, than tears.

"And you stayed away eleven yearsbecause o' that?" says the woman slowly.

"Ay, you know, lass, I'm no great hand at the preaching and Bibles and the like; but it seems pretty clear that them who's working things did not think it fit that we should marry. And so it was sent. I got to think it so in time-least, I think it's that sometimes. And no woman would like to say, "That's my man-him with only half a face. So I just stayed away."

"All for that?" asks the woman, her face, which is still pretty and round and rosy, working convulsively.

"Ay, lass."

"Then, honey," she cries softly, "you dinna understand us women!"

HENRY SETON MERRIMAN.

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I. THE BAB AND BABISM. By J. D. Rees, Nineteenth Century,
II. DEATH IN THE ALPS,

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451

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Blackwood's Magazine,

458

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V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LORD SALIS-
BURY. By T. H. S. Escott,

VI. THE FIRST NEST OF A ROOKERY. By
Phil Robinson,

VII. VERLAINE. By Augustus Manston,
VIII. IN THE HOUR OF Death,

POETRY.

THE NEW AND THE OLD,
A SHETLAND SUMMER,

450 THE ISLAND OF IONA,
450

450

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, BOSTON.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of the LIVING AGE CO.

Singie copies of the LIVING AGE, 15 cents.

THE NEW AND THE OLD.

Oh maiden of ancient romances,
So modest and stately and fair,
Knowing nought of the power of your
glances,

Of your loveliness all unaware,
And full of fine words like a poet,

Of tears as of water the sea,

Of love (but you don't seem to know it)
And innocent glee;

I seek you in Smith's and in Mudie's,
But ever I seek you in vain;
Though many a heroine wooed is
And won, it is not in your strain.
And a novelette now is your medium,
Replacing the folio of yore,
Your sentiment's voted a tedium,
Your virtue a bore.

Clarissa, Pamela, resplendent

In virtue, and all of your kin, blush for your modern descendant,

Do you

For Dodo, the Aster, the Twin? Do you ask of what genus this maid is, (Whether maiden or man do you know?) In that ultimate region of Hades, Where dead heroines go.

Yet were you so hemmed and so girt in, Oh, maid of the past, as we think? Had you never the pleasure of flirting? Did that maidenly eye never wink? Were your feelings forever the Stoics

They seem; did you always preserve Your fine words, or when tired of heroics, To slang did you swerve?

We hear you were never exponent
Of theories, a novelist's X,
Your sweet lips were never resonant
With views on law, marriage, and sex.
You were dainty as china of Dresden,

You were pedestalled far from all vice, Oh, maiden, immured and compressed in A strait Paradise.

At times when the fair but pedantic
New woman proves rather a bore,
More logical she than romantic,
Too prosy by far to adore-
We sigh for that heroine less clever,
That light o'er old folios cast,

Though we know you have left us for

ever,

Oh maid of the past. Chambers' Journal.

A SHETLAND SUMMER.

Now breaks a wave of golden light
O'er half the Earth, and stars are dim;
Glad birds the gleaming waters skim;
A dreamy glory gilds the night.

Now wake the dreary Northland isles
And beauty decks the lonely shores,
No more the wintry tempest roars;
And Ocean's face is wreathed in smiles.

It is the Sungod's Wooing, this
A moment to his heart to hold
His Northland love, so coy and cold-
In all the year, but one sweet kiss!
J. J. HALdane Burgess.
Chambers' Journal.

THE ISLAND OF IONA.

[St. Columba, though a priest, had joined in an Irish battle. The penance imposed on him was perpetual exile from Ireland. He made Iona his abode till death, preaching on the adjacent shores. Montalembert affirms that later his Irish monks converted nearly threequarters of Anglo-Saxon England.]

Not for the tombs of old Norwegian Kings Or Scottish, iron-mailed, and crowned at Scone;

Not for those "Island-Lords" the Minstrel sings

As sang his sires in centuries past and flown;

Not for yon grassy terrace breeze-o'erblown,

Yon crags to which the storm-'rocked

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From The Nineteenth Century.
THE BAB AND BABISM.1

like the French Revolutionists, he would have renumbered and renamed everything, only with him everything would have had reference to the whole, or to the component parts of the mystic number.

Among his disciples were several persons of courage, eloquence, and resolution, probably superior to his own. Among them was the warrior-priest Hussein, who at once saw that a nation which awaited the coming of the Mahdi

would be more likely to believe in the new religion if its prophet were represented as the Mahdi himself. He thus traded on the ignorance of his public, for this pretension was never asserted by Bab. It is impossible, however, as we have reason to know, to keep the Mahdi out of Muhammadan politics, and this confusion of ideas was almost inevitable.

In 1845, in the city of Shiraz, the seat of learning, as the Persians say-of rose-gardens and of nightingales, as I would call it-a young Persian began to preach. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and came back full of ideas of his own-mystic and enthusiastic ideas, which evade definition and perplex the downright Anglo-Saxon understanding. However, he made it quite clear that, in his opinion, the peo--the hidden one, the twelfth imample in general, and the priests in particular, had departed widely from the cardinal doctrines of Muhammadanism, and that the priests, in their lives, were far from practising what they did more or less erroneously preach. Now my readers will say that this is very vague; but I will make bold to say that Bab was at first as vague as myself, but his mystic hints and unintelligible suggestions were taken for the significant, if not for the magnificent. Let any one who has studied Eastern writings on religion deny, if he can, that to get anything definite out of them is as difficult as the proverbial extraction of a needle from a bundle of hay. However, the young man called himself the Gate of Heaven -the "Bab;" and it is said that he possessed a handsome appearance, engaging manners, and an eloquent tongue-powerful agents at all times for the accomplishment of any ends. A little later, and the Gate of Heaven represented himself as an emanation from the Divinity itself, and then assumed the title of "Highness," by which, also, Jesus, the son of Mary, or Miriam, is habitually known amongst Muhammadans. Next he gathered about him eighteen apostles, not that he might have half as many again as had his Highness Jesus, but because a peculiar sanctity, in his opinion, attached to the number nineteen. He, the prophet of God, the latest revelation, was the central point, round which revolved eighteen satellites, and,

1 This article was written before the assassination of the late shah of Persia.-ED. Nineteenth Century.

We have to thank Hussein for giving clear expression to two of the chief aims set before the Babees-viz., the abolition of polygamy, and of the doctrine of pollution. It may here be remarked that, of the many unfair criticisms directed against Islam, there is none it deserves so little as that of encouraging polygamy. When the prophet restricted the number of wives to four, he made an immense advance in morality on the state of things existing in his time amongst the Arabs, where practically every woman in a man's household was in some respects in the position of a wife. If he could have gone further, there is little doubt from his teachings that he would have, and, as a matter of fact, his followers are for the most part husbands of one wife, notwithstanding the indulgence allowed by law. It may safely be affirmed that the English are in one sense, and in a manner that is more demoralizing and degrading than the authorized polygamy of Islam, at least as polygamous as the Muhammadans themselves. It has been reserved for a canon of the Church of England to stigmatize a great moral reformer as "an ignorant and immoral Bedouin," and "a lecherous Arab," to whom Ma

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