woman's work, but she seemed too languid to persevere in it; her fingers soon dropped, and she relapsed into motionless reverie. At last-it was one of those bright days in the end of February, when the sun is shining with a promise of approaching spring. Maynard had been walking with her and Oswald round the garden to look at the snowdrops, and she was resting on the sofa after the walk. Ozzy, roaming about the room in quest of a forbidden pleasure, came to the harpsichord, and struck the handle of his whip on a deep bass note. The vibration rushed through Caterina like an electric shock; it seemed as if at that instant a new soul were entering into her, and filling her with a deeper, more significant life. She looked round, rose from the sofa, and walked to the harpsichord. In a moment her fingers were wandering with their old sweet method among the keys, and her soul was floating in its true familiar element of delicious sound, as the water-plant that lies withered and shrunken on the ground expands into freedom and beauty when once more bathed in its native flood. Maynard thanked God. An active power was reawakened, and must make a new epoch in Caterina's recovery. Presently there were low liquid notes blending themselves with the harder tones of the instrument, and gradually the pure voice swelled into predominance. Little Ozzy stood in the middle of the room, with his mouth open and his legs very wide apart, struck with something like awe at this new power in "TinTin," as he called her, whom he had been accustomed to think of as a playfellow not at all clever, and very much in need of his instruction on many subjects. A genii soaring with broad wings out of his milkjug would not have been more astonishing. Caterina was singing the very air from the Orfeo which we heard her singing so many mouths ago at the beginning of her sorrows. It was Ho perduto, Sir Christopher's favourite, and its notes seemed to carry on their wings all the tenderest memo ries of her life, when Cheverel Manor was still an untroubled home. The long happy days of childhood and girlhood recovered all their rightful predominance over the short interval of sin and sorrow. She paused, and burst into tearsthe first tears she had shed since she had been at Foxholm. Maynard could not help hurrying towards her, putting his arm round her, and leaning down to kiss her hair. She nestled to him, and put up her little mouth to be kissed. The delicate-tendrilled plant must have something to cling to. The soul that was born anew to music was born anew to love. CHAPTER XXI. On the 10th of May 1790, a very pretty sight was seen by the villagers assembled near the door of Foxholm church. The sun was bright upon the dewy grass, the air was alive with the murmur of bees and the trilling of birds, the bushy blossoming chestnuts and the foamy flowering hedgerows seemed to be crowding round to learn why the church bells were ringing so merrily, as Maynard Gilfil, his face bright with happiness, walked out of the old Gothic doorway with Tina on his arm. The little face was still pale, and there was a subdued melancholy in it, as of one who sups with friends for the last time, and has his ear open for the signal that will call him away. But the tiny hand rested with the pres sure of contented affection on Maynard's arm, and the dark eyes met his downward glance with timid answering love. There was no train of bridesmaids, only pretty Mrs. Heron leaning on the arm of a dark-haired young man hitherto unknown in Foxholm, and holding by the other hand little Ozzy, who exulted less in his new velvet cap and tunic, than in the notion that he was bridesman to Tin-Tin. Last of all came a couple whom the villagers eyed yet more eagerl than the bride and bridegroom; a fine old gentleman, who looked round with keen glances that cowed the conscious scapegraces among them, and a stately lady in blue-and-white silk robes, who must surely be like Queen Charlotte. 66 Well, that theer's whut I coall a pictur," said old "Mester" Ford, a true Staffordshire patriarch, who leaned on a stick and held his head very much on one side, with the air of a man who had little hope of the present generation, but would at all events give it the benefit of his criticism. "Th' yoong men now-adeys the'r poor squashy things-the' looke well anoof, but the' woon't wear, the' woon't wear. Theer's ne'er un 'll carry his 'ears like that Sir Cris'fer Chuvrell." "'Ull bet yer two pots," said another of the seniors, as that yoongster a-walkin' wi' th' parson's wife 'll be Sir Cris'fer's son-he fevours him." "Nay, yae'll bet that wi' as big a fule as yersen; hae's noo son at oall. As I oonderstan', hae's the nevey as is t'heir th' esteate. The coochman as puts opp at th' White Hoss tellt me as theer war another nevey, a dell finer chap t' looke at nor this un, as died in a fit oall on a soodon, an' soo this here yoong un's got upo' th' perch istid." At the church gate Mr. Bates was standing in a new suit, ready to speak words of good omen as the bride and bridegroom approached. He had come all the way from Cheverel Manor on purpose to see Miss Tina happy once more, and would have been in a state of unmixed joy but for the inferiority of the wedding nosegays to what he could have furnished from the garden at the Manor. "God A'maighty bless ye both, an' send ye long laife an' happiness," were the good gardener's rather tremulous words. "Thank you, uncle Bates; always remember Tina," said the sweet low voice, which fell on Mr. Bates's ear for the last time. The wedding journey was to be a circuitous route to Shepperton, where Mr. Gilfil had been for several months inducted as vicar. This small living had been given him through the interest of an old friend who had some claim on the gratitude of the Oldinport family; and it was a satis faction both to Maynard and Sir Christopher that a home to which he might take Caterina had thus readily presented itself at a distance from Cheverel Manor. For it had never yet been thought safe that she should revisit the scene of her sufferings, her health continuing too delicate to encourage the slightest risk of painful excitement. In a year or two, perhaps, by the time old Mr. Crichly, the rector of Cumbermoor, should have left a world of gout, and when Caterina would very likely be a happy mother, Maynard might safely take up his abode at Cumbermoor, and Tina would feel nothing but content at seeing a new "little black-eyed monkey" running up and down the gallery and gardens of the Manor. A mother dreads no memories-those shadows have all melted away in the dawn of baby's smile. In these hopes, and in the enjoyment of Tina's nestling affection, Mr. Gilfil tasted a few months of perfect happiness. She had come to lean entirely on his love, and to find life sweet for his sake. Her continual languor and want of active interest was a natural consequence of bodily feebleness, and the prospect of her becoming a mother was a new ground for hoping the best. But the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died. Tina died, and Maynard Gilfil's love went with her into deep silence for evermore. EPILOGUE. This was Mr. Gilfil's love-story, which lay far back from the time when he sat, worn and grey by his lonely fireside in Shepperton Vicarage. Rich brown locks, passionate love, and deep early sorrow, strangely different as they seem from the scanty white hairs, the apathetic content, and the unexpectant acquiescence of old age, are but part of the same life's journey; as the bright Italian plains, with the sweet Addio of their beckoning maidens, are part of the same day's travel that brings us to the other side of the mountain, between the sombre rocky walls and among the guttural voices of the Valais. To those who were familiar only with the grey-haired Vicar, jogging leisurely along on his old chestnut cob, it would perhaps have been hard to believe that he had ever been the Maynard Gilfil who, with a heart full of passion and tenderness, had urged his black Kitty to her swiftest gallop on the way to Callam, or that the old gentleman of caustic tongue, and bucolic tastes, and sparing habits, had known all the deep secrets of devoted love, had struggled through its days and nights of anguish, and trembled under its unspeakable joys. And indeed the Mr. Gilfil of those late Shepperton days had more of the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint of in the open-eyed loving Maynard. But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their youug life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty, and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered. And so the dear old Vicar, though he had something of the knotted whimsical character of the poor lopped oak, had yet been sketched out by nature as a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest, and in the grey-haired man who filled his pocket with sugarplums for the little children, whose most biting words were directed against the evil-doing of the rich man, and who, with all his social pipes and slipshod talk, never sank below the highest level of his parishioners' respect, there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its lifecurrent in a first and only love-the love of Tina. AMERICAN EXPLORATIONS.-CHINA AND JAPAN. We know not how it is, but few modern books of voyage appear to us to possess that richness, raciness, and variety, which were so characteristic in the narratives of the early navigators. We cannot admit that this decay of interest is mainly to be attributed to the increase of our years, which are many, or to a vitiated taste endangered by long indulgence in highly-spiced literary viands. We do not of course mean to assert that we can now devour a book with the terrible avidity of a youngster, dream of it all night, and awake on the morrow with undiminished appetite for the banquet. That stage has long gone by, and we are glad of it; for as our idiosyncrasy inclines us to the reperusal of especial favourites, we could not by this time have got beyond "Jack the Giantkiller," "Sanford and Merton," the "Fool of Quality," the "Arabian Nights," and the "" Pilgrim's Progress,"-books which, for a long period, were our prime and almost exclusive favourites. But even now such works as the "Voyages of Cook," or the "History of the Buccaneers," have to us an inexpressible charm. We never weary of the descriptions of the Eden isle of Otaheite, with its bread-fruit and its palms-of New Holland, with its wondrous fauna, first disclosed to the European eye-or of the wild adventures of the reckless band who plundered the Spanish galleons, and My Last Cruise; or, Where we went, and What we saw. By A. W. HABERSHAN, Lieut. U. S. Navy. London: Trübner & Co. 1857. overawed the garrisons of Panama. the prevalent jargon; hence they But when we turn to modern books write like dissectors, and, instead of of voyage, we find them for the most giving us books of vivid travel, put part dull, frigid, and overloaded with forth polyglot manuals hich can circumstantial detail. They want profit none. Even the more sensible, picturesqueness, they want poetry, who despise the affectation of appearand they are intolerably scientific. ing more versed in science than they In them we are constantly aggra- actually are, feel a kind of awe for vated by dreary calculations about the learned bodies who infallibly the dip of the needle, magnetic-poles, will pronounce judgment on their barometrical pressure, and other researches, and refrain studiously topics of the sort, which possibly might interest a small minority of the members of a Royal Society, but which, on men in general, have merely the effect of forcing the jaws to expand for the utterance of a protracted yawn. Let the very grandest from an expression of feeling or ethusiasm, which they rightly consider to be a style extremely distasteful to the ologists. So they confine themselves to meteorological observations, jottings of soundings, memoranda of the quantity of coal consumed volcano in the world be belching by their engines, et cetera, which reforth its antarctic fires at an un- sults in their narratives possessing, in known elevation, the accomplished the eyes of the general public, little navigator does not try to give a pic- more interest than would be felt in the ture of that sublime spectacle by recorded voyages of the captain of a word painting, but bestows all his steamer, plying regularly twice in the energy upon a description of the week between the ports of Rotterdam strata and the scoriæ, until the and London. reader feels as if he had eaten for dessert half-a-dozen pippins, grown on the shores of the Dead Sea. Beasts, birds, fishes, molluscs, trees, shrubs, flowers, and lichens, are not sketched as they appear to the outward eye, but are catalogued in preposterous Latin, which conveys as vivid an idea of their aspect, as if the narrator had taken the pains to transcribe a few pages of "Ainsworth's Dictionary." In short, the curse of the age-pedantry, and an af fectation of superior knowledge-has lighted even on our navigators, a class of men whom we might reasonably have expected to be free from such a baneful influence. Yes were it our last word-we should protest against the egregious foppery of science, which tends so strongly towards symbolism, and cold unidea'd nomenclature! Botany, and chemistry, and geology, and mineralogy, and zoology, and ichthyology, with twenty, fifty, nay, an hundred other ologies at their back, are rapidly corrupting our language, barbarising us in expression, and annihilating descriptive power. Those who in reality know nothing of these sciences, or, at best, only possess a smattering of them, think it their duty to accommodate themselves to We do not expect, and we do not wish, to receive from our explorers or navigators fine writing, as the term is generally understood. We do not want them to moralise, or wax maudlin, or intersperse their narrative with pathetic and philanthropic reflections. We want them to tell us what they saw and what they heard, not with pre-Raphaelite minuteness, but even as these things are impressed on their memories-for the memory of man is, for all purposes of reproduction, a thousand times superior to note books and journals, which invariably contain superfluities of no actual interest, and terribly wearisome when repeated. We want them to write freshly, freely, and forcibly, conveying to us readers, as closely as may be, the sensations which they experienced; for which purpose, and as a guide in composition, we earnestly recommend all future explorers to study the works of the late Thomas Cringle. An attentive perusal of these will at once reveal the enormous difference between scientific symbolism and masterly delineation of nature-between diagram and landscape-between the catalogue and the subjects of exhibition. It is absurd to suppose that the charm of novelty is gone, because we are better acquainted, through books, than we were fifty years ago, with the aspect of antipodean regions, and the manners of their inhabitants. Nature never palls. We, whose des tiny it is to tarry at home rather than wander over the face of the habitable globe, feel and acknowledge the truth of that axiom. A visit, however protracted, to the beautiful lakes of England, or to Scotland's more romantic Highland scenery, so so far from satiating or fatiguing, inspires us with a longing to return. Still in our dreams we see the placid sheet of Windermere, or hear the cataracts calling to one another as they thunder down the gorges of Cruachan. And what lies utterly beyond our ken, belongs to the realm of fancy. The polar seas, with their awful icebergs and floes, dimly descried amidst the darkness, or lighted up by the shimmering of the crimson aurora-the dense American forest closing its colossal growth over the ruins of an ancient city, founded, it may be, and peopled, when Britain was a thicket and a swamp-the wide open prairie, dotted over with countless buffalo, herds of the Sun, more noble than those which tempted the famished Ithacans to their ruinthe Indian jungle, wherein the tiger prowls, and the serpent sleeps and swells-the grand peaks of the Himmalayas, which seem to pierce the azure, highest pinnacles of the visible creation of God the isles of the Pacific, oases of the ocean desert, with their feathered tufts of palms, deep lagoons, and coral reefs, where the pelicans have their home,-all these we must be and are content to see through the eyes of others, provided they use their own natural vision, and dispense with the abomination of scientific spectacles! Think of this, ye explorers, navigators, travellers, pioneers, or by whatever other name you may be called-think of this! and, for the future, instead of cramping your intellects by compiling dreary papers, more sickening than statistics, for the exclusive gratification of fogydom, tell us what you saw and what you did, where you went and how you felt, in language which men can appreciate, and children understand — and, whereas at present you are but ranked as heavers of heavy lumber, we guarantee you quadrupled sales for your works, augmented reputation, and speedy promotion, besides the chance of posthumous renown. Mr. Now here is an American-stand forth, Lieutenant Habersham of the United States navy!-who may serve as a pattern to most of you. He is thoroughly national, a quality which we always admire, even though, as in this instance, it assumes the shape of a certain prejudice against the British people. And why not? Love will not be coerced, and liking is as free as air. No nation, we say it deliberately, is more obstinate in prejudice than the English. They have an inveterate babit of measur ing everything by their own standard and despising or contemning all that does not tally with it; hence they are not universal favourites, even among the nations with which they have the closest intercourse. Habersham, so far as we can see, has formed his impressions of the English character upon very slight grounds, and without much opportunity of observation; but in that he is by no means singular. We have known sturdy beef-eating and beer-consuming Britons who considered it their duty to hate the French, although they never had set eyes upon a living specimen of humanity from the Gallic coast. Others, with a similarly limited stock of information, consign the Russians to an extremely hot locality, as a race of nasty beasts, who subsist principally upon whaleblubber and train-oil. Others regard our beloved brother Jonathan as a sanguinary savage, and swindler, who can find no relish in a mintjulep unless be has previously gouged or Bowie-knifed a foeman, or imposed upon a friend in a bargain of spiceries, by passing off as genuine a parcel of wooden nutmegs. Even within the boundaries of our own happy island prejudice is Sturdy John Bull has his sneer for supple Sandy, while Sandy repays the gibe by denouncing the purseproud bearing and gluttonous propensities of the pock-pudding. Nay, does it not often happen that we rife. |