VIVIEN ESDAILE'S SECRET; OR, LABORARE EST ORARE.

BY MARY BASKINS.

Author of "Wild Violets," "Only a Life," "Through the Fire," &c., &c.

"Remember, every soul He made

Is different has some deed to do, Some work to work. Be undismayed. Though thine be humble, do it."

A HUMBLE HEROINE.

HAVING Written the heading of my chapter, I pause. A curly, boyish head comes over my shoulder, two laughing eyes scan the words, "Humble Heroine," then a voice I know so well breaks out into the exclamation

Now, look here! don't do the Uriah Heep business; and, for pity's sake, don't write anything vulgar."

I make some sort of laughing retort, ridiculing even the imputation of my ability to do either, after which a pair of long legs find their way back to my study door, and their owner flings back a last word, and then there is silence; and by it I know that my boyish tormentor has vanished to some other part of the house, seeking "fresh fields and pastures new" for the display of his teazing proclivities.

My next proceeding is to take down a large book -one which helps to swell the number of occupants upon the third shelf of my little library-and there search for the dictionary definition of the word vulgar. I find it: "Vulgar (adverb), mean, low, common;" therefore I can unequivocally promise my readers that you shall hear of nothing of the sort in connection with my heroine or her home, unless you take the broader definition of the word "common," and apply it to the commonalty of women and their homes.

But this tormentor threw another word at me, the final one; it was

"Woman-worshipper!"

That word has cost me a fit of musing, also one of metaphysics, and even now I am not able clearly to define or separate the truthfulness of his statement from its falseness.

There is truth, inasmuch as is contained in the fact that I have "a dream of fair women, " but they are not "stiller than chiselled marble,' or fair in physical beauty only. They have not "Drunk the Libyan sun to sleep, and lit lamps which outburned Canopus." These women I could never worship, never love, for this is the highest form of worship I have yielded to, the soft, witching spell of an Enid, Eltarre, Maud, or Guinevere; and they have soothed and charmed my restless brain; but no single one of these grand intellectual creations have ever been for a single moment taken into my head. I have lingered with pensive tenderness over

unre

the dream-faces of Europe's greatest painters, an have bowed at the shrine of their rare beauty, bu no iota of affection has breathed through the coldness, so my heart has still remained sponsive. Yet, with all this, I am, to a certain ex tent, a woman-worshipper," and Tom's inuend was not without its sting. Before worshipping my requirements for its successful completion are many its object must be truly womanly, as purely as the religion she practices, and as true as the finest tem pered steel. Such a woman I will try and give you a glimpse of, and if you then think her worthy of love-consider that she has crowned her own brow with woman's brightest garlands, I shall be more than satisfied.

Vivien Esdaile. My pen lingers as I write her name, touching every letter of it as if I were putting upon paper the thing which I love the most. Before me e picture flits-this is the only word I can usefor it comes and goes like a sweet firelight vision, leaving the same half-sad, yet pensive gladness. You have known the feeling? surely every mortal has; a time when memory has brought to you a scene so precious, that God only knows how carefully you treasure every outline of it, and yet so sad that you could weep even as mothers weep over tiny garments and golden tresses, when the hopes they cherished are laid away in some quiet cemetery under a little grassy mound.

Here is the picture. A girl is reclining upon a couch as soft and "rose-lined" from the cold as is her own life. The room is a marvel of billowy laces, rare statuettes, and flowers. So beautiful is it, that if you took the hand of some city arab and led him into its precinets, you might almost induce him to believe that he was in heaven. A harp stands in one recess, a piano in the other, while various etchings adorning the walls proclaim the cultivated taste of its occupant. Exquisite in their arrangement, as if she had made a personal friend of each, and loved and cared for them accordingly, were to be found ranged upon the hanging shelves the works of Bardour, with his passionate apostrophe to freedom, Dunbar, Douglas, Scott, Ayton, Buchanan, and Ramsay, with their Scotch satire and inimitable pathos; while in covers from which the freshness is already worn lie the thoughts which once burned in the hearts of Spenser, Southwell, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Herbert, Coleridge, Longfellow, Holmes, the Brownings, with a long list of others, around whose names the nations have entwined an untarnishable garland of admiring love; last, but not least, Tennyson, with his subtle witcheries of song, intoxicating alike heart and brain with an indescribable yet delicious madness.

The owner of these had culled their sweetest thoughts, revelled in their most glorious imagery, knelt with reverential awe at the shrine of their greatness and their genius, felt to the full the power of hero-worship, and yet had fallen short of living. She knew the grand impassioned language teaching the uses of life, such as are found in the