thus still have the same fortune and a better position-all at once, too, without waiting for dead men's shoes. How that would gall Bertrand! And what glory to domineer over Mrs M'Killop! what an extinguisher this would be for her insolence, her affected superiority, her nonsensical pedigree! Lady Cameron of Aberlorna would put Mrs M'Killop of Tolmie-Donnochie in her place, and keep her there. Then the county neighbours who had ignored them ;-what bliss to snub them all round as the great lady of the district! She would turn the tables on them with a vengeance; and Mr Tainsh's brutality to her, that would not be forgotten. Tainsh should either be summarily dismissed from his factorship, or retained for purposes of persecution. It was a glorious vista. She rubbed her hands with delight as she contemplated it, and reflected on her marvellous escape, and how two days ago she might have thrown herself to the dogs, and espoused a Horneyhoff. Again and again she expressed the devoutest gratitude to Heaven. There were minor difficulties to encounter, of course. Her father might be troublesome; he was set on the marriage with Bertrand, whom she was to jilt,-ha! ha!—but Sir Roland must manage all that. Under the shelter of his name and position, it mattered little to her what her relations thought, or said, or did. Sir Roland would make the details all right; and with such thoughts she tripped out joyously to meet him; and never with a brighter mien, or half so light a heart, had she gone forth to meet her gallant young lover in the summer woods. "Ah, that deceit should steal such gentle shapes, She arrived first at the rendezvous, and had time to pose herself and study an effective overture before Sir Roland made his appear ance. The role she should adopt had been a subject of some doubt to her. She had hesitated whether to play Beggar-maid to his Cophetua, or the coy and difficult nymph requiring solicitation and time for thought. But the latter was too hazardous; the time was so short that her art must be no longer than was absolutely necessary; and she decided for a modified reading of the "Beggar - maid." This resolution had scarcely been taken, when the sound of approaching steps warned her to fall into a fit of deep abstraction, from which she did not awake till the fitting moment, when Sir Roland was, so to speak, within range. Then she looked up with a start, rose quivering, went forward to meet him, with two or three steps of impassioned energy, gave him one long, thrilling glance, and fell upon his bosom. "Mine, Eila? mine?" cried the old reprobate. "It is your generosity, and not your love-it cannot be your love that has prompted you to this," she murmured. "It is my fervent love, my darling-I swear to it," cried Sir Roland. "No, no, it is your chivalry that speaks," moaned the Beggar-maid. "It is my love, which I glory in," shouted King Cophetua. "I will go on my knees to you, and swear it" (he didn't, though), "and beg for a little in return." "Ah! what heart could refuse love to such noble generosity?" "Do not talk of generosity; tell me that you believe in my love; tell me that you return it a little; tell me that you accept me, and then I shall be happy." "I do, I do,-all-all!" "Then I am happy," cried Sir Roland; and nothing further of a sentimental nature occurring to him to say at the moment, he set to work and kissed his fiancée in a very business-like way, conduct ing her drooping form, with a "longdrawn-out sweetness " of slow progression, back to the seat from which she had arisen. It was a loathly sight. The interview between this wellmatched pair was a long one. The main question that of the marriage -was carried, as we have seen, nem. con.; but when it got into committee, there was a good deal of debate and difficulty in adjusting some of the details. A businesslike spirit being displayed on both sides, however, and an honest desire to effect a settlement, all difficulties were, at length, removed, and the session closed with the sentimental formalities which had marked its opening. Let us leave the romantic lovers for a little to themselves. AMERICAN THE lighter literature of America has hitherto confined itself within a very narrow sphere. Its nationality has been only the nationality of a limited circle-it has had nothing in it of the wider air of a great continent. The opinion of a village, the habits of a town, have been the most we have been able to learn that was novel or characteristic. Its tone, in short, has been local and not national. Except in the works of Mrs Stowe-or, to speak more to the letter, in her first work-and in those of Mr Hawthorne, there has been nothing like the beginning of a new literature. The books have been middle-class books, domestic in tone and narrow in treatment, and evidently written for the young people, who alone in a busy community have time to read. Women, of course, are the great novel-readers everywhere, and a great majority of such books must at all times take their tone from the mild tastes and home interests of the gentle reader, whose leisure permits her to go contentedly through hundreds of pages of unexciting dialogue. We have earned from these works that young BOOKS. ladies have a different code of manners in New York or Boston from that which is current in London. We have acquired wonderful scraps of information about the toilette and expenses of an American beauty, and the easy manner in which she treats her lovers; and on the other hand, we know how they make cakes in a New England farm-steading, and how well literature and the fine arts may thrive in conjunction with washing and scrubbing. This sort of thing is amusing enough, and even those who are not acquainted with the society it portrays may generally make out with tolerable distinctness which part of it is true to fact, and which is coloured by the hopes and theories of an enthusiastic fancy. But in all this there is nothing new, nothing of the energy of youthful forces, and not much beyond mere imitation of the English model upon which the school has been formed. Of late years, however, this flatness and dead level have begun to break up, and the impulse of new life makes itself visible to us in the hands of two very different classes. The one * which is the most healthy and vigorous is that which comes from the lawless outskirts of the world, from California and the wilds, and is represented to the English reader chiefly by the little volume called 'The Luck of Roaring Camp' a book which has been visible about the railway bookstalls for some time past, with a revolting green-and-yellow picture of a furious virago of the lowest class on its boards-by way, apparently, of keeping it out of the hands of readers with any regard for their character. The other class is of a very different type, and is also to be found about the bookstalls in very slim and cheap, and apparently very popular, little volumes. It is feminine in tone, but so far different from the merely domestic ideal as to open up to us a new school of thought and feeling, such as we have but few specimens of in England. This class of books may be represented by the tiny production called 'Gates Ajar.' Here are two ways newly opened up into the mind of the great continent, which are worthy a little consideration. They represent the world which is beneath conventionalities, beyond the sway of any thing but the roughest and widest principles of life, on the one hand, and the world which is making an effort to break through the banal laws of flat, respectable, middle-class existence on the other. The first is rude and wild, and though sufficiently pure in tone, yet dealing with many questions and introducing many personages in a calm historical fashion, without praise or blame, which are not often mentioned in the domestic circle; the other is apt to be fantastic in its spiritual yearnings, and will not please the orthodox. The one is all fact, rough, terrible, unusual, sometimes touch ing, sometimes revolting; the other is all theory, aspiration, fancy. Both are tentative efforts towards something better-chaotic heavings of untrained intellect, and power which has not quite learned to know itself and its strength. But on that very account they are full of interest; their irregularity and imperfections giving evidence of the working of new life. America, as it is in New York drawing-rooms, is something considerably more artificial, conventional, and untrue, than even life in London,-we speak, let us premise, not from personal knowledge, but from the pictures in American books; the New England villages are very much better and more original, yet they are also limited by all the pettiness of a fully established and unchanging life. But very different is the wild existence among the diggings, the chaotic beginning of new empires. In California the Pilgrim Fathers are not the founders, neither are old laws of an old world the foundation upon which the new state is to be built. It is founded rather upon conquest, not of old civilisation, but of older nature, and represents to us more nearly what primitive settlements must have been, how Nimrod and Tubal-Cain may have started their new kingdoms, than any more stately impulse of colonisation. It is to be hoped that the patriarchs were more innocent in their ways than the diggers, and less skilled in evil; but in their case, as in that of this last embryo of human power, life went first in its rudest principles, and worked itself into law and shape. The shape has scarcely come yet in California, but the life is there, fierce, unruly, and untrained-abounding in evil. elements, with nothing beyond some spark of constitutional kindness for * The Luck of Roaring Camp; and other Sketches. By Bret Harte. Hotten: London. the weak and awe of the unknown to represent religion in it—but yet natural, vigorous, and new. "The Luck of Roaring Camp' is but one very brief tale out of a dozen. It is a narrative of a short life-that of a baby-in one of those curious colonies of gold-diggers. It bears every evidence of being true to the life, as a picture studied from the life might It is full of be expected to be. rude figures, without a pretence at civilisation even, much less refinement-men without conscience or of withered pine-boughs added sociality to the gathering. By degrees the natural levity of Roaring Camp returned. Bets were freely offered and taken regarding the result. . . . In the midst of an ex cited discussion an exclamation came from those nearest the door, and the camp stopped to listen. Above the swaying and moaning of the pines, the swift rush of the river, and the crackling of the fire, rose a sharp, querulous cry—a cry unlike anything heard before in the camp. The pines stopped moaning, the river ceased to rush, and the fire to crackle. It seemed as if nature had stopped to listen too. "The camp rose to its feet as one man. We restraint, careless in body and in mind, and rough as the rocks they work among; yet it is long since we have read anything so touching. Here in some dozen pages the whole wild, rude, unlovely life is set before us, utterly denuded of anything elevating or beautiful, unteachable, uncontrollable, and yet with a heart that can be touched, and is still capable of the very simplicity of tenderness in its uncouth way. are introduced to the camp at a moment of high excitement. A wonderful event has just happened in it. The one wretched woman in the place, an abandoned creature, for whom no one pretends to have either respect or regard, dies in giving birth to a child, and the child is received by the diggers with a wondering reverence, curiosity, and sense of proprietorship, which have the strangest effect upon them. Here is Roaring Camp as it appeared while this event was taking place : "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of them were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminals, and all were reckless. Physically they exhibited no indication of their past lives and character. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blond hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the noblest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice, and an embarrassed timid manner. The term 'rough' applied to them was a When the next step in the story comes, and the loungers are admitted to see the new-born creature, cradled in a candle-box, and placed upon the table, while its mother lies dead, and decently covered over in a corner, the scene is not less characteristic. The dead woman has little or no pity from them, but the new life is wonderful and strange, filling them with curiosity and a sentiment which they do not understand. A hat is placed for contributions for the maintenance of the baby beside its uncouth cradle, and into this all kinds of extraordinary gifts are put 66 -" a silver tobacco-box, a doubloon, a navy revolver, silver-mounted-a gold specimen, a diamond breastpin, a diamond ring (suggested by the pin, with the remark from the giver that he saw that pin, and went two diamonds better),"-all this comes pouring into the hat, while the men pass in a line staring at the infant. The first man who en tered had taken off his hat, "and in such communities good and bad actions are catching," and the whole camp thus uncovered to the child, who had been given to it, a novel responsibility and privilege. "Only one incident occurred to break the monotony of the procession. As Kentuck bent over the candle-box, halfcuriously, the child turned, and, in a spasm of pain, caught at his groping finger and held it fast for a moment. Kentuck looked foolish and embarrassed; something like a blush tried to assert itself in his weather-beaten cheek. The d-d little cuss!' he said, as he extricated his finger, with perhaps more tenderness and care than he might have been deemed capable of showing. He held that finger a little apart from its fellows as he went out and examined it curiously. The examination provoked the same original remark in regard to the child. In fact, he seemed to enjoy repeating it 'He rastled with my finger,' he remarked to Tipton, holding up the member; 'd-d they are at first ashamed,-become apparent to us. Nothing is softened in the picture-there is no sentiment-nobody is reminded of the innocence of his own cradle in words, as so many moralist-humorists would take pleasure in reminding him. The Camp is not changed at once into a nursery Bethel. But nevertheless, the whole community, in which there is not a single woman left, gets gradually absorbed in the child, and with a shamefaced submission to the soft new yoke which is thus put upon its neck, it knows not how, grows a little cleaner, a little quieter, a little kinder, with a clumsy surprise at itself which is perfectly well rendered and thoroughly natural. Stormy discussions are held over the best manand the whole camp rises fierce and ner of rearing the little orphan; "It was four o'clock before the camp unanimous to resist the suggestion sought repose. A light burnt in the of sending the child away to be cabin where the watchers sat, for Stumpy nursed. When the difficulty is did not go to bed that night. Nor did Kentuck. He drank quite freely, and solved by means of ass's milk, they related with great gusto his experience, send to Sacramento for baby-clothes invariably ending with his characteristic with the wildest liberality. "Mind," condemnation of the new-comer. It said the treasurer, as he pressed a seemed to relieve him of any unjust imputation of sentiment, and Kentuck bag of gold-dust into the expresshad the weaknesses of the nobler sex. man's hands, "the best that can be When everybody else had gone to bed, got-lace, you know, and filigree he walked down to the river and whistled work, and frills,-d-n the cost!" reflectingly. Then he walked up the gulch, The christening of the baby furpast the cabin, still whistling with demonstrative unconcern. At a large red nishes another most characteristic wood tree he paused, and retraced his steps, scene. One of the wild crew, "a and again passed the cabin. Half-way noted wag," had prepared a burlesque down to the river's bank he again paused, of the Church service, which was expected to afford unbounded amusement to the community. Two days were spent in getting up this mock ceremonial, training the choir and making ready all requisites for the fun. little cuss!' and then returned and knocked at the door. All It was opened by Stumpy. How goes it?' said Kentuck, looking past Stumpy towards the candle-box. serene, replied Stumpy; anything up?' 'Nothing. There was a pause-an embarrassing one-Stumpy still holding the door. Then Kentuck had recourse to his finger, which he held up to Stumpy'Rastled with it, the d-d little cuss!' he said, and retired." In this amusing, affecting way does the rude economy of the diggers' life, their profanity, and the touches of feeling of which "But after the procession had marched to the grove, with music and banners, and the child had been deposited before the mock altar, Stumpy stepped before It aint my style the impatient crowd. to spoil fun, boys,' said the little man, stoutly, eyeing the faces around him; but it strikes me that this thing aint |