cussing with her a matter of business, in which she showed her usual clear-headedness and precision, when my attention was arrested by the child and his pony Scouring over the park in our vicinity, I need not say at poor Mouse's utmost speed. Lady Olivia stopped in her walk and drew herself up as was her wont. 'I wish you to know my son,' she said in her cold measured voice; and the clear imperious tones calling 'Gilbert! Gilbert!' cut through the summer air to where he was galloping, intent only on Mouse and his performances.

The child seemed pleased to be taken notice of, and turned quickly in our direction. As he approached us without checking speed, a fallen tree of no great girth lay in his course, and with a pardonable display of horsemanship he put his pony straight at the obstacle. I can see him now, sitting resolutely back on his little saddle, his golden curls floating behind him, and his smooth brow bent, and rosy lips set fast, for the effort. Mouse rose gallantly, but predestined to failure, or perhaps a little blown with the pace, caught his fore legs in the leap, and pitching his little rider forward over his head, followed him in a very complicated and dangerous kind of fall.

'What

I was standing close to his mother, and I thought I heard her breath come quick; but as the child rose to his feet, I glanced at her face ere I went to catch the pony, and saw that it retained its usual marble composure. is the woman made of?' I thought, as I ran my arm through Mouse's rein, who no sooner found himself. on his legs again without a rider, than he took advantage of the respite to crop a mouthful of the short sweet grass.

When I came back to them the child had his hand in his mother's. He was pale, and evidently shaken, but not frightened the least bit, though there was a severe bruise reddening and smarting on his cheek-bone. With some vague remembrance of his nursery days, he looked up in

VOL. LXIII. NO. CCCLXXIII.

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Lady Olivia's face, and I heard him whisper

'It does hurt, mamma dear; kiss it and make it well!'

'Nonsense, Gilbert,' was the cold reply, 'don't be so silly; how can my kissing it do it any good?'

I saw his little face flush up and change all in a minute; I think I remembered even then of Him who said it was not good to offend one of these little ones; but I helped the child into his saddle in silence, and was not surprised to see poor Mouse taken short by the head, and turned round to jump once, twice, over the unlucky tree, with so fierce an application of his rider's whip as I have seldom witnessed before or since.

'Gently, child,' I could not forbear saying as I took hold of the pony's bridle and caressed it after the second performance; 'do not punish your poor pony, it was more your fault than his. Another time do not ride so fast at an upright leap.'

The boy stared at me without replying, then turned and galloped away; whilst Lady Olivia and I continued our walk and our conversation without again reverting to the accident.

But when the luncheon-bell rang, and her ladyship had gone into the house, I met Gilbert on his way from the stables. He came up to me very shyly, and put his little hand timidly in mine.

'I like you,' he said, because you were sorry for poor Mouse when I beat him.' Then looking down and getting very red, he added, 'I like people who are sorry; I would like you very much if you would let me.'

Need I say that henceforth we were fast friends? I will not recapitulate the progress of our intimacy. How family circumstances brought me more and more into contact with Lady Olivia and her son. How I used to correspond with the lad at Eton, and visit him regularly in the dear old College, from the 'after-twelve' on which with three others of the fourth form he was most deservedly 'swished,' having attempted in vain

B

to get off with a seventh 'first-fault,' till the memorable evening of that 4th of June on which I went up sitter' with him to Surley Hall, and he pulled stroke in the ten-oar. How we parted with mutual regret when he went abroad for six months, and met again delighted, to read, as I have already said, for his matriculation at Oxford; a place from which I regret to say my pupil was more than once rusticated, in consequence of his attachment to divers sports and pursuits which cannot be brought to harmonize with academical regulations. But still, Orme was avowedly the most popular man in his College.' I knew one or two of the dons behind the scenes; their faces always brightened when his name was mentioned; and they were quite of my opinion, that with the least thing more application he could have taken 'honours.' As it was, I am constrained to admit that my pupil was 'plucked,' and being by that time pretty well his own master, he abandoned the University in disgust.

Nevertheless, I do not believe the ripest scholar of them all could have written a letter teeming with such classical learning, fun, and imagination, as that in which he apprised me of the unexpected failure; nor would I have exchanged for the proudest diploma of science the kindly expressions of regard and sympathy in which he couched his announcement of a defeat which he regretted far more for my sake than his own. After this I saw him of course at rarer intervals; the lives of a young man in the world and an old man out of the world are so different, that they need seldom expect to meet. full two years I had not set eyes on him, when I met him in Piccadilly on that spring day to which I have already alluded, after his walk with his cousin, Lady Gertrude, in the square. We were on opposite sides of the street, but my boy rushed across, regardless of mud and omnibuses, with all his old freshness and cordiality, to link me by the arm and turn me as of yore in his own direction instead of mine.

For

"You have nothing in the world to do,' said the butterfly to the earthworm, and I am always so busy I have not a moment to spare. Come with me as far as the top of St. James's-street, and tell me all about yourself as we go along.'

I had been busier perhaps than he thought for, but my day's work was nearly over ere his had begun, and it was refreshing to look upon his kindly handsome face and listen to the tones of his cheerful, hearty voice once more, though it seemed to me that they were a little faded and saddened to what they had been long ago. I sometimes think that the world wears the gloss off the players faster than the workers. It may be perhaps that the former are the more in earnest of the two. I know that I would fain possess the same energies now to be expended on useful purposes, which I wasted in my youth on trifles and worse than trifles; but, alas! in life, vestigia nulla retrorsum, and indeed that world of long ago was a bright and a joyous world after all.

It had not palled entirely on Gilbert yet. As we paced slowly along the pavement, every second man we met seemed to know Orme and to be glad to see him. Bright glances were shot at him from open carriages, and pretty fingers kissed in his favour from brougham windows. Truth is truth, and despite all the sneers of philosophers, it is no unpleasant lot, while it lasts, to be young, rich, well-looking, and well-received in London society. A man must either be very happy or very miserable, who can afford to treat the opinion of his fellows with contempt. Even my own old heart felt lighter after my walk with my pupil; and I wended my way towards the British Museum, where I resolved to spend the afternoon, with a firmer step than usual; the while Gilbert, with his hat very much on one side, sprang lightly up the steps at White's, and inquired according to custom of the affable functionary who presides over the postal department, whether there were any letters for Mr. Orme?'

There was one, a note that had just arrived. Gilbert smiled as he perused the laconic contents:

'Dear Gilbert,-The tickets have come for the morning concert. We will call for you at White's in an hour.-Yours as ever, G.'

'That's rather a bore,' remarked the recipient with a yawn; 'however, I promised Gertrude, and after all it's SOMETHING TO DO!'

CHAPTER IV.

" THE BEES AND THE DRONES.' How little does one half the world know how the other half lives. The streams of life, like the waters of the Rhine and the Moselle, though they flow down the same channel, fatten the same pastures, turn the same mill, and eddy over the same shoals, meet, but mingle not, and what interests are there in common between No. 1 and No. 2 of any street, square, or row in the great city? Your next-door neighbour, the man who spends his whole life separated from you by a party wall of one brick and a-half in thickness, may be a coiner, an Italian refugee, or an alchemist in search of the philosopher's stone, for aught you know to the contrary. You lay your head on your pillow within eighteen inches of his, and whilst the rosy dreams from which it is such a mockery to awake, are gilding your morning sleep, he may be lying racked with bodily pain, or breaking his heart with mental torture. What care you? So as he does not poke his fire too loudly, you are unconscious of his existence. For forty years you pay the same water-rate, and consume an equal number of cubic feet of gas, but you never exchange a syllable, probably never set eyes on each other from year's end to year's end, till at last the mutes are standing at the door, the mourning coaches are drawn up decently next the pavement, and one of you removes to another and a narrower house 'over the

way suppose, with the variety of a

little more bloodshed and a little

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more flirtation, things went on in Babylon the Great much as they do in the London of to-day. The wine-cup bubbled again and again usque ad nauseam, for the high and the low gasped in vain for a mouthful of pure cold water. The Assyrian in purple wallowed in profusion till he longed for a sensa tion, even though it were a sting of pain; while the Assyrian in rags starved and drooped at his gates, faint and hungry, and weary of his life. It was the bees whose sweltering labour constructed those hanging gardens, the fame of which reached the uttermost ends of the known earth, but it was the drones who walked delicately along their terraces, and languished in their perfumed bowers, and caught the diamond drops from their plashing fountains, gushing, and glittering, and hurling themselves upwards against the scorching sky.

So the bees and the drones jostle each other to-day in the crowded thoroughfares of London, and some take the rough, and some the smooth, and they have nothing in common, and know each other not.

A section of the bees are clustering very busily in a musical portion of the hive. There is a morning concert this afternoon, and the professionals are all in tune and time, preparing for those grand effects and combinations which delight the dilettante, and of which less instructed listeners deem it incumbent on them to say-' magnificent! very fine!' They are assembling even now in a little room off the grand hall, which is already half filled with an impatient audience, reduced to the sad necessity of criticising each other's dresses, and dirtying their gloves with the programme as they read it over and over again. The drones are always employed in doing nothing, and always very tired_of that laborious occupation. The bees seem to enjoy their half hour's respite, and to have a good deal of fun and cordiality amongst themselves.

The male portion are chiefly remarkable for the extreme accuracy of their toilettes, and the purity of

their close-fitting white kid gloves, which, with black evening coats and continuations, seem somewhat out of place at three o'clock in the day. They are either men of extremely martial appearance, running considerably to mustachio, whisker, and in some cases closecut beard, or else they affect an open simplicity of countenance amounting to vacuity, enhanced by bare throats and long hair trained studiously off the temples, and flowing down the nape of the neck, than which, in my humble opinion, no fashion is more unbe coming to the face of a male adult.

You would make some strange mistakes, though, if you judged of their tones by their appearance. The large, well-built fellow, with the legs and chest of a Hercules, is the tenor, and if you only heard that soft silvery voice of his quivering and thrilling on the sands by moonlight, you would fancy such seductive notes could proceed from nothing less feminine than a mermaid, instead of a stout soldier-like convivialist, who would incontinently offer you a cigar, and take you home with him to a Perigord pie and a cool bottle of claret.

The bass, again, whose diapason shall make the very window-glasses shake before sunset, is a pale, weary-looking man, whom at first sight you would call weakly, if not an invalid. His tailor alone knows that he requires a larger girth round the chest than most Life-guardsmen, and indeed the organ that can evolve such music as that deep thunder-roll, must be endowed with valves and material of no ordinary strength and dimensions. He has a wife and large family to be provided for out of the low notes of that instrument, and already an unpleasant suspicion dawns upon him that it will not last for ever. Great was the consternation in his home at Brompton when he caught cold last winter, and the cough has not left him yet, even in the fine spring weather. If he was to spit blood, the children would soon be hungry, and the poor mother at her wit's end.

The lady singers are in low evening dresses, and most of them wear their hair à l'Imperatrice. They are whispering and talking to each other with that busy goodhumoured cordiality which the sex is prone to affect in public places, and those who have not brought bouquets with them are vehemently admiring the flowers of those who have. One sits a little apart from the rest; she is attired very simply in mourning, and carries a half-blown rose in her bosom. As she droops her head over the score in her hand, the tenor, who has something of a painter's taste, thinks she would make a pretty picture, with her white shoulders relieved by her black dress, and the nut-brown hair shading and hiding her face, while a sunbeam slanting through the window, brings out a golden tinge on the glossy head. He is a soft-hearted, good-natured man, this tenor, and cherishes a romantic and self-denying adoration for many ladies, both in and out of the profession, and for this one especially, the more so that there is a quiet reserve in her manner by which he is abashed not a little, and that after he has said 'good morning,' he generally falters, puts his hands in his pockets, and becomes mute.

There is safety, however, in numbers, and his own good looks are no bad protection to a man in his dealings with the enemy. A joli garçon has generally more than one string to that bow of which the cord sometimes breaks with so sharp a twang, and a spice of admiration for himself is no bad antidote to too violent an infatuation about another. If you want a devoted lover, ladies, take an old man's advice, and choose an ugly one. He is vain, too, but his vanity is more easily managed than the other's; he is more impassioned, more constant, more submissive, and if you do break his heart, your own remorse will be a thought less keen when you are adding up the sum total of your victims. Bar the pleasure of taking him away from somebody else, and after the first week he makes

just as good a slave as a second Apollo would, and, say what you will, you know that you do not appreciate beauty as much as we do. You know that you are not so gentle, not so soft-hearted, nay, not half so refined, as the so-called sterner sex. When do you see us take a repulsive being to our bosom, and cherish it there, unless it be for some extraneous object? She may be an heiress, or an authoress, or a good housewife, and there is a reason for it. But you! Beauty and the Beast is so every-day an occurrence, I can scarce believe the story to be a fable. You go to the altar unhesitatingly with some monster whom his fellow men cannot look upon without loathing. You not only marry him, I could forgive you that, but you love, and coax, and prize the wretch, and make him happy ever afterwards. I sometimes think this strange predilection originates in the instinctive jealousy and love of appropriation so remarkable in the sex. Beauty thinks nobody else will care to interfere with Bruin, and it is pleasant to have even a beast all to herself; but old Flippant, for whose lengthened experience in such matters I have the profoundest respect, takes a wider view of the subject, and refers all such incongruities to the general principle of contradiction, and the impossibility of arguing from probability, expediency, or any other rational data, as to what a woman under any given circumstances will, or will not do, or let alone, or otherwise.

The singer in mourning seems very busy with her score, and the admiring tenor has not yet been able to obtain a glimpse of her face, still shaded by her thick hair worn deep and low over her temples, a fashion which she is probably well aware is exceedingly becoming to a wide fair forehead and a pair of arched brows, such as give softness and feminine dignity to a woman's face. His attention, however, is almost entirely taken up by two very smart and lively ladies, who seem to despise the idea of reserving their vocal powers for a

19

musical triumph, but are expending a liberal amount of breath and volume in lively conversation with each other, with the tenor, with the leader of the band, with any of the gentlemen who are disposed to bandy good-humoured jokes and lively repartee.

The bass alone sits apart from the rest. He looks very pale and weary, leaning his head upon his hands, and coughs more than once. There is a hard-working, careworn woman at Brompton, now clearing away the remnants of the children's dinner, whose heart would ache to hear that cough, who would bless the lady in mourning for looking up as she does from her task, and crossing the room so quietly, and laying her hand with such gentle sympathy on the sufferer's shoulder.

"You are worse to-day,' she says, in a low tone of peculiar sweetness; 'I did not forget you, and I have brought the lozenges, but I am sorry you require them.'

He looks up quickly, and grasps her cordially by the hand.

'God bless you,' he says, in his deep, full voice; 'you never forget any one but yourself. My little girls call you the good angel, and indeed, I think you are an angel!'

She shakes her head, and smiles. Such a smile as brightens only a countenance where they are very rare, as decks it with a wild, painful, melancholy beauty, and leaves a sadder and more hopeless expression when it fades.

She makes no other reply, and buries herself again in her score, while the bass shakes his honest head with a puzzled air, half pitiful, half provoked.

'I wish I could make her out,' he thinks, as he dwells on her kindliness, her reserve, her abstraction, her avoidance of intimacies, and backwardness in showing friendship, save to those who are in sickness or otherwise distressed. 'I suppose she isn't happy, that's the truth. She has never got over it, and she's thinking of him still.'

They have often talked about her in the little parlour at Brompton; and this is the verdict to which, after a masterly summing up from