the former, husband and wife invariably arrive.

Poor honest bass! you have lived for five-and-forty years in this specious world, twenty of which you have spent in a happy reciprocity of confidence, with the frankest and most affectionate of wives. You think you can read a woman's heart. Bless you! you know no more of it than a child!

And now the doors are opened. The professionals move from their retiring-room to take their seats in the body of the hall. The leader of the band assumes his bâton with a martial air, and the concert begins. The seats are nearly all full. Very few tickets have been given gratis. There is a dense crowd about the doors; and notwithstanding the many rival attractions of a summer's afternoon in the metropolis, there is every reason to believe that it will pay.

Meantime a barouche is waiting three doors lower than the steps of White's, Lady Olivia's prudence and propriety forbidding her to draw up exactly opposite the wellfilled window of that exclusive club, from which critical and unprejudiced eyes would be sure to pass in review herself, her niece, her bonnet, her gloves, her parasol, nay, the very liveries of her whitestockinged servants, not to mention the heavily-plated harness and stately appearance of her bay carriage-horses champing and stamping in the sun, concluding in all probability with a sweeping condemnation of the whole. So she waits for Gilbert three doors off, and the frown darkens ominously on her stern forehead as the minutes pass and her son does not appear.

Very odd of Gilbert,' says Lady Olivia in her harshest tone; 'he knows how I hate waiting, and does it on purpose, I believe.'

Men are always unpunctual,' answers Lady Gertrude, looking very smiling and rayonnante in another killing little bonnet. Is it not so, Mr. Gordon?'

Mr. Gordon answers not much to the purpose; he is thinking of something else. He is a student

of human nature, this gentleman, during his play-hours, and takes a good deal of relaxation out of Lady Gertrude and her inexplicable ways. He is speculating now intensely on why she should have secured him so long ago for the back seat of the barouche, and why she should have been so fidgety all the way along Piccadilly, and why she was so good-humoured now during the painful process of waiting for Gilbert; above all, why there should be to-day, of all days, a scarce perceptible tone of softness in the few observations she makes to himself, and a shade as of pity and compunction cast over that usually thoughtless and buoyant nature. Topics of reflection, Mr. Gordon, which may well make you ponder, and which, with all your keen-sightedness, you will find it no easy task to understand.

Lady Olivia will wait no longer; regardless of a suppliant look from her niece, she is in the act of giving orders to drive on, when the truant appears with his mouth full of chicken-sandwich, and in his usual good-humoured bantering way carries the war at once into the enemy's country by accusing them of keeping him waiting.

'I have a bouquet for each of you, too,' he says, handing them with a good deal of mock dignity to the ladies, and a cauliflower coming later from Covent-garden for John, who is a practical man.'

The gentleman alluded to looks practical enough as he turns a sharp keen eye upon the cousins. His exterior presents a marked contrast to that of his friend. Power is the prevailing characteristic of John Gordon's physiognomy and figure. The bold well-cut features, the clear sallow complexion, the deepset glittering eye, and close raven hair, are types of an iron physique and an iron will. His tones are short, sharp, and imperious; they seem to be propelled, so to speak, from the thin lips, that close again as with a steel spring when they have gone forth. That mouth belongs to a man from whom you could never coax anything by persuasion, or wrest it from him by

force. His very dress, plain to simplicity and unpretending though it be, has a character and a peculiarity of its own; whilst the muscular figure combines in a rare degree great physical power with activity and insensibility to fatigue.

No woman ever yet thought John Gordon good-looking, at least none could ever be brought to say so. Quiet and unassuming as he was, they always affirmed that they were 'a little afraid of him; and perhaps they like being frightened, for they were always ready enough to sit by him, or dance with him again. I do not know whether Lady Gertrude admired his face, but she must have looked at it pretty often; and even now, though she buries her head in her cousin's bouquet, her eyes pass over it once, with a strange, half-angry, halfpleading glance that does not escape him, as, indeed, nothing does, but that he cannot for the life of him fathom or understand. The next instant, however, she is talking so gaily and playfully, that even Lady Olivia thaws to the influence of the girl's merry sunshiny manner; whilst Gilbert sits back at his ease amongst the cushions, submitting to be amused with the good-humoured grand-seigneur indolence habitual to him, and that is not without its attractions to his companions of either sex.

So they reach the doors of the building where the concert is going on, and there is a vast deal of fuss and ceremony and parade about their alighting, and a policeman makes way for them authoritatively, and they take the seats provided for them with no small noise and bustle, to the just indignation of the audience, all of whom do the same thing constantly themselves, but who think it right now to betray marked disapproval, for our goodlooking friend the tenor is pouring forth a strain of clear continuous melody, sweet and luscious, like some rich liquid of which it were shame and pity to lose the smallest drop. 'Bravo!' says Gilbert with honest enthusiasm at the conclusion of the piece; and 'Bravo!' echoes

Lady Gertrude in more subdued tones, looking nevertheless sidelong at John Gordon's face to see whether

he too approves. Nothing less than absolute perfection satisfies the latter; and his applause is less demonstrative than that of his companions. Lady Olivia is peering about through her glasses to see who is there; and a pause in the performances enables the wellpleased spectators to relax their attention and fall to conversing amongst themselves.

'I hate fine music,' observes Gilbert, whose nervous system, truth to tell, is strung to a far higher pitch than he would have his friends believe, and who is ashamed, as well he may be, that he can turn pale and shiver for so unreal a cause as a thrilling stream of melody; in fact, all music bores me rather than otherwise, though it's not quite so bad as dancing.'

'Then why did you come?' asks Lady Gertrude, very justly accepting this last shaft of her indolent cousin as aimed especially at herself.

'Because you ordered me,' was the reply, with one of Gilbert's sweetest smiles; and no woman's face that ever I saw had a softer, kindlier smile than his. 'Because you ordered me; and I've been here half-an-hour already, without wishing yet that I hadn't obeyed.'

The girl put the bouquet he had given her to her face, and looked full at him over the flowers with her bright speaking eyes.

"Then you like to do as I bid you,' she said, very low, and with a slight tremor in her voice, not quite in keeping with the triumphant expression of her glance.

Gilbert thought he had never seen her look so pretty. Something tenderer than admiration seemed to shoot through him as he eyed the proud young beauty, so refined, so delicate, so well-dressed, and so high-born. high-born. John Gordon's back was turned to the cousins, and he appeared intensely occupied with the stir caused by the re-entrance of the performers. As Gilbert lounged forward to read the programme, his head drooped nearer

and nearer his companion's pretty hand, in its neat, well-fitting glove, perhaps his lip would have touched it even there, I hardly know, but his mother's measured tones broke in unexpectedly as she nudged the younger lady rudely with her elbow, and called her attention to some of the notabilities amongst the audience.

"There's Mrs. Mangonel, Gertrude, did you bow to her? and her two daughters, and the Dowager Lady Visigoth.'

'More like Boadicea than ever, and with nearly as little on her shoulders,' whispered Lady Gertrude mischievously to her cousin ; but Gilbert answered not, for a low sweet voice at that moment stole upon his senses, and he was feeling keenly, nay, painfully, in his inner being that music did not bore him in the least.

It was a simple song enough, something about an angel and a child, of which the words and the poetical conception were below contempt, but they were wedded to a fanciful and melodious strain, an air that comprised but few notes, and yet into which you could not but feel the composer had thrown his whole art; an air that seemed less the elaborate conception of the brain than the irrepressible expression of an engrossing sensation in which suffering predominated. Such an air as recalls to us, we know not why, that sunset evening or that starry night; pshaw! that time of delicious folly which most of us have known, and to which the roughest and the harshest look back with strange wild longing

and regret; what is this secret charm of music, that it seems to speak to all alike? Why should it thus probe us to the quick? and bring the past back so cruelly in its hopelessness, only because it is the past? Oh! for the fresh glad heart; oh! for the days gone by;

and

Oh! for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still.

The lady in mourning sang as if she felt it; after the first bar she seemed to forget her audience, and to lose herself completely in the strain. Gilbert, too, never took his eyes off the singer's face, and when she finished and there arose a burst of applause from all the others, something like a tear stole down his cheek. Of course he began to talk vehemently to his companions, but Lady Gertrude thought him less pleasant than usual, and all seemed relieved

when the concert was over and it was time to go. The gentlemen put the ladies into the carriage, and walked arm-in-arm back to St. James's-street, preserving for full five minutes a dead silence. the end of that period Gilbert made the following remarkable observation :

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'That's a pretty woman, John.'

And although they had neither of them mentioned her before, they must both have been thinking of the singer in black, for John replied

Would be rather good-looking if she'd more colour; I know something about her, she's a Mrs. Latimer.'

himself, and he began, as he tells us, to be 'proud and conceited' in consequence, and to show an 'irritability and violence of manner not grounded in his constitution,' his mother quietly endeavoured to take down his young pride and impatience.

By acting upon my religious feelings (he says) she endeavoured to change my pride into gratitude towards God, and although her own temperament inclined towards the same fault, she opposed to my violence a systematic calmness and an obvious justice, which convinced me by experience that I was the only one who suffered by my conduct, and that the good which I wished to effect on such

of the United (Moravian) Brethren, at Niesky, in Upper Lusatia, and he resolved to send his son thither. The first contact of young Schleiermacher with the characteristic pietism of the Brethren awakened the chord of mysticism so deep in his nature, and which never afterwards slumbered. Even before this he had known something of religious conflicts; the doctrine of eternal punishment had exercised a disturbing power over his imagination, and the doctrine of the atonement had cost him 'several sleepless nights.' Now, on his entrance among the Moravians,

achieved in another manner. My pride was humbled by other means. As reading books had not yet been introduced into the school, I was soon made to read a Latin author. Here I saw nothing but darkness; for although I learned to translate the words mechanically into my mother tongue, I could not penetrate into the sense, and my mother, who directed my German readings with much judgment, had taught me not to read without understanding. When I endeavoured to collect into a whole the detached pieces which I had read at school, my deficiency in the necessary preliminary knowledge frequently rendered me incapable of forming a vivid conception of the subject, a fact which made me very uneasy; and as I perceived none of this uneasiness in my comrades, I began seriously to doubt the much-lauded greatness of my natural faculties, and was in a state of constant fear lest others also should make this unexpected discovery.

His education appears to have proceeded in a very desultory and interrupted fashion. His father was frequently absent from home in the discharge of his duties, and, left to the care of his mother, his dislike of the study of languages, he says, greatly increased; but he unconsciously imbibed an amount of practical knowledge quite unusual among children. At length, from his twelfth to his fourteenth years, he was sent to a boardingschool at Pless, where he remained two years, when an important and very significant event in his life took place. His father, on some of his journeys had become acquainted with the educational establishment

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ness became greatly excited. doctrines of man's natural, corruption, and of the supernatural means of grace, and the manner in which these doctrines were combined in the discourses of the brethren, deeply agitated him. He could realize the fact of corruption in his own experience, and consequently understand the state of spiritual torture of which the reformers had spoken so much, and for which they had come to be so much blamed by the religious teachers of the eighteenth century; but he aspired in vain after those supernatural experiences the necessity of which the corresponding fact of redemption seemed to involve, and the reality of which externally to himself every hymn and lesson, and even glance, of the Brethren, 'so attractive while under their influence,' witnessed. times he thought that he had caught some feeling of them, but it soon vanished, and he felt that he had been fondling the mere delusions of his own imagination. But fruitless as were his strivings after this higher state, the religious impulse now held absolute control over him. He trembled lest he should be refused membership in the community of the Brethren, and had even formed the resolution, should this be denied him, to learn some honourable trade among them, rather than not to share what appeared to him their peaceful life of piety. The path of literary and scientific

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