and Erl Harald's vikings were in this respect but little childrenruthless warriors, daring adventurers, helmed and plumed and steeped to the elbows in blood, but still in this one weakness little children and of the same family. Superstition is but faith exaggerated -fanaticism is but religion gone mad. The human race are willing slaves of the one, sadly prone to the other; but this only proves that the principle of worship is inherent in their nature, and that pantheism rather than atheism is the extreme to which they tend.

How easy then is it, and how profitable, to lead a child in the right way. What a responsibility is theirs who have the guidance of youth. What an old metaphor that is about the pebble which turns hither or thither the course of a mountain rill, but how suggestive too. It is no trifling consideration whether the mighty flood shall eventually roll into the easternmost or the westernmost ocean. How often do I reproach myself with my negligence towards my pupil. Woe is me! for I had already learned the lesson on my own account, had been crushed and humbled and beaten with many stripes' for my sins. Yet was I content to pore with him over the character of every sage in history, to discuss the belief, the career, the doctrine of each, and pass by the Man of Sorrows in silence as though he were but a fabulous personage after all; nay, could read the Greek Testament, and dwell upon the purity of its language, the simplicity of its expressions, the very mood and tense of a verb, whilst I neglected or slurred over the Divine Spirit that vivified and sanctified the whole. What is education, after all? Is it a dull routine like the work of a horse in a mill, to be trod by every disposition alike? Is it sufficient that each disciple should be taught in turn to construe, and parse, and scan-to admire old Homer's hexameters with Dacier, and criticise Horace's iambics with Anthon?-nay, to obtain a thorough insight into, and acquaintance with, the elegancies and

the manners of Greece and Rome, the while trigonometry, logarithms, and conic sections are not wholly neglected? Or is it a preparatory course of training for the great struggle that every child of man must hereafter wage, of which the prize is what?-success in this life? Who was ever satisfied with it? Earthly happiness? Who will confess to it? A quiet heart? Who has got it? What then? If it be what twelve poor Jews affirmed nearly two thousand years ago they knew it was, by direct inspiration -if it be what some millions of the bravest, and gentlest, and best on earth have since died believ ing it-if it be that without which you have perhaps never pictured to yourself what a blank would be your own identity-then surely it is not well to ignore in your preparation of the candidate the very aim and end you would fit him to attain.

I might have done much with Gilbert that I neglected to do. I could at least have sown broadcast a few grains of the good seed which so multiplies in a fertile soil under God's blessed sunshine. Here a little and there a little, and in that warm, kindly heart what a goodly harvest might have been the result. I dare not dwell on the contingency now.

Still, if he had but had a mother, Gilbert's disposition would have been so different. If Lady Olivia could but have looked upon the boy as it is woman's instinct to look even on a stranger's child, if she had not thrust his tenderness away from her, and taught him, as it were, that to his mother alone he was unwelcome, her influence with a youth of his character would have been paramount. He was so tractable, so docile, so easily led. He was so loving and considerate to all that came about him, from his frightful old nurse down to 'Mouse,' the longsuffering and never-resting pony. Brave and high-spirited as the boy was, a word of kindness would at any time bring the tears to his eyes. He would have required no teaching to love his mother, and his

mother might so easily have taught him to love his God.

And yet Lady Olivia was what the world called a 'religious woman'-a person of 'excellent principles'-cold, pitiless, and unwavering. To be punctual in your payments, to'give tithes of all you possess,' to exact implicit obedience from your inferiors, to offer outward homage to your betters, and to return with scrupulous accuracy the courtesies of your equals, this is to be thoroughly respectable, and for this be sure you will obtain your reward. You have never been tempted; therefore you shall spurn the fallen: you have never been in need; therefore you shall in no wise stretch a helping hand to the unfortunate. The outside at least of your own cup and platter you have kept clean and unseamed; so when your neighbour's pitcher is broken, you shall stand exulting at the well-mouth, and mock his agony of thirst. All this is to be worldly-wise and worldly virtuous. All this is to be eminent in a service of which the rewards are immediate and tangible, of which the medals and decorations hang glittering outside your breast; but I doubt hugely if it be the service of the cross. I doubt it may be but disobedience and rank mutiny in the eyes of Him who came to call, not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.'

Lady Olivia called herself a miserable sinner once a week; also once a week she heard poor Gilbert his catechism, as lucidly set forth in the Book of Common Prayer for the instruction of young Christians. The boy repeated it scrupulously by rote, standing the while on one particular square of the carpet, in a perfect perspiration of fear lest he should omit or mistake a single word. The slightest error was corrected with merciless severity: the task was fulfilled with undeviating exactitude. Whether this method of teaching the sublime and simple truths of our beautiful faith be the most advisable, it is not for me to question. I would only ask you, sir, a man of forty, if you can at this moment say the Church

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Catechism by heart? if you can explain it to your own satisfaction? if you can make that explanation clear to the intelligence of a child?

As the boy grew up, it was not likely that he would submit to the control of a mother who ruled by fear rather than love. Petticoat influence, indeed, is seldom either much regarded or dreaded by a man under thirty. By degrees he slipped his neck out of the yoke, I am bound to say with perfect temper and good conduct. Ee never spoke harshly or disrespectfully to Lady Olivia, but he simply absented himself as much as possible from her society, and ignored her authority altogether. Such a state of things was unnatural, and could not possibly lead to good. Then came all the excitement and temptations of the great world to be encountered in their most seductive form, without the one controlling principle which steadies even when it fails to guide, as the helm of a ship keeps her head well up to windward in a gale. A young man of fortune loose upon London, without domestic ties, and without a strong sense of religion, is not unlikely to make shipwreck. That Gilbert escaped so long, I can only attribute to his excellent natural disposition, to a certain degree of innate refinement that shrank intuitively from vice, even when the dame draped herself, as she well knows how to do, in her daintiest attire, and to a grave brotherly regard he entertained for his cousin Gertrude, whose alternate sarcasms and good counsels did not fail on more than one occasion to rouse in him that sense of self-respect and that strength of self-control which the extremes of prosperity and adversity are so prone to annihilate.

Why he never fell in love with Gertrude it is not easy to say. Perhaps the very facility of winning prevented him from entering the arena: perhaps the most tempting fruit is always that which hangs out of reach, and it is poor sport to strike the quarry without the excitement of the chase. At the time when my story opens, the

girl had almost made up her mind to marry him, and when such young ladies are in earnest they are not easily foiled. It is folly to speculate on what might have been. Would such a marriage have ensured his happiness here and hereafter? or would it but have made confusion worse confounded? There is no such thing as a suppositional past; and yet how prone we are to lament and bewail. If I had only known. If I had but been a day sooner.' If so, you would have been a different person, under different circumstances, in a different world; and the whole hypothesis explodes in its own absurdity.

Long before he was thirty Gilbert had become a good-humoured, easy, unprincipled man of the world. I use the latter adjective in its narrowest sense. I do not mean to say that he was capable of any infamous act, and for what the world calls honour, he had the most scrupulous regard; but I do mean to say that of such latitude as that world allows, totally irrespective of religion and morality, he was quite ready to avail himself. Like the bulk of his associates, he was also somewhat bored and blasé, as those must always be who expend immortal energies in hunting butterflies; but like them, he accepted this weariness as an ́indispensable condition, and only strove to dispel it by a fresh pursuit after a fresh insect.

If the butterflies had been all alike, flitting the same unvarying round within the garden walls, this would have been of less importance, but in a fatal moment he was attracted by one of fairy colours and far extended flight. Hot, breathless, and exhausted, he followed it beyond the bounds of lawn and pleasure-grounds, far out and away into the wilderness. When Gilbert Orme first met Ada Latimer, he thought he had exhausted all the sensations and experiences of life. He fancied in his ignorance (was it pitiful or enviable?) that he had felt everything, done everything, that he was getting old in mind if not in body, and that there was very

little left worth living for, but the common_needs of every-day existence. To awake from such a state of torpidity was in itself delicious. There was a zest in everything now that even boyhood had failed to find; he triumphed like a miser in his newly-discovered treasure, pondered on it in secret, and hid it away in his inmost heart. In such a disposition as his there was a considerable leavening of the womanly element, which makes an amiable companion, but a weak man. The besoin d'aimer' was strong within him. He had never got through that disease which, like the measles, it is best to encounter in early life, consequently it took a firm hold of his constitution. He had often been grazed before, but never hit, consequently the wound assumed an undue importance, and he pulled it about, and probed it till it festered and spread over his whole being.

His was a temperament capable of going any length where the affections as well as the passions were concerned. I have seen him when a boy, plunge into a study which interested, or take up an amusement which fascinated him, with an energy and a persistency that of themselves predicated success. Contrary to one of the fundamental rules of mechanics, his violentum was also perpetuum, and he was a rare instance of impetuosity and perseverance combined. Beneath that careless, indolent exterior lay, dormant indeed, but only waiting to be aroused, strong passions, unbending resolution, an iron will that could strike fiercely on the instant, or wait doggedly for years, the whole tempered by a rare generosity and kindliness of heart. Such a character indeed is powerful for good or for evil, such a character above all others requires some guidance superior to the sordid motives that commonly sway mankind.

I have heard a theory broached which at first sight may appear untenable, but on which the more I reflect, the more I am convinced it contains a considerable leavening of truth. It is this, that there is a

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strong similarity in the characters of the very good and the very bad, nay, that their prevailing qualities are actually identical, and that the difference, as in the mountain stream, depends upon the channel into which they may happen to be turned. It is a startling consideration truly, and more especially for those who have to do with the young. Doubtless it is difficult to define the exact point at which a virtue carried too far passes into its corresponding vice. It requires, indeed, a skilful moralist L to decide where faith ends and fanaticism begins where courage becomes rashness, decision degenerates into self-conceit, or perseverance petrifies into obstinacy. The more I reflect on such ethical inconsistencies, the more hopelessly I lose myself in a maze of conjecture from which I feel there is no egress but by the light of revelation. No system of man's philosophy has ever yet been sufficient to satisfy the cravings of man's reasoning powers. It is better to accept humbly what we feel we cannot do without; it is better to believe than to understand, and while we take morality as a staff, to hold fast by religion as a guide.

Yes, we come back at last to the Druid's stones, to the Norseman's runes, to the Pythian oracle, and the Papist's mother of God. We must worship something. Have we not the simplest and noblest faith

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that was ever believed by man? Can we not worship as that faith enjoins?

There was no want of veneration in Gilbert. He was capable of a fanatic's devotion, body, and heart, and soul. God help him! it was no cold, self-sufficing temperament that made such havoc with my boy.

"Little children, keep yourselves from idols! Even in these Christian times idolatry is one of the crying sins of the human race. Be it the money-worship that reduces every thought and feeling to a golden standard-be it the ambition that leaves not a moment for reflection or repose-be it the more amiable yet no less fatal folly that exalts a fellow-creature into a divinity-too surely does it mete out for itself its own retribution. It is a fine thing to be rich. It is grand to have power, and station, and influence. Above all, it is a golden dream to love. How sweet is it to treasure up something so dearly! how ennobling to adore it so devotedly! what unspeakable happiness in the utter self-abandonment and self-sacrifice!

can

any pleasure of gain or success compare with that which we feel in pouring out all our wealth of life and hopes at our idol's feet? -and yet I wonder what the poor negro thinks of his Fetish when, as must sometimes happen, he finds it break to pieces in his hand?