You

appointed? Shall I call him back, and resign my claim in his favour? look as if I had deprived you of a pleasure. You know, Caroline, I wouldn't do that for the world.'

She could not help laughing at his mock-heroic look and tone. Besides, by this time, she had explained and refined away by various involuntary sophistries, that which at first had struck her healthy sensitiveness as 'not quite right.' She was glad to turn to some other subject of conversation.

'You have not told me anything about yourself. What have you been doing all this time?'

'Oh, far too much to be discussed in a ball-room. Studying law, Carry. Think of it! If we talked about it, the candles would go out. You shall see some of the books I've brought with me to read.'

'But you were not studying law at Mr Farquhar's?'

'No; I was enjoying a respite therefrom. Caroline, what a pretty girl Bessy Windleton has grown. They are forming the quadrille. Let us go and choose a vis-à-vis.'

So they went, and there followed an interval of dancing and fragmental conversation. Then Vaughan left her, to go to Miss Windleton. Caroline was amused to watch him: the half tender politeness of his manner, the polished air with which he conversed, so different from the terse, boyish style, which it seemed natural for him to assume in talking to her, his old playmate. As she thus watched them, a voice, a very mellow and pleasantlymodulated voice, sounded just at her shoulder.

"This is "home" in a new phase, is it not, Miss Maturin ?'

It was Mr Farquhar. He was leaning on the arm of the sofa on which she sat, and when she turned to him, his dark face took a curious expression of pleasure and interest.

'We have never had a ball at Redwood before.'

Would you like to have it again— often?'

She considered. 'I think not-not too often, at least. I suppose it would lose its zest.'

'Have you had much experience of such gaieties?'

'This is my first ball.'

'I am afraid you will never like another so much as this, the first. That is

rather a discouraging philosophy, you think.'

'No; there are plenty of pleasures in the world to have for the first time.'

'And variety is charming. Down with old things, let us perpetually be having something new!' Mr Farquhar cried, with energetic irony.

'I don't mean that,' said Caroline, courageously, looking up at him; 'pleasure is not all, not the only thing in people's lives. And things that are the best worth having, never grow old.' 'You think not?' 'Do not you?'

He paused, then said, suddenly, 'What are the things best worth having?'

But Caroline found herself in a difficulty, and did not answer immediately. Won't you tell me? Perhaps you think I ought to know for myself.'

'I suppose you do know. Most people are aware what it is that they most prize and care for.'

'But the question is, what is best, not what is dearest.'

'People ought to love dearest what is best,' pronounced the legislator of seventeen.

That ends the question,' said Mr Farquhar, laughing.

Caroline felt her old displeasure revive when he laughed. But he looked serious and earnest enough when he again spoke.

'I suppose, in your estimation, home is one of the things best worth having— one of the things that never grow old?'

'Yes; it never grows old. One would never tire of that.

'A happy thing, indeed, for those who have a home. But for nous autres who have not, is not our case a pitiable one?'

'But you have a home, for Vaughan has been staying with you there,' cried Caroline, quickly.

'I have a house,' said Mr Farquhar, with a peculiar expression at the mention of Vaughan's name; 'and I have what is called "chambers" in London. But neither of these is what you mean by home; I never had that. Are you sorry for me?'

'Very sorry,' said Caroline, expressing, because she felt, much cordiality as she spoke.

'You, who are so rich in "things worth having" - love and care, friends, all that makes a home dear and beautiful— should have very great indulgence for your poorer brethren,' Mr Farquhar went on; 'and must not quarrel with them, if

occasionally they do not "love dearest what is best." Happy people are apt to be great tyrants; don't be a tyrant, Miss Maturin.'

She was puzzled to make out his meaning, and she was about to ask him, when Mr Bracebridge approached to claim her for the next dance.

There were no more philosophical conversations that evening. The festivities waxed gayer and gayer up to the climax of supper. Caroline, besides her position as hostess, was far too brilliantly attractive not to be constantly engrossed, and her attention fully occupied in succession, now by one, now by another, and not unfrequently by two or three admiring swains at once. Mr Farquhar held aloof under these circumstances. Caroline was afraid he was not enjoying himself much. She occasionally caught glimpses of him standing against a doorway, or examining the prints and books on one of the tables, or leaning by the sofa where they had been talking together, apparently watching the dancers, his peculiar but not unkindly smile curving his mouth. Once Vaughan came up to him, and they exchanged a few remarks. Mr Hesketh also, fresh from his hard-won rubber, and very genial and exhilarated, as whistplayers always are in such cases, came into the room, with a word and a smile for everybody, and finally anchored beside the stranger guest.

'Not dancing, Mr Farquhar? I hope you have at least a dislocated ankle to plead in excuse. In these days, for a young man not to dance is to be a sort of Pariah in society.'

The gentleman addressed bowed, as if in humble acceptance of his doom, and presently made some complimentary remark on the brilliancy of the evening.

I am glad you are entertained,' said the old gentleman, taking that fact for granted rather prematurely; 'I suppose a festivity of this kind does not often enliven your dry legal studies. I know-I have heard that you are a most determined and indefatigable student.'

'Pray believe all you hear of me that is in that strain,' his companion rejoined, with his inscrutable glance from under his dark brows.

'I am glad to believe it,' said Mr Hesketh, emphatically; 'the capacity of hard work is one which I greatly respect in a man. There is a kind of courage in labour that transcends most bravery, I think.'

'Yet it must require more courage to be idle, I fancy,' remarked Mr Farquhar; 'the reality of work and its results is a very comfortable fact, such as few men's lives could afford to be without.'

Mr Hesketh did not reply to this, but passed on to the subject of Vaughan; his present studies and future career. He was anxious that his nephew and adopted son should make a figure at the bar, where he himself had practised in his earlier manhood, but without much success. He told Mr Farquhar with what satisfaction he heard of Vaughan's intimacy with himself.

'A companion like yourself, persevering and industrious, is precisely what I could have most wished for him. He has talent enough, and energy, too, when he chooses?'

'Undoubtedly,' returned Mr Farquhar, warmly, seeing that the words were uttered in a half-questioning tone; 'I know few things that Vaughan Hesketh could not do, if he once resolved on doing them.'

'Exactly; and he seems to have been setting to work in earnest of late. He tells me he has even brought his law-books down here, intending to study during his holidays.'

'Indeed!'

The dancers were promenading round the room just now, and the speaker's eye had fallen, with a very odd glint in it, on the tall figure and handsome face of Vaughan Hesketh, who was bandying all sorts of lively nonsense with pretty Miss Windleton. But the next minute Mr Farquhar's look changed. Miss Maturin passed, and as she went by smiled up brightly at Mr Hesketh; the edge of the smile seemed lightly to touch the face of his companion, and that face looked disturbed for an instant, then it settled into a pleasanter expression than it had yet worn. The doubtful flicker left the dark eyes, the shade of irony and subdued bitterness went from the thin, expressive lips.

"Your niece looks thoroughly happy. What a pleasant thing to see is happiness!'

Mr Hesketh assented, while his eyes proudly and admiringly followed the retreating figure of Caroline. But Mr Farquhar meditatively fixed his regards on the polished oaken floor, and was silent for awhile. Presently, the host's attention was claimed, and he moved away to another part of the room. The mys

terious, vague, but magical 'sensation' which the initiate know to portend 'supper' was commencing. Vaughan, still with Miss Windleton on his arm, passed his friend, with a hasty nod. Then came Caroline, full of her duties as hostess, and busily engaged in 'pairing off' all the ladies and gentlemen who had not performed that office for themselves. As she was arranging a last detachment, she perceived Mr Farquhar, looking, as she thought, rather lonely, by the mantelpiece. She hesitated a minute, half blushing, and looking a very sweet picture of girlish shyness.

He came forward, and offered his arm with what seemed only a due amount of courteous eagerness. She accepted it, and they went into the supper-room. Mr Farquhar appeared to revivify under her influence. His face brightened, his very voice changed; the atmosphere of her innocent, happy youth seemed to work a sort of enchantment upon him. Vaughan paused_in_the_midst of his petits soins to the fair Bessy Windleton, and looked with amazement at his friend. He could hear his voice, distinct above the loud hum of the roomful of talkers, for George Farquhar's voice was a peculiar one-rich and clear, and with a certain metallic resonance that seemed to hold its own place even in the midst of numbers. He could see also Caroline's face bent slightly towards her companion, with evident interest in what he was say ing. And Vaughan's amazement changed into dissatisfaction, which again increased to displeasure. Miss Windleton wondered what had made him suddenly so distrait, and checked the easy flow of the sweet courtesy of which he had been so lavish a little while before. He was unaccountably discontented with the state of things which had seemed to please him well enough until now. Bessy was a pretty little creature; but Caroline was twenty times more distinguished, more spirituelle, more interesting as a companion. Why had he been so foolish as to permit all this to fall to the share of any other than himself? What right had Farquhar to monopolise the attention of her who was at once hostess, the heroine of the night, and the most attractive girl in the room? Under the influence of all these moral and philosophical speculations, Vaughan's brow slightly contracted, and his voice also betrayed some disturbance. He pressed no more cracker bon-bons on his

fair companion, forgot the very existence of the sentimental French motto which only a minute before they had been commenting on, and presently, nothing loth, he escorted her into the ball-room, and relinquished her, with a smile of exquisite politeness, to an expectant partner there. Then he strode back into the supper-room, now rapidly thinning, and threw himself on a sofa near the table at which Mr Farquhar and Miss Maturin were sitting. The former saw him at once.

'Vaughan,' said he, 'Miss Maturin and myself are planning a delightful excursion for to-morrow: to go on horseback to the foot of some wonderful hill, which we are to climb, and see a marvellous prospect.'

'Indeed! Is it a new arrival in the neighbourhood, Caroline, this wonderful hill? Our humble lions are not accustomed to rejoice in such adjectives.'

His friend, with elevated eyebrows, was about to laugh outright at the ill-humoured tone in which he spoke; but Caroline eagerly interposed. Foolish child! she knew well the turn of the lip, the shade in the eye, and what those signs portended. Yet she did not know them well enough to disregard them, it seemed.

'Dear Vaughan!' she cried, 'you remember Crooksforth, surely. My uncle told me you went up one day long ago. I have been waiting for your return to go there-it will be so pleasant!'

Well, he seemed to admit it would be pleasant. A smile dawned about his handsome mouth. It grew to full day when Mr Hesketh called on Mr Farquhar to come and see his much-prized Guido, which hung curtained in a recess of the room. Then Vaughan took his vacated seat, nearer to Caroline.

'You look quite radiant,' he remarked, with an odd, half-discontented inflection in his voice; 'I suppose you have had what young ladies always call "a most delightful evening?" Haven't you, now?'

'Indeed, yes,' she replied, heartily; 'and I was thinking,' she added, after a brief pause, 'that you also liked it. I hoped so.'

'One must do at Rome as the Romans do,' he answered, carelessly; 'it is absurd to stand aloof in the midst of an assemblage of this kind, looking a grave and wise reproach to all the foolery that is going on, like my friend there. Poor George! I suppose he feels in a ball-room

very much as you would feel at a smoking party.'

Oh, Vaughan! is he that sort of person?' 'You simple child! "That sort of person" is nothing so very unusual or dreadful, is it? Men are not angels, Carry, and they will smoke cigars, and play billiards and écarté, and all sorts of uncelestial things. Your pleasures are not their pleasures; your tastes are widely different from theirs. They care nothing for what makes the glory of life to you. Their hopes, and aims, and wishes, and enjoyments, are utterly opposed to yours. Trust me, you have very little in common with them.'

Caroline, in the midst of some dismay, derived comfort in noticing that he said 'them,' and not 'us.' Very wistfully she looked down at her fast fading flowers.

'But, Vaughan, all the men in the world are not like that?'

Very nearly all,' he said, decidedly. 'If you knew as much of the world as I do But women never do know anything of life as it really is, happily for them, and for us, too. Where should we come for fresh air, if it were otherwise?? And he smiled down at Caroline the old, pleasant smile.

Bewildered, and rather troubled as she felt, she could not resist the cheering influence of Vaughan's look.

'I am glad I am only a girl,' said she, laughing, in spite of all my old ambitions. Don't you remember, Vaughan, years ago, how I used to chafe over my feminine privations? But it was not because of such delights as you tell me of that I longed for manhood. I had much nobler ideas: chivalry, heroism, romance, were in my mind.'

'I know. You were always such a dreamer,' he said, with an admiring glance at her animated face.

'Oh, Vaughan, do you say it was only a dream to imagine a man might be noble?' 'No-not exactly. But there are different ways of being noble, you know. There are no crusades now, Carry; the age of chivalry is past. What opportunities are there for heroism in the nineteenth century? As for romance, just think of romance in connection with broadcloth and upright hats!'

His jesting tone made her laugh, and with the laugh ended their talk; but not its impression on her simple, implicitly credulous mind. The first blow had been dealt at her faith in goodness; the poisonous sneer at humanity had entered VOL. XXIII.

into her ears, and had every chance of fructifying in her heart.

But at present life was stirring around, and demanded attention. The guests were most of them thinking of leaving, and Mr Hesketh's courtly hospitality was manifested, at first in urging their longer stay, and then in facilitating their departure. The old gentleman passed through the corridor and into the wide hall, with ladies on his arm, his grey head bent deferentially towards them-his whole manner a fine example of the chivalric courtesy of a past generation. Vaughan was idle in comparison, as he leaned on a chair near where Caroline was standing, and bowed or shook hands with a retiring visiter, as occasion suggested.

'How thoroughly my uncle seems in his element,' the young man remarked; 'so active and busy to the last minute. It is quite admirable to see his unwearied politeness to all these people; going out, too, into this chilly night air, assisting these fair dames into their carriages. Really, Caroline, I begin to repent me of saying the age of chivalry was past.'

Caroline was too much occupied with leave-takings to reply. Vaughan's words fell on her ear pleasurably, but the full sense of them escaped her. It was Mr Farquhar who presently suggested to her the danger of Mr Hesketh's hasty transitions between the hot ball-room and the cold entrance - hall. She was equally touched by his thoughtfulness and her own negligence. She ran out, and was just in time to see the bare grey head bowing adieux to a last carriageful of county beauty and fashion. Eagerly she drew him from the open door, mingling reproaches with compliments to his gallantry, which the old gentleman received with great complacency.

They all four gathered in a group in the deserted ball-room, for a brief, desultory chat, much interspersed by ejaculations of weariness from Vaughan. Then they separated; Mr Farquhar adding to his good-night to Caroline a reminder of the promised excursion for to-morrow.

'Oh, you may rest quite easy, my friend,' interposed Vaughan; 'I won't suffer her to forget.'

Mr Hesketh and the two younger men watched Caroline trip lightly up the stairs. 'You don't seem much overwhelmed with fatigue,' Vaughan cried after her.

'No, indeed!' She turned round at the landing, and waved her hand gaily, with

B

the sunniest smile in the world, 'I am quite ready to begin the evening all over again,'

They all three smiled, very different smiles. Then she disappeared, and so the birth-day fête was over.

LISTENING in the choir of Nôtre Dame to the voluble and manly declamations of Lacordaire, waited on by thousands of emotion-seeking hearers, or drinking in the no less attractive, but more smooth and silvery, eloquence of the Jesuit Ravignan, in the over-painted-and-gilded church of the Lorette, we perceived in the themes, preachers, and admiring crowds, such contrasts to anything existing in Great Britain, that this exhibition, as much as any other, impressed upon us the conviction that we were in a foreign country. And yet, all that we describe seemed perfectly natural there, as soon as we had placed ourselves en rapport with our immediate surroundings, and allowed Popery and Paris to filiate these preachings and assemblies as their own. Given the precedents, and the consequents follow as a matter of course. Beyond the limits of popedom, and north of the latitude of the frivolous-earnest metropolis of France, the scenes we witnessed were not possible; whereas there, they appeared bone of the bone, and flesh of the flesh, of the place and people, incorporate with their substance, and germane to their ideas. From the harmony into which one necessarily falls with the condition of things about us for any length of time, especially if there be more than usual plasticity of mould and elasticity of fibre in our composition, we took, chameleon-like, the tone and colour of the company into which we were cast, and resigned ourselves passively to the influences which we saw operating upon our neighbours. This submission to the predominance of the hour was made on our part with no express 'purpose of heart'no positive exercise of volition; we merely drifted insensibly into it, like a log upon the tide, and were mesmerised, without

* Cours d'Eloquence Sacrée Populaire, ou Essai sur la Manière de Parler au Peuple, par M. l'Abbé Isidore Mullois, Premier Chapelain de la Maison de l'Empereur, Missionaire Apostolique. 3 tomes, pp. 288, 351, 430. Paris, 1856.

our consciousness, into a slumber of the critical faculty. It was a happy, and, indeed, the only appropriate mood in which to enjoy the intellectual exercises we were called to witness, and had the effect of rendering the impression they made more distinct, and their memory not less pleasant, now that they are recalled after the lapse of years. The vivid, easy, and fluent, yet impassioned and abrupt (but in all the changes of its diapason most natural) delivery of the orators, could not fail to move any person of education and sensibility; the grandiloquence of the great Dominican less striking, perhaps, than the easy flow of the majority of French preachers, because more nearly approaching the style of the most elaborate rhetorical efforts at home. From the highest to the lowest strain, however, French oratory was marked by features peculiar to the region and the religion; and by qualities which we sigh for in vain in our foggy yet beautiful island, in our own copious and vigorous, but uncouth tongue.

In the point we have just named, the language itself, will be found, doubtless, some portion of the reason why we differ to so remarkable a degree from our neighbours, whose capital is but little removed from our own. If Jupiter, addressing mortals, would have adopted the Greek of Plato, certain are we that the ladies of Olympus, in their causeries with one another on the last new bonnet from their modiste, or the most recent faux pas in their chronicle of scandal, must have chatted in the neat, voluble, and delightful lingo of the French. The language of sentiment, rather than feeling, there is no conception current in society which it will not readily formulate into the most terse and polished expression. It is the language of epigram and mot, of riddle and calembourg, of sparkling comedy and light vaudeville, but at the same time, of the chambre and salon, of domestic confidences and of public devotion. Never did Byron, by his great reputation, give sanction to a more egregious fallacy, than