cradle which had been rescued from the day, when she was engaged shaking and lumber of the garret, and once more turning her store of bleaching, formless graced with an occupant, or on the blan- straw bonnets in the wash-house, with ket in one corner of the floor,— and of the doors of both kitchens, back and blessed fulness and satisfaction when the front, carefully closed to prevent the sulinfant was nestling to her breast. phur fumes to which she was so much accustomed that they did not even make her cough or sneeze, reaching her father or little Miles-who were, the one at work in the room which served him for a shop, and the other fast asleep carefully tucked, and barricaded with chairs, in his cradle in the front kitchen.

occupants, and hurry to ascertain what | moved them, the wash-house door was thrown open by a hasty hand, and Kitty walked in with her baby in her arms Kitty, who had always loathed and retreated from the fumes of the sulphur, who had not been to her father's house since her illness and recovery, and who had brought her infant in her arms within the noxious influence.

The last fact presented so real and near a danger, which assumed pathetically overpowering proportions to the elderly woman, who had been but lately aroused to and engrossed with the preciousness of a baby,- that Kitty's child positively eclipsed its mother at that moment in Sukie's regard.

figures of Samuel kneeling with his hands clasped in youthful awe and reverence, and the child holding a fish, from originals more famous than Sukie could dream of, was not far to seek, and would soon be reached and the worst known.

Sukie stumbled into the shop, where more than one loitering man with paper cap, smeared apron, and paint pot or brush in his hands, who had been eagerly conversing with the man in charge of the shop, beat a rapid retreat into the inner premises before Sukie entered.

"Can you tell me if my brother or Will Mayne are painting out at Leascombe to-day?" asked Sukie, hesitating painfully.

The man whom she addressed hesitated in turn, shifted from one foot to another, coloured up, turned away his head, when, catching a glimpse of one of the loiterers in the further doorway, he made a sudden attempt to get some aid in discharging a painful task.

"Look here, Simmons, can you tell Miss Cope anything of her brother and Mayne? I I understand you saw and spoke to them last."

66

The story of the flight of the men from their home-ties had only just oozed out and reached Mr. Bridges and other responsible persons, who might have taken steps to have the delinquents arrested, or, at least, to give their friends and the town authorities information of their heartless intention; but the deserters from their posts had got such a start in .. their favour that even an immediate pursuit would in all probability neither overtake nor recall them. All that the most merciful man could say by way of comfort in imparting the news to Sukie Cope was that she and her sister might in the end be well rid of such a pair of ne'er-do-wells.

Sukie had no thought of pursuit. With her feet weighted as if by lead, she tried to hasten back to her still more miserable sister. What could she and Kitty do to follow and bring back runaways and traitors from home and duty? What could their father do save expose his sterling honesty (which could not have compassed the conception of such betrayal), and his grey hairs to insult and mockery?

There was but one gleam of consolation in the agony of the trial-Kitty was not so unprepared as Sukie had been. Whether from previous neglect and unkindness, taunts and threats on Will

"Man, what is the use of beating about the bush and torturing the poor soul?" protested the man who was thus appealed to, gruffly. Cope and Mayne have bolted and given you and your sister the sack, my woman, and so there is nothing| Mayne's part, she had, in some measure, more to be said."

foreboded the catastrophe, though she had shrunk, as a woman might well shrink, from conveying such apprehensions and fears, even to a sister.

be a mistake, Kitty-they could not do it-to leave you and the children and father without a word—I can hardly believe it possible."

Sukie heard the worst, and it was beyond what her utmost panic could have conceived, though Kitty was right that there had been no accident. Young Accordingly, when Sukie had laid the Miles Cope was not at Leascombe, for particulars with all their humiliation bethe good reason that, in consequence of fore Kitty in the few simple words, "Oh! a quarrel with his master, in which he my dear, bear up, for they are goneand some of the other journeymen paint- Miles and Mayne-both gone to Amerers had been involved the previous even-ica," and had made a faint attempt in ing, he with others had thrown up their which she herself had little faith to mend work. Mr. Bridges had accepted their the narrative by adding, “But there may withdrawal from his employment without the usual warning-only too glad, as he put it, to be rid of two or three dissipated, troublesome workmen, whose places he could easily fill. Will Mayne was another, and it was understood that he had set off from Cranthorpe the same night. Miles Cope had waited till the following morning, and had gone away with a third man, who had let it slip out before he left that their immediate destination was Bristol, from which he and Miles, with their fellow-painter Mayne, who bad preceded them and taken their berths, were to sail within a few hours of their arrival for America.

"It has been possible," said Kitty, with a hard sob. "I was a vain idiot not to believe anything against him and his love, once on a day; I can believe everything possible now. There is no mistake, Sukie; I guessed it when I sat up all last night in my weakness, waiting in vain for him. They are gone, and it is Will Mayne who has enticed away Miles."

Old Miles had to be thought of and taken into the consultation. Sukie had to go to him next with the news of his

son and his son-in-law having absconded, abandoning not Sukie and Kitty and him alone, but each his child to the care of two forlorn middle-aged women and an old man whose active days were long past, and his business fast leaving him.

Old Miles's pomposity and pedantry, great though they were, were not proof against such a shock. They were dethroned for the occasion. Like the first man who gave the information to Sukie, old Miles was abashed in his very manhood, and with his pride humbled into the dust before the women - his daughters. He spoke plainly enough in his

first sentence.

"Both men gone, and you girls left with me, no longer able to provide for you, and a couple of infants these Scoundrels' infants-on your hands, and one of the scoundrels my son! It is a base lie which some vile slanderer has palmed off on you and your sister, Sukie. I thought you would have known better than to have believed it. Get me my hat, and let me out to clear it all up."

"How can I come upon father and yɔu with my child? But what can I do, Sukie?" cried Kitty, hoarsely.

"Say no more or you will break my heart, Kitty; and father is right; it is God's will which must be done," whispered Sukie, quietly.

From The Fortnightly Review. PLUTARCH'S ESSAYS.

THE versatile and nimble-witted Greek readily found a home in the capital of his Roman conqueror. Rome with the wealth and love of luxury, which followed in the wake of her eastern conquests, naturally became a centre of attraction to every description of adventurer. Under the imperial rule the city swarmed with Greeks, whose multifarious accomplishments enabled them to gratify every variety of taste to which a rich and idle society would be inclined. A man who had to live by his wits could not possibly have desired to be surrounded by more favourable conditions. For artists, physicians, architects, teachers of grammar and rhetoric, there were easy and abundant openings, and into all of them the Greek stepped as a matter of course. Had journalism been a profession at Rome, Greeks, we may be sure, would have monopolized it. No event could

Even when he had gone and come back, and sat down helpless under the disgrace and calamity, and when strong habit had resumed its sway, and the old man either lapsed into gloomy silence or raised his head with something of its old conceit, and delivered an oracular utterance which sought piteously to cloak and veil the misfortune that had befallen him and his, and to find an excuse for his own man-have occurred, no subject in heaven or hood before the wronged women, there was something more dazed than profound in his air, and there was a humble plaintiveness in his conceit, as he said,

"Lads are vagarious and want to go out into the world to make their fortunes, if women will but wait and have patience, and let God's will be done."

"You and your dear little baby will stay in your old quarters, Kitty," proposed Sukie at once, but speaking brokenly, and unable to make the smallest feint at cheerfulness, while she could not keep from recalling how lately, and in what triumph, Kitty had quitted her home of many peaceful years, and wondering if it would be her, Sukie's, part to give up the River End lodging as she had given up Miles's lodging in the Forge Lane, and settle with another landlady, and, oh where should she find the means to do that, and provide for them all, and little Miles, who had nobody but her now nobody! Yet she found voice to say reassuringly, "There is room for us all, Kitty."

earth could have been propounded, on which a Greek littérateur would not have written with an awful fluency. Readers of Juvenal will recall with a smile, the passage in which the "Græculus esuriens," with his wonderfully various capabilities, is held up as an object from which honest simplicity ought to recoil with horror. We can well understand that the average Roman, who was somewhat dull and matter-of-fact, would not unnaturally half dislike, half despise Greek cleverness. He would have much the same feeling towards it, as the old-fashioned country squire still has towards an artist or a man of letters. The Greek professor, as a man who lived by his wits, would have been more or less of an abomination to him. This sort of feeling, however, which though stupid had really something to say for itself, must have almost worn itself out soon after the establishment of the empire. Society frowned on it and condemned it as ignorant and unenlightened. The highest aristocratic circles had distinctly recognized the worth of

Greek culture, and set the tone in its fa- have imposed only on the rich Roman vour. The Roman youth, who in former money-lender or contractor, there were days had learnt jurisprudence and elo- men of learning and culture answering quence under the care of some eminent to our best university professors. Such lawyer, now attended the lectures of a men would of course have too much delGreek professor, and in this manner icacy to attempt to force themselves into completed the higher part of his educa- great social prominence; but we may be tion. The change was in great measure tolerably sure that the more cultivated due to circumstances, over which parents circles at Rome felt and recognized their had no control. The eloquence of the stimulating and refining influence. It is bar had languished under imperialism, probable that Tacitus knew and respected and the law courts no longer supplied the many of these accomplished Greeks. intellectual training which they had for- The younger Pliny can hardly find lanmerly done. A substitute, necessarily a guage strong enough to express his admiformal and artificial one, was sought in ration of them. They are singled out in the classes presided over by eminent his epistles as specially distinguished repGreek grammarians and rhetoricians. resentatives of the class, and are praised Here lads were carefully taught the va- as much for their moral as their intellecrious arts of style, and had to discuss tual qualities. Of their learning and acevery imaginable topic. The great ob- complishments he speaks with absolute ject of education seemed to be to turn out clever speakers and talkers. It must have produced a plentiful crop of conceited smatterers, whose intolerable affectation must have made them bores of the first magnitude in Roman society. You would have had not infrequently to sit next a man at dinner, who would have insisted on dragging you into some abstruse question of mythology or archæology. Imagine being expected to discuss why the temple of Saturn had been used from time immemorial as a record office; or why the ancient coins had on one side the image of Janus, on the other the stern of a ship. The discussion of questions which could merely give scope to the exercise of intellectual ingenuity, appears to have been sedulously encouraged by the teachers of Roman youth. Among the Greek professors at Rome, we can quite believe that there was a considerable sprinkling of ridiculous pedants, and probably too, for the special benefit of the rich parvenu class, of downright impostors, who thoroughly deserved the worst that Juvenal has said about them.

There was, however, as we have good reason for knowing, real moral worth as well as literary merit of a high order, in this Greek society. The Roman fashionable world was, we doubt not, on the whole, decidedly a gainer by its presence. Here was at least an element which could do something to counteract the vulgarity of wealth, and the excessive love of material enjoyments. We wish we knew more of the inner life of the best of these Greek rhetoricians. We get, it is true, a few glimpses into it; and we see enough to convince us that, in marked contrast with the disreputable adventurer who could

rapture, and he adds that he finds them the most guileless and estimable set of men with whom he is acquainted. We think it highly probable that Pliny's esteem for them was by no means undeserved. Many of them, we can well suppose, were quite as much lovers of truth and honesty as we usually find a great scholar or man of science to be in our own day.

To this class belongs a writer whom most of us, I should think, look upon as an old familiar friend. Probably, no classical author is better known to the average modern reader than Plutarch. His Lives, I suppose, have been oftener translated than any other work of Greek or Roman antiquity. He is hardly known except as a biographer, and it is no doubt in this capacity that he chiefly deserves to be known. His age was one in which, for some reason or other, biography was a particularly popular form of literature. Perhaps this was due to the extraordinary importance with which imperialism had invested a single man. History, if not identified with, was at least of necessity closely connected with the character and habits of the reigning emperor. In the absence of the stirring associations of political life, the reading public naturally felt a keen interest in all the various gossip which centred round the Court and its leading figures. Personal anecdotes were sure to be in great demand. The taste may not have been a very elevated one, but it was almost inevitable under the circumstances of the time. Hence arose a crop of biographers, of whom Plutarch was unquestionably the worthiest. He sought, naturally enough, to amuse his readers, and, to his honour, be it said,