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great Reformer Miles Coverdale, to whose genius is chiefly due peculiar beauty of our English Bible. As the traveller hangs r the stone bridge at Coverham, and listens to the flow of the ter over its bed of shingle, or as he climbs down one of the lls whose musical cascades feed the impetuous stream, the ught occurs whether the beauty of that wonderful rhythm was rn of such murmuring sounds heard by the sensitive ear of the verdale youth.1

The long list of worthies above rehearsed who owe their disiction to being born in Wensleydale emboldens me to ask whether for all we are an island people-there is not more inspiration r the heroic life to be found in our inland dales than on the seaDard. Which of our national heroes was born and bred in the uch vaunted ozone of a seaside town or village? Even of the mous admirals celebrated by Mr. Henry Newbolt—and an admiral, anybody, should be ocean-reared—

Effingham, Grenville, Raleigh, Drake,
Benbow, Collingwood, Byron, Blake-

only the last was cradled within sound of the sea. And if that pe so, is it not a little wonderful that fashion should be allowed o override the healthy instinct of the people for inland places and drive them in shoals at this holiday season to the sea-side? To see a long line of people sitting disconsolate by the margin of the bitter sea-like Ariadne, but without her excuse-gazing blankly on its blank expanse day after day for a month or six weeks, is to have a vivid illustration of how essentially unintelligent is the practical genius of middle-class Englishmen. They are not happy; their wives are not happy; their children would be as happy anywhere else; nevertheless for the prescribed period they are content to suffer existence in a state of semi-coma, half reading the newspaper and half listening to nigger minstrelsy, while the sun blinds them above and the sea wind makes them sticky, as though they were in training for Yogidom and enfranchisement 'I notice that Drayton, in his spirited geography book in verse called the Polyolbion, speaks of the Cover as 'a clear rill.'

Cover, a clear rill,

Next cometh into Yore, whereas that lusty chace
For her loved Cover's sake doth lovingly embrace.

'Clear' it is, but in spate it is far from being a rill. The Cover flows into the Yore in Mr. Scrope's park, below Middleham.

CHAPTER XI.

WITH hands clasped behind his back, head bent, absorbed in thought, the black fan of his beard spreading over the black broadcloth on his breast, the cross-folds of the turban startlingly exotic on top of the fluttering sable garments the latter pathetically European in intention—an incongruous figure under these bare placid English fruit-trees, Muhammed Saif-u-din came full upon Raymond Bethune.

The sodden grass of the long neglected road had swallowed the sound of their footsteps. For once the Pathan was shaken out of his oriental calm for a brief moment as, suddenly looking up, he found himself within a yard of the officer of Guides.

The guest of the Old Ancient House had strolled out by himself to smoke a solitary meditative pipe in the wild avenue. Seeing Muhammed's flaming headgear, he had deliberately directed his steps towards him; for Bethune would not have been that self that India had made him, had he not felt instinctively lured into the company of the Eastern, all degenerate as he chose to consider him. Moreover, the personality of Sir Arthur's secretary baffled him, and Bethune resented being baffled. He fixed his eye keenly upon the Pathan, turned babu.

'Your soul is in the East, Muhammed,' said he, addressing him in his own tongue.

The dark face opposite relaxed into a smile, the white teeth flashed, Muhammed made the supple Indian salaam.

'Nay, your honour, my soul is in great England,' he said, and would have passed on. But the other arrested him somewhat peremptorily. Muhammed wheeled back and brought his hand to the edge of his turban with a gesture that betrayed the soldier, then drew himself up rigidly.

Under Bethune's long scrutinising look the thin face fell into deep lines of gravity; the large dark eyes, somewhat restless as a rule in their brilliancy, gazed back straight and full. The Englishman's heart kindled as the unconquered spirit of the Pathan seemed to rear itself to meet the cold domination of the conquering race. There was nothing of revolt in the man's look, yet something untameable, he thought. And it pleased him hugely. His mind leaped back to his own devils of boys' on the mountain sides-eagles

lated from a leisurely sojourn among the sights and sounds of sophisticated nature will translate itself on our return to human iety into works of beneficence—

little nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love.

Cheerfulness then being the goal of the holiday-maker, he is e wise man who chooses for the scene of his experiment a place ich will yield activity to his interests as well as to his limbs. le careless person, if he has escaped the awful fate of the mere a-side tripper, or that tripper as recently modified into a pilgrim the golf links, is apt to confuse the pursuit of an interest with ere sight-seeing; whereas a sight, whether of art or nature, unless makes some peculiar appeal to us, remains a sight and nothing Lore. We drive, perhaps, ten miles to see a rock or a heath or a aterfall; 'we glance and nod and bustle by,' and have gained othing except the right to say we have seen it. We might more roperly, as Dr. Johnson suggested, 'sit at home and conceive ocks, heaths, and waterfalls.' And the same simple truth holds ood of the curiosities of art. Why should we turn aside to see a icture gallery because it is in the neighbourhood we are visiting, If we have no knowledge of painting; or spend half an hour inpecting a monastic ruin if we are indifferent to architecture? Let us holiday-makers, to quote the great moralist again, clear our minds of cant,' and go where we go riding our own 1obbies.

Wensleydale is fortunate in the variety of the entertainment at affords to man and his hobby. The historian can pore over the traces of the successive invasions-Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman, Scottish-to which the dale lay only too openly exposed, or read the fortunes of the long strife between king and baron, or king and parliament, in the ruined castles that still frown over the neighbouring hamlet; the ecclesiologer, starting from the only two churches chronicled in Domesday, Spennithorne and Thornton Steward, will trace the gradual unfolding of the Gothic flower under the peculiar conditions of the place; the lavish flora will appeal to the florist, the fauna to the faunist-Middleham Moor, for example, has a fine breed of race-horses-while the simple child of nature who restricts his interest and his curiosity, like the old gentleman in the Terentian play, to human affairs need not spend an idle moment. My own foible, I confess, is generalisa

VOL. XVII. NO. 102, N.S.

53

'Greed for money, and wily determination to get to lucrative posts in life-ambition to play the European-or-what?' No motive that his sober common sense could accept as a plausible alternative. Yes, his previous impression had been correct; nothing but a desire for self-advancement-nothing but greed and an Eastern cleverness to seek opportunities-animated that splendid bronze, after all! A disappointing specimen to one who loved the warrior race; a specimen of the westernised Eastern-degenerate leopard, with the spirit eliminated and the wiliness twice developed, according to the law of nature that so often strengthens one attribute by the elimination of another.

CHAPTER XII.

THE old tin box again and the breath of terrible India in this quietEnglish room. Siege, struggle, treachery, bloodshed, hunger, thirst, and fever, the extremes of heat and cold, the death agony of the young comrade-this was the story it held. The story of the difficult grave dug in the rock; of the inexorable exigency of the moment, the narrow strait for England's honour which could allow no lingering thought for him that was become useless; of the drawing together of the ranks to hide the gap and keep up the long fight. The story of every conceivable distress of the flesh, every sordid misery of the body, every anxiety of the mind; of hopeless outlook, lingering torture. But, above all, the record of the indomitable purpose; of the white and red crossed flag floating high-of the spirit unconquerable, even to death.

Rosamond sat down on the slanting floor, lifted and took into her lap-as a mother may lift her dead child from the cradle-the old leather case that contained in such small compass so great a story; Captain English's papers of the siege. The parcel had been delivered to her even as he had prepared it for her. To the elastic band that clasped it a scrap of paper was still pinned: For my wife.' And she had never opened it!

All these years his voice had been waiting to speak to her; his own words for her had been there, the last cry of his soul to hers; nay-how did she know ?—the message that should have shaped her future. Something of himself that could not die, he had left her, something of himself to go with her through the desolation! But she, the wife so tenderly loved and thought of to the last-she

had, as it were, denied herself to his death-bed. She had closed her ears to his dying speech. She had thrust his dear ghost from her. How was it possible for any woman to have been so cruel, so cowardly? How was it possible . yet it had been!

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'It is we who make our dead dead,' had said the mourning mother. Rosamond, the wife, had done worse: she had buried what was not yet dead. She had heaped earth upon the lips that still spoke, that she might not feel the sorrow of their last utterance!

When trouble comes it is woman's way, as a rule, to yield herself up to it, to gloat upon her grief, to feed upon tears. She has a fine scorn for man's mode of mourning, so different from hers; for the seeker of distraction, of forgetfulness; for his deliberate shunning of those emotions in which she sinks herself. And yet it may be that this divergence comes less from man's more selfish nature than from the fact that he is a creature of passion, where she is a creature of sentiment; that he knows within himself forces which are to her undreamed of; that her sorrow is as the chill rain that wraps the land and clears in lassitude at last over tender tints, while his sorrow is as the dry convulsion that defaces the earth and rends the foundations of life's whole edifice.

But there are women apart; women who unite with their own innate spirituality the virile capacity of feeling; who can love fiercely and suffer as fiercely. Of such was Rosamond. And she had been called to suffering before her undeveloped girl-nature had had time to lay hold on love. Love and sorrow, they had fallen upon her together, in her ignorant youth, like monstrous angels of destruction. What wonder then that she should have cried out against them and hidden her face! What wonder that she should have shrunk with a sickly terror from her own unplumbed deep capacity for pain!

But no one may deny himself to himself. And the passionate soul makes for passion, be it a Paul or an Augustine! The nemesis of her nature had come upon Rosamond; and she was to be fulfilled to herself, after so many years, at this moment of her woman's maturity, with a handful of relics and the dust and the smell of the distant Indian fort upon them.

Out of the far far past her love and her sorrow were claiming her-at last.

The logs from the Dorset beech-woods flamed in the queer

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