was a thorough woman at heart; and, as such, was not disposed to let a chance slip of turning to account the apparent bodily fragility which dissembled a very good constitution. Seldom, indeed, does maid or matron allow any small capital of the sort to lie long idle or profitless. Throughout all ages, despots have been found, anxious to drape their acts of oppression with a veil of reason and legality just dense enough for decency. In the present case, Lady Mildred brought forward a convenient and colourable pretext for a fresh exaction; she was rather indifferent as to its being received with implicit credit, for she knew that Alan was too kindly and courteous to contradict her.

As it happened, Wyverne was not deceived for a moment; but as the really important points of the hollow treaty were already decided, he did not think it worth while to hesitate over minor details.

'You shall have all you ask without reservation,' he said, 'and "thereto I plight my troth."

So they locked hands therefaith and falsehood — truth and treachery-the one, harbouring no thought that was not honest and tender; the other, consistent to the last in her dark, pitiless scheming. Yet the woman's fingers were most cordial in their pressure, and they never shrank or trembled.

It is pleasant to read of the retribution that descended on Brian de Bois-Guilbert, or Sir Aldinger; but poetical justice does not always assert itself so conveniently as in the lists at Templestowe. I wonder how often in the ordeal of battle, honour has gone down before dishonour, to the mocking echo of the herald's cry-God defend the right!'

Lady Mildred lay back on her sofa, with a long sigh of weariness which was not altogether feigned.

his hand as it lay on the arm of the vast fauteuil. They had been very quiet, those two, while the conference was proceeding, scarcely venturing to glance twice or thrice furtively in the direction of the dread divan; but their whispered confidences were pleasant enough, if one might judge from Helen's beautiful blushes and the Squire's musical laugh breaking in at intervals, discreetly modulated and subdued. Both gazed anxiously in Alan's face as he drew near, trying to augur from its expression how he had sped. It told no tales; for his brow was smooth and his smile serene, as if there were no such things in this world of ours as doubt, or distrust, or despondency. If he could not hope to clear away all troublesome thorns from the path of the fair girl who had promised that day to trust him, he could at least spare her the pains of anticipation for her sake as well as his own he was determined to make the most of every hour of sunshine. Without going into particulars then, he succeeded in leaving an impression that Lady Mildred had shown herself more favourable to their wishes than could have been hoped for. Helen went to rest on that eventful night, when childhood ended and her womanhood began, in a flutter of happiness which lasted through her dreams.

'While we live let us live.' How is this agreeable maxim to be carried out, if we are always looking forward into the Dark? There is little wisdom in the desperate philosophy which teaches men 'to eat and drink for to-morrow. they die;' but surely there is reason in taking, while we may, such moderate refreshment as may brace us for the perils and labours that the dawning may bring. Do you suppose that Teucer's galleys clove less swiftly through the Egean, because their crews had feasted high in Salamis on the eve of exile! I fancy those grim old sea-dogs at their last home revels - cutting deeper into the mighty chines, and dipping their grizzled beards into the black wine with a keener

tively frivolous; accomplishments which certainly were not worth the labour and the time which it must have cost to master them. Thus, M. Blondin has probably made as much of himself as can be made of mortal, in the respect of walking on a rope stretched at a great height from the ground. Hazlitt

makes mention of a man who had cultivated to the very highest degree the art of playing at rackets; and who accordingly played at rackets incomparably better than any one else ever did. A wealthy gentleman, lately deceased, by putting his whole mind to the pursuit, esteemed himself to have reached entire perfection in the matter of killing otters. Various individuals have probably developed the power of turning somersets, of picking pockets, of playing on the piano, jew's-harp, banjo, and penny trumpet, of mental calculation in arithmetic, of insinuating evil about their neighbours without directly asserting anything,-to a measure as great as is possible to man. Long practice and great concentration of mind upon these things, have sufficed to produce what might seem to tremble on the verge of perfection: what unquestionably leaves the attainments of ordinary people at an inconceivable distance behind. But I do not call it making the most of a man, to develop, even to perfection, the power of turning somersets and playing at rackets. I call it making the most of a man, when you make the best of his best powers and qualities; when you take those things about him which are the worthiest and most admirable, and cultivate these up to their highest attainable degree. And it is in this sense that the statement is to be understood, that no one is made the most of. Even in the best, we see no more than the rudiments of good qualities which might have been developed into a great deal more; and in very many human beings, proper management might have brought out qualities essentially different from those which these beings now possess. It is not merely that they are rough dia

monds, which might have been polished into blazing ones; not merely that they are thoroughbred colts drawing coal-carts, which with fair training would have been new Eclipses: it is that they are vinegar which might have been wine, poison which might have been food, wild-cats which might have been harmless lambs, soured miserable wretches who might have been happy and useful, almost devils who might have been but a little lower than the angels. Oh the unutterable sadness that is in the thought of what might have been !

Not always, indeed. Sometimes, as we look back, it is with deep thankfulness that we see the point at which we were (we cannot say how) inclined to take the right turning, when we were all but resolved to take that which we can now see would have landed us in wreck and ruin. And it is fit that we should correct any morbid tendency to brood upon the fancy of how much better we might have been, by remembering also how much worse we might have been. Sometimes the present state of matters, good or bad, is the result of long training; of influences that were at work through many years; and that produced their effect so gradually that we never remarked the steps of the process, till some day we waken up to a sense of the fact, and find ourselves perhaps a great deal better, probably a great deal worse, than we had been vaguely imagining. But the case is not unfrequently otherwise. Sometimes one testing time decided whether we should go to the left or to the right. There are in the moral world things analogous to the sudden accident which makes a man blind or lame for life: in an instant there is wrought a permanent deterioration. Perhaps a few minutes before man or woman took the step which can never be retraced, which must banish them for ever from all they hold dear, and compel them to seek in some new country far away a place where to hide their shame and misery, they had just as little thought of taking that miserable step as you, my

reader, have of taking one like it. And perhaps there are human beings in this world, held in the highest esteem, and with not a speck on their snow-white reputation, who know within themselves that they have barely escaped the gulf; that the moment has been in which all their future lot was trembling in the balance; and that a grain's weight more in the scale of evil, and by this time they might have been reckoned among the most degraded and abandoned of the race. But probably the first deviation, either to right or left, is in most cases a very small one. You know, my friend, what is meant by the points upon a railway. By moving a lever, the rails upon which the train is advancing are, at a certain place, broadened or narrowed by about the eighth of an inch. That little movement decides whether the train shall go north or south. Twenty carriages have come so far together; but here is a junction station, and the train is to be divided. The first ten carriages deviate from the main line by a fraction of an inch at first; but in a few minutes the two portions of the train are flying on, miles apart. You cannot see the one from the other, save by distant puffs of white steam through the clumps of trees. Perhaps already a high hill has intervened, and each train is on its solitary way-one to end its course, after some hours, amid the roar and smoke and bare ugliness of some huge manufacturing town; and the other to come through green fields to the quaint, quiet, dreamy-looking little city, whose place is marked, across the plain, by the noble spire of the grey cathedral rising into the summer blue. We come to such points in our journey through life: railwaypoints (as it were) which decide not merely our lot in life, but even what kind of folk we shall be, morally and intellectually. A hair'sbreadth may make the deviation at first. Two situations are offered you at once: you think there is hardly anything to choose between them. It does not matter which you accept; and perhaps some

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slight and fanciful consideration is allowed to turn the scale. But now you look back, and you can see that there was the turning-point in your life; it was because you went there to the right, and not to the left, that you are now a great English prelate and not a humble Scotch professor. Was there not a time in a certain great man's life, at which the lines of rail diverged, and at which the question was settled, should he be a minister of the Scotch Kirk, or should he be Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain? I can imagine a stage in the history of a lad in a countinghouse, at which the little angle of rail may be pushed in or pushed back that shall send the train to one of two places five hundred miles asunder; it may depend upon whether he shall take or not take that half-crown, whether, thirty years after, he shall be taking the chair, a rubicund baronet, at a missionary society meeting, and receive the commendations of philanthropic peers and earnest bishops; or be labouring in chains at Norfolk Island, a brutalized, cursing, hardened, scourge-scarred, despairing wretch, without a hope for this life or the other. Oh, how much may turn upon a little thing! Because the railway train in which you were coming to a certain place was stopped by a snow-storm, the whole character of your life may have been changed. Because some one was in the drawing-room when you went to see Miss Smith on a certain day, resolved to put to her a certain question, you missed the tide, you lost your chance, you went away to Australia and never saw her more. It fell upon a day that a ship, coming from Melbourne, was weathering a rocky point on an iron-bound coast, and was driven close upon that perilous shore. They tried to put her about; it was the last chance. It was a moment of awful risk and decision. If the wind catches the sails, now shivering as the ship comes up, on the right side, then all on board are safe. If the wind catches the sails on the other side, then all on board must perish. And so it all

depends upon which surface of certain square yards of canvas the uncertain breeze shall strike, whether John Smith, who is coming home from the diggings with twenty thousand pounds, shall go down and never be heard of again by his poor mother and sisters away in Scotland; or whether he shall get safely back, a rich man, to gladden their hearts, and buy a pretty little place, and improve the house on it into the pleasantest picture; and purchase, and ride, and drive various horses; and be seen on market days sauntering in the High-street of the county town; and get married, and run about the lawn before his door, chasing his little children; and become a decent elder of the Church; and live quietly and happily for many years. Yes: from what precise point of the compass the next flaw of wind should come, would decide the question between the long homely life in Scotland, and a nameless burial deep in a foreign sea.

It seems to me to be one of the main characteristics of human beings, not that they actually are much, but that they are something of which much may be made. There are untold potentialities in human nature. The tree cut down, concerning which its heathen owner debated whether he should make it into a god or into a three-legged stool, was positively nothing in its capacity of coming to different ends and developments, when we compare it with each human being born into this world. Man is not so much a thing already, as he is the germ of something. He is (so to speak) material formed to the hand of circumstances. He is essentially a germ, either of good or evil. And he is not like the seed of a plant, in whose development the tether allows no wider range than that between the more or less successful manifestation of its inherent nature. Give a young tree fair play good soil and abundant

air; tend it carefully, in short, and you will have a noble tree. Treat the young tree unfairly: give it a bad soil, deprive it of needful air and light, and it will grow up a

stunted and poor tree. But in the case of the human being, there is more than this difference in degree. There may be a difference in kind. The human being may grow up to be (as it were) a fair and healthful fruit tree, or to be a poisonous one. There is something positively awful about the potentialities that are in human nature. The Archbishop of Canterbury might have grown up under influences which would have made him a bloodthirsty pirate or a sneaking pickpocket. The pirate or the pickpocket, taken at the right time, and trained in the right way, might have been made a pious exemplary man. You remember that good divine, two hundred years since, who, standing in the market-place of a certain town, and seeing a poor wretch led by him to the gallows, said, 'There goes myself, but for the grace of God.' Öf course, it is needful that human laws should hold all men as equally responsible. The punishment of such an offence is such an infliction, no matter who committed the offence. At least the mitigating circumstances which human laws can take into account must be all of a very plain and intelligible character. It would not do to recognise anything like a graduated scale of responsibility. A very bad training in youth would be in a certain limited sense regarded as lessening the guilt of any wrong thing done; and you may remember accordingly how that magnanimous monarch, Charles II., urged to the Scotch lords, in extenuation of the wrong things he had done, that his father had given him a very bad education. But though human laws and judges may vainly and clumsily endeavour to fix each wrongdoer's place in the scale of responsibility; and though they must, in a rough way, do what is rough justice in five cases out of six; still we may well believe that in the view of the Supreme Judge the responsibilities of men are most delicately graduated to their opportunities. There is One who will appreciate with entire accuracy the amount of guilt that is in each wrong deed of each wrongdoer, and mercifully allow