modern sophistication; and this, deny it who will, is a very important factor in the matter. When a man's cogitations are secretly turning upon the badness of his breakfast, and the yet more doubtful prospect which awaits him at dinner, he is seldom, it must be owned, in the mood for very warmly appreciating scenery-especially when that scenery is admittedly somewhat of the bleak and hungry kind. Then, again, there is another and a very serious matter-the weather! Without going into the vexed and oft-disputed question as to whether this part of Ireland or the west of Scotland is the worst and the wettest, it may be admitted at once, and without further question, that it is badvery bad indeed. Even while in the very act of abusing it, however, it is only fair to add that to this very badness, fractiousness, what you will, of the climate the scenery owes a share, and to my mind a by no means inconsiderable share, of its charm. The actual landscape doubtless is fine, but the actual landscape is nothing, literally nothing, until you have seen it under a dozen different moods: now grey and sullen; now fierce and passionate; now, when you least expect it, flashing out smile after smile, as only an Irish landscape can smile when the sun suddenly catches it after a spell of rain. At all events I can personally vouch for the fact of long-continued dry weather being anything but becoming to the scenery. Wanting the moisture which lends them atmosphere and distance, the mountains lose their aërial tints, become dull and grey, oppressed as it were with their own nakedness. I remember (the statement, by the way, is not perhaps a particularly credible one)— nevertheless as a matter of fact I do remember a summer in the west of Ireland, when for weeks together not a shower fell. The loughs sank low in their beds of rock; the bogs, seamed with cracks, showed as dry as so many high roads; the grass turned brown; the flowers withered; the mountains, hard as iron, stood out with every muscle in their stony anatomy brought into the strongest possible relief; now and then a wind got up, but no rain fell; every atom of moisture seemed to have vanished out of the atmosphere, and from morning till night the sun shone down with the same broad, unwinking persistency. It was exactly what everybody had always been wishing and sighing for, but somehow when it came no one appeared particularly gratified, and I can recall no very genuine expression of regret when at last one morning we got up to find that the sky had lost its brazen look, and that the greys had once more resumed their dominion. Nowhere, perhaps, in the world are there such greys as here-pale greys, dark greys, greys tinted with blue, and with green, and with rose-colour; greys merging and melting into one another, and into every other tint imaginable. Yet nowhere, on the other hand, is the colouring more gorgeous when now and then the sky does take a colouring fit. See it at the coming on of rain! A minute, perhaps, ago sky and sea were cloudless; suddenly as you look again the clouds have gathered, struck against the cold sides of the mountains, and begun to descend in rain, which goes sweeping like a pall

along the whole length of the valley, brushing against the flanks of the mountains, and passing away eastward, to be followed by a rapid burst of sunshine, bringing out the colours of the wet grass and smoking rocks; in its turn passing on, reappearing for an instant in fantastic patches of light upon the distant slopes, and then again being swallowed up in the wide-spreading darkness of another sudden storm. The brilliancy and swift chromatic changes of these alternate sun-bursts and rain-squalls are indescribable, and, when seen from a height where they can be followed across a wide stretch of mountain and sea, they constitute a never-failing panorama-a drama the incidents of which are perpetually varying. One is in fact tempted to dwell far too much upon these transitory effects, because in a climate so capricious it is they rather than the [permanent features which create the most vivid and lasting impressions. Looking back into that private picture-gallery which most of us, consciously or unconsciously, carry about with us, two scenes at this moment start into my memory, and both, as will be seen, owe the fact of their being remembered at all, not certainly to anything in the actual scenery, but wholly and solely to the disposition of the lights and atmosphere.

The first was an effect of early morning seen from a window overlooking a wide tract of comparatively low-lying land, sodden with recent rain, where small pools caught the eye, leading it on to a large freshwater lough which lay beyond. Across this tract lay the arch of a rainbow, stretching from the grey of the water to the pale green of the hillsides above. Not a rainbow which came and vanished, but a rainbow which hovered and lingered; now fading until it was all but invisible, now unexpectedly flaring into sudden splendour again. And behind, the nearest hills were vague and dim with mist, while the distant ones were wholly hidden under a vast and capacious cloud-canopy, through which a pale sun shone upon the lough, so that it gleamed like a tarnished shield. All the greens and blues had vanished out of the landscape, but the yellows seemed brighter than ever; the highest note of all being struck where the foam, driven in a long sinuous line across the lough, was washed in a broad palpitating drift against the yellow sand.

The second-an effect of a very different kind-occurred at the end of one of those utterly hopeless days when the weather, after holding out some slight promise in the morning, settles down to rain with a dull and dogged self-satisfaction, as if it never had rained before. For an hour or more we had been tramping homeward, knee-deep in drenching heather, and had just reached the crest of a ridge, overlooking the bay and the dull grey flanks of the opposite hills; already the sun had set behind fourfold walls of cloud without showing itself, and without a moment's intermission of the pelting rain. Suddenly, when we least expected it, an arrow of red light was seen to shoot across the leaden-coloured sky. Another and another followed. Layer after layer of clouds caught the glow, until the whole heavily laden floor of heaven was burning with an

intense and terrible conflagration, out of the very midst of which bars of molten metal appeared to rise, writhing and melting as in a furnace. Across all this swept a few lighter clouds, driven by the wind, each tipped with an edge of light, too intensely luminous to be looked at. A rush of colour, caught from the sky, spread itself over the dull face of the bay, the very stream, at our feet being tinged with the pale opal-coloured tints. Nor was this all; for the clouds, which had been rolling overhead, began suddenly to descend; not in wisps and scrolls, nor in a thin impalpable veil, but altogether, in a vast and apparently solid body; rolling, pouring, gathering on the tops of the hills, and streaming down through the passes. It was a regular cloud-avalanche; and, despite our knowledge that we were too near home to run any risk by being enveloped in its folds, there was something curiously alarming in the sight of these huge summits rolling downhill, and approaching momently nearer. On and on they came, until suddenly, just as they were within about a hundred yards of us, their course was arrested by a fresh conflicting current of air. Here, then, the vanguard stood still, and began slowly melting, passing away in thin shreds and rags of vapour; but the rearguard still continued to pour in fresh reinforcements from behind; which, accumulating faster than they could be dissipated, reared themselves up in vast dome-like masses, towering thousands of feet in air, and gradually slipping downwards until they had enveloped not only us, but the whole valley in their folds. An hour later the overcharged atmosphere relieved itself by a couple of violent thunder-claps following one another in quick succession; after which the night grew calm and clear, and the next morning was glorious; but, alas! before the day ended the dull, persistent, pitiless drizzle had again set in.

E. L.

Upstairs and Downstairs.

A ROSY lass stands one evening in a bare-boarded room where the shadows are gathering quickly. Except for some wooden chairs and a table, and a few books upon some shelves in a corner, the place is empty enough; but the windows look out upon the river, upon a great vault of drifting sky, upon the floating vapours, and the thousand lights of London that are kindling along the banks and reflected into the stream. A small maiden stands perched upon a chair in the window, rubbing her nose against the pane and absorbed by the unaccustomed sight of the fiery lights and the rushing waters, and above all by the swinging creaks of a giant crane at work just in front of the house. The little one has come with a party of visitors, who together with the rosy girl, and a busy lady secretary, just leaving the room, represent for the moment what the report calls "the Central Office of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants." And of all the long names ever given to a most simple and efficient piece of work this seems to be one of the longest. The whole thing is a necessary and very friendly bit of machinery, chiefly worked by the goodwill of the various people concerned in it. It is much to be wished that the number of those who are kindly disposed with help of money and good service could grow with the society itself, which has spread in one direction and another, and which, from the few hundreds of girls with which it began, has now near 3,000 upon its books a statistician might tell us how many more there are growing up, a youthful ever-increasing congregation of many necessities and claims, troublesome enough, at times, but rarely ungrateful. These girls are divided among a certain number of associates, who are prepared to take an interest in their affairs. One could see the whole thing represented that evening at a glance-the books upon the shelf, the people who wish to help, the office, and the rosy lass herself, an item of the 3,000, who had come in by chance and been asked to tea. She stood a sturdy little figure in the usual smart hat and cloth jacket of “ a general," with a round-faced and a bright-eyed and unmistakable "out for a holiday" air. She seemed quite prepared for conversation, but our first start was not propitious.

"Are you in service? Are you a little nurse?" I ask affably.

"I ain't in service; I'm out at service," says the girl, somewhat offended. "Nor I ain't a nurse neither; I'm a general servant; but master says I could be a housemaid any day. I don't like children myself," she goes on, "but ours ain't no trouble; they are such good little things. I minds the three; and I does the house and cleans out

the kitchen. I've had a very nice holiday" brightening up; "I've been round and round by myself, and across the bridge, ever so far, and then I come back here at last to see Miss D-." "Do you

"You look like a country girl," says one of the ladies. know your way about London ?"

"I'm a London girl, I am. I was born in the New Cut. I knows my way. I ain't ever been in the country," says the child. "I've heard say mother was a country girl once, long ago. Mother's dead, she is, and father's in China, aunt says. He don't care nothen' about me (angrily), and I don't want to have nothen' to do with him; he never did nothen' for me. Miss D she found me my place."

And this was true enough, and Miss D

told me afterwards of all the trouble she had to find the place, which had, however, turned out well. For many months before going there the girl had been tiresome and unruly, and no one would keep her. She was saucy, intractable, violent at times; but at last a special place was found, and in this special friendly effort lies the whole secret of this unpretending work. "We are often sorely puzzled what to do with them," said Miss D- "Sometimes, as a last resource, we have been obliged to advertise, 'Will anybody take a difficult tempered or dishonest girl on trial?' and people actually do come forward in answer, and very often the girls we have despaired of do well after all."

Besides the Central Office of the Association there are branch offices all over London now-at Chelsea, Islington, Notting Hill, Paddington, North St. Pancras, South St. Pancras, Poplar, Southwark, Wandsworth, Westminster, Whitechapel, and Fulham. Each of these offices means a committee and a certain number of visitors, who undertake to help and care about a certain number of little girls who are from circumstances among the most absolutely friendless and helpless members of society. Their fathers have abandoned them or are dead; their mothers are dead, or mad, or drunk; they have no relations, or, worse still, only bad ones. They have been kept alive, indeed, by the State; but the State at best is more of an incubator than a parent, and this Association for years past has tried to help the children, with some heart and pity to spare for so much helplessness and childish misery.

When Mrs. Nassau Senior was appointed Inspector of Girls' Schools by Mr. Stansfeldt, she became convinced after experience (which experience she had gathered together during many previous years) that, although most of the masters and chaplains of district schools had made an effort (quite independently of their own hard work) towards continuing the care of the children after they had left the district schools, yet some further organisation was absolutely necessary for their proper supervision. Workhouse girls generally leave school for domestic service at about fourteen, and are not at that early age, any more than other girls, supernaturally endowed with every discretion and necessary experience of life. Some few happily constituted little creatures, established by chance in