it laid its fatal hand upon. We have all learnt to love and admire art in our daily life, and to look for it here and there; but as we look, somehow, and as we exclaim,-Here or there behold it !—the fairies vanish, the birds fly away, the tranquil silence is broken, the simple unconsciousness is gone for ever, and you suddenly awake from your pleasant dream. A ruin enclosed by a wall and viewed with a ticket, a model old woman in a sham rustic cottage at the park gate; even the red cloaks of the village children which the lady at the hall brought down from Marshall and Snellgrove's, when she was in town last Tuesday-all these only become scenes in a pantomime somehow. In these days, one is so used to sham and imitation, and Brummagem, that when by chance one comes to the real thing, it is hard to believe in it. At least, so Butler thought, as he trudged along.

Presently he began to climb the cliff, and he reached the top at last with the great fields and the sea on either side, and the fresh breezes blowing. He did not go into the village, but turned straight off and strode up the hill. He passed groups all along the road, resting or plodding through the dust. The west was all aglow with sunset, great ranges of cloud mountains were coming from a distance and hanging overhead in the sky. He beheld fiery lakes, calm seas, wonderful countries. He could see land and sky and sea glowing for miles and miles in wreathing vapours of loveliest tint, and golden sun-floods. Butler trudged along, admiring, wondering, and at the same time with his head full of one thing and another.

He was loth enough to go, but there was no help for it. He had been in scrapes and troubles at home, and had come away for a change, and now he felt he should get into a scrape if he stayed, and they had sent for him home again. His uncle, Charles Butler, had paid his debts once more, and his uncle Hervey had written him a lofty and discursive epistle conveying his forgiveness, desiring him to come back to his work and his studio. His aunt, Madame de Tracy, announced that she would accompany him to England, spend a short time with her two brothers, and make the way smooth for her nephew. Madame de Tracy had but ten fingers, but if she had possessed twenty she would have wished to make use of each one of them in that culinary process to which the old proverb alludes. Her efforts had never been successful as far as Butler was concerned.

Dick, as his friends call him, had been cursed with a facility for getting into scrapes all his lifetime. He had an odd fantastic mind, which had come to him no one knew how or why. He was sensitive, artistic, appreciative. He was vain and diffident; he was generous and selfish; he was warm-hearted, and yet he was too much a man of the world not to have been somewhat tainted by its ways. Like other and better men, Dick's tastes were with the aristocracy, his sympathies with the people. He was not strong enough to carry out his own theories, though he could propound them very eloquently, in a gentle drawl

ing voice, not unpleasant to listen to. He was impressionable enough to be easily talked over and persuaded for a time, but there was with it all a fund of secret obstinacy and determination which would suddenly reassert itself, at inconvenient moments sometimes. In that last scrape of his, Dick having first got deeply into debt, in a moment of aberration had proposed to a very plain but good-natured young lady with a great deal of money. He had made the offer at the instigation of his relations, and to quiet them and deliver himself from their persecutions, and he then behaved shamefully, as it is called, for he was no sooner accepted, to his surprise and consternation, than he wrote a very humble but explicit note to the heiress, telling her that the thing was impossible. That she must forgive him if she could, but he felt that the mercenary motives which had induced him to come forward were so unworthy of her and of himself, that the only course remaining to him was to confess his meanness and to throw himself upon her good-nature. Poor Dick! the storm which broke upon his curly head was a terrible one. He had fled in alarm.

His curly head had stood him in stead of many a better quality; his confidence and good manners had helped him out of many a well-deserved scrape, but he was certainly no sinewy hero, no giant, no Titan, like those who have lately revisited the earth-(and the circulating libraries, to their very great advantage and improvement).-So far he was effeminate that he had great quickness of perception, that he was enthusiastic and selfindulgent, and shrunk from pain for himself or for others. He had been petted and spoiled in his youth, and he might have been a mere puppet and walking gentleman to this day, if it had not been for that possession, that odd little craze in his mind which seemed to bring him to life somehow, and force him into independence and self-denial; and Charles Butler, his eldest uncle, used to make jokes at him, or occasionally burst out in a fume when Dick gravely assured him he believed himself possessed and unaccountable for his actions. But for all his vexation, the old man could not resist the young fellow's handsome face, and his honest, unaffected ways, and his cleverness and his droll conceit, and humility, and grateful ingratitude, so to speak. His scrapes, after all, were thoughtless, not wicked ones, and so old Butler paid and paid, and preached a little, and jibed a great deal, and offered him regular employment, but Dick would not be regularly employed, would not be helped, would not be made angry; it seemed all in vain to try to influence him.

“If your pictures were worth the canvas," the old fellow would say, "I should be only too thankful to see you so harmlessly occupied; but what is this violet female biting an orange, and standing with her toes turned in and her elbows turned out? P. R. B's. I have no patience with the nonsense. Pray, were Sir Joshua, and Lawrence, and Gainsborough, and Romney, before Raphael or after? and could they paint a pretty woman, or could they not?"

"They could paint in their way," Dick would answer, twirling his

moustache, "and I, probably, can appreciate them better than you can, sir. You haven't read my article in the Art Review, I see." And then the two would talk away at one another for an hour or more. It all ended in Dick going his own way, wasting his time, throwing away opportunities, picking up shreds that he seemed to have thrown away, making friends wherever he went, with the children of light or of darkness as the case might be.

As Dick walked along the high road to Tracy this afternoon, he replied to one greeting and another good-humoured looking women stepping out by their men-companions, grinned and nodded to him as they passed on; children trotting along the road cried out, "Bon-soïr," in the true Normandy sing-song. Butler occasionally interrupted his somewhat remorseful meditations to reply to them. "What a fool he was !" he was thinking. Alas! this is often what people are thinking as they walk for a little way alone along the high road of life. How he had wasted his youth, his time, his chances. Here he was, at eight-and-twenty, a loiterer in the race. He had tried hard enough at times, but life had gone wrong with him somehow. "Why was he always in trouble?" poor Butler asked himself; "dissatisfied, out of pocket and temper? Why was he unhappy now when matters were beginning to brighten, and one more chance offered itself for him to retrieve the past?" He had a terror lest the future should only be a repetition of times gone by-thoughtless imprudence, idleness, recklessness.-He thought if he could turn his back upon it all, and take up a new life under another name, he would be well content,-if he could put on a blouse and dig in the fields like these sunburnt fellows, and forget all cares and anxieties and perplexities in hard physical labour and fatigue. A foolish passionate longing for the simpler forms of life had come over him of late. He was sick of cities, of men, of fine ladies, of unsuccessful efforts, of constant disappointment and failure. He was tired of being tired and of the problems of daily life which haunted and perplexed him. Here, perhaps, he might be at peace, living from day to day and from hour to hour.

And yet he felt that the best and truest part of him, such as it was, was given to his art, and that he would sacrifice everything, every hope for better things, if he sacrificed to weariness, to laziness,—to a fancy,what he would not give up for expediency and success. He was no genius, he could not look for any brilliant future; he was discouraged and out of heart. He blinked with his short-sighted eyes across the country towards a hollow far away, where a farmstead was nestling; he could see the tall roof gleaming among the trees and the stacks. How loth he was to go. He imagined himself driving cattle to market along the dusty roads; bargaining; hiring labourers, digging drains, tossing hay into carts; training fruit-trees, working in the fields. It was an absurdity, and Butler sighed, for he knew it was absurd. He must go, whether he would or not; he had seen the last of the place and the people in it; he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of good and of evil, it was too late, he could

not be Adam living with his Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was a garden full of apples, bounteous, fruitful, which was spread out before him, stretching from the lilac hills all down to the sea, but it was not the Garden of Eden. Had Eve bright quick brown eyes, Butler wondered; did she come and go busily? did she make ciders and salads, and light fires of dried sticks in the evenings? Did she carefully pick up the fruit that fell to the ground and store it away? did she pull flowers to decorate her bower with, and feed the young heifers with leaves out of her hand? Did she scatter grain for the fowls of the air? did she call all the animals by their names and fondle them with her pretty slim fingers? did she, when they had been turned out of Paradise, weave garments for herself and for Adam with a spinning-wheel, as Butler had seen the women use in these parts? Had she a sweet odd voice with a sort of chord in it? Dick sighed again and walked on quickly, watching a great cloud-ship high overhead. And as he walked writing his cares with his footsteps on the dust, as Carlyle says somewhere, a cart which had been jolting up the hill-side passed him on the road.

It was full of country-people: a young man with a flower stuck into his cap was driving, an old man was sitting beside him. Inside the cart were three women and some children. One little fellow was leaning right over, blowing a big trumpet and holding a flag. The other children. were waving branches and pulling at a garland of vine-leaves, of which one end was dragging, baskets were slung to the shafts below, two dogs were following and barking, while the people in the cart were chaunting a sort of chorus as they went jolting along the road.

They sang while the children waved their branches in accompaniment. It looked like a christening party, with the white ribbons and flowers. One of the young women held a little white baby in her arms: another sat as if she was in a boat, holding fast a pretty little curly-headed girl, while the other arm dropped loosely over the side.

As the cart jogged past him, the children recognized Butler, who was well known to them, and they began to call to him and to wave their toys to attract his attention. The two men took off their caps, the women nodded, and went on singing; all except the young woman who had been leaning back-she looked up, smiled, and made the little girl next her kiss her hand to the wayfarer.

"Good-by, Reine," said Butler, in English, starting forward. "I'm going to-morrow."

Reine, jogging away, did not seem to understand what he said-she stretched out her long neck, half turned to the others, then looked back again at Dick. The other two women did not heed her, but went on shrilly chaunting—

And a second verse

Si le chemin nous ennuic
L'un à l'autre nous boirons!

Voici tous gens de courage
Lesquels s'en vont en voyage
Jusque par-de-là des monts
Faire ce pélérinage.

Tous boire nous ne pouvons.
Que la bouteille on n'oublie.
En regrettant Normandie,
En regrettant

went the chorus with the men's voices joining in.

There was a sudden decline in the hill, and the horse that had been going slowly before, set off at a trot. Reine was still leaning back and looking after Butler. Dick never turned his head as he walked quietly on towards Tracy. It seemed to him as if the sun had set suddenly, and that a cold east wind was coming up from the sea.

The cart jogged off towards the farmstead which Dick had seen nestling among the trees-Dick went on his road through the growing dusk. About half an hour later, Madame Michaud, belated and in a great hurry, drove past him in her little open gig; she pulled up, however, to offer him a lift, which Butler declined with thanks.

The road makes a sudden turn about a mile before you reach the château, and Dick could perceive the glow of the windows of the old place already beginning to light up. He could also see a distant speck of light in the plain, shining through darker shadow. Had Reine reached home, he wondered? was that the flare of the Colza blaze through the open door of the dwelling, or the lamp placed in the window as a signal to Dominic and her grandfather that the supper was ready? "It is as well I am going to-morrow," Butler ruefully thought once more.

It was almost dark by the time he reached the iron gates of the Château de Tracy, where his dinner was cooking, and his French relations were awaiting his return. They were sitting out-dusky forms of aunts and cousins-on chairs and benches, upon the terrace in front of the old place, enjoying the evening breeze, fresh though it was. English people would have huddled into cloaks and bonnets, or gathered round close up to the wood-fire in the great bare saloon on a night like this; but French people are less cautious and chilly than we are, and indeed there are no insidious damps lurking in the keen dry atmosphere of Normandy, no hidden dangers to fear as with us. Tonight the mansarde windows in the high roof, the little narrow windows in the turret, and many of the shuttered casements down below were lighted up brightly. The old house looked more cheerful than in the daytime, when to English eyes a certain mouldiness and neglect seemed to hang about the place. Persons passing by at night, when the lamps were lighted, travellers in the diligence from Bayeux, and other wayfarers, sometimes noticed the old château blazing by the roadside, and speculated dimly, as people do when they see signs of an unknown life,-as to what fort of people were living, what sort of a history was passing, behind the grey walls. There would be voices on the terrace, music coming from