little service to Mr. Roscorla for your
sake."
The girl beside her did not under-
stand; she looked up with wondering
eyes.

"What money, Mrs. Trelyon?"

"I mean the money that Harry got for Mr. Roscorla-the money, you know, for these Jamaica estates; is it possible Mr. Roscorla did not tell you before he

quite sure that if he did get in, he would be too proud to put himself in competition with the other young men who were properly prepared for study, and he would take to boating, or cricket, or some such thing. Now, don't you think, Mrs. Trelyon, he would be as well occupied in amusing himself here, where you might gradually get him to take an interest in something besides shooting and fishing? He knows far more things than most peo-left?" ple fancy, I know that. My father says he is very clever and can pick up anything you tell him; and that he knows more about the management of an estate, and about the slate quarries, and about mining too, than people imagine. And "You don't know, then ?" Mrs. Trelas for me," added the girl bravely, "Iyon said, with a sudden fear that she had will say this, that I think him very clever been indiscreet. "Oh, it is nothing, a indeed, and that he will make a straight-mere business arrangement. Of course, forward and honourable man, and I gentlemen don't care to have these should like to see him in Parlinment, things talked over. I hope you won't where he would be able to hold his own, mention it, dear Miss Rosewarne; I I know." really thought you might have overheard them speaking of the matter."

"Oh, my dear! exclaimed Mrs. Trelyon, with a joyful face, “I am so grateful to you. I am so proud to know you think so highly of him. And won't you say a word to him? He will do whatever you please."

But Miss Wenna had somehow been startled into that confession, and the sudden burst of honesty left her considerably ashamed and embarrassed. She would not promise to intermeddle in the matter, whatever she had been induced to say about the future of the young man. She stooped to pick up a flower to cover her confusion, and then she asked Mrs. Trelyon to be good enough to excuse her staying to lunch.

"Oh no, I dare not do that," Mrs. Trelyon said, "Harry would pull the house down when he found I had let you go. You know we have no visitors at present, and it will be such a pleasure to have him lunch with me; he seldom does, and never at all if there are visitors. But really, Miss Rosewarne, it is so inconsiderate of me to talk always of him, as if you were as much interested as myself. Why the whole morning we have not said a word about you and all you are looking forward to. I do hope you will be happy. I am sure you will be, for you have such a sensible way of regarding things, and all is sure to go well. I must say that I thought Harry was a little more mad than usual when he first told me about that money; but now I know you, I am very, very glad indeed, and very pleased that I could be of some

"I don't know anything about it, Mrs. Trelyon, and I hope you will tell me at once," Wenna said, with some decision in her tone, but with a strange sinking at her heart.

Wenna said nothing. The soft dark eyes looked a little troubled, but that was all. And presently, up came young Trelyon, full of good spirits, and poise, and bustle; and he drove his mother and Wenna before him into the house; and hurried up the servants, and would open the wine himself. His mother checked him for whistling at luncheon; his reply was to toss the leg of a fowl on to the hearthrug, where a small and shaggy terrier immediately began to worry it. He put the Angola cat on the table to see if it would eat some Cornish cream off his plate. His pigeons got to know of his being in the house, and came flying about the windows and walking jerkingly over the lawn; he threw up the window and flung them a couple of handfuls of crumbs.

"Oh, Miss Wenna," said he, "would you like to see my tame fox? I am sure you would. Mather, you cut round to the stables and tell old Luke to bring that fox here off you go - leave the claret this side."

"But I do not wish to see the fox; I particularly dislike foxes," said Wenna with some asperity; and Mather was recalled.

Master Harry grinned to himself; it was the first time he had been able to get her to speak to him. From the beginning of luncheon she had sat almost silent, observing his vagaries and listening to his random talk in silence; when she spoke it was always in answer to his

mother. Very soon after luncheon she begged Mrs. Trelyon to excuse her going away; and then she went and put on her hat.

66

"I'll see you down to the inn," said Master Harry, when she came out to the hall-door.

"Thank you, it is quite unnecessary," she said, somewhat coldly.

"Oh," said he, "you may be as nasty as you please, but I shall conquer you by my extreme politeness."

At another time she would have laughed at the notion of this young gentleman complimenting himself on his politeness; now, as she walked quietly down the gravelled path to the gate, she was very grave, and, indeed, took no notice of his presence.

"Wenna," said he, after he had shut the gate, and rejoined her, "is it fair to make such a fuss about a chance word? I think you are very hard. I did not mean to offend you."

"You have not offended me, Mr. Trelyon."

No, thank you," she said, quietly, and then she went away.

Well, he stood looking after her for a few seconds. Now that her back was

"Then why do you look so precious turned to him and she was going away, glum?"

She made no answer.

"Now look here, be reasonable. Are you vexed because I called you Wenna? Or is it because I spoke about singing in

the choir?"

"No," she said, simply, "I was not thinking of anything of that kind; and I am not vexed."

"Then what is the matter?"

For another second or two she was silent, apparently from irresolution; then she suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, and confronted him.

"Mr. Trelyon," she said, "is it true that you have given Mr. Roscorla money, and on my account?"

"No, it is not," he said, considerably startled by her tone; "I lent him some money the money he wanted to take to Jamaica."

"And what business had you to do anything of the sort?" she said, with the shame in her heart lending a strangely unusual sharpness to her voice.

there was no longer any brightness in the fresh spring woods, nor any colour in the clear skies overhead. She had been hard on him, he felt; and yet there was no anger or impatience in his heart, only a vague regret that somehow he had wounded her, and that they were no longer good friends. He stood so for a minute or two, and then he suddenly set out to overtake her. She turned slightly just as he had got up.

"Miss Wenna," he said, rather shamefacedly, "I forgot to ask you whether you would mind calling in at Mrs. Luke's as you go by. There is a basket of primroses there for you. I set the children to gather them about an hour ago; I thought you would like them."

She said she would; and then he raised his cap to her looked at her just for one moment and turned and walked away. Wenna called for the basket, and a very fine basket of flowers it was, for Mrs. Luke said that Master Harry had given the children sixpence "Well," said the young man, quite a-piece to gather the finest primroses humbly, "I thought it would be a service they could get, and every one knows both to you and to him; and that there what Cornish primroses are. Wenna was no harm in it. If he succeeds he took away the flowers not paying any will pay me back. It was precious silly particular attention to them, and it was of him to tell you anything about it; but only when she got into her own room still, Miss Wenna-you must see now and when she felt very much inclined to don't be unreasonable — what harm could sit down and cry that she noticed lying there be in it?" among the large and pale yellow primroses She stood before him, her eyes cast' a bit of another flower which one of the

are wholly unlike what I had imagined.

children had, doubtless, placed there. I that the present and future of English art It was merely a stalk of the small pinkflowered saxifrage, common in cottagers' gardens, and called in some places London-pride. In other parts of the country they tenderly call it None-so-pretty.

From The Cornhill Magazine. THOUGHTS OF A COUNTRY CRITIC.

Some months ago, at one of those social meetings in which the country still preserves a kindliness of neighbourly intercourse which is lost to the town, there appeared a young Oxonian, the nephew of our excellent rector, a recent candidate for honours, and lately elected fellow of his college. It was interesting to meet a young man of promise, and, for his years, of some reputation; and he was cordially received by the company. After dinner the conversation (leaving for a while our favourite local topics) turned upon the exhibition of the Royal Academy. I had visited it in the month of May, and had been glad to see in it evidence that the vigour of English art was still unimpaired, in spite of the influence of pre-Raphaelitism now happily passed away, and of a too dominant French sentimentalism. It is true that a sense of staleness had sometimes interfered with my enjoyment, as I saw the same painters executing the same feats I think I have some idea: for I have which they have executed for goodness been a humble lover of art from my boy-knows how many years past. Yet I hood, and till lately fancied that I knew found plenty to praise, and just cause for some little of what was going on in that congratulating a country which had beworld. But some recent flashes of light have told me that I have been asleep, I know not how long, and am in danger of finding myself after all no better than a Rip Van Winkle.

I WONDER what were the feelings of an old-fashioned Derbyshire gentleman some three hundred years ago when the Countess of Devonshire had brought down a lot of outlandish artists and masons to build Hardwicke Hall, and instead of the good old gables and buttresses of his youth arose classical pilasters and entablatures, a new and wonderful birth of heathen art to supplant the dull but sufficient Gothic under which he and his fathers had lived for a couple of centuries.

Let me explain. I live in a market town in the North Midland counties, five hours from London. We are not wholly Boeotian. We take in the Saturday Réview and the Pall Mall Budget, and see the Quarterly Review and an occasional number of the Fortnightly and Contemporary. I myself travelled in Italy some years ago. I used to take in the Art Journal. I have read Ruskin, have never lost an opportunity of seeing good pictures, and I am, I hope, as open to new impressions as I was in 1850. We are, I repeat, not wholly Boeotian; but the mere fact of our latitude makes us provincial; and our brightest rays of enlightenment come rather from Manchester than from London. Yet we do not fail, once at least in two or three years, to visit the Royal Academy and the National Gallery, and any exhibitions of pictures which may be open when our visits to town take place, and instruct ourselves as well as we may in the progress of the art and art-literature now going on in the busier world. But all my ideas have been upset by the discovery

fore it so good a hope of a progressive school of art. I was enumerating some of the pictures of the year which had seemed to me specially worthy of remark, and amongst others a painting by a Mr. Moore which had puzzled me; a single figure without light or shade, or any particular colour; something like a tinted bas-relief. I now know that Mr. Moore is one of our great ones; but then I used his name ignorantly. My young friend, who had been silent during dinner, pricked up his ears at the name, and said, in a tone which, if not disrespectful, was not deferential, "You do not appear to have noticed the best thing in last year's exhibition - the great Greek procession, by the same painter." Now I had noticed that picture, and spent some time before it, and marked it with a cross in my catalogue. I had expressed my surprise to the friend who was with me at the time (not a judge of painting himself) that such a picture should have been admitted at all. It had seemed to me a dull and flat composition in sad green and grey, a dead echo of an unreal past.

"Ah!" broke in my young friend, with a regretful air, "and what have we at best but an echo? There is no art-life in this century; we can but try and feel the past, and make it live again as we

best may. Look at Jones! look at Morris! what do they do but catch a spark from the ages which had a life? The sentiment of that picture is not unreal; it is refracted, if you will. The poetry of it is a poetry of situation, which none but a delicate culture can taste. There is a world of passion in that situation, if you can but feel it."

"A situation," I said; "but what a situation!"

"Oh, pardon me; I do not mean by a situation a mere transcript of a fact; it is the transcript of a sentiment. Look at the Greeks! No incident too slight, too fleeting, to be the casket of an imperishable thought."

66

were in the habit of running up and down once a week or so); “ I will take you to all the studios. I know all these fellows; and you should read the Academy and the Portfolio; the Academy is the best thing there is. I write in it myself sometimes. Good night."

Im

A week after this conversation I found myself in Oxford with my new acquaintance Mr. W. The young gentleman had insisted on my accompanying him to Oxford and thence to London; and I retain so pleasant a recollection of his hospitality that I am unwilling to criticise himself or his tastes, or even to call in question the furniture of his rooms, to which I had looked forward as a probable soluHere he turned away from me to some tion of the problems which his conversaladies who were of the company, ladies tion continually suggested. I must conwho have lately come into our neigh- fess that what I saw amazed me. bourhood, and whose unconventional be-agine an old set of panelled rooms dating, haviour, dress, and conversation furnish I dare say, from 1700. I remembered much matter for les disettes of a country them as occupied by a friend of my own town. As far as I can hazard a guess, their aim is to reconcile the thirteenth with the eighteenth century; and our sweet Phyllises and Phidyles, always ready to learn, are dropping the quaint skirts and ribbons which made them as pretty as Dresden china in the Clarissa period of a few years ago, and are becoming

mediæval Florentines, sweeping through the aisle on Sunday mornings like Laura or Beatrice at a fancy ball.

I could find no place for myself in this conversation; the names were unfamiliar. I had been visiting picture-galleries with my eyes shut, it seems Blake, Stothard, Watts, Morris, Rossetti, Corot, Daubigny, Jones and Jones, and again Jones. I knew the names of these painters to be sure, but had looked upon most of them as artists who had more sentiment or quaintness than knowledge and power. Then the terms they used tonality, mood-landscape, exquisite passion, splendour of experience, pulsations of consciousness and adjectives: intimate, precious, sharp, swift, resonant, sweet. "Well," I thought, "I am an old fogy, but not too old to learn; and I will find out whatever I can of these lean kine who are to eat up our John Bull and all he has believed in hitherto, and see whether the leanness is theirs or mine; and meantime I will boldly ask this young précieux how I can obtain access to the studios in which these painters work, and to the literature in which their principles are set down."

"Are you coming up to town any time in the next ten days?" he said (as if I

about thirty years ago: they were then painted or grained a cheerful light-oak colour. Mr. W. had had the panels painted tea-green. His sofas and chairs were covered with yellow chintz. Persian rugs lay in all directions about the room

the floor covered with China matting. The curtains were of a kind of snuffcoloured green. The furniture, spindlelegged mahogany tables, odd round looking-glasses like those one sees in bedrooms, and carved book-cases with glass fronts such as I remember in my grandmother's house some forty years past. The fireplace was full of Gothic or semi-Gothic blue-and-white tiles, with an old-fashioned brass fender. In the upper lights of the windows were some allegorical subjects in white and yellow-the four seasons, I think-in an extreme mediæval style. It was all very refined and pretty, but what a jumble! Here was eclecticism with a vengeance - Hafis on the floor, Queen Anne on the walls, Chaucer in windows, glass from the Grand Canal, mirrors Louis Quatorze, chairs and tables which might have stood in Clarissa's parlour. And when I came to look more closely at the pictures - for you may read a man's mind as well by his pictures as by his books — I was more confounded than ever. Here was a writhing, sweeping mass of black and white, a photograph from Blake. Here an extraordinary transparent white figure standing amongst azaleas by an enormous China pot 66 -- Morgiana?" I asked myself. Then there were two little watercolours, one representing half an acre of