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woodbine as she went, and, throwing it round her shoulders, held the two ends in one hand like a ribbon, while with the other she swung her white sun-bonnet. She laughed, and shook her head at me, and there, large as life, under the dark braids dangled my coral ear-rings, that she'd adopted without leave or licence. She'd been down to the lower landing to meet Dan | (a thing she'd done before I don't know when), and was walking up with Mr. Gabriel while Dan stayed behind to see to things. I kept them talking, and Mr. Gabriel was sparkling with fun, for he'd got to feeling acquainted, and it had put him in high spirits to get ashore at this hour, though he liked the sea, and we were all laughing, when Dan came up. Now I must confess I hadn't fancied Mr. Gabriel over and above; I suppose my first impression had hardened into a prejudice; and after I'd fathomed the meaning of Faith's fine feathers I liked him less than ever. But when Dan came up, he joined right in, gay and hearty, and liking his new acquaintance so much, that, thinks I, he must know best, and I'll let him look out for his interests himself. It would 'a' been no use, though, for Dan to pretend to beat the Frenchman at his own weapons-and I don't know that I should have cared to have him. The older I grow, the less I think of your mere intellect. Throw learning out of the scales, and give me a great, warm heart-like Dan's.

Well, it was getting on in the evening, when the latch lifted, and in ran Faith. She twisted my ear-rings out of her hair, exclaiming-

"Oh, Georgie, are you busy? Can't you pierce my ears now?"

"Pierce them yourself, Faith."

"Well. But I can't-you know I can't. Won't you now, Georgie?" and she tossed the ear-rings into my lap.

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"Why, Faith," said I, "how'd you contrive to wear these, if your ears aren't-"Oh, I tied them on. Come now, Georgie!" So I got the ball of yarn and the darningneedle.

"Oh, not such a big one!" cried she. "Perhaps you'd like a cambric needle," said I.

"I don't want a winch," she pouted. "Well, here's a smaller one. Now kneel down."

"Yes, but you wait a moment, till I screw up my courage."

"No need. You can talk, and I'll take you at unawares."

So Faith knelt down, and I got all ready. "And what shall I talk about?" said she. "About Aunt Rhody, or Mr. Gabriel, or I'll tell you the queerest thing, Georgie! Going on now?"

"Do be quiet, Faith, and not keep your head flirting about so!-for she'd started up to speak. Then she composed herself once more.

"What was I saying? Oh, about that. Yes, Georgie, the queerest thing! You see, this evening, when Dan was out, I was sitting

talkin' with Mr. Gabriel, and he was wondering how I came to be dropped down here, so I told him all about it. And he was so interested that I went and showed him the things I had on when Dan found me-you know they've been kept real nice. And he took them, and looked them over, close, admiring them, and-andadmiring me; and finally he started, and then held the frock to the light, and then lifted a little plait, and in the under-side of the beltlining there was a name very finely wroughtVirginie des Violets; and he looked at all the others, and in some hidden corner of every one was the initials of the same name-V. des V. That should be your name, Mrs. Devereux,' says he. Oh no!' says I; my name's Faith.' Well, and on that he asked was there no more; and so I took off the little chain that I've always worn, and showed him that; and he asked if there was a face in it, in what we thought was a coin, you know; and I said, oh, it didn't open; and he turned it over and over, and finally something snapped, and there was a face-here, you shall see it, Georgie."

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And Faith drew it from her bosom, and opened and held it before me; for I'd sat with my needle poised, and forgetting to strike. And there was the face indeed, a sad, serious face, dark and sweet, yet the image of Faith, and with the same mouth-that so lovely in a woman becomes weak in a man; and on the other side there were a few threads of hair, with the same darkness and fineness as Faith's hair, and under them a little picture chased in the gold and enamelled, which, from what I have read since, I suppose must have been the crest of the Des Violets.

"And what did Mr. Gabriel say, then?" I asked, giving it back to Faith, who put her head into the old position again.

"Oh, he acted real queer. The very man!' he cried out. The man himself! His portrait-I have seen it a hundred times!' And then he told me that about a dozen years ago or more, a ship sailed from-from-I forget the place exactly, somewhere up there where ke came from-Mr. Gabriel, I mean-and among the passengers was this man and his wife, and his little daughter, whose name was Virginie des Violets, and the ship was never heard from again. But he says that, without a doubt, I'm the little daughter, and my name is Virginie, though I suppose everyone'll call me Faith. Oh! and that isn't the queerest. The queerest is, this gentleman'-and Faith lifted her head -'was very rich. I can't tell you how much he owned-lands that you can walk on a whole day and not come to the end, and ships, and gold! And the whole of it's lying idle and waiting for an heir, and I, Georgie, am the heir!"

And Faith told it with cheeks burning and eyes shining, but yet quite as if she'd been born and brought up in the knowledge.

"It don't seem to move you much, Faith," said I, perfectly amazed, although I'd frequently expected something of the kind.

'Well, I may never get it, and so on. If I

do I'll give you a silk dress, and set you up in | a book-store. But here's a queerer thing yet. Des Violets is the way Mr. Gabriel's own name is spelt, and his father and mine-his mother and- Well, some way or other we're sort of cousins. Only think, Georgie! isn't thatI thought, to be sure, when he quartered at our house, Dan 'd begin to take me to do, if I looked at him sideways-make the same fuss that he does, if I nod to any of the other young men."

"I don't think Dan speaks before he should, Faith." "Why don't you say Virginie?" says she, laughing.

Because Faith you've always been, and Faith you'll have to remain, with us, to the end of the chapter."

"Well, that's as it may be; but Dan can't object now to my going where I'm a mind to, with my own cousin!" And here Faith laid her ear on the ball of yarn again. "Hasten, headsman!" said she, out of a novel, " or they'll wonder where I am."

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"Well," I answered, "just let me run the needle through the emery."

"Yes, Georgie," said Faith, going back with her memories while I sharpened my steel," Mr. Gabriel and I are kin. And he said that the moment he laid eyes on me he knew I was of different blood from the rest of the people." "What people?" asked I.

"Why, you, and Dan, and all these. And he said he was struck to stone when he heard I was married to Dan-I must have been entrapped-the courts would annul it-anyone could see the difference between us-"

Here was my moment, and I didn't spare it, but jabbed the needle into the ball of yarn, if her ear did lie between them.

"Yes!" says I, "anybody with half an eye can see the difference between you, and that's a fact! Nobody'd ever imagine for a breath that you were deserving of Dan-Dan, who's so noble, he'd die for what he thought was rightyou, who are so selfish and idle and fickle and"—

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And at that Faith burst out crying. "Oh, I never expected you'd talk about me 80, Georgie!" said she, between her sobs. How could I tell you were such a mighty friend of Dau's? And besides, if ever I was Virginie des Violets, I'm Faith Devereux now, and Dan'll resent anyone's speaking so about his wife!"

And she stood up, the tears sparkling like diamonds in her flashing dark eyes, her cheeks red, and her little fist clenched.

"That's the right spirit, Faith," says I, "and I'm glad to see you show it. And as for this young Canadian, the best thing to do with him is to send him packing. I don't believe a word he says: it's more than likely nothing but to get into your good graces."

"But there's the names," said she, so as

tonished, that she didn't remember she was angry.

"Happened so."

"Oh, yes! happened so'! A likely story! It's nothing but your envy, and that's all !" "Faith!" says I, for I forgot she didn't know how close she struck.

"Well, I mean--there, don't let's talk about it any more. How, under the sun, am I going to get these ends tied?"

"Come here. There! Now for the other one."

"No, I shan't let you do that: you hurt me dreadfully, and you got angry and took the big needle."

"I thought you expected to be hurt." "I didn't expect to be stabbed!" "Well, just as you please. I suppose you'll go round with one ear-ring!"

"Like a little pig with his ear cropped? No, I shall do it myself. See there, Georgie!" and she threw a bit of a box into my hands.

I opened it, and there lay, inside, on their velvet cushion, a pair of the prettiest things you ever saw: a tiny bunch of white grapes, and every grape a round pearl, and all hung so that they would tinkle together on their golden stems every time Faith shook her head-and she had a cunning little way of shaking it often enough.

I.

"These must have cost a penny, Faith," said "Where'd you get them?"

"Mr. Gabriel gave them to me, just now. He went up-town and bought them and I don't want him to know that my ears wern't bored." "Mr. Gabriel! And you took them?"

"Of course I took them, and mighty glad to get them."

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"Faith dear," said I, don't you know that you shouldn't take presents from gentlemen, and especially now you're a married woman, and especially from those of higher station?”

"But he isn't higher."

"You know what I mean. And then, too, he is; for one always takes rank from one's husband."

Faith looked downcast at this.

"Yes," said I; "and pearls and calico-"

"Just because you haven't got a pair yourself! There, be still: I don't want any of your instructions in duty!"

"You ought to put up with a word from a friend, Faith," said I. "You always come to me with your grievances; and I'll tell you what I'll do. You used to like these coral branches of mine, and, if you'll give those back to Mr. Gabriel, you shall have the coral."

Well, Faith, she hesitated, standing there trying to muster her mind to the needle, and it ended by her taking the coral, though I don't believe she returned the pearls! but we none of us ever saw them afterwards.

We'd been talking in a pretty low tone, because mother was asleep; and just as she'd finished the other ear, and a little drop of blood stood up on it like a live ruby, the door opened,

and Dan and Mr. Gabriel came in. There never was a prettier picture than Faith at that moment-and so the young stranger thought, for he stared at her, smiling and at ease, just as if she'd been hung in a gallery and he'd bought a ticket. So then he sat down, and repeated to Dan and mother what she'd told me, and he promised to send for the papers to prove it all. But he never did send for them, delaying and delaying till the summer wore away; and perhaps there were such papers and perhaps there wern't. I've always thought he didn't want his own friends to know where he was.

THE DISCOVERY OF POTOSI.

BY MRS. ABDY.

Fatigued with our search after pleasure! We grasp in our haste at some poor little flower, And find that its root is endowed with the power Of giving forth long-hidden treasure.

Yet ofttimes this treasure is missed by the throng; To a limited class it alone can belong

They are varied in age and in station; But each has a secret of marvellous might To change common objects to things rare and bright,

By a system of quick transmutation.

Go, join ye their numbers; you shortly shall own
That a treasure before you is constantly thrown,
Though oft in strange semblance presented;
And living, as Providence wills you to live,
You shall find that Potosi has little to give
To that privileged class-the Contented!

"I am struck by the Spanish discovery of the mines of Potosi. An Indian, pursuing deer, to save himself from slipping over a rock, seized a bush with his hand; the violence of the wrench loosened the earth round the root, and a small piece of silver attracted his eye. He carried it home, and returned for more. A torn-up shrub discloses a silver mine! In the waste places of our mortality, there is not a common flower which has not some precious ore at its root. We catch at the broken reed, and a treasure appears."

-Willmott's "Summer Time in the Country."

How simple, methinks, this discovery seems! It came not in omens, it came not in dreams; It came not by Sybil discerning;

It came not to brighten the lays of the bard, It came not to give an abundant reward

To the ponderous professors of learning.

An Indian, engaged in pursuit of the deer,
To the edge of a cliff drew alarmingly near,
No marvel that terror came o'er him:
He grasped with such force at a bush in his way,
That he loosened the earth round its root, and it lay
In a mass of rude fragments before him.

He looks on the wreck with delighted surprise-
A small piece of silver shines forth to his eyes!
To its source he determines to trace it.
It heralds a treasure of infinite worth-
Oh, wondrous! a bush is torn forth from the earth,
And a silver mine comes to replace it!

Yet say, is it wondrous? From Life's troubled

maze

How often we turn to its desolate ways,

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A PEEP AT THE BLACK COUNTRY.

BY MRS. CAROLINE A. WHITE.

The best way, I had been told, to see the effect | fire! while the sound of beating hammers, of of the blast furnaces, was to take a return ticket after night-fall, from Wolverhampton to Wednesbury, or Walsall. Therefore, as daylight closed in on the eve of my last day's sojourn in the former town, I took my seat in one of the carriages, on the low level line, in order to witness with my own senses the singularity of a scene so often described, but which can never be realized from description. I had been startled by the reflection of these furnace fires at Lichfield; and their lurid glare reddens the heavens nightly, over a district much farther in extent. Fortunately for my object, the night, though fine over-head, was dark and gusty; neither moon nor stars shone; so that the fires burning on either hand, soon after we had left the station, glowed more fiercely through the darkness; and the tall chimneys that appeared to come out of the gloom, solitary or in groups, as we rushed past them, crowned with great cressets of flame, wavering and undulating in the strong upper currents, assumed Vesuvian airs above their brickwork craters. Occasionally the cranes, and pulleys, and wheels, on the mound at a pit's mouth, stood forth in outline upon a foreground of Tartarian darkness, backed by fire; and one thought uncomfortably of the scaffold of Albert von der Wort, and of the bones of Brandt and Struenzee, whitening on their wheels, between Copenhagen and Elsinore, while the Danish Queen, Matilda, wept at Zell.

hissing steam, the groaning of hardly used pulleys, and the creaking and clanking of machinery, made a fitting accompaniment to the unearthly scene.

At Wednesbury, finding that I should have to wait half-an-hour for the return train, I made my way through the town to a spot which commanded a view of some very large premises. Many rows of furnaces appeared abreast of one another, and, in the gloom and darkness that separated me from them, took for my eyes the semblance of tiers of ships moored side-by-side, with stern lights showing, and open port-holes all a-glow; the mast-like chimneys streaming forth flags of fire, and long tortuous pennants of sulphureous smoke. It was a fanciful likeness; but the whole scene was a waking nightmare-a confusion, with an over-wrought imagination giving its own interpretations to the half revealments of unknown objects, seen through the demoniac medium of fire!-and we all know how much our impressions of objects depend on the light in which we see them.

You remember the story-that romance and tragedy of the days of George III.? yet, what the common-place machinery of mining districts had to do with the resuscitation of these tragedies, the youngest of which is near upon a century old, I know not, seeing that there was not the slenderest thread of analogy between them, only night, a black mound, and the outlines of gibbet-like pulleys and wheels; but, by the help of these, imagination had clambered to the brain-cell, where the records of those grim traditions were stored.

Below us crept the waters of the Dudley canal, keeping its own dark secrets-but ingeniously throwing back the reflection of the train, with its flaming engine funnel, and long row of lamplit carriages; the rail running with it, side by side, a considerable part of the way.

And now I am in the heart of fiery phantasmagoria, wild fires seeming to rush past uswild fires struggling afar off-fires by the waterside, and on the mounds, and in the air. Fire on the right, and on the left; fire close at hand, and in the distance, behind, ahead; everywhere

On my return I took the opposite side of the carriage to that which I had occupied in going; and, by so doing, obtained rapid view of more than one cavernous interior, all a-flame; with the indistinct figures of the puddlers turning and rolling the spongy metal on beds of fire, or beating scintillating masses on glowing anvils. Vainly, on subsequently going over the same route, I strove to retrace my fiery ships in the furnace banks, and tall chimney shafts, which, even at noon, displayed their flaming banners and (at the iron works) great undulating pennons of yellow smoke; but these objects bore no likeness to the forms I had imagined-the phantasmal fleet had foundered with the daylight, and all that remained were the ordinary features of a mining and iron manufacturing district, upon a foreground depressing in its desolation.

On either side of the railway, the land lay scarred, and devastated, delved into stagnant pools, heaped into barren hillocks; blistered with vapouring cinder heaps, or sunken into indentations above exhausted mines; wretched rows of tipsy houses, holding one another up; old mine hills, and recent pit shafts roughly fenced round, and with the necessary plant of such places. While verging pretty close to the canal banks (that great artery of the local traffic before the days of railways, and which, dark and still, shows higher in places than the land) rise the great walls, and columnar chimneys of the various "works," as the manufactories are invariably designated.

A district, in short, out of which all vegetable life has been burnt, and crushed, and torn out; an arid wilderness of fire, and slag, and ashes; yet, retaining in the names of many of the neighbouring "works," the memory of pastoral times, and rural beauty. Thus, between Wolverhampton and Birmingham, "Daisy-bank," and "Spring-field," and Lady-wood," recall periods, when these pretty country names had relation to some special loveliness or circumstance, just as in the suburbs of the former town, Gospel-oak" and "Merridale" have absolute and literal reference to the days of the preaching-friars and May-day pastimes.

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But the human life upon the banks of the Dudley Canal, even such revealments of it as the window of a railway carriage affords, shows us that nature suffers, in the lives of women and children, at least as great and deteriorating a change as has the face of the fair landscape. Bronzed, and weather-beaten, and aged at thirty, can any Southern State slaves be harder worked than are these English wives and mothers; who moil at the pit's mouth, feed the furnaces, pick iron-stone, and help to load the coal barges, and load and unload lime?

In all weathers, in all seasons, dirty, degraded, unsexed in manners, unwomanly in garb (for what part would vanity, or cleanliness play, riddling cinders or sorting penny-stones at the furnace bank?) untutored and reckless of all neat household ways, that go so far to warm, and brighten, and purify the home; aye, and by the force of their own orderliness, to keep its peace; help-mate services in very deed, that are as fitting a counterpart to the out-of-door character and quality of masculine labour, as the relation of sex to sex.

The demoralizing nature of these coarse employinents I learn, on inquiry, tells on the habits, the tempers, and instincts of the women; and the treatment of children, and the mismanagement of the home in these districts, might be commended as a reasonable theme to any one of the members of next year's Social Science Congress, in want of one. I see that they have travelled into some of our agricultural counties, for speciinens of unwomanly employments for women; but field work is pure, healthful, vigorous, and refining, compared with the debasing, brute-upon-a-par uses, to which women are put, in the mining districts of Staffordshire and Worcestershire. In the vicinity of that once Merrydale, about which bits of green fields are (or were in 1861) lingering, I saw a child, panting with physical agony and mental terror, hunted into a narrow passage, from which there was no escape, as if he had been a ferocious animal to be broken-in with blood-compelling blows; and the creature who pursued him, stick in hand, with reckless eyes, and language that tempted one to put their fingers on their ears, and curses broadcast, and too heavy for one poor soul to reap through a whole life-time (supposing the crop to come to anything), was a woman, with a mother's breast, even then teeming with the abundance of

maternity, for her slatternly and disordered dress discovered it. Ah me! and there were hearts aching to have realized the sweet name desecrated by the torture her hands inflicted, and with which her own child failed to call back nature's instinct-the pity of the dam for its young!

We made a little tour of inspection of some of the homes in that row of red-brick houses, before visiting the manufactory, in which many of the inmates were employed-a firm famed in the world of commerce for the thoroughness of its workmanship and the artistic beauty of certain of its specialities; and we wished to see how familiarity with these qualities worked in the houses of the artizans, how much of either the men and women learned from the enforcement of the first in their daily labours, how far beyond the physical retina the impressions of the other extended.

In these homes, we are bound to say that otherwise than as an exception (and a rare one) we met no trace of either; disorder, rags, uncleanliness, and beer showed in plenty, and might be smelt upon the thresholds. Unbrushed hearths, unmade beds, unmended clothes, dirty floors, frowsy rooms, were common enough; but signs of neatness less frequent than a coarse attempt at ornament in prints and pottery. The thoroughness was left behind under the master's eye: the impression of beauty in forms and colours and designs was seen, not felt, and did not extend its influence beyond the work-shop or the show-room.

The housewifery falls upon children too young to be available for factory work, or wanting them is wholly wanting; for the women have no time, from a quarter to six in the morning till six at night (apart from meal hours), to call their own. All day long they are at one or other of the various "works" with which the town abounds. And thus the care of children, home cooking, and home cleanliness are thrown over for weekly wages, to which the man looks for compensation for loss of family love, comfortable meals, neat. ness, and thrift; and if the coins leave a bad taste in his mouth, he has at least what he has bargained for, and is content to swallow his discontent in public-house beer; for thither, or to a one day's feast of flesh, cheap concerts, and excursions, goes the over-and-above, and all beyond the man's own fairly-earned legitimate wages. Look into nineteen out of twenty of these workmen's homes, and see what there is to show in decency, or comfort, or savings for the women and children's earnings? Here and there, men are found who have managed to get a few pounds together, and begin a little business and eventually to burgeon out of workmanhood into mastership; but these men would have done this unaided by wife or child, for the strong will, and patience, and self-denial that was in them would have helped them to the result, though it might be a little longer first. But as a rule, the fitness of things is vindicated in the condition of the unmothered families and mistressless homes of the working classes in manufacturing districts; and we find that the

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