it with an interrogative umbrella. The heap remained motionless, and full of a vague fear she pulled violently at the bell. As the door was opened by her little maid the light from the lamp in the hall fell on the face of the intruder, and Eliza uttered a strange cry. It was Anthony who lay curled up fast asleep on her doorstep-her own little Anthony, dirty and pale; his thin strap shoes trodden into shapelessness, coatless in the chill autumn weather, and wearing a fussy French pinafore, whereof the original hue was scarcely recognisable through the mud splashes. He had run away from his home to her, and a great unreasoning flood of joy overflowed her heart. Motioning silence to the scared little maid, she put her arms about the little boy and bore him into the warm sitting-room, where she sat down with her precious burden in a low chair by the fire. The movement, gentle though it was, awoke him. He sat up with a start, then fell back again with a sigh of weary content when he saw in whose arms he lay.

"Oh, auntie dear! it's a long, long way to your house. I thought I should never reach you." Eliza pressed him to her by way of response. Then she softly called the wondering maid, and bade her bring warm milk and biscuit and a shawl for the little guest. Next she gently pulled off the poor spoilt socks and shoes, and her tears fell on the little ice-cold feet and hands as she chafed them and covered them with passionate kisses. Presently the tired eyes opened again. "I'm always naughty now-too naughty for anyone to love me. Even Mother Nelly doesn't want to see me. I hate Marie-I fought her to-day in the square-and she dragged me home and shut me in father's study, and no one came near me for hours and hours; and at last I came out and opened the street-door and ran away to you, and I'm so glad I've come”—and he flung his arms round her neck with a sigh of happiness.

The arrival of cake and milk still further revived him, and he was soon chattering away to her about the little events of his life, making many unconscious revelations of neglect and misunderstanding; and Eliza, as she listened, could have cried aloud with pity and indignation. He told with pride the story of his long journey through the streets.

In the early days of her married life his stepmother had taken him in her victoria to pay his aunt a visit, and his memory had enabled him to start in the right direction. The rest had been achieved by a clear little inquiring tongue and tireless legs. It did not seem to occur to him that he had in any way offended by acting as he had done. All his ideas of rightful authority were embodied

in Eliza.

When she had first left him he had indeed seemed content to accept a new rule, but now that he wanted her, he believed their right in one another to be unquestionable.

was a strange one. pity and triumph. and for all time.

She had not courage yet to break to him the real state of the case. First, she rolled him up in a shawl, and put him in an armchair while she went to post a telegram to her brother. Her mood Her heart seemed divided between feelings of Her boy was hers again-hers wholly for to-night No golden presence and odour of violets stood now between her love and his. Yet she must part with him-must give him back into the very hands that played so ill on the delicate instrument of his childish heart. But to-night he should be happy, and should believe, as he desired, that they would henceforth be always together. She herself would strive to live only in the present, and for a few hours put away all thought of the morrow.

What an evening they had in that cosy little room! Anthony had given a cry of delight at sight of the old chairs and tables. She roasted him apples on the hob, and he made her toast as he knelt on the hearthrug, a quaint little figure swathed in the shawl. She told him the old tales out of Andersen's fairy book, and he babbled with laughter as they recalled past memories. It was an hour of paradise for her and for him. At bedtime she bore him up in her arms, and put him to bed on the sofa in her own room, and sat holding his hand long after he had gone off to sleep. That night her own dreams were sweeter than they had been for years.

The next morning she bore the little boy, sobered and convinced of his misdemeanour, back to her brother's house. Augustine was awaiting his sister in the study with Eleanor beside him, but the latter remained rather sulkily silent while the brother and sister took counsel as to the best way of dealing with Anthony. It was finally arranged between them that he should be sent to a country boardingschool, the selection of which Eliza undertook to make. All she bargained for was that some part of the holidays should always be spent with her at her home. Then she took her departure, in the fulness of her content offering, for the first time, to kiss her sister-inlaw as she bade her "Good-bye."

Her journey home was a royal progress of the emotions-her eye was bright, her step elastic; the little maid-servant gazed at her in wonder as she let her into the house. She set about her household duties with new interest and vigour. The spirit of her boy's love seemed to hover over her hearth, never again to leave her starved and desolate. Her kingdom was restored to her, and again she could enjoy her own.

THE BIRDS OF WORDSWORTH.

IF

F frequency of reference may be accepted as deciding the matter, it is the cuckoo that is probably first favourite among the birds of Wordsworth. The "blithe new-comer" he calls "the darling of the spring," and confesses, in mature manhood, that

Even yet thou art to me

No bird, but an invisible thing,

A voice, a mystery;

The same whom in my schoolboy days

I listened to; that cry

Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.

With that peculiar love of mystery so characteristic of Wordsworth, we find him still linking the larger outlook of the man's soul within him to the boy's delight in the unseen singer, and lying on the grass until the "golden time" of the past returned and the earth became once more "an unsubstantial faery place." Elsewhere he advises the sleepless to abjure the repeater and provide themselves with a cuckoo-clock, the sound of which will lead to "composure," if not to sleep, and fill up the darkness with light and summer fancies. "I speak with knowledge,"-always an easy thing for Wordsworth to say,-" of sharp distress, and as one who sometimes tosses on a bed of pain." The mimic notes, he asserted, send "a dear delightful land of verdure, shower, and gleam" into the soul. The "vernal soul" awakes and goes with the sound. It must be added, however, that in his beautiful sonnet "To Sleep" he states that even "the first cuckoo's melancholy cry" failed occasionally to bring sleep, "dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health." In another sonnet he writes that "not the whole warbling grove in concert heard" can fill the breast like the first pulsing note of the cuckoo. It is only when "the still sad music of humanity" comes to him from the "Solitary Reaper" that, in exquisite verse, he is brought to confess that "no such voice was ever heard in spring-time from the cuckoo-bird." In "The Cuckoo at Laverna," the poet tells us he heard other birds such as he had been accustomed to hear in many an English grove;

but it was not until the "vagrant voice" sounded that he felt his greeting, in a foreign land, complete, and, as is his wont, he carries the simple double-note of his feathered favourite into spiritual relationship with the "voice of one crying amid the wilderness." His love of the cuckoo's "sovereign cry" must indeed have made him feel a pang when, in modernising his selections from Chaucer, he found himself compelled to speak of his pet bird in such terms as "vile cuckoo" and "bird unholy."

As might be expected, the lordly nightingale receives large and honourable mention, but it is not difficult to discern that the song of "full-throated ease," as Keats calls it, is not that kind of music which most takes the contemplative ear of Wordsworth. It may be that the nightingale's singing is of such a nature as to be content with no second place; that is to say, the songs of other birds blended with the pensive reflections of the poet's brain, and helped and refined these rather than extinguished them by persistent strength. This view seems borne out by No. ix. of the "Poems of the Imagination." Once he chided, but at the same time excused himself, for carolling "fancy-free," as if the nightingale had neither heart nor voice for him. Even the nightingale, it may be remembered, was among the birds at Laverna whose vocal presence did not make up for the absence of the cuckoo. It is not to be forgotten, however, that in his ode "To Enterprise" he refers to this bird as "the sweet bird misnamed the melancholy," and that in comparing the song of the solitary highland lass to that of various birds he writes :

No nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands

Of travellers in some shady haunt
Among Arabian sands.

In another poem he speaks of those who listen to the nightingale as being fancy-cheated into the belief that the bird's song is the outcome of exultant outlook on wood and stream, instead of a steady outpouring into the dark ear of night. He speaks, we must not forget, too, in the "Excursion" of the cessation of a certain human voice being

Regretted like the nightingale's last note.

These passages show withal that he was not insensible to the "anthem" that intoxicated Keats, and many others before and since. The redbreast is always referred to by Wordsworth in terms of homely affection:

Driven by autumn's sharpening air

From half-stripped woods and pastures bare,

Brisk robin seeks a kindlier home:
Not like a beggar is he come,
But enters as a looked-for guest,
Confiding in his ruddy breast,
As if it were a natural shield
Charged with a blazon on the field,
Due to that good and pious deed

Of which we in the ballad read.

He hails robin as the thrice happy creature that in all lands is nurtured by hospitable folks, and offers his whole house as a cage for the bird when winter comes. A redbreast found chasing a butterfly draws from the poet a gentle playful protest, and he exhorts the "pious bird whom man loves best" to love the butterfly, if possible, but leave it alone in any case. In a sonnet he gives us a picture of himself, the grey old man "in still musings bound," with the redbreast fluttering round him, pecking at his lips as though they were those of a lady whose mouth resembled "a half-blown rose." Living an open-air life, he has not failed to note that the red-breasted songster is the last to sing in the autumn, coming, as he does, close to the roadsides and homesteads to "warble when sweet sounds are rare." The pretty little poem "To a Redbreast (in sickness)," in which the bird is asked to come at the last hour and sing the requiem of the dying,

Nor fail to be the harbinger
Of everlasting spring,

is, of course, not Wordsworth's composition, but was written by Sara Hutchinson, his sister-in-law. It is interesting to notice that the very last bird written about by Wordsworth is the redbreast. The lines are, it is true, nothing at all in themselves. They were written as late as 1846, and are entitled "I know an aged man constrained to dwell."

"Hark, 'tis the thrush, undaunted, undeprest," is the exultant opening of a sonnet. Here the poet would seem to have been found in a depressed mood-a fireside prisoner, as he calls himself when the wind was roaring outside. The carol of the bird charmed away his cares, and snapped the moody chain, so that at length he also went forth to front the blast and bear the heroic songster company. The sonnet immediately following deals also with the thrush's song. It was the thrush as well as the nightingale that was heard at Laverna; both alike, however, failing to interest supremely until the cuckoo sang, and it is the thrush that is described in one of the "Evening Voluntaries" as receiving from the linnet the signal to stop, which, however, the larger bird paid no attention to, but heed