where we found the two boatmen that had brought him over, and a third This inman, who proved to be the beadle of the parish of Chatham. dividual put into his hand a bit of paper, which proved to be a magistrate's order to pay five shillings weekly for the support of a little baby in longs, whose mother the wretch had seduced and abandoned.

"Then I've escaped personal exposure, and am no longer A REFUGEE. Glasses round,' said Clemmy.

"He went off that night, and has never been seen in Deadman's Ness since."

SOCIETY FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF HEARTS.

BY LAMAN BLANCHARD, ESQ.

It is a remarkable fact that up to the auspicious moment in which the establishment of this new society-of whose existence and proceedings we have a special report-was conceived for the happiness of man, no institution having a similar object and tendency had ever been projected. Societies were any thing but scarce. Human nature has shown an inclination, in all times and countries, to combine and associate for its own pleasure and profit; but for the purpose indicated by the title of this admirable association, the idea of gathering together never awoke in the

brain.

Societies for every purpose beside,-good and evil-in the earth, or in the waters under the earth. Societies to make us swimmers and skaters, to create painters and sculptors, to foster art and science in every shape, to dig up antiquarians and screw out engineers, to make laws and compel their repeal, to set us singing and dancing, shooting, riding, and driving: societies to drill us into every thing attainable; to teach us something of all that is useless, and a little of much that is useful; to make us accomplished, knowing, learned-to give us grace and bodily strength, to use perfections and to conceal defects-to do ten thousand opposite things, many of them possible, and a few desirable.

Yes: people have never been slow to evince their cleverness, such as it is. Not a child of their begetting but would rather, when patted on the head, be called clever than good; and the same weakness is not always worked out of the flesh in old age. And so we have societies of every class and degree, devised from time to time by wonderfully clever fellows, to make mankind intellectual and happy: associations for improving the head, for enchanting the ears, for fascinating the eyes, for feasting every sense, for directing the voice, for educating the hands, for exercising all the limbs, for advancing the feet in the general march; but one Society-efficacious and full of blessings above all others-was still wanting until now-it was the Society for the Encouragement of Hearts.

How it originated is of little consequence. Be sure of this, that its origin was small enough; what good work ever had any other! There

is no crevice so narrow, that good will not ooze through it, and gather and augment slowly, until it can force its way by degrees, and flow in a full broad stream. Once set good going, and who can say where it will stop!

Perhaps the grand originating idea of this Society first awoke in a brain of not superior dimensions or quality, ordinarily, to that of a moth when it is flying into the flame. Perhaps the benevolence, the humanising spirit of the project first heaved and throbbed in a heart no bigger than a mite's, and having commonly no sympathies, no aspirations towards any thing higher than cheese. Some men's hearts are of this pattern-very possibly-but do not therefore give them and their affections up. No; cherish a hope of those hearts still; nay, generously prophecy their enlargement, and they will expand, and glow, and become animate under the very influence of that prediction. The affectionate confidence of it acts upon them like destiny.

The Society for the Encouragement of Hearts, however it sprung up, was born to flourish and prosper for ever. It has many distinguishing features; but the chief one is that it has no bound or limit, and the only rule provided for its government seems to be, that there shall be no rules at all. Any body may become a member in whatever state or stage of the heart. The door is open to all in all conditions. There are no black-balls, except the pieces of ebony which numbers of people bring with them in their bosoms. Hearts of even that hue and substance are not unwelcomed, and nothing is too bad for admission into the Encouragement Society.

What is the result! In ten hundred instances out of a thousand, a rapid, beautiful, and all but marvellous change. No sooner is the candidate for admission an acknowledged fellow of the Society, registered and enrolled, than an alteration ensues. A certain lightness pervades all the region of the heart; the inward ebony blushes for its own blackness, and softens instantaneously. Sometimes, this takes place of its own accord, sometimes it happens unconsciously. But the transformation is not the less certain. The dry withered root puts forth a sweet and innocent blossom; the hard cold cinder emits a brilliant flame, clear and of heavenward course as when life began.

It may be asked, how can a change so sudden and complete be effected, by the simple act of enrolment as a fellow of the Society of Hearts-without any gradual operation of its principles, or affording needful time for the development of its proper influences. The answer is easily supplied by another question-how is it that a man becomes an antiquarian the instant he is admitted a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries? How does it happen that we become learned on being called to the bar, and honourable the moment we get, by disgraceful means, into Parliament?

Enough for the fame and honour of the society if we state facts, without attempting to account for them. It is a case in which clouds of witnesses can be called. Old Lord Cheeseparing would serve to prove something; he who starved for forty years, till having joined the society under the impression that he should have his board for nothing, he went out immediately to bespeak many quarts of turtle-soup, gave a sumptuous banquet to a score or two of astonished friends, and has kept open house

at Mouldy-hall ever since. A society, or a system, call it what we will, that could move Lord Cheeseparing to give a dinner-not to speak of the continual practice of hospitality-never need despair of success.

Greater wonders, however, were worked when Luke Quinton became a member. Luke was a man with only one fault-but it was the monster-vice, envy. His whole heart was sound save in a single place-it was where the deadly plague-spot of envy lingered year by year incurably. The horrid sore was the more burning and sickening, because he was incessantly conscious of its nature. His hateful malady was his hourly familiar, like his shadow; but then like his shadow he could not drive it away, never separate himself from it. He knew the name as well as he knew the aspect of his eternal fiend, who was present with him even in sleep; but he could no more banish the reality that tormented him than he could banish from his sleep the spectres that reproached him. A thousand times he felt the dead gnawing sensation at his heart's core; and a thousand times he said, "This is envy, let me root it out, ere it eats away the very life of life!" but it came again, unthought of and on the sudden, fastened on the faint sick heart, and fascinated while it stung.

This inveterate and ever-returning envy had but one object. In the wide world there was but a single being who excited the odious feeling in the otherwise innocent breast of Luke: and this one being was his old playmate, his early chosen and most constant friend. Fire could not have burnt out of him the passion of friendship that had grown up and entwined itself with his life; but on the other hand to have poured out all of his blood that was daily and almost hourly tainted with the meanest envy, would have been to empty his veins.

Struggle with the strong vice, and guard himself as he best might against its dark and insidious approaches, he assuredly did, but he did so unavailingly. He reasoned with his own nature in the silent meditative self-examining night; and roused himself into the best of humours and the happiest reliance upon his recovered soundness and security in the warm, cheerful day, when he laughed openly with his companions, and felt no secret shame within; happy, because he believed that his heart might be laid bare to all the world, and no trace of envy be detected lurking amid its most hidden sensations. But then suddenly, while esteeming himself saved and purified from so corrupting and humiliating a sin-while enjoying accordingly all the emotions of his better nature, and especially while partaking the sweets of a friendship that constituted the master-sentiment of his existence-the former pang would return, and an instantaneous convulsion of the bosom would show the old evil to be yet alive in him.

How reconcile such contradictions, or release him from such a tormentor! His friend's good fortune, which should have filled him with joy, often made his heart ache. He would himself have died so have been the author of it; yet he felt a sickness like death when he saw that friend profiting by a rich windfall, and revelling in some unexpected happiIf the same lot had fallen to another he had been content and pleased. It delighted him to see people prosper. To witness the enjoy ment of good luck, was in his case to share it. And this, too, at all times, and with all persons but the one. When this good luck fell to his

ness.

friend, the bright sunny flash brought to Luke only a chill and a shadow. He could almost have dashed the golden prize from the deserver's hands, or have intercepted it on its way; and gladly would he have seen it in preference enjoyed by some unhonoured, unbeloved possessor.

In the midst of mirth and gaiety the black feeling stole over him— shot through him rather; and he seemed as unable to protect himself from it as from the lightning of heaven. He began to think that he was defenceless-incurably subject to the constant and dreadful visitations of a disease that, do what he might to expel or to hide it, discovered itself, coldly or fiercely, in his eyes, while his cheeks at the same time blushed at its presence. A breath would sometimes suffice to bring the blighting air upon him; a careless allusion to his friend, a word dropped in his honour. Eulogy and admiration, expressed in his hearingthough spoken of the man whom he had no words to praise sufficiently -wrought in him an impulse of disparagement, and moved him (strange as it may sound) to depreciate what he idolised. The expression of such regard and affection as he himself felt, instead of being echoed by every wakened sympathy within him, by answering music from every chord of his nature, provoked displeasure and dissent, and feelings that only rankled the more if constrained to be silent. Envy at such moments took possession of him, and scarcely left him the semblance of self-control.

The malady hung about him for ten years, poisoning the spring at which he most loved to drink, embittering his best enjoyment. He tried all this time every remedy but the right one. That he found only in the association for the Encouragement of Hearts. When the society was founded, the patient, instead of shrinking into solitude, communing with his own weakness, and making vows which he had lost even the hope of being able to keep, immediately joined its ranks-and he began to im

prove that very moment. In three days he heard his friend praised, and

that highly, without experiencing a pang. In a week the most rapturous eulogy bestowed in the same quarter, awoke in him no uneasy feeling whatever. A day or two after, he began even to find pleasure in listening; which rose next morning to joy of the most novel kind, and he now swelled the strain with all the power of his lungs, his spirit was so light. He was like a fond, passionate lover, just released from the rack of jealousy. The cruel and remorseless enemy dropped from his heart. Envy was dead, and Luke Quinton lived, for the first time in his life. The society will now "warrant him heart-whole."

There was the case of the Hon. Simon Wrinkle-it only happened last week ;—the catastrophe, that is to say;-for the case itself commenced years ago, when that superior town-made gentleman fell in love with the sweet suburban beauty, Kitty Auburn. People laughed a little at the time, but Simon was serious; and Kitty, for her part, was very serious, though she prettily pretended to laugh. It was palpably a case of true love, if ever there was one; but there is not the slightest ground for declaring that its course did not run smooth-the sole complaint being in this peculiar instance, that it did not run at all. True love stood still, and uttered not a word. That was its only fault. Kitty Auburn was manifestly all ear; Mr. Simon Wrinkle had evidently no tongue.

Night after night, moonlight, starlight, or no light, there hung the

fair Capulet upon the accustomed balcony, eager to be wooed and willing to be won; but the enamoured Montague never effectually cleared the garden-wall, but stuck fast on the spikes at the top. Such was their sad situation for years; the lady audibly avowing a passion of which the Hon. Mr. Wrinkle would have given his ears to hear a single whisper; and the gentleman dying visibly of a sentimental lock-jaw, finding it impossible to get his mouth open whenever his adored was approachable.

With every hope of being beloved, he had every fear of betraying his own affection. "If she should find it out," he would say to himself, “what would she think of me?"

"If he would but speak," murmured Kitty, every night as she went to sleep: "and speaking is so easy when it is but to tell what one knows already!" A comfortable reflection—and yet it was very provoking.

But Simon Wrinkle could do any thing in the world but that. Not lover on earth so attentive, though as a lover he had no nominal or authorised existence. No passion so many-tongued and expressive as his, though he had never breathed a syllable that could be said to disclose it. By a thousand nameless tokens, and by sympathies that required no aid from speech, he had poured out all the secrets of his soul; but he was tongue-tied nevertheless.

"Why don't he speak!" still murmured Kitty, every night, tired of the pretty pantomime of love that spoke so plainly in another language.

He would have spoken out fast enough, and not have allowed those precious months and years to roll over in silence-two kind hearts beating in union on the brink of bliss, and yet trembling in uncertainty-had Kitty Auburn been a duchess. Not then would he have lingered at the gate of his paradise, that gate being left ajar, and he with one foot inside. No, he would have risked every thing, and shrunk from no degree of presumption. He would have boldly told an empress that he adored her, and have said, in plain English, "There's my hand-will you have me?" But Kitty Auburn was not an empress; she was no duchessany more than a simple field-flower is a diamond; yet, though the duchess would have had no power to dazzle Simon, Kitty had; and Mr. Wrinkle wished his father had been an ironmonger or a potato-merchant, that he might have been relieved from the humiliation of being supposed to be conscious of any distinction between them, or any advantages unshared by herself.

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"I only ask her to be Mrs. Wrinkle,” he reasoned; "but if she should for a moment suppose that I presume to seek her hand, conceiving she might be influenced by a thought of a coronet to come-the bare suspicion of the possibility deprives me of utterance. No, I don't think I can ask the delightful, the awful question this morning. But when I again come to town-"

However, the Hon. Simon Wrinkle, whether in town or country, was so happy in his wooing, that he could never rouse himself to make the first motion necessary to marriage. "He never was, but always to be" bold. He was for ever on the eve of crying, "Do you, and will you?" Like the learned ignoramus who had been talking Greek