ments, assaults, and battles, in which I have led my comrades to victory, I never undertook impossibilities.

He might have said nearly the same of his political exploits, of his coups d'état which, rash as they generally appeared, never failed when he was left to himself. Nor is it enough to say that they were well planned and well executed; or that he was eminently endowed with courage and decision, the qualities which carry all before them in revolutionary times. Uniform success on such a variety of occasions cannot be explained away in this eign after sovereign, telling them all fashion. Why was he trusted by soveralong that he was defying their authority, keeping order by disorder, and committing treason out of loyalty? Why did the people as well as the army rise at his bidding whenever he proclaimed that the hour for action had struck? Why did En

I have read with great interest your important work. Whilst there are, of course, some things in it which are written from the standpoint of another Church, it is impossible not to admire, and appreciate highly, such an earnest attempt to defend the truth against dis-glish ambassadors encourage and applaud belief. I doubt not that it will do much good. measures so much opposed to English notions of legality? They must one and He died at Gloucester Place on Nov- all have given him credit for honesty of ember 21, 1876, four days after he had purpose; and his consistency of aim is completed his eighty-sixth year. The beyond dispute. The two things which body was conveyed to Lisbon and buried he kept steadily in view throughout were in state with royal honors. He died in the monarchy and the Liberal constituembarrassed circumstances, and a pen- tion; and on a careful analysis it will be sion of 533. was granted by the Chambers found that the preservation of one or the to the widow, with one of 444/. to his sole other was involved in every exceptional surviving son. proceeding on which he staked his honor and his life. He acted strictly on the maxim,

The career of which we have given little more than an outline was and is wholly without parallel, precedent, or example in any country. Saldanha has been called the Espartero of Spain, but he presents rather a contrast than resemblance to the Spanish dictator, who grasped the supreme power which Saldanha repeatedly refused. At the risk of being thought paradoxical, we should say that he had more in common with the Iron Duke, asking first in a crisis how the king's (or queen's) government was to be carried on, always guiding his course by the public weal as his polestar, and subordinating even principle to broad considerations of expediency. There is extant a letter from Saldanha to a minister of war, in which

he says:

I cannot help telling you that on many occasions I have undertaken acts of the most decided rashness, and have always come out successful. The results have proved that, notwithstanding obstacles which to many ap peared insuperable, victory was possible. Up to the present moment, thanks to the Supreme Being, I have never suffered a defeat; an evident proof, that in the numberless engage

Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus. He was pre-eminently the man for an emergency, but he never intrigued to create or accelerate one: he never came till he was wanted; and whenever he put his shoulder to the wheel, it was on the eve of an otherwise inevitable crash. This is a decisive answer to the current calumny that he remained quiet whilst his pecuniary affairs were in a satisfactory state, and that, when he wanted money, he made a revolution. Moreover, to suppose him possessed of such a talisman, such an Aladdin's lamp, is simply to exalt his influence, his powers of mind and strength of character at the expense of his disinterestedness; which is not commonly the strong point of men who win their way to eminence, of men who leave footprints on the sands of time.”

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his statesmanship was not of the highest His views were not far-reaching, and order, or he would have established something permanent, something to obviate the constant recurrence of the evils to

which his drastic remedies were applied. | fortable square box in the north aisle, But he has left a reputation that his coun- well-cushioned and carpeted, with plenty trymen will not speedily let die. When a of high hassocks, on one of which I gendeputy towards the close of 1870 stated in the Chamber at Lisbon, that Saldanha had not stood alone as the champion of the Constitution, another indignantly replied:

True: but without the Marshal Saldanha, the cause of liberty was lost. He is our only general; and base is it to deny his work. If France, instead of Bazaines and Leboeufs, had had Marshal Saldanha, she would not, at this moment, be trampled upon by Prussia.

From Temple Bar.

GIRL AND GRANDFATHER.

I

erally sat, my head resting on my grandfather's knee. We were great allies, he and I, and braved my grandmother's looks of mild disapproval on many minute occasions, when her sense of propriety was ruffled by some childish freedom of gesture, or breach of rules conventional. She was a strict disciplinarian, and could not forget how in her young days the maternal hand had held a stick when the hour of correction came, a vision which always Although, therefore, he may not be made me rejoice in secret that my greatplaced by posterity where his biographer grandmother was safe out of sight and would fain place him in the category reach before I came into a world, where, of statesmen and warriors alongside of as a rule, children were naughty. No Washington - he will fill some of the reforming finger had as yet been laid on most luminous pages in Portuguese his- Aspenkirk Church. The large east wintory, and take high rank amongst the dow, thickly festooned with ivy, looked brightest illustrations of the nineteenth beautiful in my inexperienced eyes. century who just fall short of being great. did not know how hideous the whitewashed walls and great high pews were, but I hated old Robbie, the clerk, who took so prominent a part in the services, and whose droll nasal performances, and self-satisfied smirk, used to excite me to illicit smiling, which not all the cold severity of my grandmother's eye could control. Heavens! what a performance was the "Old Hundredth" in those days at Aspenkirk Church! There was no organ, nor can I remember any tuneful voices, but I can still hear Robbie, in high monotone, giving out each line successively, before it was sung by the congregation of untutored north-country voices at the full pitch of the lungs. One hymn-tune which was in use, and which, in spite of barbarous treatment, still haunted my ear and gave me pleasure, I never heard elsewhere, till after many years, in a French convent, I found it again, and recognized in the old Latin invocation to Mary, chanted so pathetically by the nuns of Avranches, the identical melody that had charmed me in Aspenkirk Church when I was a child. But this is a digression. Let us get outside the church this glorious summer day, for the rector's discourse is over, the first rush of Cumberland clogs has escaped into the churchyard, the lads and lasses are sidling off in company, the farmers gathering in knots for a gossip about the hay and other rustic matters, and their wives and daughters are exchanging civilities and the tittle-tattle of the week, before dispersing to their several homes. Through them all strides the rector, in gown and college cap, tall, spare, and aristocratic. Bob go the

THE pretty, sleepy parish of Aspenkirk lay basking in the fervid blaze of a noontide sun, one Sunday, early in June, some five-and-forty years ago. It was the hour of morning service, and the doors of the old parish church stood open, so that the rector as he stood preaching in the wormeaten pulpit, a commanding-looking figure in his black gown, could see all around him, not only the living flock of which he was the shepherd, and who now sat respectfully hearkening to his accents of rolling thunder, but also the quiet, grassy graves outside, where the village forefathers lay taking their rest under the daisies. I, too, could see from the corner where I sat in my grandfather's pew, a green patch of churchyard, with a butterHy skimming about the porch, which was very refreshing to me after keeping my eyes dutifully fixed on my prayer-book such a long, long time. Close to the door sat the workhouse children, who also snatched a fearful joy as they sniffed the summer air, but woe to the wight whose roving eye, or gently protruded head was detected by the guardian's searching glance. Crack went the cane on poor woodenpate, to his grief and anguish, and at the well-known sound my heart would bleed for woodenpate as I thought how sore his head would be next time he had his hair brushed. Our pew was a com

children, the women curtsy; he nods, I stood up, confused, and properly overpleasant and royal-looking, as he passes through them all down the churchyard path, his eagle eye sweeping their ranks, and an indescribable effluence of high breeding and careless kindheartedness playing about him like an invisible atmosphere.

"Ah! Mrs. Somerby," he cries out to my grandmother, "what a fine rose you have there! Why have I none like this in my garden?"

"Dear! Mr. Featherstone," she says, "you have finer far than this, for certain," as she puts the rose into his hand.

He stood smelling it critically. "Where will you match me a fragrance like this among all the apothecary's gums?" says he, in that deep, rolling voice that always sounded to me like the sea.

He carried it off with him as he disappeared through the door in the rectory wall, and from that day the bush on which the ruddy rose had grown was called the "apothecary's rose.' My grandmother's quaint-looking conveyance, styled the "minibus," was standing waiting for us outside the churchyard wall, under the shade of a great elm-tree, but old Farmer may just go on whisking his tail at the flies for another ten minutes, for the meetings at the church-gate are not to be scrambled through all in a moment.

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powered by such an honor. Miss Betty's girdle-cakes were the creamiest in the parish; moreover, her cow," Miss Story," was an old acquaintance, having been once a calf in our Holm field. Her garden lay in pleasant proximity to a broad and silvery river, and there, on a bed of fine gravel, I could enjoy an unmolested half-hour at the agreeable game of ducks and drakes.

I demurely thanked Miss Betty, whose old, puckered, parchment mask took an additional crease of approbation. I was only a visitor at my grandmother's house, and was to return to my parents in Scotland shortly. I think Miss Betty somehow expected to inhale, through my small personality, some impressions of the northern metropolis, as her sister, Miss Anne, always dubbed the city of my birth. Of Miss Anne I was considerably afraid. She was much more imposing than Miss Betty; wore a silk gown, and confined her hair by a very broad fillet of black velvet, which gave her an impressive appearance. She was generally spoken of in respectful tones, as "a woman of very superior mind." She was portly in person, and condescending in manner, but she had a displeasing custom of always coming down on me with a sudden public appeal on historical questions, which was sorely disconcerting, and made me timid in her august presence. Only last week, at my grandmother's tea-table, just when the hot, buttered cakes were coming in, she had startled me by the abrupt question, "Now then, Miss Charlotte, what is your opinion of the character of Henry VIII.?"

I sat down on a gravestone, and waited contentedly enough while grandmamma gossiped. Mary Atkinson" slumbered below. I began to draw mental pictures of Mary Atkinson's past, present, and future condition, who had lain here for fifteen years. Her natural body must have been eaten by the worms long ago. Tremblingly I felt that upon the style of I wondered if her bones were quite gone my reply would depend Miss Anne's also, and if the coffin was empty, and what opinion of the system of education in the was going on inside it now; and where northern metropolis, and that my mother Mary Atkinson's soul was waiting all this and my governess stood upon their trial time, and if she were not rather tired of in that dread moment. Grandpapa had waiting, and feeling chilly without her old somehow come to my aid, as he generally body? Suddenly I heard a cracked, did in awkward emergencies, and I was quavering voice close at my ear, which saved for the time. But now, again, I made me start up in apprehension. Mary saw her steadily approaching. Surely Atkinson's voice might sound as queer as she would not desecrate the holy day with that if she had nothing but a few bones profane antiquarian researches. There left; but, oh relief! it was only Miss was no saying. I slipped out at the Betty Jefferson, who stood looking curi-churchyard gate, and made for the "miniously at me from under her long poke bonnet, eccentrically trimmed with a knotted bunch of worsted stay-laces. My grandmother's more familiar tones saluted

me,

"Lotty, are you dreaming, child? Do you hear, Miss Betty is inviting you to tea?"

bus," where I sat, full of hopes and fears, a distinct hope being that my grandmother would not ask Miss Betty to Fairholm till after my departure, for the good lady, having a nervous disinclination to sleep alone in the yellow guest-chamber, had invited me, on a recent occasion, to keep her company there. Should I ever forget

the vague, unutterable terrors of that night, when I, aroused by some inexplicable sympathy with Miss Betty's wakeful fears, opened my eyes in a pitchy dark ness within that hearse-like bed, and heard in the unearthly silence the odd, croaking voice of Miss Betty proclaiming nervously, "How deadly still all is!"

My grandmother joined me at last, and we drove home to Fairholm in our usual jog-trot fashion, picking up my grandfather after we had gone about a mile. There were two little cupboards in the "minibus," whence grandmamma always produced some relishing gingerbread cake to beguile the long drive of four miles. What a pretty rural drive it was through the Aspenkirk plantations! How fragrant the odors of pine and fir! What a liberal margin of short, sweet turf bordered the park-like road on either side! Here and there we passed a cottar's cow, peacefully grazing on the roadside, followed step for step by a little herd-girlpatient virtue in miniature-for whom there was generally a bit of gingerbread to spare. Why does no gingerbread taste the same nowadays?

them in the coverts where they reared their young; to stand in the early morning, as the mower whetted his scythe, and smell the new-cut grass; to hunt the mushroom ere the dew dried upon the meadow, and gather the eggs for breakfast from the cackling hens; to watch the cows, over the byre-door, as they yielded their milk to the pail, and stand aside as they passed me lowing to the fragrant pastures. Here I learned the names and properties of flowers and herbs, and wrought in a corner of my own with spade and watering-pot; watched the bloom on the plum, as it swelled to ripeness on the sunny wall, and the cherries reddening day by day beneath the net, among their pointed, glossy leaves. Down in the hayfields, I played till I was weary, and read fairy-tales underneath the gold tassels of the laburnum-tree. And moving through all, was the influence of a mighty affection, which tinctured everything in which I lived, moved, and had my being. Never have I loved any human being as I loved my grandfather. I loved my grandmother also, but in quite a secondary way. She was less indulgent, more impatient of the small mistakes and blunders of childhood. Narrower grew the lanes, and more A little wholesome fear tempered my love tortuous. The hedges and ditches here- for her, yet I liked well to lay my round abouts are all a tangle of meadow-sweet young cheek against her soft, velvety old and ragged robin. The home landscape one, or to trot by her side as she visited is tame and monotonous; but in the dis- the dairy and larder, and to watch her tance rise the blue hills of the Borderland. decant her clear gooseberry wine into the And now we must cross Lyn Bridge. quaint old pint decanters, with roses How black and sullen the river looks on wrought into the crystal. My first view the one side under the cliffs of red sand- of her in the day was always pleasant. stone, and how brightly it ripples on the She sat in a sunny window of the breakother! Then we turn a sharp corner, and fast parlor, which looked into the garden descend gently for half a mile, through—in sober, black gown, a clean muslin grandpapa's fields and plantations. At kerchief folded across her bosom, pinned last we sight our own pretty homestead, at the throat by a little rose in garnets, and Farmer, with no need of admonition, turns into the courtyard, his labors ended for the day.

CHAPTER II.

READER, let me linger a moment over the memory of Paradise, for such was Fairholm to me. The days I passed there were purely happy, the only days out of a long life that shine ever un dimmed in memory's golden light Arcadian days, when my soul, like a bud, began to open softly to the morning sun, and no cankering worm crept nigh the favored blossom days that rolled by blessedly uneventful, as I learned to read out of Nature's book, and to rejoice in the operations of her hands; to distinguish the notes of the birds, and watch

the only ornament she ever wore, a gift of my grandfather in his courting days. She was always reading the same little book, Bogatzky's "Golden Treasury," whence she gathered, I fancy, her note for the day. I can see her well-cut features, her calm, sensible, spirited expression, and the little stiff brown curls upon her forehead, for she did not then wear her own hair. I now know that the mistress of Fairholm was a very handsome woman. My grandfather was not handsome a homely-looking, blue-eyed man of medium stature and ruddy complexion. His smooth, bald crown I admired exceedingly. I was not the only person who paid him homage. John Somerby was master wherever he stepped. Another bright tint at the breakfast-table

CHAPTER III.

was the china which lay on the snowy grandfather and I sit together, many a cloth, with odd, unmeaning pattern in time, sheltering from a summer shower, Chinese style, vermilion and blue. I he trolling out some old English ballad, have never seen the same again. Nor which I repeated after him, verse by could you have easily matched the grim verse, till I knew all he had to teach, waiting-maid in her large-flowered print and could give "The Minstrel Boy," or gown, with forbidding countenance, the "Dulce Domum," at a harvest supper, to malevolent-looking old fairy of the house. the wondering admiration of the rustics. She had but one eye, but nothing ever The old man was, I believe, as happy as escaped the other. Work was as the the child. Purer, more legitimate joys breath of her nostrils. There are no were never marred by the trail of the sersuch servants nowadays. As soon as pent. John Somerby was a man with a breakfast was over, the Psalms for the story, all unknown to me in those sweet, day were read aloud by my grandfather early days. I learned it bit by bit long and me, faithfully, verse about. My after. grandmother listened with her hands folded on her knee, and always said the doxology at the end in a curious accentu- IN a secluded Lincolnshire village, fifty ated way which impressed my imagina-years before I came upon the scene, there tion. Then my day began out of doors grew up a rustic beauty in her father's with grandpapa, if weather was fine, prun- cottage by the roadside, known to her ing and watering the vines, and convers- little world as Somerby's Hannah. A ing with the pet toad, who never failed to fairer creature than Hannah at the age of come out of his corner of the vinery at sixteen, no artist ever drew. Greuze our entrance, or spudding thistles in the must have dreamed of her in some happy Holm field, or walking through the young night, for in all the enchanting girlish plantations. Perhaps there was a sheep-heads that laugh or pout from his canvas, washing on hand, then a glorious morn- there is a fugitive glance of Hannah. ing of excitement was spent at the river- No sheltered, pampered, delicate toy was side, where, amid a Babel of barking dogs and shouting shepherds, the heavilyfleeced creatures were plunged into the river one by one to the men who waited, waist deep, to receive them, each newlywashed sheep swimming off to the opposite bank after the operation, as nimbly as though it had done nothing but swim through life.

On market-days I was sometimes allowed to drive to the cathedral town in grandpapa's dog-cart. These were days marked by a white stone. Then the old man would teach me to drive, and I was soon initiated into the rule of the road, and the handling of the reins, and great was my glory, as at the close of the day, I would skilfully draw up in the courtyard at Fairholm, grandpapa sitting in apparent indifference, his arms crossed on his breast, and a defiant look at grandmamma, who was always on the watch for our return, as much as to say, "Who says we can't drive?" Balzac writes somewhere of "the little blue flower of perfect felicity." Seldom is it found upon earth; but I gathered it, reader, at moments like these, and wore it in my bosom.

There was a curious erection in one of the plantations, an ingenious device of "Harry the Carpenter." A large barrel, set on end, with a door in the side, and a seat all around within. Here would my

she, but a playmate of nature, a creature kissed by breeze and sunshine, whose healthful, innocent charm blossomed all about her, from the curling, golden head, to the arched and rosy foot that seldom wore a stocking.

Madam Boothby, from the great house, driving slowly through the village one summer evening, heard a fresh voice singing like a lark.

"Larks don't usually sing so late," she suggested languidly. Then she spied the songstress, ankle-deep in the stream which madam's horses must presently ford. A three-year-old urchin sat astride on her shoulders, his fat arms cuddling round her neck, whose white secret was half revealed under the rumpled folds of a checked cotton kerchief. Madam's coach stopped, and she beckoned imperiously from the window. "Where do you spring from, pretty water-witch?" she said, in a fine drawl.

"She's noan a witch," cries little Bill from his perch, with a strangling embrace, which sends the rosy color racing over the girl's brow and bosom, "she's just our Hannah."

"Down, Bill, and hold thy tongue, will thee, when the lady speaks?" And now Bill's cheek is laid sheepishly against his sister's rough skirts, as she swings him from her shoulder to the dusty road.