is more interesting in the literature of the present day than the mode in which ancient State documents have been sifted and published, and a whole flood of illustration poured forth on events only imperfectly comprehended by contemporaries. Dr. Willis has a theory to prove that Calvin was the means of putting Servetus to death, and this, not in consequence of the intolerant and persecuting spirit which then pervaded nearly all religious life and thought, but through private grudge, enmity, and revenge. As we only hear Dr. Willis's, and are hardly in a position to get Calvin's, side of the question, we must decline to adjudicate. Dr. Willis has given a genuine instance of historical investigation, and what he tells us of Servetus's anticipation of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood is highly curious and interesting.

One of the most interesting and complete books of the kind which we have seen for a long time is Dr. Rink's monograph on Danish Greenland.* All those who recollect how frequently Disco and Greenland have been mentioned in our own Arctic expeditions will be interested in such a work. There is now no doubt that the Danes discovered America centuries before Columbus or Vespucci. This is abundantly proved both by the Icelandic sagas and

* Danish Greenland: its People and its Products. By Dr. Henry Rink. Edited by Dr. Robert Brown. (Henry S. King & Co.)

also by the remains of the old Danish churches and other edifices. Greenland itself, though generally supposed to be part of America, is more probably an island or cluster of islands. Dr. Rink, who is the Director of the Royal Greenland Board of Trade, has already given us a most excellent work on the Eskimo, and his present exhaustive monograph will leave nothing to be said by any future writer. The work is so full of matter, that to give a fair summary would be like abbreviating an index. The true hero of the story of Greenland is Egede the Danish missionary, and his work is taken up and sustained by the Moravian missions. The geographical contrasts of the country are of the most violent character. Entering the fjords we have verdant valleys, wooded slopes, and luxuriant vegetation; but penetrating beyond the margin, we have the boundless icy plateau of the Arctic zone. Dr. Rink tells us that the whole mass of floating icebergs are exclusively discharged from the inland ice. The author deals very fully both with the natives and the Danish settlers. The reindeer meat has now ceased to be in daily use, but the quantity of seal taken is prodigious. Eight pounds a year gives an income for a family. We had marked many passages for reference or quotation; but we by all means advise readers to refer to the work, to which we can give a most thorough and hearty recommendation.

our

VOL. XXXII. NO. CXC.

AA

CHAPTER XXVII.

DEAD-SEA FRUIT.

I COME now to the nearest approach to an adventure that I ever had in my life.

Three days had gone by, outwardly tranquil, but for me all one feverish unnatural dream of most morbid pleasure; nerves and brain stirred and strung up to that pitch when they refuse to relax, and to allow of rest or sleep. To counteract the strain, and set the balance of being to rights again, I would try ways of tiring myself out, developing a taste for open-air exercise that surprised everybody. I wanted to exhaust myself physically, till I should have no strength left for thinking and feeling, and Nature herself must enforce a vegetative repose. I learned to row, dragged Eva out for long walks before breakfast over the Seckendorf estates-anything to still this cold excitement vibrating within me night and day.

The present ordeal was so new, so unthought of, that it found me quite off my guard, as against an unrecognised adversary, who first pulls out his weapon when he is close upon you. There is a dire fascination, the fascination of evil, as of something strange and untried, which, like vertigo when we look into deep water or over a precipice, takes hold of the spirit unawares, tempting it and drawing it down into the giddy vortex of the game of self.

The third day was intensely hot and sultry. Sophie and Hilda towards two o'clock esta

blished themselves out on the lawn for the afternoon. They had become fairly friendly lately, since Hilda had been pleased to drop her haughty nonchalance of manner, and one subject at least they had in common, upon which they could talk by the hour and never tire or quarrel-the subject of dress.

Coming into the billiard-room, I found it empty. But Jasper had just been there, I knew; the volume of Heine he was reading lay open on the table, a halffinished piece of music he was copying for me beside it.

He would return in an instant. My first impulse was to seat myself at the open piano as usual, run through song upon song, with words and without; a prelude to an afternoon like the last and the one before. My second, which I obeyed, was to take my gardenhat, and promptly, before he reappeared or Sophie and Hilda had seen me, to slip out of the house, resolute to free myself for a few hours from the sweet captivity of Castle Adlerberg.

Eva was sketching at the Swallow's Nest, and my original intention had been to go there and join her.

But a wayward fancy seized me to take a long walk first, and, yielding at once to the caprice, I struck into the next path that offered itself, one leading out into the country and away from the Seckendorf estate.

As if from sheer perversity I had chosen the least attractive route of all, a walk nobody ever took, and no wonder. To begin with, it was

lonely and monotonous; the road, which was execrable, meandered on for miles through dull country, without leading to anything of the faintest interest at last, and the wayfarer must perforce return the same way by which he came. Probably Sophie had never been a mile along it in her life. The castle inmates seldom cared to stray out of their own grounds, which extended for miles in other directions. Who, indeed, with such a park as Adlerberg boasted under their windows-Adlerberg with its river, ruins, rocks, and hills-would dream, except by way of a penance, of making a pilgrimage along a dreary road, that dwindled in time to a drearier foot-path leading across potatofields and barren hills to a few wretched cottages?

As I said, no one ever did, and I had but a dim idea of where it would land me as, forgetting Eva and the Swallow's Nest, I trudged along, until I had put three miles between me and Castle Adlerberg. But the bleak ugliness of the scene was almost congenial that day. Beauty sickens us at certain seasons. There is a time for daffodils and marigolds, for roses and pomegranates, and there is also a time for thorns and briers, gall and wormwood; things quite as real, more enduring, and as worthy a poet's theme.

I was unceremoniously recalled to the world of prose by the sudden bursting of a heavy shower. Though prepared for rough roads, and half enjoying their discomfort, I had forgotten the weather, and never paid attention to the longgathering thunderclouds overhead. A violent storm now caught me half-way across a shelterless common, and in a few minutes I was wet to the skin. I ran for some cottages I saw in the distance, but long before I could reach them

the rain had done its worst. The group of mud and plaster habitations huddled together before me I recognised as the little hamlet of Neudorf, which I knew by name as the first to be met with in this direction. The girls of one or two of the poor families there made lace, and from time to time came round to the castle to try and sell it. They had appeared there very often lately; for Hilda had taken an immense fancy to this commodity, purchased a good deal on each occasion, and given an order for more.

I saw standing in a doorway a girl whom I remembered as having brought over her wares to Mrs. Gerard a day or two ago. So I accosted her and asked for a shelter, adding that I came from Castle Adlerberg. She called her mother, who received me most hospitably, moved with much pity for my dripping condition. My garments, alas, were past drying except by a furnace, and there was no fire in the cottage. However, the eldest daughter's best Sunday and saints'-day gown was brought out, and I was entreated to try it on. I arrayed myself provisionally in the bright-coloured stuff skirt, black jacket, apron, and thick shoes, even tying a variegated cotton handkerchief round my head to complete the disguise and amuse my hosts and myself.

Whilst I sat chatting to the woman as fluently as my scanty acquaintance with her peculiar patois permitted, there came a loud knock at the outer door. She went to open, and a long parley ensued between her and the visitor. I heard a man's voice speaking in accents of broken German. It riveted my attention, it sounded so familiar. Yet so inconceivable was the supposition that I should meet that voice

here, that I failed to put a name to it for the first moment.

One of the children who had remained in the room peeped out of the window, and explained to me that it was a strange gentleman, a traveller who had borrowed an umbrella of them a few days ago, and had come to return it.

That was simple and humdrum, indeed; but whose voice was that?

The next minute he walked straight into the room where I sat-Leopold Meredith.

I was thunderstruck, but not so aghast but I marked the cool careless air with which he sauntered in, as if familiar here already. I turned away sharply and kept my face carefully averted, but my disguise rendered but slight precaution necessary. He never looked at me. The peasant-girl, to him, was worth no more scrutiny than the clumsy table, broken. chairs, and kitchen pots and pans. The good woman, for her part, concluding, no doubt, that I was ashamed to be seen by a gentleman in my rustic habiliments, said and did nothing to draw his attention to me.

He stayed for a few minutes, rewarding the peasant's wife right royally for the loan of the umbrella, and then departed, mother and children reverentially ushering their benefactor to the door.

Pray who may that gentleman be? I inquired of the woman when she returned. 'How comes he in these parts?'

Very innocently she explained that he was an English tourist, staying, she supposed, at Rosenbad, a town some six miles farther on, where travellers came occasionally sketching, fishing, botanising, or collecting stones; she was not very clear on the subject, but whatever she did not know she took for granted.

I watched her and the girl narrowly, questioned them as closely as I dared, and soon felt convinced of their ignorance of their visitor's identity. They were all honesty and stupidity. Their information and ideas barely went beyond their cluster of cottages and the little allotments attached.

Sophie and her father had been more than a name for them in the former's maiden days, when now and then in hard seasons she had played the Lady Bountiful to her poor neighbours. But never since her marriage had she appeared at Adlerberg till this summer. As for her husband, he was an abstract idea to the cottagers. He might

be old or he might be young, a German or a Turk-they did not even know his name; Leopold's shooting and deer-stalking excursions would certainly never have brought him in this direction.

As for this Englishman, this visitor, he was evidently on a walking tour. There would pass

at least two or three of his kind every year, and Neudorf had ceased to wonder at such apparitions. There is an ignorance so dense that it stops short of gossip, conjecture, or curiosity, and remains quite satisfied with itself.

'Now what object on earth can Mr. Meredith, whom we thought still at Ludwigsheim, have for playing off this little farce upon us? I mused silently, puzzled.

The old dame meanwhile had taken up her knitting, and forthwith became more garrulous and confidential.

'Ah, to be sure, and the gentleman has friends at the castle,' she said, looking up; 'the gracious lady may have met him there. I even think he said he had been over to see them yesterday. To-day he has left this parcel for

my girl to take when she goes tomorrow with the lace. Perhaps the gracious lady would like to see.'

And she brought it out unsuspiciously. The address was in a disguised handwriting, to a Miss Harvey in London, care of Mrs. Gerard, Castle Adlerberg;' and the contents, I should have said, were a letter, nothing more.

I stared at the sealed paper, and the reality of what a suspicious fancy had forecast flashed upon me all at once with blinding, scathing force. An indescribable horror, a sensation of sickening disgust, followed. I felt ashamed to live. If the reckless effrontery of the intrigue had confounded me for the first moment, there came a reaction quickly enough, in an insight into its full ugliness and iniquity. The odious duplicity, the false lulling of poor Sophie's irritated and too well-founded jealousy, Leopold's departure a blind for stolen communications, perhaps for stolen interviews,-it all revolted me past expression. O, the selfish wickedness of two people, sacrificing and duping those nearest to them; egotists who all the while put in their claim-a claim that no one was allowed to dispute to be respected, honoured, loved, by their own dupes!

The fear of anything, however vivid or imminent, is worlds removed from the impression of the actual catastrophe. The whole drama that had been slowly evolving itself these last few weeks at Adlerberg, and in which I too had been more than a mere shocked spectator, now first stood before me plainly, stripped of gloss and glamour, in its native hideousness.

There was Leopold, playing false to his wife, who had done him no wrong; Hilda deceiving her husband. How would it end? There was worse than this; the

path, dark as it was, had yet darker windings. Leopold's part had a dash of malignancy in it to make it thoroughly odious. Instinctively I doubted the unmixed nature of his feeling to Mrs. Gerard. I detected that he had not forgiven her. Indeed her nature, charms and all, was not of that temper which stirs up the forgiving principle in us. He would have liked her now to compromise herself for him, for the man she had professed to hold cheap; let her feel and have to own herself the slave of his will, repenting that in the past she played with him and then threw him overboard. Better not ask to what such a labyrinth of evil will lead at last.

And I ?

The spectacle of another, selfabandoned to those waves of ill, had awakened me suddenly to a true view of the treacherous sea on the edge of which I myself had been standing. Such a shock roughly brushes the film from the mind's eye, and the mind shrinks appalled and ashamed at the first faint symptoms that one has been tampering with one's spiritual honesty.

You detect your neighbour cheating at cards, and turn your back upon him henceforth as a swindler. Your game has been fair and open. Good. But there are insidious games to which honest players may not put their hand without damage to their honesty, and I, to say the least, had willingly sought and dared just such a pernicious influence.

That proud numbness of heart, on which I had relied as a shield, whilst on the one hand it took away what excuse a master passion can give, on the other, how long would it last? For who shall say where temerity ends and madness begins Instinctively as I