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body, you know, who flies about at night, like the ballet, I mean like the Sylphide in the ballet. Only, of course, she isn't as good as the Sylphide; at least the Sylphide I saw Taglioni do, long ago, one could not help being sorry for, and, except that she flew about, she seemed so quiet you know; but of course it would have been better if the lover in the ballet had loved the Highland girl in the green plaid. Still she was so wonderful, that one can't exactly wonder -but I dare say she'll keep Kenneth in good order don't you think so?"

even if it had been, how was she to know that it was not as much the usual costume of an elderly Scotch lady, as the kilt was, which she had been shown in pictures, and had already see worn by peasantry that morning?

So they were all very comfortable, and Sir Douglas very genial and cheerful; and a day was fixed for a dinner to neighbours and friends, some to stay in the Castle, and some only to come "over moor and fell" to feast, and drink healths, and congratulate on the marriage of Ross of Torrieburn, Sir Douglas's nephew.

Sir Douglas smiled, rather abstractedly; he was musing over the prospect of life-long When the glum old dowager at Clochnaneighbourhood and companionship between ben Castle ascertained from Ålice that Jezethis Spanish woman and his wife. He look- bel of the radiant locks was an admitted ed at his serene, dove-eyed Gertrude. The guest at the castle of Glenrossie; and would serene eyes were bent gently and with ex- probably, if not certainly, grace with her treme approbation on the singer. As they presence the table of its master, she fiercely left the piano, and Eusebia lingered to lift and defiantly shook her head with the black gloves and rings and a bracelet with pendent silk bonnet on it, at the unconscious card of jewels which Kenneth reclasped on her arm, invitation; and, pinching that oblong bit of Lady Ross bowed her head while passing the pasteboard hard, between a thumb and finottoman where her husband was seated, and ger of each hand, as she held it out towards whispered, "What a bewitching creature!" Sir Douglas's half-sister, she ejaculated, And Kenneth also evidently thought her "Well! that ever I should live to see the a bewitching creature. He was what is day, when such a neighbourhood as ours was called "passionately in love" with his Span- when first your mother came here- a ish Donna; and he occasionally adopted to- neighbourhood of good names and good wards Gertrude, in memory of unforgotten families, and folk well-to-do and respected days at the Villa Mandorlo, a manner ab- should come to be such a heatherum-gathersurdly compounded of triumph and resent- um as it is now! How Lady Ross could ment, especially when the applause of his dare to write such words to me -Requestbride's singing was greatest. It was a man-ed to meet friends and neighbours on the ner that seemed to say, 66 Ah, you wouldn't accept me, and now see what I've got. A woman with twice your beauty, and four times your voice, and twenty times your talent, and so in love with me that I believe she would stab any one she thought I fancied instead of her."

The next evening and the next passed off calmly enough. The sinner of Torrieburn came; and saw her son's foreign wife with interest a with admiration, though unable to make out the meaning of the gracious sentences in broken English, which were delivered with the gleaming smile and the "effusion" of manner Donna Eusebia thought right in addressing all relatives. One smothered fear of Kenneth's was not realized. Donna Eusebia did not perceive his mother's vulgarity. The few phrases in the broadest Scotch which Maggie in her amazement uttered from time to time, were Greek to her but not more obscure than a great deal of what other people said. The over-decoration of Maggie's still handsome person at this festal meeting was scarcely more than she herself had indulged in; and,

happy occasion of Mr. Kenneth's marriage.' Happy occasion, indeed! I wonder what his fine Spanish she-grandee of a wife will think of the miller's daughter! Friends and neighbours: was I ever friendly, or neighbourly either, with that ranting roaring woman? I'll not stir from Clochnaben; nor shall Clochnaben stir; nor Mr. James Frere, whose name Lady Ross has had just the blind impudence to add in; expecting decent women, and clergy, and people of a Christian sort, to sit hugger-mugger with women who've done nothing but offend the Lord ever since they were baptized! It's really a thing that should be noticed with reprobation, and young Lady Ross should blush to have written such a card."

So saying, the irate dowager flung the card into the wood fire crackling before her, and, giving a last trembling shake of indignation to the black bonnet, she added:

"Humph! It's not the only thing that ought to go to flames and brimstone. And you may just tell your milk-and-water Lady of Glenrossie that I'm a trifle less bendable than she is, and have neither an old hus

band nor a young lover to make me knuckle | great crimson silk arm-chair, one of her down to such company. And, when I'm large white arms lounging on either side of asked to meet such, I answer stoutly, No.it; giving a peculiar look of squareness to a Keep yourself to yourself on such occasions; that's my dictum."

figure already portly. She had on a gown of pale green satin, excessively trimmed with white blonde, and rather too short for a lady whose habit it was to sit cross-legged, with one foot in the air. But, beyond that, the dowager could find no comfort, nor any special ridicule in Maggie's appearance. Mrs. Ross Heaton was fortunately very proud of her golden hair, and had not therefore hidden it with wreaths or lacecaps on this occasion; she had merely plaited its immense length, and coiled it round, as Lady Clochnaben said, "just like the sea-serpent she was."

She seemed extremely cheerful and elate; rather loud in her laugh, and an object of some attention to the gentlemen immediate

People

The party was rather numerous. Kenneth had not seen from childhood, were gathered there-names he faintly remembered sounded in his earhands utterly unfamiliar clutched his with sentences of congratulation.

But, when Ailie had described "all the doings" at the castle, all the singing, and strangeness, and entertainment to be gathered therefrom; when she had described that manner of Kenneth's which she had shrewdly watched from her half-closed eyes, aided by the light of foregone conclusions; when she dwelt on the offence a refusal would give Sir Douglas, with the love he had for his nephew; and probably also to the Spanish she-grandee" he had married. Lady Clochnaben sniffed, wavered, and covered the retreat from her resolute stand, which (curiosity getting the better of propriety) she at length permitted herself to make, by giving utterance to another dic-ly near her, tum; namely, that one was no more bound to know beforehand what company one would meet at dinner than what dishes would be set on the table; that, maybe, Maggie would not be there (this being an interpretation to save her conscience, for she felt convinced of the contrary), but that, if the dreaded Jezebel did come, then she would show her neighbourly abhorrence of a neighbour's faults by treating Mrs. Ross Heaton with stern disdain; never speaking to her; never seeming to perceive her presence; and, if she dared volunteer an observation intended for the Clochnaben ear, then to pour out such open reproofs, such vials of fiery wrath, as would teach the brazen hussy never to forget herself again; even if she was puffed into as much importance as the toad in the fable by the unheard-of imprudence and apathy of Lady Ross; an apathy as to the great rules of marriage and chastity which could only be attributed to her foreign education, and the idiocy of the mother who superintended it.

And so a haughty condescension of assent was vouchsafed; and the Dowager Clochnaben, clothed in black velvet trimmed with grébe bordering, and with a necklet of large single diamonds surmounting a white gauze ruff, sailed into the great crimson room where the company were assembling, and cast a severe and searching glance over the heads and shoulders of most of the party, to see if the sinner of Torrieburn was there.

There was Major Maxwell, who had served with Sir Douglas, and Mr. Innes of Innes, and three Forbeses of three several places, who had barely a distant cousinship among them, though all bore the same name, and who were accordingly all called by the names of their places, and the good word Forbes never mentioned. There was a remarkably handsome young Highlander in a kilt, with a velvet jacket, who rejoiced in the title of Monzies of Craigievar and Poldoch, and who had an estate of about two hundred a year, somewhere "ayont the hills." There were Campbells, and Stuarts, and Frasers, and Gordons, all "good men and true;" and many who had served their country, though their country was utterly indifferent to their existence-loyal men who loved their unseen monarch, and were ready at all times to fight in India, China, or America, as the case might be.

The dinner was gay, and healths were drunk even in the presence of the ladies. The Spanish beauty flashed eyes and fan and jewels, with double and treble energy, and bit her under lip more than ever, and laughed with Monzies of Craigievar and Poldoch. Lady Clochnaben grew grimmer and colder; as the winter sky grows in the fall of the day. Mr. James Frere became excessively animated; insomuch that even the wary Alice was caught with an expression of surprise, and something strangely resembling fear, on her generally guarded countenance.

Yes, she was! she was; in spite of all proper regulations of human conduct. And, even then, Dowager Clochnaben had a frown ready to annihilate her, only that Maggie never looked her way. She was seated in a FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. III. 42.

And Lady Ross, after also glancing at him once or twice unquietly, gave the usual signal for the ladies to proceed to the drawing

room.

There the Spanish beauty threw herself full length on one of the sofas with an exclamation of fatigue and exhaustion. Lady Ross moved towards her, and sat down by her side. Alice conversed in an undertone with Lady Charlotte.

Coffee was served and taken; and then there was a pause.

"I'm saying I'm glad we're met at last, Leddy Clochnaben."

"I desire you'll not have the boldness to address me," said the dowager, with excessive fierceness. "If family reasons induce persons who ought to know better, to invite you among decent folks, at least you might have the decency to keep quiet in your corner."

I keep quiet, mem!" exclaimed Maggie, bursting with wrath. "Who's the stranger here, I'd fain ken? I'm here amang my ain kin; for the marriage of my ain lad; wi" a leddy that's mair a leddy, an' a bonnier

How could Maggie find courage to address that pillar of black velvet, which stood erect, surmounted by the diamond necklet, lean-leddy too, than a' the Clochnabens that ever ing one stern hand on the chimney-piece, and setting one stern foot on the fender! She did find courage, careless courage; did not even know any was needed. Still seated and lounging, she looked up at the dowager and said,

"I kenned ye weel by sicht, Leddy Clochnaben, but we're strangers else. Ye were no ow'r willing to show, the day ye mind I cam' wi' my puir mon, Mr. Heaton, to speak wi' ye."

Lady Clochnaben positively shuddered with anger; but she made no reply.

Maggie raised her voice, already something of the loudest, as if she thought the hearer might be deaf.

crooed on their beggarly midden; and I'd hae ye to ken that I'dinna care that for yere airs and yere graces, and, if my mon's dede that wad hae gi'en ye as gude as ye bring, I can tak' my ain pairt; if even I hadn't my lad come hame, and I'll".

What more Maggie would have said, snapping her white fingers with a rapid and resounding repetition of snaps in the infuriated dowager's face, cannot be known, for an hysterical burst of tears and howls began to wind up (or break down) her oration, before she perceived that many of the gentlemen who had re-entered from dinner, and all the ladies, were gazing, at the scene in dismay.

"CARISSIMO."

JUST beyond the Julian Gate,
Stands an old and ruin'd seat,
With some Latin and a date,
'Neath a broken statue's feet.
There, from out a batter'd mask,
Once a fountain used to flow,
There by day the lizards bask,

There by night the lovers go.

There I heard them over night,
Billing, cooing - all alone;

I was hidden out of sight,

Where the bank slides sheerly down Sitting on an olive's root

In a dream of love and pain,

Eating Memory's bitter fruit;

Living the old times again.

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Little Nina's voice it was,
Whispering "Carrissimo"
Once I did the same - alas!
That was twenty years ago.
'Twas the very voice and tone
Once her mother used to have;
I could not repress a groan,
Thinking she is in her grave.

Then they heard me, found me there -
Nina fell upon my breast,

Kiss'd my cheek but I forbear-
You who know me, know the rest.
They are happy - from the tree
Falls the fruit when fully grown.
She is happy to be free-
I am wretched, left alone.

Good Words.

W. W. STORY.

From the Saturday Review.
OLD-FASHIONED SINS.

revenge. People seem really to have taken an exquisite pleasure in revenging themselves; they are warned against yielding to its temptations as a working-man of the present day is warned against drinking gin. It is supposed to be undoubtedly wrong, but so pleasant that it requires almost superhuman strength to refrain from it. Now what civilized being at the present day really thinks it worth while to take any trouble to revenge himself? If any one has injured his vanity, has treated him in public places with contempt, or exposed his folly, he is rather glad than otherwise to pay off his adversary when the occasion comes; but to make vengeance any very serious object of thought, much more to devote a life to it after the melodramatic fashion, is so rare as to be almost an evidence of insanity. In old days, the case would naturally be different. A feudal baron, in the intense dulness of his country life, would very likely have nothing else to think of than the injury. done to him by some brutal likeness of himself; the one great excitement of his life being a fight, he would be always employing his imagination at odd times in taking his enemy at a disadvantage, getting him down, and casting him into a loathsome dungeon. He might brood over this for hours, when his modern counterpart would be reading the Times. It would doubtless be extremely gratifying when he could ultimately change these amiable fancies into facts, and get his enemy bodily into the loathsome dungeon before his eyes. It would be a real addition to his narrow round of amusements to gloat over his unlucky victim in the dungeon, to ask him how he liked mouldy bread and stinking water, and perhaps ultimately to put his eyes out, or starve him, after the playful custom of the period. Loathsome dungeons have, however, gone out of fashion. If a country gentleman were to get another into his power, and lock him up in the coalcellar, there would be a row about it in the papers; he therefore gives up meditating such an action as a part of real life; he does not even anticipate very seriously that he will ever be able to knock his enemy's head off, though he sometimes uses some such traditional form of words as roughly expressing his feelings. As distractions are more plentiful than they used to be in the country-it is much easier to forget all about his injury, thus combining obedience to Christian morality with amusement. Mr. Mudie's Library has no doubt done a For example, old-fashioned moralists are good deal towards eradicating this evil always talking about the wickedness of passion. Revenge is still. known, indeed,.

THE history of mankind may be traced by the sins which have gone out of fashion. Not that it at all follows that mankind tends to perfection, or even to improvement. There is a fashion in sinning, as in other things. One popular sin may have gone out with the use of wigs, but another has perhaps been introduced with cylindrical hats; if so, it has brought its punishment along with it. Moral diseases change their type like physical. The Black Death and other hideous sicknesses have gone out, but we have got a good many new and virulent diseases in their place. Whether the physical constitution of men has on the average improved or decayed is a question for physicians to settle; and moralists may decide, if they can, whether we are on the whole better or worse than our forefathers. Believers in democracy will of course hold that we are improving; and staunch old Tories, that we are steadily declining in virtue. The cynical part of mankind will fall back on the somewhat musty aphorism that human nature is much the same in all ages, which is as far from the truth as most aphorisms. It depends for its superficial probability upon an arbitrary division between the permanent character of a man and the modifications produced by circumstances. We do not know that those modifications are merely temporary, and that a modern Englishman transplanted back to the middle ages would throw off his present habits as easily as he would change his clothes. On the contrary, it is more likely that some passions are ultimately killed out by particular forms of society, as the instincts of a beast are altered by his domestication. The moral injunctions which were applicable in previous ages thus gradually acquire a curious tinge of naïveté; they are directed against sins which have so changed in character that we have some difficulty in discovering their modern representatives. In some cases, we have merely changed our mode of action. We have learnt to convey, and not to steal; to break a wife's heart by refined spiritual torture, instead of knocking her down with a club and stamping upon her; to influence by delicate attentions, instead of practising coarse bribery; and so forth. But there are also some sins for which we seem to have grown too sensible or too virtuous.

even

and is exemplified by occasional mur- think of mixing up business with revenge. derers, and eccentric old bachelors and It is generally fatal to both purposes to ladies; but in the classes whose time is fully endeavour to combine benevolence with occupied it has gone pretty well out of fash- business. If you invest money with the ion; the pleasure is not worth the trouble. purpose of doing good, you probably get no It is still believed in by novelists, because interest and no thanks; but to invest it it is very convenient for dramatic purposes, with malevolent objects would be even and because nine-tenths of novelists draw, worse, in a commercial as well as a Christian not from life, but from their predecessors. point of view. In short, it is getting daily But even novelists are beginning to find it more difficult to injure our enemies satisfacvery hard to introduce it with any probability. torily, and we have daily a greater number It is one of the many excellencies attributed of causes of distraction. It is not yet easy to Mr. Guy Livingstone that he has a very to love our enemies, but it is remarkably low opinion of the Christian virtue of for- easy not to hate them. In fact, very few giveness. But the author is amusingly un- men have got any enemies in the proper able to give him an opportunity of gratifying sense of the word. In a remote district the his revengeful spirit. He goes about curs- parson and the squire may quarrel, and go ing and swearing a good deal; but the on "nursing their wrath to keep it warm,” worst he can do, when it comes to the point, for any number of years; but how could a is to decidedly cut the person who has parson and one of his parishioners quarrel offended him. Duelling is gone out of fash- to any effect in London? The parishioner ion, and murder is not common in good may cease to go to the parson's church, or society. The way in which the heroes to ask him to dinner; but that is a very of most novels revenge themselves is by negative way of quarrelling; the two fill too one of those elaborate and diabolical plots little space in each other's lives to be capwhich have, so far as we have ever heard, able of inflicting or receiving much injury. absolutely no counterpart in real life. Peo- There are many men for whom one feels an ple sometimes tell a good many lies to get instinctive dislike, but the worst that the up the shares of a railway company, or to most spiteful of us can do is to avoid their send down a horse in the betting; but the company, and perhaps to speak ill of them plot of fiction the elaborate arrangement behind their backs. And nobody is seriin which the villain brings the virtuous ously the worst nowadays for a little backcharacters under the influence of a diaboli- biting. The world won't trouble itself cal enchantment, causing everybody to mis- about trifles, and such hostility is at most understand everybody else throughout two like throwing a few shells into a fortified volumes and a half-is simply fictitious. town. It is annoying, but does no vital No one has time enough to weave such injury. tangled webs of deceit. The villain has to be at his chambers or on the Stock Exchange, and cannot be bothered with acting Iago in common life; he would much rather give up the lady and the revenge, and take it out in money. One common device of novelists is exemplified in a story in Pickwick, where a gentleman manages, after a long course of commercial operations, to sell and leave him to starve in his enemy, the Fleet; he of course appears subsequently, wrapped in a cloak (another arrangement which has perhaps become obsolete with the decline in melodramatic revenges), and reveals himself to his victim with an appropriate speech. But even this sort of revenge is already losing its efficiency; it depends upon the old law of imprisonment for debt, and the probable result in real life would be that the old gentleman would go through the court and retire upon a moderate competency, which would be a somewhat lame and impotent conclusion. Moreover, no good man of business would

up

There are various other vices which tend to become obsolete on the same principle. Why used our fathers, fifty years ago, to consume two bottles of port after dinner? Simply because life was so dull that they had nothing better to do. The dreary old bacchanalian melodies about driving away care merely meant that an elderly gentleman of the period was generally bored unless he was drunk. No man could now afford to dine early every day, and pass the evening boozing, even if it were intrinsically pleasant. A somewhat similar case is that of gambling, considered as distinct from speculation. People enjoy games of pure chance because it is the simplest possible way of obtaining excitement without even an intellectual effort. Savages are keen gamblers, when they have a chance; it is a pleasant relief to the torpor of their ordinary lives at home. Red Indians, after losing all their other property, will stake their scalps, their lives, or their liberties. In more civilized states of society a craving

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