amount to something beside mischief. He hasn't an atom of either. She tries to deceive herself, but she is not deceived. 'Well, I did make her forget her boy for a few minutes. Even that was a satisfaction. First by attacking herself, then the country. But that boy has got to go, I'm afraid, in spite of raw beefsteak. A clear case of paidatropia. Washington has finished what nature began. Too much nerve, too much brain for the body; bad diet, bad air, malaria, all 'have had a snatch at it. It might be built up, it would be built up on my prescription, with a different brain and nervous system. With his, there's not an even chance; far from it. He may live a year, he may die before fall. She is right, he cannot live to be a man, - of course not." But it was scarcely gloomy, the boy's slow fading away. Through it Agnes became familiarized with aying in its gentleat guise. She had learned to feel that life held nothing, even for her boy, so sweet as rest. He was all a boy in his delight in snares, in his desire for a gun, in his longing for a bear, a good little bear who would play with him and live with his rabbits, in his proneness to "train" and to beat a drum in martial array, while his little sister marched behind as “a private,” and in his capacity to build and to man a mud fort, under the generalship of the warlike Colin. But every boyish delight was overtaken by the inevitable weariness. Howsoever gladly the day began, with boyish shouts and laughter in the sunny air, it ended by his mother's side in the fine, incessant, exasperating cough, in the weakening chill and slow, low fever.

The special nature of his disease was the impossibility of tracing it to any one known cause, its subtle and evasive symptoms, its extreme difficulty of cure. There were days when it seemed as if he could never be so ill again, so resolute and so enthusiastic he seemed in his out-door sports; yet another morning would find him lower than he ever was before followed by other days and nights of the same alternate brightness and languor. Through every fluctuation his mother seemed to see the final end, to see it just the same even when she deluded herself to hope. When she lost her other child, to bury him seemed to her life's direst ill. She knew now that life held sorrows deeper than death, pangs harder to be borne. With her heart reft in anguish at the very thought of his dying, she would still say steadfastly that she would choose that he should go, rather than stay to outlive his mother's kiss, to forsake her love for the evil in the world. Her way might be long and lonely without him, but it would be so much to know that her lamb was safe, sorrow, safe from sin, safe forever.

safe from

Living in and for her boy, hour by hour, she thought less of herself and of his father. Still, when she heard him happy on the lawn, or held him in her arms, or watched him while he slept, the thought would come of that father. Sometimes he would stand before her contemptuous, cruel, as he stood that last morning; sometimes he would come to her in her dreams, the god-like lover of her girlhood. Often, in spite of herself, amid her work, her study, her child-care, the question would thrust itself in, "Where is he? Amid his brilliant, tumultuous career does he never think of me, his wife, with early-time tenderness? Does he never miss me, never want me as I do him? And where is she? Does she haunt his path still? Did she go? Is she there with him, and I here alone? Does she thrust herself athwart his path now, as she has from the be

ginning? The world—no, not all the world is wide enough for her and for me. I want a just God to avenge my wrong, to give me back that which is mine."

Cyril King had no true realization of the condition of his child. He knew that he was ailing, and also that more or less he had been ailing ever since he was born. The very character of the boy's disease made it impossible for such a father as his to think that he was in any way seriously sick. He would see him, after a night of suffering, playing about the next day, and the result was that from the beginning he thought Agnes was inclined to greatly exaggerate her boy's illness. She knew this. She knew that if she wrote to his father what she believed to be the true condition of their child, he would only blame her for telling her troubles and her unnecessary fears to one so oppressed and overburdened with public cares as himself. Thus, beyond the statement that he was not as strong or as free from the physical difficulties which weakened him when he left Washington, she said nothing of the boy. Her fears, her prayers for her child, were withheld from mortal ear and poured into the silence of the Infinite Heart that is Love.

June faded from the world all bloom and brightness till its last rose perished. July held the capital in its blazing zone, and still the congressional session lasted. Agnes had not seen her husband since the morning when he allowed her to kiss him farewell in the railway car at Washington. One day she received two letters. The first was from Cyril. It read:

DEAR AGNES, I am using the little that the heat has left of me, to tell you how sorry I am that the accumulated pressure of public business (which I cannot evade) has allowed me no chance to come home to visit you and the children, as I intended. With my committees and the congressional sessions now held night as well as day, I have not a moment that I call my own. The heat has become intolerable, and we are now pushing bills at a tremendous rate, and cutting down debate to the briefest possible limit, in order to hasten the day of final adjournment. It must come very soon; when I shall hasten to the cool airs of Lotusmere without delay.

Truly your husband,

CYRIL KING.

at first the attentions, and then the affections, of the husband. The absent wife was my friend, and I failed to do my duty to her through a fear for once to make her business my business. The result was, my friend went heart-broken to an untimely grave. As I remarked, I have not forgiven myself for minding my own business that time. You I cannot really claim, I presume, as more than an acquaintance. But I have been very much interested in you, my dear, ever since I saw so much of you at the ambassadors' ball, I write as your true friend, to warn you that if do you not look more closely after your husband, there is fearful trouble ahead for you, and disgrace for him, if a man can be disgraced by his own follies, in the eyes of a silly world that finds it so pleasant to strain at a gnat and to swallow a cable if it likes it.

Let me ask you, my dear, what in reason, or decency, is that Mrs. Sutherland doing here now? The season over, the thermometer at one hundred and seven in the shade, and she without a residence, "visiting!" "visiting," she says, Madame S; I say visiting your husband. Don't go and break your heart about it. In my opinion there is not a man on earth worth a woman's broken heart, though I think well of my husband, but, my dear, it is because I have always taken care of him, and managed him, yes, managed him, as every man has to be managed if you keep him. You must put down your foot, and hold up your head, and declare to Mr. King that you will have nothing of the kind, nothing of the kind of his driving every evening of the week in an open barouche with a woman as uncertain (to say the least) as that Mrs. Sutherland; that you will not endure it to have him dancing attendance everywhere on her, while you are shut up at home alone with the children.

P. S. You remember, don't you, that young sprout all the girls of the West End went wild over last winter, Altonious Algernon Aubrey? They all called him the very pink and prince of the dancing gentlemen. Such aristocratic airs and graces as he took on! He sniffed at the "mob," he disdained to speak to a clerk! He was an amateur in all elegant arts, a translator, everything that was "nobby" and "swell," as that set say. Every one of the seven Highflyers was dying for him. And now he's gone, they've just discovered that his mother keeps an apple stand, and with apples she paid his way through college. Fancy the plight of the Highflyers and the quaking of their genealogical tree, that struck root before the Flood!

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

CHAPTER XXXV. AT AN UPPER WINDOW.

Ir was very early the next morning-a time of sun and dew. The confused beginnings of many birds' songs spread into the healthy air, and the wan blue of the heaven was here and there coated with thin webs of incorporeal cloud which were of no effect in obscuring day. All the lights in the scene were yellow as to color, and all the shadows were attenuated as to form. The creeping plants about the old manor-house were bowed with rows of heavy waterdrops, which had upon objects behind them the effect of minute lenses of high magnifying power.

Just before the clock struck five, Gabriel Oak and Coggan passed the village cross and went on together to the fields. They were yet barely in view of their mistress's house, when Oak fancied he saw the opening of a casement in one of the upper windows. The two men were at this moment partially screened by an elder bush, now beginning to be enriched with black bunches of fruit, and they paused before emerging from its shade.

A handsome man leaned idly from the lattice. He looked east and then west, in the manner of one who makes a first morning survey. The man was Sergeant Troy. His red jacket was loosely thrown on, but not buttoned, and he had altogether the relaxed bearing of a soldier taking his ease.

Coggan spoke first, looking quietly at the window. "She has married him!" he said.

Gabriel had previously beheld the sight, and he now stood with his back turned, making no reply:

"I fancied we should know something to-day," continued Coggan. "I heard wheels pass my door just after dark you were out somewhere." He glanced round upon Gabriel. "Good heavens above us, Oak, how white your face is; you look like a corpse!"

"Do I?" said Oak, with a faint smile.
"Lean on the gate: I'll wait a bit."
"All right, all right."

They stood by the gate awhile, Gabriel listlessly staring at the ground. His mind sped into the future, and saw there enacted in years of leisure the scenes of repentance that would ensue from this work of haste. That they were married he had instantly decided. Why had it been so mysteriously managed? It was not at all Bathsheba's way of doing things. With all her faults, she was candor itself. Could she have been entrapped? The union was not only an unutterable grief to him: it amazed him, notwithstanding that he had passed the preceding week in a suspicion that such might be the issue of Troy's meeting her away from home. Her quiet return with Liddy had to some extent dispersed the dread. Just as that imperceptible motion which appears like stillness is infinitely divided in its properties from stillness itself, so had struggling hopes against the imagined deed differentiated it entirely from the thing actually done.

In a few minutes they moved on again towards the house. The sergeant still looked from the window.

Morning, comrades!" he shouted, in a cheery voice, when they came up.

Coggan replied to the greeting. "Bain't ye going to answer the man?" he then said to Gabriel. "I'd say good-morning-you needn't spend a hap'eth of meaning upon it, and yet keep the man civil."

Gabriel soon decided too that, since the deed was done, to put the best face upon the matter would be the greatest kindness to her he loved.

"Good-morning, Sergeant Troy," he returned, in a ghastly voice.

"A rambling, gloomy house this," said Troy, smiling. "Why they may not be married!" suggested Coggan. "Perhaps she's not there."

Gabriel shook his head. The soldier turned a little towards the east, and the sun kindled his scarlet coat to an orange glow.

"But it is a nice old house," responded Gabriel. "Yes I suppose so; but I feel like new wine in an old bottle here. My notion is that sash-windows should be put throughout, and these old wainscoted walls brightened up a bit; or the oak cleared quite away, and the walls pered."

pa

"It would be a pity, I think." "Well, no. A philosopher once said in my hearing that the old builders, who worked when art was a living thing, had no respect for the work of builders who went before them, but pulled down and altered as they thought fit; and why shouldn't we? 'Creation and preservation don't do well together,' says he, and a million of antiquarians can't invent a style." My mind exactly. I am for making this place more modern, that we may be cheerful whilst we

can.

"I once heard that an uncle of his was queer in his head, but I don't know the rights o't," he said.

"It is of no importance," said Troy lightly. "Well, I shall be down in the fields with you sometime this week; but I have a few matters to attend to first. So good-day to you. We shall, of course, keep on just as friendly terms as usual. I'm not a proud man: nobody is ever able to say that of Sergeant Troy. However, what is must be, and here's half a crown to drink my health, men."

Troy threw the coin dexterously across the front plot towards Gabriel, who shunned it in its fall, his face turning to an angry red. Coggan twirled his eye, edged forward, and caught the money in its ricochet upon the grass.

"Very well-you keep it, Coggan," said Gabriel with disdain, and almost fiercely. "As for me, I'll do without gifts from him."

"Don't show it too much," said Coggan, musingly. "For if he's married to her, mark my words, he'll buy his discharge and be our master here. Therefore 'tis well to sayFriend' outwardly, though you say Troublehouse' within."

"Well-perhaps it is best to be silent; but I can't go further than that. I can't flatter, and if my place here is only to be kept by smoothing him down, my place must be lost."

A horseman, whom they had for some time seen in the distance, now appeared close beside them.

"There's Mr. Boldwood," said Oak. "I wonder what Troy meant by his question."

Coggan and Oak nodded respectfully to the farmer, just checked their paces to discover if they were wanted, and finding they were not, stood back to let him pass

on.

The only signs of the terrible sorrow Boldwood had been combating through the night and was combating now were the want of color in his well-defined face, the enlarged appearance of the veins in his forehead and temples, and the sharper lines about his mouth. The horse bore him away, and the very step of the animal seemed significant of dogged despair. Gabriel, for a minute, rose above his own grief in noticing Boldwood's. He saw the square figure sitting erect upon the horse, the head turned to neither side, the elbows steady by the hips, the brim of the hat level and undisturbed in its onward glide, until the keen edges of Boldwood's shape sank by degrees over the hill. To one who knew the man and his story there was something more striking in this immobility than in a collapse. The clash of discord between mood and matter here was forced painfully home to the heart; and, as in laughter there are more dreadful phases than in tears, so was there in the steadiness of this agonized man an expression deeper than a cry.

(To be continued.)

ART SHOP.

THE present age, like most ages past, and probably also like most ages to come, has incurred a considerable amount of abuse from divers quarters. It is lightly spoken of by those who were born before it, who remember better days or days which they believe to have been better, and who compare the present time disadvantageously with that which was privileged to be theirs. It is ill-spoken of also by some who were born in it and are of it; who cannot therefore affect to remember anything better, but who yet, being little content with the present, look forward to something better in the future. It is probable that the same feelings of dissatisfaction with their time, and hope for a time to come, were entertained by many men who now look back with regret to the blessings which existed in their youth. Probably, too, the same regret for these present days will in future be entertained by those who are now railing at them; " and thus," as the Clown in "Twelfth Night " says, "the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.' There are, however, many men of this age who, if not well pleased with its doings, at least think that it represents an onward step in the world's progress, and oppose this hopeful conviction to the lamentations of the malcontents.

On no subject, perhaps, do these two parties take issue more vigorously than on the advancement of art. While these wail for the loss of artists of earlier fame, and grieve that there are none such now, those contend that there are plenty such, and that, if there are not, it must at least be allowed that the love and appreciation of art are far more universal now than they ever were before; and that this fact in itself marks a distinct progress. That the love, real or apparent, of works of art extends over a wider area now than it did some years ago can hardly be denied. Whether the true appreciation of these works has kept pace with this is another question. No doubt there is something hopeful in the quantity of art schools which now exist in town and country. The cheerfully disposed point with delight to the crowd of young ladies of fashion, formerly employed in shopping, in reading trashy novels, or at best in doing needlework, who are now to be found attending lectures by art professors, or copying industriously from the antique. It may be said, in opposition to this, that in many cases they are urged by precisely the same motives which impelled them formerly; that their nature is like that of their predecessors; and that, being young ladies of fashion, they follow the fashion, not the love, of art. Even so, however, their present course of study may possibly be of some use to them, which could hardly be said of the novels or the shopping. Again, it must be said that art obtains almost as much favor in high places now as it did in the days of the king who stooped to pick up a painter's brush. Men already famous in learned professions add to their fame by contributing to the recognized art school of the kingdom. The meaning conveyed by the title of artist is so different from that which attached to it a few years ago, that one feels some surprise in reading that Lord Farintosh spoke contemptuously of Clive Newcome as "a painterfellow." All these things no doubt are good signs, and are evidence of an increasing respect and admiration for art and its works. On the other hand, the direct means by which art is to be fostered and encouraged must always be the existence of wealthy art patrons, and the wealth of these patrons is not always the exact measure of their taste and judgment. In some cases indeed it might be supposed to be so inversely, but it may be hoped that these cases are rare. Doubtless many kind protectors of the fine arts, famed for the purchase of first-rate pictures, or the giving of first-rate concerts, or both, are impelled more by the desire of acquiring a reputation like to that of Maecenas than by any likeness between their tastes and those of their model. They plunge into the patronage of the arts with the same spirit in which a certain class of young men plunge into what is called a "vortex of dissipation;" they do it because it is supposed to be part of their position. Many years ago a case occurred on a circuit which runs

through those places where the wealthy who delight in the possession of art treasures abound. The plaintiff was a rich manufacturer who sued a picture-dealer for breach of contract, the contract being that the defendant should furnish the plaintiff's galleries with a sufficiency of pictures equal to sample." One may hope that it would be difficult now to find an exact parallel to this case, but undoubtedly something of the spirit in which the contract was made yet remains. While money is exchanged for some work which is good, it is given also for much which is not good. It is not impossible, however, that the contemplation of inferior art may be better than the contemplation of none at all. One of the greatest dramatic singers of the world, Mme. Malibran, could never form an idea of how she should act a part until she had seen it played by some one else. Whether she saw it well or ill played mattered little. If the acting was good, she seized upon its good points and made them her own, improving them in the process. If it was bad, she discerned its faults, and by learning what to avoid arrived at the idea of what to seek. Without assistance she could not grasp the conception of a character; a leading-string, however weak, was wanted to guide her along the road. Thus good may be derived from the study of faulty works of art. If there are some people for whom it would be good to contemplate inferior works of art, while the best are beyond their reach, there are others for whom it would be good to contemplate none at all.

There has arisen of late a new school of criticism. However one may disagree with the founders of this school in their views, one must recognize that those views are based on study and knowledge, and therefore are worthy of attention. But for the disciples of these founders there is not so much to be said. There is a certain class of young men who distinguish themselves by the title of "intellectual." They despise the frivolous follies of the day, but it may be doubted whether the so-called earnestness which is their pride is in any degree less frivolous, or less the result of a devotion to fashion, than the pursuits of other young men to whom nature is supposed to have been more parsimonious in the matter of intellect. The two classes follow different kinds of fashion, it is true, but the motives which impel them seem to be much the same. Perhaps if the two were weighed together, the balance would incline to the intellectual class, on the ground that they exhibit more daring in their worship of their goddess. Some knowledge of his subjects is necessary to the young man of fashion; he must be well informed, for instance, upon approaching fashionable engagements, marriages, and divorces. To the intellectual young man no knowledge is necessary, or rather he is far removed from the consideration of so trivial a matter. It is his privilege to discuss the hidden meaning of the most complex sonata without having any ear for music; to talk learnedly of the secret of the Venetians (which secret was, in fact, that the Venetians knew how to paint) without possessing any eye for color. His special province is to have a keen critical faculty, a nice judgment in all artistic matters, and to exercise it in every direction. His gifts, like those of the great masters whose works he passes in review before him, are the result of direct inspiration. But he is more highly favored than were those masters, in that he finds it unnecessary to cultivate his powers with patience and application. One particular sect of these philosophers must indeed be allowed to work hard in the service of their theories. These are they who have some little love for music, and on the strength of this affect a classical severity of taste. Vocal music they find trivial; instrumental music is, if merely beautiful, worthless; they require depth of thought expressed in orchestration. In support of this idea they abjure all such frivolities as the opera, from which they might derive some real enjoyment, and sit bravely through long movements of stringed instruments which less intellectual persons would be apt to call tiresome. They have their reward in the pedantic talk which they indulge in afterwards. The most irritating section of the intellectual school consists perhaps of those who are judges of pictures, and, taking the technical terms of painting and music, with neither of which arts, probably,

they have more than a superficial acquaintance, mix them together into a new and horrible jargon. Following the unpleasant fashion set them, it must be allowed, by some to whom they may rightly look up, they describe pictures as symphonies in green, harmonies in white, and notturnos in all sorts of colors. Their delight in this new method of expression leads them to carry it further, it may be hoped, than its originators intended. They will beg you to admire the tremulous tones of an atmosphere, the swell of a foreground, or the diapason of scarlet in a sunset. They discourse learnedly of ascending and descending scales of color, of melodious passages running through the middle distance, of the phrasing of a picture, and of the key in which it is set. When they wish to praise a painter, they say that he has a fine eye for harmony. It has not yet, we believe, come to pass that those who more particularly affect musical knowledge speak of a composer possessing a fine ear for color. It would be no more ridiculous, however, to hear of the middle distance and morbidezza of a quartet than of those things which we have mentioned above, and of others like them. The extraordinary fluency and extraordinary unintelligibility of these philosophers' disquisitions reminds one of the nonsense rhyme concerning the old man who "walked by the Trent, and talked to himself as he went, but so loud and so much, and moreover in Dutch, that no one could tell what he meant." After listening to them for some time one is inclined to doubt whether the universal spread of art, or rather of a superficial acquaintance with art, is an unmixed blessing. They are so well contented with themselves, so thoroughly convinced that the words which they speak are the words of wisdom, that there seems no hope of their ever straying from the paths which they have made peculiarly their own. "Shop" of all kinds is apt to be tiresome even when talked by those who are well versed in their subject; when talked by those who are not so well versed, its weariness assumes gigantic proportions. It is an old and true saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Certainly a little knowledge in the matter of art is a dangerous thing for the friends and acquaintances of those who possess it.

ST. THOMAS.

FROM Trebizond, Asia Minor, Turkey, to St. Thomas, Danish Antilles, West Indies, is a distance of one hundred and six geographical degrees of longitude west, and of twenty-four degrees of latitude south; besides some odd minutes, the exact number of which may be determined by reference, say, to Keith Johnston's "Royal Atlas." Not a full third of the circumference of the globe in one direction, and little more than a ninth in the other. But insignificant as these distances may appear on a map, especially one of Mercator's delusive projection, they are in reality immense. Their true measurement is not by miles, but by centuries; not by geographical but by cosmical lines; by those, in fact, that divide the oldest of the Old World from the newest of the New.

With Xenophon and Arrian for its chroniclers, broken Roman sculptures and crumbling Byzantine walls for its memorials, Pontic tombs excavated in its rocks, and the mosque in which Mahomet the Conqueror said his thanksgiving prayer, the Te Deum of Islam, crowning its heights, Trebizond is old enough in all conscience; nor do its widetrousered, cross-legged shop-keepers, its veiled women, its mangy dogs, and its dark patches of cypress grove over Turkish-lettered tombstones, each inscribed with "He is the Eternal," suggest much idea of change. Indeed, its extreme easterly, that is, most out-of-the-way, position in the most unprogressive of all empires, that is, Turkey, might alone furnish sufficient warrant that the refuge of the Ten Thousand is in no imminent danger of becoming modernized. Nor is it; my word for the fact.

Sunrise may be never so lovely, but sunset moves us more; and a farewell to the old calls up a deeper response in our nature than a welcome to the young. I have left

it, amid the chill gray shades of an April evening, the late, almost wintry April of those regions; and I have no wish to see again that still, mist-shrouded line of mountaincape and dark forest; no desire to climb again that rockhewn ascent, to tread those rough-paven streets, and receive the obsequious salaams of the wide-robed, bearded inhabitants, who rise up Eastern fashion to greet the offi

cial badge as it passes by. The British lion and unicorn have disappeared_from over the door of my little garden-surrounded house; Turkish children, very dirty, I make no doubt (for the laws of ablution do not seem obligatory on the juvenile faithful), play about the entrance. Turkish slippers strew the hall; against the latticed windows of what was once my sittingroom, now transformed -a most poetic, most prosaic, thought!-into a Turkish harem apartment, moon-faced Turkish beauties flatten their lovely noses, as they gaze, if they care to do so, on the gray Byzantine walls of the Comnenian fortress across the opposite ravine. My negro groom, the best gereed-player in the province, has, I hear, settled down into the quiet proprietor of a small coffeehouse by the beach; my Turkoman attendants have transferred the pistols and daggers with which they loved to skewer their voluminous waist-bands to the service of other masters. Town, castle, market-place, inhabitants, house, garden, friends, dependants, all have retreated into the lessening proportions of remote perspective; new figures, new landscapes, thrust them daily further and further off across the gulf of life-long distance and sepa

ration.

66

Yet they have each and all of them an abiding place in not ungrateful recollection, and a good wish for the long and undisturbed continuance of their contented stagnation; from the Tartar-eyed, wool-capped driver who lounges purposeless in the miry Meidan beside his crouching camel, to the drowsy pasha who languidly extends a be-ringed hand for the scrap of dirty paper on which is scrawled, for the fiftieth time, the long-unanswered petition. They all belong, more than they themselves know, to the world's great past; and the past, be it what it may, has in it a charm denied to the present. Say not," vainly preaches the old Chaldæanized rabbi who has assumed the name, but not, if scholars are right, the style and dialect of the Son of David, "say not thou what is the cause that the former days were better than these." Why not? most venerable Babylonian. Is it that the former days were in reality no better than the present, rather worse? That a six-pound franchise is in very fact an improvement, penny papers a gain, and steam-engines a blessing? Or is it that the old printingless, steamless, Bright and Gladstoneless times were really the best? and the cry of "God Save King Solomon ! " more to the purpose than the triumphant shout of a Beales and a Beales-led multitude over the demolished railings of Hyde Park? Truly I know not, nor perhaps did either the Hebrew Chaldæan moralizer. Let us take the world as we find it; speed, however regretfully, the parting guest; and get ready a cheerful countenance, as best we may, to greet the coming.

Farewell, then, the Old World, and welcome the New; nay, even the newest of the new, West Indian St. Thomas. No chroniclers need we consult here, for there is next to nothing to chronicle; no voluminous historical records, where there is hardly any history to record. Scarce visited towards the close of his career by Columbus, scornfully abandoned by Spain, that only just condescended to bestow on them from a distance the title of “Virgin,” equivalent in this particular instance, I suppose, to "Barren," Islands, these smallest, driest, rockiest of the diminutive, rocky, arid, Lesser Antilles remained for a century and a half after the mighty world-seeker had turned away from them wholly untenanted, or at best the chance resting-place of buccaneering adventurers, unannexed by any nationality, unsheltered by any flag. The very Caribs, the questionable authors of some undeciphered scratchings on a sea-side cliff or two, had left them; and no European, no African, had cared to enter on the abandoned heritage. So late as 1650 St. Thomas lay as unclaimed by any of the

respectabilities of the world as Oliver Twist or Ginx's Baby at the workhouse door-better off, indeed, than those remarkable infants, in that it was already possessed somehow of a name, the identical one that it yet bears; though who conferred on it that distinction has remained an unanswered question in the catechism of history.

At last it was in A. D. 1657-those most sedentary, most erratic of mortals, the Dutch, tentatively anchored their broad-built ships in the best of West Indian harbors, and took possession for their own of the forty square miles of rock in centre of which that harbor is set like a greenblue turquoise in a rusty iron ring. Ten years Dutch bales lumbered the beach; and Dutch merchant sailors, under an embryo Dutch Government, sat meditative beside. But after much consumption of tobacco, scheedam, and thought in the monotonous contemplation of dried-up bushes and brown rock, the Hollanders came to the conclusion that Java, Ceylon, and the Eastern Indies offered better investments for their painstaking enterprise than the Western; and in 1667 the gallant Batavian tubs sailed slowly but not reluctantly away, just as the semi-piratical flag_of St. George and merry England speckled the offing of St. Thomas.

So the island changed masters, and the "oath of British commerce" replaced awhile the corresponding guttural expletives of Dutch trade. But the quicker workings of the English brain, the naturally sluggish Teutonic fibre of which is, as no less an authority than Mr. Matthew Arnold assures us, abnormally stimulated into incongruous activity by lucky aspersion of brisker Celtic blood, required scarce five years to solve the problem that the Batavian intellect had with difficulty accomplished in ten. Like their predecessors, however, the new-comers solved it with a negative a mistaken solution, as subsequent events have proved - and in 1671 the British ensign too fluttered off to larger and more fertile isles.

"Tarde venientibus ossa" is a hemistich not less applicable to the great banquet that Nature spreads before her children, than to the monkish refectory of the Middle Ages. Thus it was with the West Indies, where the late-arriving Danes, long after the more enterprising first-comers, Spanish, English, and French, had divided among themselves every fleshy tit-bit, were fain to put up with the scraggy virginal bones of the least among the Lesser Antilles for their share. Of St. Croix, popularly known as Santa Cruz, an island larger and of better promise than St. Thomas, to the south of which it lies at a distance of about forty miles, these Scandinavian Berserkers-to borrow a flower of nomenclature from popular rhetoric - had indeed already, after a sharp struggle with Spanish and French rivals, taken possession; and now, in 1672, seeing St. Thomas absolutely vacant, and a first-rate harbor, if nothing else, ready to hand, they appropriated the Dutch-andEnglish-deserted island.

I do not envy the feelings of his Excellency the gallant Iversen when welcomed as the first Danish governor over forty square miles of volcanic rock by the only surviving inhabitants, the melancholy wood-pigeons and sinister land-crabs, of St. Thomas. Nor do I envy the negro slaves who first toiled at clearing bush and levelling stony ground enough to make space for the diminutive square fort and incipient town of " Charlotte-Amalia." Let us hope that Mark Tapley's mantle descended by some fortunate anachronism on Danes and Africans alike, and enwrapped them in a double fold of jollity as they took possession of their new isle of Eden in its dark-purple sphere of sea.

Sixty years have passed, and half Danish, half Dutch — for the persevering Hollanders had returned to their first love, but this time under the unassuming guise of a trading Brandenburg company-St. Thomas uneventfully carries on its little trade with its wealthier neighbors, besides affording a convenient shelter in its harbor to storm-driven ships, and a place of refit to the damaged victims of the West Indian cyclones. This avowedly: perhaps, too, not a little business was done, though less openly, in the wrecking, smuggling, privateering, and buccaneering lines; for besides the principal harbor there is many a deep calm