VOL. II.]

HIS TWO WIVES.1

BY MARY CLEMMER AMES.

CHAPTER XXIII. THE REFUGE.

AND this was the end? Apparently, her life had held more varied objects of interest than usually occupy the thought of a domestic woman. She loved her country with a deep personal patriotism. She loved knowledge for its own sake. She loved books, pictures, flowers, children. She loved great Nature through her every mood and manifestation, with a poet's fervor. She loved all pure and true ideals, and all her life of aspiration and effort reached only after them to make them her own; to reembody and revitalize them in her own individual being. Yet these broad and varied tributaries of life had all flowed inward to one concentrated centre of interest, which seemed to take in and to absorb every other a single man, her husband.

She had tried to educate herself through every phase of her being, that she might be able to meet the utmost demand of his Protean nature. He demanded so much, he needed so much, in order to be content. Early she saw in how many opposite directions she must pursue culture if she were not to seem lacking to Cyril. She knew that he must find in her embodied the gifts and graces of a hundred contrasting women, if she were to hold supremely his allegiance to herself. The pangs and toils of maternity, while borne, are enough to tax the strongest soul God ever made, to its utmost; but with these upon her she had, in addition, pursued impossible and conflicting objects, incited by her idolatry for a single man; an idolatry which made him not only a god but a never-ceasing goad to her soul. Thus body, brain, and spirit had been overtaxed to meet the incessant and ever-accumulating demands of marriage, through the nature of such a man. Was there anything that she would not sacrifice to her love for him? Yes, one thing, else why were she here? her wifehood, her honor. She had surrendered all, she believed, yet when the test came she could not yield these. She had been ready to sacrifice her nature, if not her soul, to him. And this was the end? She was fleeing from his face and from her home forever. And whither? She had left her friend and her child asleep in the little cabin below, and wrapped in her waterproof cloak had crept upon deck for air. The rushing current from the sea, it seemed to her, would quicken the low, slow beating of her heart; would help her to breathe, for respiration was stifled, and it seemed at times as if her life was ebbing out

1 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by H. O. HOUGHTON & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

[No. 12.

into unconsciousness. This must not be. She must live. She could not leave her child.

By the uncertain light of a lamp she discerned the form of a man on watch, and knew he was Captain Ben. He would trust no eyes but his own to guard the precious ones whom he believed to be sleeping below. He neither heard nor saw her as she stole to a sheltered spot beneath the shrouds of the vessel. A pile of rope that had been carelessly thrown down there broke somewhat the force of the wind sweeping over the deck. She involuntarily sank down and leaned against it for support. She looked out across an absolute waste of waters. The tumbled rocks, the low hills of the coast, the coast itself, had long since faded from sight. How awful seemed the vast, solitary stretch of ocean around her! Was the life before her to be like that!

Far up amid the spars and rigging pale lights were shining, which now and then shot down long white rays to play athwart the mane of an upleaping wave. Afar, at intervals, outflashed the warning light on some dangerous headland, or flamed the revolving planet of some tossing light-ship; all else was blackness. The clouds hung low and leaden. The wind smote shrouds and sails with a wail almost human.

The

mounting ocean answered back with monotonous cry. But through winds and waves, straight, strong, and swift rode the sloop. It was as if Agnes held certain rein on the tumultuous courser on which she sat, that tossed and threw her, yet bore her unerringly onward. The eager rush of assaulting waves, their steady swash as they slowly washed back into the deep, the creaking cordage, the crying wind before the advancing storm, the blackness of the night, the desolation of the sea, all penetrated her senses, and with them somewhat of the abounding energy surrounding her struck through her

still cold veins.

It was fit that such a night and such a sea should bear her from the home that she had left, to the life before her of which she could yet foretell nothing. Crouching there in the darkness, an atom of humanity only, her heart seemed to reach infinity, in its gratitude that amid this wreck of life she yet held her child, and was not friendless.

"Captain Ben and Mary," she said, "will show me the way to the railway station in Boston. 'Tis but one day's ride to the Lake; and then, Evelyn! She will be sure to meet me there if she is alive. I wrote her to wait for me till I came, if she reached the Lake House before me. What if she is not alive! So much can happen in seven years so much has happened to me; but I cannot make Evelyn dead, or changed, or old. I feel as if I should find her where I left her, the same Evelyn. Yes, she will take me in and hide me from the world."

"The same Evelyn." There she was, standing waiting, watching as the train of cars pushed slowly up to the Lake, just at the sunset of another day. Her calico dress looked not an inch longer, nor a moment older, nor her alpaca apron a thread less shining than they did seven years before. The broad-rimmed hat, tied with brown ribbon, did service still, and the face which it shaded had changed in no essential. It bore a few added lines, perhaps, and a few threads of silver gleamed in the brown curls; but the brown eyes danced and laughed as of old, in the light of endless youth.

"Dear suz me! jes' to think this is you, Mis' King!" she exclaimed, with a sound between a laugh and a sob, as she snatched Agnes' hand and drew her out of the crowd struggling toward the Lake House from the platform of the railway station.

"And you knew me, Evelyn?"

"Knew ye! I knowed ye the minnit I sot my eye on ye! I don't say you haven't changed none, for you have. You're paler an' thinner, an' awful worn-lookin'. But my! I'd know them eyes of your'n in Jericho, if there warn't a smitch of nothin' else left to tell ye by. An' do ye mean to say this little beauty is your baby?"

"My baby, Evelyn; the last of three."

-

"I knowed she warn't nobody else's baby, and couldn't be, with that hair and them eyes, your eyes; the rest of her all father," with a sigh. "There ain't no goin' to the Pinnerkel to-night. John would go sure as a whip, straight through the woods, an' we've burned an' pulled the stumps up out of the road long ago, but it's twenty mile to the Pinnerkel, an' I say that's too far for you an' this baby, after an all-day's ride from Bostin. I know the clerk at the house here. Why, he's nobody but Nate Billings, from the Corners, if he is a big hotel clerk. I told him I was expectin' a lady an' child from Bostin, who'd be too tired, I knowed, to go over to the Pinnerkel to-night, an' I wanted him to pick out a tip-top room for 'em afore the crowd on the train come; an' he did. Nate Billings know'd 'twasn't no sort o' use takin' on big airs to me, if he is a hotel clerk. Why! I've spanked him many's the time, when he was a young un'. He jes' give me a room lookin' spat out on the lake. I know you'll like it, Mis' King."

66

"I know I shall, you good Evelyn," said Agnes, without telling her friend that she had intended to brave the fatigue and dangers of the drive through the woods that night, for the sake of the slender little purse hidden in her bosom. But Evelyn was right. She would rest till morning, and trust the future with God a little further still. How she had personally dreaded to enter the great summer hotel, with its memories of happy days, she did not know till, following Evelyn, who carried Vida, she walked alone up to its thronged piazza. She was more severely tested still when a few moments later she found herself in the very room occupied by Cyril and herself seven years before.

Seven years, which had winnowed her heart and left it desolate, had not stolen a tint of brightness from the fair world without.

The previous day of wind and rain had swept every film from the vast amphitheatre of sky. The opaline mountains lifted their mighty shoulders into a sea of silver mingled with fire, while the lake, another molten sea, gleamed at their feet. The daily steamer, its flags and streamers gorgeous in the sunset, floated

slowly toward the hotel, laden with pleasure-seekers. Its band in scarlet coats were playing airs from "Martha," which fainted in sweetness far out upon the waters, or were caught up in tender reverberations by the surrounding hills. The same window, the same picture of seven years ago.

Vida clapped her hands and cried out with delight, while she was held back from going over the sash by the strong hand of her new friend, Evelyn. Agnes held back the crowding tears, but it was a blanched face that she turned to view as she spoke.

"Evelyn," she said, "I wrote you that I was in trouble, and coming to you. I did not tell you that I was coming to stay. Can I stay with you, Evelyn? Except this child, I have nothing left in this world."

"Mister Cyril! He ain't dead?'

"Yes, Evelyn, dead to me. Dead, dead! More dead than if I had kissed his face in his coffin, and had seen it shut forever from my sight."

"Dear suz me! But it ain't surprisin', not to me. He never seemed stiddy-minded, not like you; kinder feather-brained, blowin' this way an' that, fur all he was so smart. Many's the time I've sot on my front door-steps, an' tried to study it out, jest what screw was loose; an' I never could tell, till I bought a phrenology book of a pedler at the Corners. Now I know jest what the trouble is, Mis' King. His conjugality ain't more than 'two;' an' as for his conscientiousness, 'tain't nothin'. An' I'd mark you'seven' in both. Yes, I would," seizing Agnes' head, "an' there ain't no higher number or I'd mark you with that."

"I don't think I understand you, Evelyn," said Agnes, smiling in spite of herself as she felt her head. held in the vice of Evelyn's strong fingers. "I know nothing whatever of phrenology."

"Of course you don't. If you had, you'd married a minister, an' let Mister Cyril gone to his own kind. Veneration! Spirituality! big as eggs. Oh my!"

Evelyn was making statements. She forbore to ask questions. She was saying to herself," Poor little cretur'! She may tell me jest what she has a mind tu, an' no more. I shan't harrer her by askin' her nuthin'. If I can get her mind off on phrenology, so much the better."

But Agnes had "a mind" to tell her friend everything that was necessary to a perfect understanding between themselves.

"I may have to depend upon you many times in the future," she said; "thus it is best that you should know just how it is with me. All I can tell of my trouble I will tell now. Then if we can help it we will never mention it again."

It was a brief statement of facts that she gave Evelyn. She did not dwell upon her own pain, and she did not know how indelibly it had stamped itself upon her youthful face. She was tender of him still. She could not hide the cruel fact that he had been false to her, that he had left her in heart, if not in name, for another; "but he has been so sorely tempted, he is infatuated, he is not himself, Evelyn," she said piteously, pleading his cause while trying to state her

own.

"Oh yes, he is jest himself," replied Evelyn, “an” you are jest yourself; that's what's the matter. You, with conjugality seven, makin' the whole world out of him, feelin' that the sun rose and set in him, with no eye nor ear fur no other man on earth, warn't goin' to

divide him with no other woman, of course not; 't'warn't in natur'.

"I'm awful sorry for ye, child," said Evelyn, breaking a silence, “an' I might as well tell ye the truth. Your room is ready an' waitin', an' has bin this long time. I felt it in my bones, you'd come back some day. I didn't know when, but sooner or later, I was sure. An' when I didn't hear nothin' from ye in so long, I said to myself, Ev., you're jest a fool, to think the Honerabel Mis' King, a-livin' in Washington, is ever a-comin' ag'in to stop in a log-house.' But I kep' your room ready jest the same. An' somehow, every chance I got, 'twas lots of comfort to fix it up. like this or t'other,' I said, 'for I know she'll see the old Pinnerkel ag'in afore she dies, she set such a store by it; an' she never tuk on no airs, an' nobody can make me believe that bein' an honerabel has changed her a mite.' True as gospel, deary, your room is ready an' waitin', little chair an' all."

'She'll

No profuse thanks filled the air. A pair of arms were outstretched, and a still, white face went down upon Evelyn's breast, and lay there as if it was a little child's, while tears slowly trickled down the thin cheeks; and Vida, with a positive intention of not being left out, mounted into Evelyn's lap also and laid her cherub face beside her mother's.

"No trunk nor nothin'," said Evelyn ruefully, as Agnes with her little girl and small reticule ascended the ancient buggy behind the venerable John, the next morning. "It makes me madder'n all the rest to think you left everything for her, the hussy."

"You are mistaken, Evelyn; she had all I called mine that she wanted, before I left. She wants nothing else. She is very rich."

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"Then I hate her all the more," said Evelyn. Charity for sech ain't to be thought on."

One must pass beyond the cry of the railway whistle to enter solitude. Then and not till then is civilization at your back, and your face set toward nature. Evelyn had breathed out her wonted sighs over the Castle and the memory of her lost friend Isabella. Dufferin Street was passed, and John's head was turned toward the broad uplands and deep woods of Tarnstone. With stiff joints and solemn visage he was bearing back to nature's solitudes a child who loved her

How much she loved her, the all-healing mother, this child did not know, nor think; yet under all the wounds which life had made upon her heart, she felt the old delight quicken and thrill as they passed into the grateful shade of the primeval forest. The lofty maples and elms, taller, more stately than the southern oak, wove an arcade far up in the air. Spruce, hemlock, tamarack, and balsam trees ran their needles and fringes of darker green in and out amid the light emerald foliage of the maple, elm, and birch, while all were shot through and through with sunshine and rifts of blue sky. Great wafts of warm fragrance swept over them from the depths of the wood. It was pervading and haunting in the suggestions of its odors. One instant it seemed all exuded from the ripe red raspberries that held up their tantalizing bunches by the road, the next it seemed all to flow from the lifegiving balsam of the firs, and the clustering cones of the spruce hanging overhead; then to sweep upward in the spicy breath of the ferns crowding close with dipping plumes by the way, or to be wafted downward in faint perfume from the snowy blossoms of the

wild clematis, that ran in airy festoons from tree to

tree.

Through miles of warm shade and aromatic air they rode, before they emerged from the woods to behold before them, resplendent in midday sunshine, the green Pinnacle, the Tarn flashing beneath its fringing cedars, the log-house by its side. In a single glance Agnes saw with what added grace nature had touched it in seven years. The mountain-ash, whose clustering berries rested on the roof when she saw it last, held them up now high in the sunshine. The tiger lily reached far above the window. The clematis and woodbine, which she herself planted, now ran in exquisite tracery over all the rude walls. The little orchard bore a richer fruitage, the garden was braver with bright flowers, the fields were broader and more opulent in ripening grain, the woods before the house had receded, but lifted a deeper frontage of foliage to the sky. There were the sheep pushing their noses through the pasture fence, the spring leaping by the grassy yard, the cosset lamb rubbing its rotund sides against the corner of the house with all the old blissful

content.

Evelyn took Vida into her arms and led Agnes directly to her own little room; the very same room that she left with such loving regret seven years before; and yet how many touches of brightness as well as of beauty a loving hand had added. Through the parted curtains of sheer muslin on the windows were revealed the Pinnacle and the Tarn on one side, the woods and pasture on the other. The log walls were neatly covered with white cotton cloth, and decorated with prints and engravings in neat frames. A bright carpet covered the floor, and a lady's small sewing and writing table stood by the window opening upon the Pinnacle.

"Look a' here!" exclaimed Evelyn, drawing back a white curtain above it, and showing a small set of pine shelves packed close with books. "These are my comforters, an' they shall be your'n. When I'm all tuckered out an' sort o' lonesome, I jes' come in here an' read my Phrenology, an' look over my scrap-book, an' paste in all I've saved up out of the old newspapers I find at Dufferin an' at the Corners an' everywhere else; for I save my own newspapers. Ain't these nice scrap-books?" taking down a set of ledgers whose accounts of cash and barter were almost covered over with strips of poetry and prose. "They're lots o' comfort to me, I can tell ye. An' these books, libra'y editions every one. My, I'd never got 'em in my lifetime, only the Monteith Libra'y was sold at auction at last, an' the estate owed me for my work an' I took 'em toward the debt. It seemed kind o' hard at fust, for they didn't half pay me for my scrubbin' an' bakin', but I'm glad now, deary. Jes' cum out an' see my little faces, an' then I'll go straight an' get you some dinner."

Agnes, with Vida pulling at her skirt, followed Evelyn, and found her "faces" to be a solid phalanx of pansies covering the southern embankment of the

house.

"Now, if them ain't faces," exclaimed Evelyn, "human faces, an' King Charles spaniel faces, then I never see none. They're more company than the books; an' when I'm clean gone for a chat, I jes' come out an' talk to 'em, an' there's no end to the queer faces they make up at me."

(To be continued.)

THE ROD IN OLD TIMES.

GENTLE remonstrance for a fault is of modern date. The old and universally recognized practice consisted of coarse abuse, kicking, and beating. It perhaps is so still in certain parts of Europe. Clarke, in his "Travels in Russia," tells us that the cudgel goes from morning to night. Things may there be now softened a little; but before being too hard on Russian usages sixty years ago, let us bear in mind, that beating domestics with a stick was common in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It is a matter of history that that excellent female sovereign used so to beat her maids of honor that they cried in a piteous manner; and that Her Majesty son etimes so lost her temper and sense of dignity, as to strike her courtiers with her fist. When the appointment of a lord-deputy of Ireland was discussed by her, Sir Robert Cecil, and the Earl of Essex, the last named opposed the wishes of the other two as to the person best fitted for so important a post. Sir William Knollys was named by Her Majesty; but Essex very warmly insisted on Sir George Carew, and turning his back upon her, used a contemptuous expression. The queen, exasperated beyond all the bounds of self-control, gave him a sound box on the ear, and bade him "go and be hanged." Instead of receiving the chastisement with humility, he grasped his sword hilt, and swore "that he would not have taken that blow from King Henry her father, and that it was an indignity that he neither could nor would endure from any one." With some further impertinence about a king in petticoats, he rushed from his queen's presence, and withdrew from court.

It is said that George II., when greatly offended by some remonstrances of his prime-minister, Walpole, kicked him out of his cabinet; and as His Majesty had shown such passion before in the presence of several persons, Fielding took up the idea of printing in his journal, Common Sense, a "Dissertation on Kicks," which is not wanting in many passages of clever satire. He remarks that, at the court of France, the sovereign would not disgrace himself by using personal violence. This is too complimentary. Fielding does not seem to have been aware that the French kings liked, on occasion, to indulge their temper in a way very similar to the true Briton. Louis XIII. declined to have noblemen for his gentlemen of the bedchamber, because he could not beat them as he liked, and gave a dozen hard blows to a valet who disputed with the pages the honor of precedence. His brother, Gaston d'Orleans, threw a gentleman into the canal at Fontainebleau, because he had not shown him sufficient respect. Even Louis XIV., with all his magnificence, so far forgot himself as to raise his cane to the back of one of his servants; and on another occasion he threw the weapon out of the window, lest he should yield to the temptation of chastising Lauzun. The clever Louvois ran the same risk, and, had it not been for the timely interference of Madame de Maintenon, would have suffered by the hand of his royal master.

He was

Thus the courtiers came to consider the stick as the ultima ratio in their relations with interiors, more especially authors. In their eyes, they were gent bâtonnable, every time there was a wrong to be redressed, and that was very often. It was an incident of this kind that drove Voltaire into banishment, and led to his residence for some time in our island. The tragedy of "Edipus" and the poem of the "Henriade" had already made him a name. then about thirty-one years of age, and discontented with his surname of Arouet, which he received from his father, he chose another more euphonious, borrowing it from a small property which his mother possessed in Poitou. This piece of vanity offended the Chevalier de Rohan, and meeting Voltaire at the opera, “Ah çà,” said he to him, "how are you to be addressed? Is it to be Monsieur Arouet, or Monsieur de Voltaire?" "Monsieur le Chevalier," replied Voltaire," it is better to make one's self a name, than to sully that which has been given to us."

The chevalier resolved to be avenged. One day, when Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully, the servants

66

told him that a carriage was waiting for him at the door. He went down immediately, and was seized by the footmen, who struck him repeated blows with their sticks. The chevalier, seated inside the carriage, watched the proceedings, and encouraged his servants by his approving words. Strike, strike!" said he; "only take care of his head; something good may come out of it." Like a Frenchman, he could not help uttering his bon-mot to excite a laugh even in such circumstances. His influence was so great with the ministers and the Lieutenant Criminel, that when | Voltaire would have brought an action against him, the poor author found himself thrown into the Bastile, and then ordered to exile himself to the other side of the Channel. He landed just in time to see the splendid obsequies accorded to Sir Isaac Newton. This roused in him the desire to know more of those sciences in which he afterwards became an adept, and which, until then, had received but little attention in France.

Had the Pont-Neuf in Paris a tongue, how many of these scenes could it bear witness to. It was the favorite lounge of newspaper writers and wits, thus it became also the classic ground of the law of the stick. Here it was that Monsieur de Bautru, a gentleman and an Academician, was found one morning rolled in the mud, and half dead, from the attacks of the lackeys of a nobleman whom he had offended in a witty song. Some days after, one of these satellites, passing near him, began to imitate the cries he had uttered during his punishment. "Truly," said Bautru, "that is a good echo; it repeats the sound a long time after." When the queen Anne of Austria, saw him walking with a stick, she inquired if he had the gout. On his replying in the negative, the Prince de Guéménée said, "Do you not understand that he carries a stick as Saint Lawrence does his gridiron; it is the mark of his martyrdom." His passion for bon-mots could not be restrained, and soon brought upon him another attack from the Marquis de Borbonne. When he appeared at the Tuileries after this misadventure, no one knew what to say to him. "Ah!" he cried, "do they think me a savage because I have passed through the wood?

When the "Essay on Satire" was published, the authorship was generally attributed to Dryden. The Duchess of Portsmouth and the Earl of Rochester, believing themselves to be insulted by some of the remarks, could do nothing better than set the servants of the latter to beat the poor author; and it is also said, but without sufficient proof, that the Duke of Buckingham did the same. Unfortunately, the character of Dryden was not equal in dignity to his talent.

Though the noblemen of the day were generally willing enough to have the wits at their tables, they did not enjoy being altogether eclipsed in society. One of them said to a comedian; I warn you, that if from the present time to the end of supper you display more wit than I, you will receive a hundred strokes of the cane." A critic who would not speak well of an author's work had this remark addressed to him: "An ass was once made to speak by a blow, but a stick shall make you be silent." To which the critic replied, "Well, if you wish me to change my tone, I will say that your piece is charming; for I had rather say a silly thing than be beaten." Of all the writers of the last century who came in for attacks, La Harpe was the object of hatred, contempt, and bitter satire from all the republic of letters; his very face provoked a blow. After he had given great offence on one occasion, this squib appeared: "A society of amateurs, having offered a prize to the best player on la harpe, have adjudged it to Monsieur Dorat; it now proposes to give a double prize to any one who, to the satisfaction of the public, will, by means of rods, draw the sweetest and most harmonious sounds from la harpe."

It is not surprising that actors should in such a period treat the poor authors to blows when they did not like their cast of character; but more than one actress is recorded to have broken her delicate whip in flagellating one who had offended her. A poet who had written an opera, found himself on one occasion surrounded by all the ballet

dancers, who fell upon him with their fists, saying in chorus, "Why did you write us such a worthless piece?" A young author who had ventured to parody some couplets, and turn them against the actors at a certain theatre, was asked to sit beside the prima donna, who thus addressed him: "I can understand a good joke, and am not vexed with your wit, but I have need of two or three couplets against some one I know; come, and do me the favor to write them in my dressing-room." Flattered by this, the author fell into the snare; but hardly had he entered, when all the actresses, armed with long rods, fell upon, and beat him unmercifully, until an officer of police, hearing_the cries, interfered. It is said that the Chevalier de Boufflers had written an epigram against a lady of rank. After some coolness, she begged for a reconciliation, and asked him to dinner. But though he went, like a prudent man he put his pistols in his pocket. As soon as he arrived, he was seized by four strong footmen, who, under the very eyes of the lady, gave him fifty strokes. Boufflers, as soon as it was over, with wonderful sang-froid, drew out his pistols, cocked them, and desired the men, under pain of death, to do to their mistress as they had done to him. They were obliged to obey, and he counted the lashes; then they were to give the same to each other; which task accomplished, the marquis bowed gracefully, and departed.

But happily the supremacy of the stick began to wane in the last century; literary men raised their heads above such insults, and would no longer recognize brutal force; the sword and the law were called in to help. The former was of no value but to prove the personal courage of those who used it but the latter proved the change in public opinion, and the progress of the condition of literary men. Mozart's passion was roused when his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, in 1781, treated him like one of his pages; and when the Comte d'Arco kicked him to the door, he declared that whenever he received such an insult, he should return it in the same way. One of the first occasions when justice openly interfered in France was about 1770, when a comedian coming from the theatre at Versailles was attacked by some officers: the patrol interfered, and took up five young men, all belonging to high families and in the king's household. Louis XV. declined to interfere, and justice took its course. Evidently the Revolution was near at hand, as may be shown by the reply of Piron some time after. He met a noble of high rank, who was showing a friend out of the door. The latter stopped from politeness, to let the author enter. "Pass on, pass on," said the host; "he is only a poet." Piron did not hesitate. "Since qualities are known," he said, "I take my rank;" and putting on his hat, went first. The queen, Marie Antoinette, afterwards confirmed this emancipation of literature by reproving one of her courtiers in these words: "When the king and I speak to an author we always call him Mon

sieur."

Arriving at the nineteenth century, our task is ended; the stick is now a fallen royalty; the aristocracy of birth and that of the pen can meet on level ground without attacking each other. Literary manners are on a much higher level; the author is no longer a valet or a parasite, neither the court-fool, nor the pet spaniel of the duchess. Assaults on the person, of whatever kind, are now SO speedily punished by fine and otherwise, that they are little heard of, except among the rude and least instructed of the population an immense advance on what prevailed even in "good" society so lately as a hundred years ago.

MY IRISH STORY.

BY NUGENT ROBINSON.

II.

"It's a car from the Royal," exclaimed Micky in great excitement. "Och, begorra, it's the wan that tuk the fightin' doctor from Westport, an,' blur an' agers, they 're bet be the snow!"

"Fighting doctor! Who's the fighting doctor?" I

asked.

"Ould Finnerty, no less, av the militia. Begorra, he 'd have ye out for sneezin' crucked, so ye'd betther mind. I'll ga bail he has the pistols wud him. He never thravels wudout thim. He downed sivin min wud thim deadly tools."

By this time we had reached the scene of accident. One of the wheels of the car had noiselessly and unostentatiously scattered its spokes, which lay strewn along the road like so many valiant soldiery who had fallen in defence of some isolated fortress. The fighting doctor had proceeded in advance, in the hope of obtaining assistance at a wayside sheeling, and the driver was bitterly lamenting the ill turn that his luck had played him.

"What betther cud I hope for, comin' wud that ould bloodthirsty villyan? He's goin' to fight a jewel beyant at Phoul a Dhonninel, the haythen. Goin' to kill a man on Christmas Day, the ould varmint, av he can. Och, wirra, such a Christmas Eve! It's in the chapel I ought to be, on me bades, let alone bein' out wud a murtherin' ould Turk on a lonely common, wud nothin' betune me an' heaven but the snow, and a blast that wud cut the back teeth out av an ostrich."

"Hould yer whist!" cried Micky Delany, leading him rather roughly aside, "hould yer whist, an' mebbe we cud set it all right afther all."

Here my charioteer dropped his voice into a confidential whisper, and after some very impressive pantomime, in which he would appear to be endeavoring to induce the other to come round to his views, he ended by exclaiming in a loud tone,

"Av ye don't take me offer ye'll be here till the new year, an' the divil mind ye for an ungrateful bosthune."

Micky Delany's proposition was simply to impress the services of the second horse, to drive tandem, and give a lift to the driver and passenger of the useless car, leaving the luckless vehicle to its fate.

I offered no objection, and in a few minutes the fighting doctor's carpet-bag was transferred, a rough sort of tandem established, and the injured car placed safely inside a ditch. Dr. Finnerty, whom we picked up at a distance of about a mile, seemed exceedingly well pleased with the change in his rate of travelling.

"Their conveyances here, sir, are of the most infayrior description. Their horses, sir, are only fit for the knacker. The owner ought to be hanged. The driver ought to be shot."

The doctor jerked out his sentences broadside at me, and threw forward his wiry little frame at every final word.

Having offered him a “nip " from my flask, which he tossed off with a flourish as if it were a pint bumper, and having accepted in return a pinch of snuff strong enough to blow the lid off a plate-chest, we warmed up considerably.

"It's a strange night for a drive. I'm on a strange errand, sir," observed the doctor.

"A case of surgery?" I remarked inquiringly. "Oho! oho!" and his laugh flew across the snow, and I thought of Gabriel Grubb and the goblins. "Oho! there may be surgical assistance required. A leg may have to be amputated. A body may have to be cut open. Do you see this box, sir?" producing as he spoke a dark oblong box, the brass rims of which shone up like the plates upon a coffin-lid. "There's a brace of surgical instruments in this box that have made holes in men's bodies before now. Oho!"

"I imagine from the shape of the box that it contains pistols, doctor."

"I don't say what they are. I say that they can bark and bite. They will bark before long. They will bite before long, if I get the chance."

A thought flashed across me like lightning. This bloodthirsty doctor this drive in the snow- this case of pistols-led directly to the "mess "referred to in my cousin Geoffry's telegram. A duel was to be fought, and Geoffry was to be one of the targets.