watch which secured warmth, slumber, and safety to the child.

Miss Percival sat on the other side of the great dining-table and gazed at her old friend with that mixture of irritation, wonder, and reluctant sympathy which provokes and tantalises a friendly soul when watching some novel exhibition of human weakness. She could not understand Lady Eskside's instant adoption into her very heart of the strange little unknown creature, dropped from the skies or by the winds, unseen and unknown until this moment, and which might be a little demon in human form for aught that any one knew. And yet she did understand in a way which made her irritation rather greater than less. Mary was not very clever, not very remarkable in any way; but she was herself-thinking and feeling according to her own nature and principles, and not according to any conventional model. She did not possess that sugary sweetness of disposition or those very etherial Christian sentiments which put aside all personal consciousness of wrong and seem to prefer injury. Richard Ross had been, if not her lover, at least so indicated by every family prepossession, so prepared by training and association to be her eventual husband, that his sudden and strange marriage had given a shock to her nerves and moral nature from which she had never recovered. I cannot tell if she had ever been what people call "in love" with him. If she had, her love had never taken full shape and form, but had lingered insidiously about her heart, prepared, by every indication of her young life, and every probability of the future, to come into being at a touch. This touch was given in another way when Richard disappeared into the nameless obscurity and shame that surrounded his marriage. Her whole being received the shock, and

received it without warning or preparation. It changed the aspect of all mankind to her, more perhaps than it changed her feeling towards Richard. He it was who had inflicted the wound, but its effects were not confined to him. She was the gentlest creature in existence, but her pride was roused against the whole world, in which outward appearances seem ever to gain the day, and the still and unpretending are held of no account. Instead of making the more (after these reflections) of the simple beauty she possessed, which was of a very attractive kind, though moderate in degree, or taking the good of her real advantages, Mary had done what many proud gentlewomen do-she had retired doubly into herself after the shock she received. She had withdrawn from society, and society, heedless, had gone on its way and paid little attention to the withdrawal: so that the penalties fell not at all upon it, but upon herself. She was still young, between six and seven and twenty; but something of the aspect which that same mocking and careless world calls that of an old maid, was stealing imperceptibly upon her. Her pride, though so natural, thus told doubly against her-for people who were incapable of understanding the shock she had received or the revulsion of her proud and delicate heart, called her, with light laughter, a disappointed woman, foiled in her attempt to secure a husband. Many of us who ought to know much better use such words in thoughtless levity every day. I need not enter into the circumstances which, on this night of all others, had brought Mary to Rosscraig, and recalled to her mind, through Lady Eskside's story, many sharp and painful memories which she had partially succeeded in banishing from her thoughts. I do not think that this rush of recollection had the effect of moving her to

any enthusiasm for Richard's child. The strange bitterness of scorn with which she learned what kind of woman that was who had been preferred to herself, moved not the best part of her nature; for Mary, as I have said, was not sweetness and gentleness personified, but a genuine human creature, not all good. Perhaps the very strength of her antagonistic feelings, and the absence of any general maudlin sympathy with everything pitiful presented to her, made her all the more certain that the child was Richard's child, the child of the tramp whom Richard had admired and loved more than herself; an interest which was half repugnance attracted her eyes and her thoughts to this little creature, who was assuredly no stranger, no impostor, but the very flesh and blood which might have been her own. Yes, he might have been her child-and the blood ran tingling with shame, anger, pride, and dislike to Mary's very fingertips, as this thought flashed through her mind. She sat and watched him, falling asleep on Lady Eskside's knee, with the strangest aching mixture of irritation and interest. She was half envious, half impatient of the strange beatitude and absorption with which her old friend held the boy, throwing her own very being into him-the child who had been stolen away from all lawful life and protection, who had lived among outcasts, a beggar, a baby-adventurer, the child of a tramp! How could that proud old woman take him out of hands so stained, and take him to her pure and honourable breast? Poor Mary was not quite responsible for the hot anger, the unjust condemnation of this thought; these angry feelings surged uppermost as the worst of us always does, to the surface of her agitated soul.

The lamp had been placed in a corner, so as not to disturb the

child's sleep, and the room formed a dark background to that group, which was relieved against the dusky glow of the fire. Silence was in the house, sometimes interrupted by a stealthy suggestive creaking of the great door, as Mrs Harding from time to time looked out into the night. The winds still raged without, and the rain swept against the window, filling the air with a continuous sound. Soon that stealthy noise outside, which betrayed the watchers who were on the outlook for the mother's return with the other child, affected Mary with a sympathetic suspense. Her imagination rushed out to meet the new-comer, to realise her appearance. Richard's wife! She could not sit still and think of this new figure on the scene. If the woman came Mary felt that she must withdraw; she would not meet hershe could not! and this feeling made her eagerly anxious for the appearance of the stranger who excited such wild yet causeless antagonism in her own mind. She went to the window, and drew aside the curtain and gazed out-that she might see her approach, she said to herself, and escape out of the way. Time went on, and Lady Eskside, worn out with emotion, and hushed by happiness, dozed too, I think, in the easy-chair with the sleeping child on her lap, while Miss Percival stood, with every sense awake, watching the dark avenue through the window. And I do not know how long it was before, all at once, another conviction took possession of her-which was the true onethat Richard's wife had no intention of coming back. This thought came to Mary in a moment, as if some one had said it in her ear. Had some one said it? Was it a mysterious communication made to her somehow, from one soul to another through the darkness of that night which hid the speaker, which

had fallen upon the child's mother like a veil? Miss Percival sank, almost fell, down upon the chair, on which she had been kneeling in her eagerness to look out. She was startled and shaken, yet calmed, with sensations incomprehensible to her. She sat still and listened, but without any further expectation. A strange dim realisation of the unknown creature of whom she had been thinking hard thoughts came into her mind. Was she too, then, an independent being, with a heart which could be wrung, and a mind capable of suffering?-not merely Mary's rival, Mary's antagonist, a type of lower nature and coarser impulse. The wind abated, the rain cleared off, the silent minutes crept on, but no one came to the house where all except the old lord were listening and watching. Mary, roused at length, stirred up in all her own energies by this conviction, felt that doubt was no longer possible. The unknown mother had given this remorseful tribute to the house she had despoiled, but had kept her share and would appear no

"Eh? Is it you, Mary? What were you saying? I do not feel sure," said Lady Eskside, looking up with a smile, "that I was not dozing myself upon the bairn's head. Put him to his bed? it would perhaps be the best thing, as you say; but I cannot give him over to Harding, I will carry him upstairs myself."

"Rather give him to me," said Mary; "he is too heavy for you. I will take him to the old nursery" sery

"Where his father and you have played many a day," said Lady

Eskside, with a smile which was weak with happiness. "Oh, my dear, my dear! but how different our thoughts were then!" Here she saw a contraction upon Mary's face which gave her a note of warning. "Call the women, Mary," she added, hurriedly. "I have lost count of time. She should have been here by now with the other one. Oh but I can never love him like this one, that has slept on my bosom like a child of my own, and crept into my heart."

"She has not come. She does not mean to come," said Mary; but she spoke low, and Lady Eskside did not mark what she said. Her own mind was filled to overflowing with her new possession, and no real anxiety about the other one or about the mother existed for the moment in her mind. "Jean, take this darling in your arms-softly, softly," she said to the maid. "You are a strong, good girl, and you will carry him kindly. Don't waken my bonnie boy. I'll go with you upstairs and see him put to bed."

And, absorbed in this new occupation, she hurried upstairs after Jean, giving a hundred warningsto lay his head comfortably-to hold him faster to throw her apron about his little feet-like a foolish old mother, half beside herself with love and happiness. She could think of nothing but the lost treasure restored; and I might spend pages on the description before I could tell you with what renewal of all old and dead joys she watched the maid's anxious but vain attempts to prepare the child for bed without awaking him, and to soothe him when he stirred and pushed them away with his rosy feet, and murmured whimpering childish objections to everything that was being done for him. In this unlooked for fulness of joy, she forgot everything else in the world.

Two thousand two hundred years have passed since Cneius Flavius stole from his employer, Appius, a list of the forms employed in Roman law, and published a description of them for the benefit of his fellowcitizens. Since that day forms, formulas, formularies, and formalities, have gone on multiplying in such huge proportions, that no mind, however arithmetically powerful, can possibly realise their present number. For two-and-twenty centuries and particularly since we have grown civilised-a great part of the inventive power of mankind has been incessantly directed, in every land, to the discovery of new special shapes of rules, wordings, documents, reports, returns, and regulations, all of which have been rendered obligatory, at some time or other, by edict or by usage. More books have been written about forms than on any other subject that the world has known; forms have been created for, and applied to, every imaginable class of questions, and every act of life; Greck fire, dinner, troubadours, and women's rights; gladiators, salvation, chemistry, and ordeal by touch; single combat, cricket, cockfighting, and revolutions,-have all, in turn, had forms applied to them; and the fractiousness of nature has alone prevented eager legislators from affixing strict formalities to earthquakes, avalanches, meteors, and typhoons. Nothing that we can anyhow get at is permitted to subsist without a form; all the occupations and all the trades of men, from breaking stones to winning battles, are controlled by forms; ambition, appetite, and love, are manifestly restrained by them; and

it may be doubted whether even such seemingly independent subjects as toothache, London fogs, and the potato disease, are absolutely free from their hidden action. But, all permeating and all subjugating as their influence has always been, universal and omnipresent as it continues still to be, it is in law and in international relations that that influence is most extensive and most palpable. Law appears at first sight, perhaps, to be, of the two, the more overloaded with formalities; but, if the abundance of legal forms has become everywhere a proverbif several sorts of lawyers, and many thousand lawyers of each sort, have been found necessary in every country to aid the bewildered population to carry out the countless legal formulas imposed upon it—a little consideration shows us that, though our exterior relations may seem to be less encumbered with special details, it is not because international formalities are in reality. less numerous, but solely because they are hidden away under various deceptive names which disguise their real nature. What we call tariffs, customs' regulations, ships' manifests, bills of lading, and all manner of trading papers;-what we call passports, quarantine, rights of local jurisdiction, naturalisation, domicile, and the thousand complicated observances between peoples, -are nothing else but international formalities, just as much as treaties are. They offer very large matter for examination, far too large to be considered here as a whole, for, even in limiting our attention to the purely diplomatic elements of the question, we shall have more

than enough to talk about. All that we can do is to select a few examples, choosing out of the enormous mass before us those which seem best to illustrate the more essential aspects of the subject.

Most of the treatises on international law contain eager dissertations on the shape, sentiment, and style of diplomatic documents; and special formularies, in scarcely credible variety, have been provided in order to furnish models of every kind of act, letter, or communication, which can possibly be wanted under any sort of circumstances. The mere titles of all these books are curious and suggestive. There are at least fifty different "Guides," besides a boundless quantity of works on "the manner of negotiating," "the principles of negotiation," "the art of negotiating," followed by 66 essays on court style," "courses of diplomatic style," "literature of states' rights," and "courtesies in war;" and, that no sort of form in peace or war should be neglected, there is even a special German treatise on "Trumpeters and their prerogatives." As this last astounding statement will naturally provoke doubt, it may be useful to add, at once, that the treatise in question is contained in the fourth volume of a collection published in 1741 at Halle, under the long name of "Der prüfenden Gesellschaft fortgesetze zur Gelehrsamkeit gehörige Bemühungen." But, as might perhaps be expected, these various books are in substance identically alike the matter of which they treat is vast, but it has a limit, and all the Mémoires which could be filled with new details on it were composed a long time ago. Authors vary in the tongue which they employ, in pomposity and unction, and in words and faculty of expression; but these are the only real differences between the

piles of publications which treat of "forms." The Germans have of course been fertile in this sort of literature; at least one half of the volumes devoted to it have been edited beyond the Rhine, where the "diplomatischer Kanzleistyl" has long been profoundly studied. These guide-books (for such, in fact, they are) treat of everything which can possibly be affiliated to the subject, and sometimes include topics which seem, to unelastic minds, to lie a long way outside it. They do not constitute light reading, and, after the first three minutes, they cease even to be instructive; but they show us international vanities in another of their forms, and that is why we are looking into them for examples.

The first question touched upon in these ready letter-writers for diplomatists in difficulties is usually the choice of the language to be used for official communications; and an idea may be at once obtained of the hair-splitting spirit of analysis with which the matter has been dissected, by the fact that, before approaching the discussion of selection between different tongues, the authorities begin by dividing talk itself into six uses-Court, Diplomatic, Church, Judicial, School, and vulgar. With such a starting-point as this, it will easily be understood that the treatment of the entire subject has attained a height of bewildering amplification, of labyrinthic branch-considerations, of universal developments wandering into connexity with space and time, of which no unprepared outsider could suspect the possibility. The human mind has shown itself to be ingenious enough in its inventions of new religions (which in America are still budding at an average of one per week); but really, Teutonic writers have exhibited an almost equal copiousness