years of man. And yet, a half year ago, before my sickness, I never knew I had a body, so to speak, nor felt the burden of age; I was a young man among the young, and now I sit slipping away in my little room, while life goes rushing on outside." He repeats his wish that he might visit America, but evidently is further off from the hope than ever.

would have gone instantly into the waste-paper We shall not envy the author of "The Biglow] when he returns to this country next July, and sta to face with the editor of the Atlantic. But it wa expose Mr. Lowell's duplicity that we began this pa We merely wished to remark that epithalamium is word in its way. It is always dangerous to use

ever,

unless you happen to know what it means. you will use it, and have neglected to provide your its signification, it is quite permissible - in fact, it graceful to misspell it. The peculiar orthogr this instance, of Mr. Lowell's censor is clearly not tional; it is obviously in accordance with a well phonetic system, which leads him also to spell "Lysidas." What was that clever, wicked thing

A new entomological monthly is to be issued by a private club in Cambridge, Mass.; the title to be the pretty one of Psyche. The name will have no terror to naturalists who have struggled successfully with much more knotty-jointed words, but we trust this paragraph may fall under the eye of one or the other of the two young ladies whose conversation to this effect was heard in a Boston picture-dealer's store, as they stood before a piece of marble: :

First young lady (referring to the label on the pedestal): "This is a statue of Psish."

Second young lady (embarrassed between a desire of correcting her friend's pronunciation and a fear of hurting her feelings, very mildly): “I think people usually call it Sykee."

First young lady (with no intention of being put down, defiantly): "Well, some folks call it Sykee, and some call it Psish. I like Psish best."

One of those Britons who come to us without the attendant glories of the raree show is Principal Tulloch of St. Mary's College of the University of St. Andrew's, Scotland. He is best known by his "Leaders of the Reformation" and "English Puritanism and its Leaders," but a recent work," Rational Theology in England in the XVII. Century," ought to be better known, both on account of the admirable literary skill with which he has brought together the names of men who were consanguineous in thought and has made their speculations issue with a clear form from a mass of little-read material, and because of the spirit with which he has brought forward a phase of theology and philosophy often lost sight of as a power in the seventeenth century, and made it a fit commentary upon a parallel state of things in the thinking and literature of the nineteenth century.

- Mrs. Malaprop has a formidable rival in a Philadelphia critic who calls Lowell's poem on the death of Agassiz" an epi halmium"! He not only does this, but he goes a step further, and informs us that both Milton and Shelley had already written memorial verses on the great naturalist's death, and seems to intimate that Professor Lowell's tribute is rather superfluous. This is what he says: "All the way from Florence has come an epithalmium on Agassiz, the great naturalist, by James Russell Lowell. The idea is not new, for it was anticipated in Milton's Lysidas' and Shelley's Adonais.'" The editor of the Atlantic Monthly was probably not aware that Lowell had been anticipated in this matter by Messrs. Milton and Shelley, or the poem

6

said about the critics, in "Lothair"?

- A new edition of Boswell's Johnson is ann

excrescences of editors removed. The object i mirable one, but it is a pity that one's confider execution of the work should be shaken by lear so important a task has been assigned to Mr. P gerald, who has never shown himself to be an scholar, a judicious editor, or a man of instincti taste. An admirable opportunity exists for a t good edition of Boswell, but we fear that the a of the proposed one will have the effect of pre better.

- Private letters from intelligent traveller quently the best source from which to gain i respecting matters in any State toward which with more or less prejudice or partiality. received from a lawyer who has been travellin through the South, written on business, with no publication, thus speaks of the condition of thin isiana: "If Georgia and Alabama are poor, is a vagrant and an outcast. I could scarcel ate the miserable condition of this most unha All the evils of unsettled government, a govern: the most unscrupulous plunderers and unblushi are as apparent as the deserted houses with omin on their doors. The whole city is for sale. It i amid the ashes of Rebellion. I am painfully with it, as I have been with all I have seen in and am almost blue enough to believe that re cannot come in less than a good quarter of a cent to add to the misfortunes of Louisiana, the Miss broken in upon her and one half of the State is to water. Her people, that is, the old residents, broken in spirit, and seem to have lost all interes thing of a public nature. It is the most gloom picture I have ever seen, one that I fancy wi exceeded in the United States until we recogni as our standard."

VOL. I.]

HIS TWO WIVES.1

BY MARY CLEMMER AMES.

CHAPTER IX.-LIFE AT TARNSTONE.

IF Evelyn's log-house had been the castle, she could not have ushered her guests into it with a profounder air of satisfaction. She was as proud of its spotless walls, of its scoured floors and patch-work bedquilts, as Isabella Monteith ever could have been of her carved furniture and works of art. The front door opened directly into a large, square room - the spare room of the habitation. It had four windows: two look

ing out upon the grassy yard, the road, the farm, and the woods, and two looking back upon the orchard, the garden, the Tarn, and the Pinnacle. It also had manifold doors. One led to the orchard and garden, and a well worn path from it led down to the Tarn. Upon one side, two opened upon the bedrooms, whose gayly-decorated beds were visible from the sitting-room. On the opposite side its doors led into a spacious pantry, and a few steps down into an ample kitchen, whose burnished cook-stove was as great an object of pride to its polisher as were all her "Job's patience" and other elaborately patterned bedquilts. A certain purity and freshness of cleanliness made the distinctive atmosphere of the room. The log walls were closely boarded, and these boards, from floor to ceiling, had been scoured to a whiteness and smoothness which seemed to make the fact of universal dust impossible. No speck dared to adhere to its polished and creamy surface, and this was equally true of floor, chairs, and tables; all were alike free of paint and of olemish. The windows were ruffled with short white curtains, edged with fringe, and a small stand, holding big Bible and hymn-book, wore the same garniture. Open pine shelves, of the same spotless texture as he walls, bore in clear sight Evelyn's household treasires. One contained piles of snowy bed and table inen and spare cotton garments, spotlessly washed and aultlessly ironed; the other held stray bits of old hina, old books, and engravings, which Evelyn had leaned in her life-time of occasional sojourns of serice amid the "quality." The only article in the room which hinted of American luxury was the low wooden ocking-chair beside a back window, the rocking-chair hichMis' Dickens" had so scornfully eschewed. "This room is your'n!" said Evelyn, leading the way o the second of the side bedrooms.

Agnes' trained woman's eye saw at a glance that is room was all to Evelyn that her own pet room at otusport had been to her. Evelyn's untrained eyes,

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

[No. 20.

keenly perceptive by nature, discerned at once that he pet apartment was approved by the new-comer, and she

was content.

The feather bed was covered with a "rising sun" bedquilt, the consummate triumph of Evelyn's patchwork art, where the cotton luminary, in waves of crimson and green, soared toward the high-piled pillows as toward a cloud of white. The full, white valances were fringed like the curtains, and on the spotless floor before the bed was a large mat, braided by Evelyn's hands out of scraps gleaned from the immemorial china crate in Monteith House garret, and out of rags colored and patiently sewed together by her own fingers. A new, gayly painted cottage bureau stood against the partition which divided it from the adjoining sleeping apartment, and a similarly decorated little rocking-chair, with a cane seat, which had certainly made its advent since Mis' Dickens' day, stood beside the back window. There was also a new wash-stand, with fresh pitcher and basin of blue queen's-ware. The wooden walls were decorated with manifold pegs on which to hang garments, with a few colored prints, and an immense file of the Weekly Tribune. The great Canada porcelain stove which warmed the sitting-room, thrusting its back through the wall (carefully protected with zinc), to give warmth to the winter air of the bedroom, served as a flower-stand now, surmounted with a huge pitcher filled with poppies, marigolds, larkspurs, bachelor-buttons, nasturtiums, and asparagus.

"Pretty nice for a log-house, ain't it?" asked Evelyn, with an approving smile and nod at her bed

room.

"It is what Miss Isabella would call a chief doover; and it's all your'n while ye stay, jest as if ye was to home in your own house. You're hungry enuff, I reckon. I'll go and get yer supper in a whiffit."

In the long, mellow twilight Cyril wandered out, Evelyn said, "to see how the land lay," but actually to feast his eyes on the Tarn and to measure the capacity of the skiff by its side, and to fix upon a delectable spot out of which to dig worms for bait.

Agnes, all interest in everything around her, took a seat in the Mis' Dickens rocking-chair, and divided her attention between following Cyril along the edge of the Tarn, feasting her eyes on the glorious summit of the Pinnacle, and looking at Evelyn flying between the table that she was setting and the supper which she was cooking in the outer room, interspersing her labors with flighty snatches of rapid, disjointed conversation,

like

"This teapot Lady Monteith give me; I'm going to make tea in it for you; I don't very often for nobody, I can tell ye. It's a Stuart teapot. My! the Scottish chiefs that have drank their tea out of it in their castle! many's the time!

"The walls white!' well they may be; they give

he's handsome an' takin'. I'd like to know why I feel sorry when I look at her. I don't know, an' yet I do. I'm sure he's good to her, mighty good, an' considerate, so far, but there's a reason, sum reason, why it goes straight to my heart to look at her. I'll know what it is some time, if I can't now. Mebby it's because she's 80 young and innocent-lookin'; mebby it's because she makes me think of Mimy, an' of my little Lucy if she'd lived. If my Lucy was to look so sort o' pitiful goodness! I'd snatch her up, hold her tight, and run away with her from the bestest man in the world. I've a mother's feelin' for her, the poor little married gal, that's certain. I hope she'll never need it more, but she will. I feel she will, all through my bones. ain't cause I don't like Mr. Cyril; I do. Nor 'cause I think he don't love her, an' treat her the best, for he does. Yet the most I think on is, I'm sorry for her, an' can't help it. Well, 'tis mighty puzzlin'."

(To be continued.)

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

CHAPTER XIX. THE SHEEP-WASHING: THE OFFER.

It

BOLDWOOD did eventually call upon her. She was not at home. "Of course not," he murmured. In contemplating Bathsheba as a woman, he had forgotten the accidents of her position as an agriculturist — that being as much of a farmer, and as extensive a farmer, as himself, her probable whereabouts was out-of-doors at this time of the year. This, and the other oversights Boldwood was guilty of, were natural to the mood, and still more natural to the circumstances. The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved one not being on visiting terms, and there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had moments of commonɔlace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered. Thus a mild sort of apotheosis took place n his fancy, whilst she still lived and breathed within his >wn horizon, a troubled creature like himself.

It was the end of May when the farmer determined to e no longer repulsed by trivialities or distracted by susense. He had by this time grown used to being in love; he passion now startled him less even when it tortured im more, and he felt himself adequate to the situation. On inquiring for her at her house they had told him she as at the sheep-washing, and he went off to seek her

here.

The sheep-washing pool was a perfectly circular basin f stonework in the meadows, full of the clearest water. 'o birds on the wing its glassy surface, reflecting the light y, must have been visible for miles round as a glistening yclop's eye in a green face. The grass about the margin this season was a sight to remember long-in a minor -rt of way. Its activity in sucking the moisture from the ch, damp sod was almost a process observable by the eye. e outskirts of this level water-meadow were diversified rounded and hollow pastures, where just now everyng that was not a buttercup was a daisy, losing this aracter somewhat as they sank to the verge of the intering river. It slid along noiselessly as a shade, the elling reeds and sedge forming a flexible palisade along moist brink. To the north of the mead were trees, the wes of which were new, soft, moist, and flexible, not having stiffened and darkened under summer sun and ught, their color being yellow beside a green, green be

side a yellow. From the recesses of this knot of foliage the loud notes of three cuckoos were resounding through the still air.

Boldwood went meditating down the slopes with his eyes on his boots, which the yellow pollen from the buttercups had bronzed in artistic gradations. A tributary of the main stream flowed through the basin of the pool by means of an inlet and outlet at opposite points of its diameter. Shepherd Oak, Jan Coggan, Moon, Poorgrass, Cain Ball, and several others were assembled here, all dripping wet to the very roots of their hair, and Bathsheba was standing by in a new riding-habit-the most elegant she had ever worn- the reins of her horse being looped over her arm. Flagons of cider were rolling about upon the green. The meek sheep were pushed into the pool by Coggan and Matthew Moon, who stood by the lower hatch, immersed to their waists; then Gabriel, who stood on the brink, thrust them under as they swam along, with an instrument like a crutch, formed for the purpose, and also for assisting the exhausted animals when the wool became saturated and they began to sink. They were then let out against the stream, and through the upper opening, all impurities thus flowing away below - Cainy Ball and Joseph, who performed this latter operation, being if possible wetter than the rest; they resembled dolphins under a fountain, every protuberance and angle of their clothes dribbling forth a small rill.

Boldwood came close and bade her good morning, with such constraint that she could not but think he had stepped across to the washing for its own sake, hoping not to find her there; more, she fancied his brow severe and his eye slighting. Bathsheba immediately contrived to withdraw, and glided along by the river till she was a stone's throw off: she heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a consciousness that love was encircling her like a perfume. Instead of turning or waiting, Bathsheba went farther among the high sedges, but Boldwood seemed determined, and pressed on till they were completely past the bend of the river. Here, without being seen, they could hear the splashing and shouts of the washers above.

"Miss Everdene!" said the farmer.

She trembled, turned, and said, "Good morning." His tone was so utterly removed from all she had expected as a beginning. It was lowness and quiet accented: an emphasis of deep meanings, their form, at the same time, being scarcely expressed. Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcass, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way, to say a little is often to tell more than to say a great deal. Boldwood told everything in that word.

---

As the consciousness expands on learning that what was fancied to be the rumble of wheels is the reverberation of thunder, so did Bathsheba's at her intuitive conviction. "I feel — almost too much to think," he said, with a solemn simplicity, "I have come to speak to you without preface. My life is not my own since I have beheld you clearly, Miss Everdene - I come to make you an offer of marriage."

Bathsheba tried to preserve an absolutely neutral countenance, and all the motion she made was that of closing lips which had previously been a little parted.

I may

"I am now forty-one years old," he went on. have been called a confirmed bachelor, and I was a confirmed bachelor. I had never any views of myself as a husband in my earlier days, nor have I made any calculation on the subject since I have been older. But we all change, and my change, in this matter, came with seeing you. I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect. Beyond all things, I want you as my wife."

"I feel, Mr. Boldwood, that though I respect you much, I do not feel what would justify me to-in accepting your offer," she stammered.

-

This giving back of dignity for dignity seemed to open the sluices of feeling that Boldwood had as yet kept closed. "My life is a burden without you," he exclaimed, in a

low voice. "I want you I want you to let me say I love you again and again !"

Bathsheba answered nothing, and the horse upon her arm seemed so impressed, that instead of cropping the herbage it looked up.

"I think and hope you care enough for me to listen to what I have to tell!"

Bathsheba's momentary impulse at hearing this was to ask why he thought that, till she remembered that, far from being a conceited assumption on Boldwood's part, it was but the natural conclusion of serious reflection based on deceptive premises of her own offering.

"I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you," the farmer continued in an easier tone, "and put my rugged feeling into a graceful shape; but I have neither power nor patience to learn such things. I want you for my wife so wildly that no other feeling can abide in me; but I should not have spoken out had I not been led to hope.

The valentine again! Oh, that valentine!" she said to herself, but not a word to him.

"If you can love me, say so, Miss Everdene. If notdon't say no."

"Mr. Boldwood, it is painful to have to say I am surprised, so that I don't know how to answer you with propriety and respect — but am only just able to speak out my feeling I mean my meaning; that I am afraid I can't marry you, much as I respect you. You are too dignified for me to suit you, sir."

"But, Miss Everdene!"

"I-I didn't I know I ought never to have dreamt of sending that valentine-forgive me, sirit was a wanton thing which no woman with any self-respect should have done. If you will only pardon my thoughtlessness, I promise never to "

"No, no, no. Don't say thoughtlessness! Make me think it was something more - that it was a sort of prophetic instinct - the beginning of a feeling that you would like me. You torture me to say it was done in thoughtlessness I never thought of it in that light, and I can't endure it. Ah! I wish I knew how to win you! but that I can't do I can only ask if I have already got you. If I have not, and it is not true that you have come unwittingly to me as I have to you, I can say no more."

"I have not fallen in love with you, Mr. Boldwoodcertainly I may say that." She allowed a very small smile to creep for the first time over her serious face in saying this, and the white row of upper teeth, and keenly cut lips already noticed, suggested an idea of heartlessness, which was immediately contradicted by the pleasant eyes. “But you will just think — in kindness and condescension think if you cannot bear with me as a husband! I fear I am too old for you, but believe me, I will take more care of you than would many a man of your own age. I will protect and cherish you with all my strength - I will indeed. You shall have no cares - be worried by no household affairs, and live quite at ease, Miss Everdene. The dairy superintendence shall be done by a mancan afford it well you shall never have so much as to look out of doors at hay-making time, or to think of weather in the harvest. I rather cling to the chaise, because it is the same my poor father and mother drove, but if you don't like it I will sell it, and you shall have a pony-carriage of your own. I cannot say how far above every other idea and object on earth you seem to me - nobody knows God only knows how much you are to me! Bathsheba's heart was young, and it swelled with sympathy for the deep-natured man who spoke so simply.

"Don't say it don't! I cannot bear you to feel so much, and me to feel nothing. And I am afraid they will notice us, Mr. Boldwood. Will you let the matter rest now? I cannot think collectedly. I did not know you were going to say this to me. Oh, I am wicked to have made you suffer so!" She was frightened as well as agi

"I can do nothing. I cannot answer."

66

may speak to you again on the subject ? " "Yes."

"I may think of you?"

"Yes, I suppose you may think of me." "And hope to obtain you?" "No- do not hope! Let us go on." "I will call upon you again to-morrow." "No-please not. Give me time." "Yes I will give you any time," he said e and gratefully. "I am happier now."

"No I beg you! Don't be happier if happin comes from my agreeing. Be neutral, Mr. Bold must think."

"I will wait," he said.

And then she turned away. Boldwood drop eyes to the ground, and stood long like a man not know where he was. Realities then return him like the pain of a wound received in an ex which eclipses it, and he, too, then went on.

(To be continued.)

SIR PETER LELY.

THE town of Soest, in the old German circle phalia, is a quaint, picturesque, ancient place, wel to easy-going travellers between Cologne and I There Lely was born in 1618; and there he spent hood, playing under the shadows of the three churches, making holiday excursions out to Sasse tarrying in the market-place, watching the expre the faces of the sellers and buyers of corn.

Nagel says that Lely's father, a poor military bore the surname by which his son is known. 1 mon story runs that the family name was Van d that the house in which the Captain dwelt was d with a sculptured lily or lilies, and that Captain Faes became known as the Captain at the Lil objection to this story is that neither in Alt Mitteldeutsch, Oberdeutsch, nor in modern Germ "Lely" mean "lily." It was probably Peter's name, added to that of the husband, as is the fa the Continent at the present time.

When Peter Lely was born, by the side of on clear streams which freshen the town of Soest neighboring lake, Rubens was forty-one years ol in Antwerp in a sort of state which Lely subs emulated in London. In that year, 1618, Vandy handsome lad, nineteen years old, studying in painting-room. The Captain's little son, in his Soest, was destined to follow Vandyck in the Eng ital, to equal him in style of life, without imit extravagance, and to occasionally come very nea power of painting, without any imitation of his ma

The parents of Peter Van der Faes though church and then of the army as affording their sot for a fortunate career. Peter heard but heeded i talk, tastes, and pursuits indicated an irrepressi At eighteen, instead of preparing for ordination or the sword exercise, Peter went, by his father's a Haarlem as a pupil in the studio of a now less ret Peter-Peter Grebber. Grebber was not a grea but he was a man of infinite taste, and Lely app self with such effect to follow his instructions in and portrait painting, adding thereto much practice in landscape, that in two years Grebb touched the young fellow on the shoulder, and! enter the world on his own account, as he then ki as much as his master.

Peter took Grebber at his word, but he sta works of Vandyck before he repaired to the count Vandyck's career was closing, Lely's first appe England is said to have been in the suite of the groom from Holland, who came over here in 1641 the little daughter (Mary) of Charles the First.