IDA CRAVEN.

CHAPTER I.

IN A HAYFIELD.

It sounds like a truism to say that we only appreciate the enjoyments we have lost, but, like most truisms, it is only half a truth. In weary hot Indian days, or still more weary chill English winter nights, we accuse ourselves of not having properly appreciated the bright sunny days of childhood; but thought is so far misleading us, that we are remembering facts and not impressions, and what memory brings back is the sunshine and soft fresh air, and not our pleasure in them. One of these English summer days, bright and clear, with a fresh west wind, was very fully enjoyed by two girls in June of the year 1861. They were sitting in a hayfield, having pulled a haycock to pieces to make them

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selves more comfortable, and at their feet ran a narrow mill-stream, with a border of pollarded willows.

I have said girls, for they both looked young, though one was wife and mother, the other, our heroine, a child of sixteen. She, however, looked older than she was, and her friend rather younger. The former, the ma

tron, was tall, fair, and slender, her features good, with perhaps more of strength and ableness than expression. She was only twentythree, but had been for five years wife of Captain Henry Maxwell, of the Bengal Artillery. Her husband was in India at the time of which we write, but in the previous October she had been obliged to leave him, and hurry to England with a little four-year old son, whose life, the doctors said, was not worth many weeks purchase at Multān. She had already lost one little child, a baby girl, in that unwholesome place, and she left in haste to save the boy. The winter had done wonders for him; he ran about strongly, and chattered, and had

much the look of a child with some hold on life, and he was now with his mother paying a visit to the Bygraves. Here a few days before a letter had reached her from her husband, saying he was ill, and might have to take leave; and that much as he wished to come to England, he could not afford it, and would go to the hills instead if he was any worse. This made her anxious; and well she might be, for she knew the detestable climate he was in, as well as the unthinking, work-loving, nature of the man. Thus she had thought much while speaking little, and, just now, as was natural to her unselfish nature, was seriously interested in the child beside her, whose life seemed to be taking shape without her having much knowledge or care about it herself.

"You know, Mary," Ida was saying, "it is very nice being at home again, though it does seem very tame after the Pyrenees, and a little slow after Paris," she yawned a little, and threw herself back upon the bank. "Very

ungrateful I am," she went on.

"It is pleasant to be in England again, and I should be very happy to dream and read here for the next five years; but mamma says she thinks she will let the place after the summer, and the boys have each another plan; and I believe it will end in our living in a little house in a row in London, and I shall go wild."

Mary Maxwell smiled at her excitement. Well, dear," she said, "suppose it did, you would get on quite well. You have tastes enough I am sure. Work any one of them hard, and your life will be worth living. And then you have your mother's life to brighten, and you will be what they call a civilizing influence for those boy brothers of yours."

Ida thought a little, and then said gloomily, "I don't know which I shall hate most,-cultivating myself (I have done it till I am sick of it), or playing a civilizing influence. I wish I were not civilized myself! I don't think I am much. Oh, if I were only a boy! Nobody tells Jack to cultivate himself. He has work to do, and