fourteen miles from Castlebar, and was preparing to advance, when he received information that the French had abandoned their position and had marched in the direction of Foxford.

Humbert's position was critical; his Irish auxiliaries, additional numbers of whom had joined him since his victory, could not be depended on-were, in fact, utterly useless, some of them, indeed, never having seen a gun before. He knew that at the slightest check they would desert him; they had a too lively recollection of the horrors of the late rebellion. Humbert had, in short, expected to receive more substantial aid from the Irish; he had also expected reinforcements from France, but now saw that they could not arrive in time to do him any good. Nevertheless, he determined to do his duty, and prolong the campaign as far as possible. He therefore abandoned Castlebar on the 4th of September, and turned north-east towards Foxford, with the intention of reaching Sligo, where he had a faint hope his reinforcements might yet land. Humbert now found himself followed by two bodies of troops, one under Colonel Crawford, and another under General Lake, which hung upon and harassed his rear. A third, under General Moore-afterwards Sir John-watched him at a distance; while Cornwallis with the main army marched parallel with him towards Carrick-onShannon. As if this were not enough, on reaching Colooney on the 5th, about forty miles northeast from Castlebar, Humbert found himself confronted by a fifth force, under Colonel Verreker, of the Limerick militia, with a force of three hundred and thirty men and two curricle guns. A fierce and obstinate fight ensued this was indeed the only real battle of the whole campaign -but after lasting about an hour, Verreker, finding himself overpowered by numbers, was compelled to retreat, with the loss of his guns, to Sligo.

Although Humbert was victorious in this encounter, it caused him to change his plans. He now marched towards Manorhamilton by Drumnahair, abandoning eight of his guns by the way; but in approaching the former place suddenly turned to the right, in a south-easterly direction by Drunkerin, and attempted to reach Granard, in Longford, where a rising had taken place. His rear was now constantly harassed by the enemy, and on the 7th a smart skirmish took place with Crawford's advanced guard, in which the French were victorious. Humbert now crossed the Shannon at Ballintra, but so closely followed that his rearguard had not time to break the bridge. He halted some hours at Cloone, to give his worn-out troops a brief rest, and arrived next day, the 8th, at Ballinamuck.

The Viceroy, crossing the Shannon at Carrick, was meanwhile marching on Saint Johnstown, in order to get in front of Humbert on his way to Granard. The drama was now drawing to its close. Completely surrounded by an overwhelming force, Humbert saw that surrender was inevitable. For the honour of France, however, he determined to make at least a formal resistance; he therefore disposed his forces in order of battle and awaited the attack. His rearguard was attacked by Crawford, and, being overpowered, surrendered; and the remainder, after resisting General Lake for half an hour, laid

down their arms-the whole force amounting ts about eight hundred and fifty, the rest having been killed or wounded since the beginning of the campaign. The entire British force which surrounded Humbert numbered about thirty thousand, or five thousand more than were employed at Waterloo, or, in later days, at the battle of the Alma.

While the French received honourable terms of surrender, the Irish auxiliaries, in number about fifteen hundred, were shot and hanged without mercy, five hundred of them being killed in this way.

The closing scene of the drama was the recapture of Killala, which had remained in possession of the French, or rather of Irish insurgents under two or three French officers. It was not until the 22d of September that the royal forces, twelve hundred strong, arrived at Ballina, the Irish garrison fleeing at its approach. The English advanced on Killala in two columns, from the north and the south. The garrison posted themselves on the Ballina road, but were speedily overcome, and fled through Killala, pursued by the cavalry. At the other end of the town they were intercepted by the second column, and about four hundred of the unfortunates were killed.

In this extraordinary campaign, which lasted from the 22d of August to the 8th of September, the French had marched one hundred and thirty miles, penetrating to the very heart of Ireland, and distant only sixty miles in a straight line from Dublin, and had fought five engagements, in all of which they had been victorious. Why a handful of French troops should have achieved such success was not so much due, after all, to their own prowess, as to the nature of the forces opposed to them. These were mostly local militia, quite unused to real war, and some of them disaffected, and not inclined to fight very hard against those they secretly regarded as their friends. It is related that a number of militia, who were put down as missing after the affair of Castlebar, had gone over to the French; one of them, on being afterwards asked why he had done so, replied, that it was not he who had deserted, but the British army, who had run away and left him behind to be murdered !'

SONNET ON CHRISTMAS.

How have they dawned on us, those Christmas days,
The birthdays of the Friend as yet unseen?
In childhood's far-off vale with gladness keen
A wonderland of brightness to our gaze;
Then, the slow change, as creeps the autumn haze,
The vision fades to thoughts of what has been,
Of voices that we miss, and altered scene,
And feet that walk no more on Life's highway.
Yet through all change, the Christmas star shines on
Lonely and lovely; though the earth-lights die,
The soul looks up, and finds its goal at last,
And asks no more, nor sighs for pleasures gone.
One day its Christmas shall be kept on high,
With all Life's hopes fulfilled-its sorrows past!
MARY GORGES.

Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, Limited, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON; and EDINBURGH.

ward ho! has, after three weeks' knocking about in the Pacific, struck the coast of the almost unknown, wholly unexplored Novæ HollandæAustralia, the Great South Land. Northward he has crawled under the unbroken, uninviting wall of rock, and gazed on the illimitable monotony of sombre forest beyond it. And now at last, on this late April evening, he has discovered a break in the chain. The head of the little Endeavour swings round; she feels her way between the two rocky headlands, which, when she bids them farewell, will bear the names of the two intrepid naturalists who accompany Cook, Dr Solander and Mr (afterwards Sir Joseph) Banks. She slowly steers across the cove which forms an elbow at the entrance, passes Bare Island, and then fairly enters the placid waters of the Bay. Captain Cook's quaint Journal tells how he tried to hold converse with the natives -'Indians,' as he calls them-how they were so hostile that he tried to persuade them to reason with a 'Brown Bess'-and how this reasoning failed to have the wished-for effect, failed even to strike fear into the hearts of the untutored savages.

The name Botany Bay is its own expositor. Perhaps not anywhere in the whole world would it be possible to find such a lavish waste of flowers as along the coast hills of Australia in the early summer months. The English summer is garlanded with blossoms; but ever there is the predominating, relieving green of the grass and foliage, which, abundant as the flowers may be, makes superabundance an impossibility. Excepting where the mangrove swamps occur, a noticeable feature of Australian coast scenery is that between the timber-line and the wave-limit there is generally a belt, often narrow, but in some places swelling out into wide downy reaches, clothed with dwarf-bush and a tangle of heaths, vines, and an almost unending variety of flowers and shrubs. The very nature of every item of the flora of Australia-trees, shrubs, plants, grasses, mosses-would appear to be to bear blossoms, and not blossoms that are pale, but the brightest reds, purples, blues, yellows, and the purest whites, with the infinity of shadings the sunlight evolves out of these ground colours. With this glowing mass of petals the brightest of green foliage is looked for, and, failing this contrast, a sense of oppression is born-the same sense of oppression that makes itself felt in an art gallery, where the very variety and the lavish display of pictures seem to absorb the personality which alone appeals to the artistic.

It is not to be wondered at that the botanists of Captain Cook's expedition should have christened the newly-found haven as they did. Six-score years have gone since Mr Banks and Dr Solander were fascinated by the wonderful variety of native flora, yet to-day the haven is as appropriately called Botany Bay as it was when Nature reigned supreme. The immediate

vicinity of the historical portion of the Bay has undergone very little change. The bare sandy dunes of the southern shore mirror back the glistening shafts of sunlight, just as they must have done on that April day in 1770. There is one solitary house breaking the golden curve of bush-backed sand, and that is all. The northern shore, however, is the centre of interest. Massive old gum-trees, with their curiously-twisted trunks and arms in places sweeping almost into the water, shadow and cling to the rocks, in the damp cool crevices of which nestle a thousand ferns and flowers. Many-coloured vines and parasites link tree to tree with pendent floral chains. Under the pleasant shade of the primeval giants and their under-roofing of vines is the everlasting carpet of flowers.

It is anything but an easy task on an Australian summer day to break through the thick tangle of undergrowth; yet any one that will persevere will not be without his reward. In the wealth and variety of orchids alone is a life's delight. On the flats where the timber bends to the black swamp, and along the sparkling creek that runs out of it, they grow thick. Around that swamp a botanist might spend weeks and months without exhausting its treasures. It is a garden of tropics, compared with which the best-stocked hothouse would sink into insignificance. Sweet is the breath of the salt sea-sweet with its own fresh sweetness, and it is made sweeter still by the aroma of the acacias and honey-gums. Amongst the trees, in place of the pleasant rustle of fallen leaves, there is the crisp crunch of the dried gum-bark, which thickly strews the ground. Bright-plumaged birds and gem-like butterflies and insects flit and flutter about; watchful-eyed lissom lizards bask on every stone and trunk; occasionally a snake, beautiful in spite of its sinister associations, shuffles away to cover at the sound of a footstep; and the mosquitoes must not-will not-be forgotten.

Botany Bay boasts a river. At its eastern end, where now stands a fashionable watering-place, George's River, known in its higher reaches by the pleasant-sounding native name of Woniora, empties itself. The exploration of this river opens out a very paradise of wood and flowerland.

After a short stay, the Endeavour sailed away northward from Botany, past, and without discovering, Port Jackson, the finest harbour in the world, the only remnant of Cook's visit being the Union-jack which he left floating on the North Head. For seventeen years the Indians' were left in peace. Then came Captain Phillip with the 'First Fleet'-a fleet of eleven convict ships, crowded with five hundred and sixty-four men and one hundred and ninety-two women convicts. He came to found a new nation, the American War of Independence having made it necessary that some other outlet should be found for emptying England's prisons. Phillip soon

Dec. 17, 1892.]

ascertained that, beautiful as Botany Bay might be, it was not fitted for settlement. The land was not suitable for cultivation; water was scarce, and the Bay was too shallow to allow of vessels approaching within reasonable distance of the shore. With commendable promptitude, he discovered and shifted his quarters and his convicts to Port Jackson. But short as was Captain Phillip's stay, it left a taint on the name of Botany Bay which was long regarded as synonymous with convictism. While round the shores of Port Jackson, the very centre of convictism, has grown up a city of four hundred thousand inhabitants, Botany Bay has been left pretty well in its primeval state. In real history it has become redolent only as the site of tanyards and other noxious trades, and as the rallying-ground of Heathen Chinee gardeners. There are scattered houses along the eastern and part of the northern shore; but the interesting portion of the foreshore and adjoining bush remains almost as wild as when Captain Phillip broke camp. The presence of the small settlement of aborigines at the point helps to heighten the primitive character of the surroundings. At one time a custom-house stood at Botany Heads; but as in all things else, the custom soon drifted to the successful rival, and now the old custom-house has descended to a commonplace dwelling.

Not the least interesting relic of Botany is the monument raised by his countrymen to the illfated French explorer La Pérouse. It stands up a tall plain monolith, backed by two towering Norfolk Island pines, bearing inscriptions in French and English to the memory of the explorer and his companion voyagers. Scribbled everywhere over the pillar are the names of Frenchmen. Only a few days after Captain Phillip had effected a landing, two strange vessels came to an anchorage in Botany Bay. These vessels proved to be the French exploring ships Thetis and Espérance, commanded by La Pérouse. Phillip's landing a few days previously saved Australia from becoming a dependent of La Belle France' instead of a possession of His Britannic Majesty, George the Third. La Pérouse, disappointed doubtless, stayed and refitted his ships, after which he sailed away southward into the unknown, to be heard of no more until the bones of the Thetis and Espérance were discovered bleaching on the reefs of the islands of Santa Cruz, where the French commander and his crews were murdered by the natives.

Botany Bay is one of the favourite picnicking and fishing-grounds of the Sydneyites. It lies between six and seven miles from the heart of the city. A tramway carries pleasure-seekers beyond the far-reaching suburbs, and then through a long stretch of sandy swamp-land, until late years, the source whence the city watersupply was drawn, but now a luxuriant wilderness of Chinese gardens. To reach the picnicking ground, however, the would-be worshipper of Cook and Phillip and La Pérouse has yet to traverse as high smelling a section of the round earth as can be sampled up from anywhere, a whole colony of tanneries and boiling-down houses having located themselves there.

Such is Botany Bay after six-score years of advancement have passed over it. Starting with

a tarnished name and the disadvantage of shallow waters, it has remained and is likely to remain a silent stretch of sea in the midst of a beautiful

tropical flower-garden-a Botany Bay in reality.

BLOOD ROYAL.*

CHAPTER XVIII.-GOOD OUT OF EVIL.

THAT journey back to town was one of the most terrible things Maud had ever yet known in her poor little life. Dick leaned back disconsolate in one corner of the carriage, and she in the opposite one. Neither spoke a single word; neither needed to speak, for each knew without speech what the other was thinking of. Every now and again Dick would catch some fresh shade of expression coursing like a wave over Maud's unhappy face, and recognise in it the very idea that a moment before had been passing through his own troubled mind. It was pitiable to see them. Their whole scheme of life had suddenly and utterly broken down before them their sense of self-respect was deeply wounded; nay, the belief that they were in very truth descendeven their bare identity was all but gone; for ants of the royal Plantagenets had become as it were an integral part of their personality, and woven itself intimately into all their life and thought and practice. They ceased to be themselves in ceasing to be potential princes and princesses.

Edmund Plantagenet had started and only half For the Great Plantagenet Delusion, which children from youth upward, and especially to or a quarter believed in himself, became to his Maud and Dick, a sort of family religion. It was a theory on which they based almost everything that was best and truest within them; a moral power for good, urging them always on to do credit to the great House from which they firmly and unquestioningly believed themselves there first by nature; probably, too, they into be sprung. Probably the moral impulse was herited it, not from poor drunken, do-nothing Edmund Plantagenet himself, through whom ostensibly they should have derived their Plantagenet character, but from that good and patient of these things ever occurred at all to Maud nobody, their hard-working mother. But none or Dick; to them, it had always been a prime lives must be noble in order to come up to a article of faith that noblesse oblige, and that their preconceived Plantagenet standard of action. So the blow was a crushing one. It was as though all the ground of their being had been cut away from beneath their feet; they had fancied themselves so long the children of kings, with a moral children of kings are little given to behaving; obligation upon them to behave-well, as the and they had found out now they were mere and universal reasons for right and high action ordinary mortals, with only the same inherent

as the common herd of us. It was a sad comedown-for a royal Plantagenet.

The revulsion was terrible. And Maud, who was in some ways the prouder of the two, and to whom, as to most of her sex, the extrinsic reason

Copyright 1892 in the United States of America by the Cassell Publishing Company.

for holding up her head in the midst of poverty and disgrace had ever been stronger and more cogent than the intrinsic one, felt it much the more keenly. To women, the social side of things is always uppermost. They journeyed home in a constant turmoil of unrelieved wretchedness; they were not, they had never been royal Plantagenets.

Just like all the rest of the world! mere ordinary people! And they, who had been sustained, under privations and shame, by the reflection that if every man had his right, Dick would have been sitting that day on the divided throne of half these islands! Descendants, after all, of a cobbler and a dancing-master! No Black Prince at all in their lineage! no Henry, no Edward, no Richard, no Lionel! Coeur-de-Lion, a pale shade! Lackland himself taken away from them! And how everybody would laugh when they came to know the truth. Though that was a small matter! It was no minor thing like this, but the downfall of a faith, the ruin of a principle, the break-up of a rule in life, that really counted!

There you have the Nemesis of every false idea, every unreal belief: when once it finally collapses, as collapse it needs must before the searching light of truth, it leaves us for a while feeble, uncertain, rudderless. So Dick felt that afternoon; so he felt for many a weary week of reconstruction afterwards.

At last they reached home. 'Twas a terrible home-coming. As they crept up the steps, poor dispossessed souls, they heard voices within, Mrs Plantagenet's, and Gillespie's, and the children's, and Mary Tudor's.

Dick opened the door in dead silence and entered. He was pale as a ghost. Maud walked stately behind him, scarcely able to raise her eyes to Archie Gillespie's face, but still proud at heart as ever. Dick sank down into a chair, the very picture of misery. Maud dropped into another without doing more than just stretch out one cold hand to Archie. Mrs Plantagenet surveyed them both with a motherly glance. Why, Dick,' she cried, rushing up to him, 'what's the matter? Has there been a railway accident?'

Dick glanced back at her with affection half masked by dismay. A railway accident!' he exclaimed with a groan. 'Oh, mother dear, I wish it had only been a railway accident! It was more like an earthquake. It's shaken Maud and me to the very foundations of our nature!' Then he looked up at her half pityingly; she wasn't a Plantagenet except by marriage; she never could quite feel as they did the sanctAnd then he broke off suddenly, for he remembered with a rush that horrid, horrid truth. He blurted it out all at once: We are not, we never were, real royal Plantagenets!'

I was afraid of that,' Mary Tudor said simply. 'That was just why I was so anxious dear Maud should go with you.'

Gillespie said nothing, but for the first time in public he tried to take Maud's hand for a moment in his. Maud drew it away quickly. 'No, Archie,' she said with a sigh, making no attempt at concealment. I can never, never give it to you now again. For to-day I know we've always been nobody.'

'You're what you always were to me,' Gillespie

answered in a low voice. It was you yourself I loved, Maud, not the imaginary honours of the Plantagenet family.'

'But I don't want to be loved so,' Maud cried, with all the bitterness of a wounded spirit. 'Í don't want to be loved for myself. I don't want any one to love me-except as a Plantagenet!'

Dick was ready, in the depth of his despair and the blackness of his revulsion to tell out the whole truth, and spare them, as he thought, no circumstance of their degradation. Yes, we went to Framlingham princes and princesses; and more than that,' he said, almost proud to think whence and how far they had fallen; we return from it, beggars. I looked up the whole matter thoroughly, and there's no room for hope left, no possibility of error. The father of Giles Plantagenet, from whom we're all descended, most fatally descended, was one Richard-called Plantagenet, but really Muggins, a cobbler at Framlingham; the same man, you know, Mary, that I told you about the other day. In short, we're just cousins of the other Plantagenets-the false Plantagenets-the Sheffield Plantagenetsthe people who left the money.'

He fired it off at them with explosive energy. Mary gave a little start. But surely in that case, Dick,' she cried, you must be entitled to their fortune! You told me one day it was left by will to the descendants and heirs-male of Richard Muggins, alias Plantagenet, whose second son George was the ancestor and founder of the Sheffield family.'

'So he was,' Dick answered dolefully, without a light in his eye. 'But, you see, I didn't then know, or suspect, or even think possible-what I now find to be the truth-the horrid, hateful truth-that our ancestor, Giles Plantagenet, whom I took to be the son of Geoffrey, the descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, was in reality nothing more than the eldest son of this wretched man Richard Muggins; and the elder brother of George Muggins, alias Plantagenet, who was ancestor of the Sheffield people who left the money.'

'But if so,' Gillespie put in, then you must be the heirs of the Plantagenets who left the money, and must be entitled, as I understand, to something like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling!'

Undoubtedly,' Dick answered in a tone of settled melancholy.

Gillespie positively laughed, in spite of himself, though Maud looked up at him through her tears and murmured, 'Oh, Archie, how can you?'

'Why, my dear fellow,' he said, taking Dick's arm, are you really quite sure it's so? Are you perfectly certain you've good legal proof of the identity of this man Giles with your own earliest ancestor, and of the descent of your family from the forefather of the Sheffield people?'

'I'm sorry to say,' Dick answered with profound dejection, there can't be a doubt left of it. It's too horribly certain. Hunting up these things is my trade, and I ought to know. I've made every link in the chain as certain as certainty. I have a positive entry for every step in the pedigree-not doubtful entries, unfortunately, but such conclusive entries as leave the personality of each person beyond the reach of