The boys had all left school by then, and were out at work at different farms, but Harry and Jimmy still lived at home and had to be washed and mended and done for by Pris, and kept out of mischief as much as possible. Lucy was the only one at school, and she was thirteen and nearly as tall as Pris, and nearly as old as Pris was when she took up the reins of government. Annie was nursemaid at the vicarage, and Tom had married his Susan a year ago, and had a slatternly, untidy wife and a constantly crying baby in his bare little home, neither of whom, I regret to say, kept him from very constant attendance at the Cricketers.

Sometimes it crossed Pris's mind whether after all it would not have been better for Tom to go as a soldier; whether this sort of slipshod life of Tom's was worth the sacrifice Will had made for it; but she was not given to vain speculations, and it is impossible for the wisest of us to estimate the worth while of things.

Pris had heard nothing of Will since that golden Sunday, but this had been no disappointment since she knew that he was a poor scholar, and her own scholarship was of such an unreliable character that a letter, even a love-letter, would have been rather an embarrassment, as it would have entailed the necessity of answering it and all by herself too, without Lucy's help, who was quite a good little scholar, and always took the main part of the labor of any family correspondence. But she reckoned the days back to that Sunday and on to the day when he would come home, comforting her patient heart with memory or anticipation when things went criss-cross as they are apt to do in life. It never occurred to her mind that Will might not come back, still less that when he came she might not be there to receive him.

When she got too ill to keep about, Polly came home to nurse her. Polly was going to be married very soon to her Fred, who had quite justified the good opinion they had formed of him, and had been very faithful to Polly and steady and hardworking in his business, so that he I would have a comfortable home to offer her when the time came for their wedding.

Pris took what Mr. Mason said very quietly. He thought at first she hardly understood, she was very weak and he fancied that her mind was dulled and unable to take in fresh ideas. He had been a little bit nervous in telling her she was

going to die, and had expected great agitation and a scene that would wring his heart, but perhaps there was something more pathetic in the composed, matter-offact way she took it.

"Well, Annie's old enough now to come home and see to father, and his rheumatics ain't near so bad as they used to be since he wore that bit of new flannel; and Annie she knows about keeping his things aired, and if she can't quite manage the washing at first Tom's wife would help her a bit nows and thens; and Lucy, she's getting terrible handy, and she's a deal stronger than she were, and don't get that croupy cough in the winter as she used. I'd aliked to have finished them new shirts for Jimmy, but there! they're all cut out and Annie could place them so as Lucy could finish 'em off."

Her mind kept running off into what seemed to Mr. Mason insignificant details, not realizing how great a part in Pris's life such details had formed; but when he spoke of the great change that lay so near her, he could not tell whether she quite understood, though she said, "Yes, sure," and "There now! so 'tis," and repeated the "Amen" at the end of the prayers he said, and “Thank you kindly, sir," when he gave her his blessing and went away. He did not say anything about Will Wiseman, though he had not forgotten that Sunday and the proud look on Pris's face, but he had that feeling, shared by many, that, at the solemn hour of death, human love must be put aside with other worldly things, forgetting how strong in the suffering heart upon the cross the human love for the mother and the friend was, and how love is stronger than death, and never faileth though all else may vanish away.

After Mr. Mason had gone away Pris told Polly, in the words at the beginning of the chapter, the disappointment it was to go without seeing Will again, and she cried a little over it, and Polly, with the prospect of her own marriage so bright and near before her, said it did seem a bit hard and cried too. But after that Pris did not seem to fret, but lay very quiet, waiting for the end.

That end did not come till nearly a week had passed, and, indeed, she rallied a little, so that they thought perhaps she might get about again, and the end when it came was unexpected.

It was a bright, beautiful May afternoon. Lucy, when she came in from school to dinner, had brought a bit of gorse in flower, and Pris had seemed

quite pleased with it, and would have it laid on the broad window-ledge, for her bed was across the little window. The sun poured in bright and warm across the patchwork quilt, and Polly wanted to draw the curtain, but Pris would not let her.

Polly had been washing out a few things that morning and on the gooseberry bushes outside were hung some of her father's red cotton handkerchiefs. Whether it was this and the sun shining on the gorse that brought back that golden Sunday so vividly to Pris, I do not know. But when she spoke, which was not very often, it was always of Will and of his red coat, and of his bright sword and spurs.

Jock, who was getting an old dog now, and lazy, and blind of one eye, had crept up and got on to the foot of the bed, an unheard of intrusion in old times; but the last week he had done it unrebuked, for Pris seemed to like to have him there, and there was so little she cared for or noticed now, as mind and body fell into the drowsiness that often precedes the long sleep.

Polly had brought her work up-stairs that afternoon and sat by the bedside, not thinking Pris was worse in any way, for she was very quiet and seemed to doze off now and then.

But suddenly, she stirred and raised herself on her pillows with more strength than she had done for days past, and looked eagerly out of the window, over the golden gorse, into the garden where the sun shone on the red handkerchiefs drying on the gooseberry bushes; and such a look of surprise and pleasure and delight came into her face that Polly dropped her work and bent across the bed to see who it was coming up the path.

And not only Polly but Jock stirred too and pricked his ears, quivering all over with expectation as he had done that Sunday when he sat by Pris on the garden wall, and he gave, as then, a little shrill bark of ecstatic delight. But Polly could see no one. There was the old tom cat sunning himself on the bricks and eyed by a robin on the gate with inquisitive inter

est.

"There ain't no one," Polly said; " what did you see? I thought some one was coming in."

And some one indeed had entered, for when she turned to pick up her work and sit down again, she saw that death had come, silently, gently, kindly, and that Pris had fallen back with the sweet, bright

look of welcome and delight on her dead face.

"It do seem hard on her, poor girl, and her sweetheart coming home maybe tomorrow!" sobbed Polly that night_to Fred who had come over to see her. "But there! God knows best."

But she was wrong when she said it was hard, and right, more right than she knew, when she said, "God knows best," for how few of us who use the words realize a hundredth part of the wisdom and tender mercy of his providence. Pris was spared long weeks, perhaps months of hope deferred, ending, if the news ever found its way to Whistley, in bitter disappointment, for Will Wiseman never came back, having died three weeks before Pris, of fever in the hospital at Aden on his way home to England. Could it have been that when the gate of death opened so gently for Pris to pass through, she could see Will in the brightness on the other side and that this accounted for the look of surprise and delight on her dying face? Who can say?

From The National Review. CHILDREN AND MODERN LITERATURE. IT is often said that "this is the Age of Children." If literature really reflects the feelings of the age there would seem to be much truth in the saying. What would our ancestors think if they could rise again and read books the main interest of which centres in children?

The thing is new; it is both a cause and an effect. Children owe a good deal to the way in which they have come to the front in literature, and they never would so have come to the front had not feeling changed with regard to them since the days when - according to Miss Edgeworth the main duty of children was summed up in the lovely lines:

Speak when you're spoken to,
Do as you're bid,
Shut the door after you,

And you'll never be chid.

I know that I read, many years ago, these lines in one of Miss Edgeworth's books, though, so far as my memory serves, they were not quoted with any special approval.

In stories written especially for children it is not unnatural that children should play an important part. This class of literature, however, is of modern growth. Not until the beginning of the present century were children considered

And strewed repentant ashes on his head. HUBERT.

But children in ancient literature come in seldom, incidentally, in contrast with their elders. If they are introduced of set purpose it seems to be to bring into prominence the fact that brave men can be tender-hearted, and that women are seen at their best with children around them; or else to deepen the gloom of tragic sorrow. It is not quite true to say that children have no place in Greek tragedy. The Medea of Euripides owes much of its terrible force to the fact that Medea murders her children. But the children are not introduced for their own sake. They utter but a few words words wrung from them by terror. They are the mere means of making Medea's jealous rage more horrible, and the retribution which falls on Jason more complete. They help to show how complicated a thing is human passion; how many are the ways in which wrong-doers can be punished.

Much the same may be said as to the children introduced into Shakespeare's plays. The Arthur of “King John" is a touching picture. He is a true boy, but a boy seen amid such exceptional circumstances that his words and deeds do not give us much idea of ordinary boy-life. Some of his speeches smack too much of the philosopher. They are not, nor are they intended to be, the every-day language of childhood. What boy in ordinary life, about to have his eyes put out, would exclaim:

Hubert, the utterance of a brace of tongues
Must needs want pleading for a pair of eyes?
Though the next line is boyish enough:-
Let me not hold my tongue; let me not, Hu-
bert.
LIVING AGE.

VOL. LXXVII.

3967

But with my breath I can revive it, boy.

Hubert.

ARTHUR.

And, like a dog that is compelled to fight, Snatch at his master that doth tarr him on. I venture to think that all this is very unlike the talk of a boy, even when that boy is made by force of circumstances unusually thoughtful. In "Richard III.," we have children introduced; but they are by no means prominent figures. They do not long hold the stage, nor do they strike one as distinctively childlike. The fact is that in those days people would hardly have endured a play where, as in more than one modern drama, children were made the centre of attraction. The change is of gradual growth. Almost the first, if not quite the first, book which gave prominence to children was "Sandford and Merton," published in 1783. In my boyish days I thought it delightful. It never occurred to me then that Harry was an unmitigated little prig. I accepted him and Tommy and Mr. Barlow in perfect faith. Reading the book now, I cannot help wondering that I delighted in it so much then. Possibly children of to-day, more critical in their tastes, more ready to see the absurd side of things than were their parents, and having in their hands books much more amusing and true to life, would find "Sandford and Merton " either dull or merely a mark at which to shoot the arrows of their wit. But the book has great merit. Whatever may be said of Harry and Mr. Barlow, spoiled Tommy is real enough. A story that has been read for a hundred years, that has been burlesqued (as by Mr. Burnand), made fun of in many an article and in many home circles, and yet is read with interest, must have good stuff in it. If it had no other merit, it was original. It began a new era in literature. It showed that a book for the young could interest the old. Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Letitia Aikin) was almost contemporaneous with Mr. Day, the author of "Sandford and Merton." Her "Early