the apple tree under which you stood in those early days when I was dying of love and dared not tell you." "Yes, dear; and do you remember the gipsy tent, and" Jacob started. "What is the matter, dear ?" "Nothing," said Jacob, "nothing; I spent a night or two in the encampment, when I went to the cottage and found you gone." 'Indeed," said Lucy; "tell me of it, love; when was it?" "In the winter; it is not a pleasant memory; you shall hear the story some other time; at present let us only bask in the sunshine, dear; we have had enough of the frost and snow. There, now, you must drink one more glass of this grand old wine; and we will clink our glasses as Bohemians do and toast Fortune." "What would Allen say if he saw us?" said Lucy, laughing. "I fear we were never intended for Mayfair, Jacob." "There! I clink the glass at the top, then at the bottom, then I say, 'To Lucy." "You said we should toast Fortune," replied Lucy, smiling. "It is all the same, dear," said Jacob. "Now I must leave you to your wine," said Lucy, rising, “and prepare my companions for your presence in the drawing-room. I have two wise ladies here who assist me in my studies, you know. There, dear, will you have coffee here or in the drawing-room?" Lucy looked round at her lover with sparkling archness. Jacob's only reply was to kiss the mouth that asked the tantalising question. Coffee was speedily announced, and Jacob followed Allen to the drawing-room, where he was duly introduced to Lucy's ladies, whom he found very pleasant and agreeable. They played, and sang, and talked of lords and ladies. By-and-by Lucy sat down to her harp and sang the dear old hymn of the early days; and, with the reader's permission, we will leave Jacob drinking in words and music and all their dear associations, and, when no one observed him, quietly wiping away some tears of joy. His sudden happiness was almost too much for him. (To be continued.) FROM Italy, hard upon the news which told of the death of Mrs. Mary Somerville, comes to me from another lady of high attainments and proud position in the world of letters, one of my most esteemed correspondents, Mrs. Cowden Clarke, a sonnet touchingly expressive of her veneration for her aged sister in literature, and doubly touching now that the lady to whom the lines were addressed six years ago is dead. Mrs. Clarke's sonnet, she tells me, was laid by in 1866, and never reached the good and gifted woman to whom it was addressed. Now, therefore, for the first time, the exquisite lines see the light. I am thankful for the opportunity of printing them here as a tribute to the memory of the dead and a welcome memento of the living : SONNET ON RECEIVING A LOCK OF MRS. MARY SOMERVILLE'S HAIR. THAT head-which long among the stars hath dwelt In deep research and questions that have dealt It looks as though, communing with the stars, Some reflex of Diana's crescent white, Or steel-bright rays shorn from the crest of Mars. Feb. 26th, 1866. MARY COWDEN CLARKE. I HAVE received a second edition of the Rev. Dr. Gerald Molly's photographically-illustrated account of "The Passion Play at OberAmmergau in the Summer of 1871." The book is unique of its kind. The story of the play is told with graphic force and power, and the illustrations are characteristic memorials of the time. They include photographs of the leading actors, together with several incidents of the piece. The description of the theatre in the open air, "shut in by a glorious amphitheatre of hills," calls to mind Dickens's sketch from his window in "Pictures from Italy." Within a stone's throw, as it seems, the audience of the day-theatre sit, their faces turned this way. But as the stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of the cause, to see their faces changed so suddenly from earnestness to laughter. At the close of his book, Dr. Molly, after quoting sundry persons upon whom the Passion Play made a deep and lasting impression, records his own feelings. He went to Ober-Ammergau prejudiced against the Passion Play; he remained to be "more sensibly impressed than ever he had been by any sermon, however eloquent." Nevertheless, he is not an advocate for a frequent repetition of the Play, nor for its extension beyond the village which its representation has made famous. "The peculiar combination of circumstances which, in the course of many generations, has brought it to its present perfection in this mountain hamlet could not, I think, be found elsewhere in the world; nor could they long subsist even here without the protection which is afforded by its rare occurrence." THE cruellest people in social life are those who are exacting in the matter of personal beauty. Though professedly susceptible, they are by nature hard-hearted and unimpressionable. They want generosity; they are deficient in sympathy; they know nothing of personal affinity and community of sentiment. To them facial expression, and the colour that comes and goes in forehead and cheek and lips, have no meaning but the meaning of artistic effect; and their glance, even when it is a glance of admiration, is devoid of kindness and genuine feeling. Such people are incapable of the finer arts of pleasing, and they derive but little pleasure themselves in their social relations. Their fastidiousness amounts to partial blindness; their affectation of taste denotes a deficiency of sensibility. How can he enjoy life who is hard to please by the qualities of face and figure, of voice and expression and mode of speech of those among whom he moves? What would society be if there were in it no charm for us but the charm of perfection? Is it possible to account for the well known fact that the particular trouble or misfortune with which a man happens to be struggling is immeasurably magnified while he is half asleep or trying to sleep in the night? Everybody has had experience of this very trying form of human misery. The sorrow of yesterday piles itself mountains high while we are tossing upon a hot pillow. The obstacle that has to be encountered to-morrow already triumphs over us. When the question is fairly considered this is, perhaps, one of the most easily explained of the phenomena of the dreaming and half-dreaming state. Imperfect sleep is not, apparently, a condition equally distributed over the faculties. Our mind is, in all probability, divided into distinct sections, somewhat after the fashion in which the phrenologists map out the skull, and some of these sections are in a state of entire insensibility while others are partially active. So we are conscious of our trouble, but not of the elements by which it may be qualified. In the anxiety of the day hope has, perhaps, borne but a very small share, and hope, therefore, takes its rest in the usual way at night and plays no part in the disturbed working of the mind. Hence the difficulty has to be encountered when the mind is in the condition in which it would be in its waking time if the quality of hope were wholly withheld. We must wait, however, for a great advance in the science of psychology before we can set down a precise theory of sleep and dreams. AN altogether new experience to most Englishmen would be a day and night at Land's End when the wind blows in winter. The finest description of a hurricane ever written is that in "David Copperfield," in which the hero travels down to Yarmouth just before the shipwreck of Steerforth; but the invisible element rages under a different set of conditions in West Cornwall. There is a good, sturdy breadth of land at the back of the east coast, but at Sennen there is nothing but the mad ocean on three sides, and a strip of barren flat on the fourth. So there the howling storm rushes over the bit of granite earth unresisted, never losing force for an instant in its passage. In inland England we are astonished when the wind is troublesome to fight against. We can hardly believe the evidence of our senses if it stops our locomotion. At Land's End there is no better recognised reality than the uncompromising power of the wind. Everybody shuns it. Nobody expects to come off master in a conflict with it. The natives try to cheat it. They make short catches of runs from post to dwarfwall during a momentary lull. They throw themselves down flat to prevent being carried off their feet. The wind tears their loose clothes off them, and whips them into shreds with their strings and ribbons. If they lose guard or shelter when the gust comes it dashes them against the first obstacle and bruises them. There is a village population at Sennen, in the centre of the point of land, who grow terribly serious when the winter is coming on. They talk of their life as one of bitter hardship because of that awful season. Strong, hale, and enduring as they are, they are not, in their hearts, inured to these conditions of life. They are not, like the Laplanders or the Greenlanders, part and parcel of the country in which they live. The Cornishman is a thinking being, ready at drawing comparisons of his lot with that of his fellow-countrymen in better latitudes, and he tells the story of his misery with deplorable earnestness. His houses and huts are made chiefly of granite; but the wind, though it cannot tear them to pieces, has its revenge upon them. It fills them with a roar and racket which deprives home of all its peace and comfort. The windows are nailed up in winter to save them from being shaken to fragments. A plug is jammed into every hole and cranny. Doors are fixed in order that they may not be knocked out of their frames. Indeed, the one business of winter is to hold on for dear life till the brief summer comes again. THERE is reason to believe that the talent for oral story-telling diminishes with the extension of reading and the growth of literature. Not the same necessity exists as of old for the preservation of the details of a narrative in the memory, and there is a general tendency in human nature to avoid a needless exercise of the faculties. Thus it is that every year the men who can tell good stories grow fewer. Some have a natural bent that way, but even they do not cultivate the gift after the manner of those who went before them. They perhaps have something of an advantage in naturalness, but they lose a little in skill. It is not the practice now to preserve the exact words and identical points of a narration. The incidents are not repeated in precisely the same form. The story-tellers of a past generation knew their tales by heart, and recited them with all the exactness with which the same actor would repeat, night after night, the words, the accent, the emphasis, and the tone of a famous soliloquy. It was reserved for a particular syllable, pronounced in a particular manner, to send a shudder through the audience, to raise their expectancy to the highest tension, or to call forth irresistible laughter. By abundant testimony, aided in some measure by the recollections of a generation now passing away, we know that these were the |