Major Gore had lingered on at Old Towers, she well knew, for her. They had talked much together; she had been in a melancholy mood, and his note had exactly harmonized. He had told her much of himself; of his past; of the meshes in which men by accident, fate, or folly, become entangled, of ties which cannot be avowed, but which none the less-all the more perhaps -a man of honor cannot discard; of obligations too subtle to define, but too real to be ignored when happiness would tempt us to ignore them. He had spoken with pathos, with despair, with a hopeless indifference about a life fatally complicated. And Flora Davenant had listened, with a growing chill at her heart as he spoke, for she knew what he meant to hint. It was a cry of suffering, of despair; it was the doom, too, of her own happiness, for she felt that she was talking to the man she loved. And now she stood a suppliant before the woman whose rival she had been, whom she had so often thwarted, humiliated, eclipsed. Lady Ormesby still lay motionless on the sofa, her eyes closed, as though she would fain shut out the world. A struggle was going on, the struggle of right and wrong, of good and bad, of noble and base, that is waged in every human conscience to the end. She had been profoundly mortified by all that the other had told her. It had stung her to the quick; it had roused her combativeness; it had appealed to feelings, to gratify which, at other times, in other moods, she would have crushed a rival without mercy and without remorse. But as she lay listening to the impassioned woman before her, a new light seemed to strike into her soul- -a new light, a new warmth. Emotions, long dormant, were stirred to life; she recognized the possibility of a generous act. The event long known to be inevitable had befallen her; yet the discovery cost her less than she could, beforehand, have imagined that it must. Was it coldness of heart? Was it indifference, or fatigue? Was it that she had never loved him? She knew not; she knew only that her feelings were as straw and stubble before the hot fires of her companion's vehement passion. She felt no power, no wish to resist. 66 "Flora Daven At last she spoke. ant," she said, you are strangely moved, strangely unlike yourself. I too will be unlike myself, the self the world has known. I will not admit all that your request implies. It is not true. No such attachment exists, or has ever existed; of late there has been less approach to it than ever. I have no rights to resign, no power to hinder your intimacies, your friendships; but I believe that I am honest in saying that I would not, if I could, stand in the way of your happiness, or what you believe to be so. I rejected that love years ago, and I have never, notwithstanding all that happened, regretted that decision. No relations of mine to any man need stand in your way. So far as any obligation to me goes, Major Gore is free; I set him free, if you are pleased to have it so. he is free already, and has made good use of his freedom. Let me be the first to wish you joy. The world is a friendless place, is it not? Let me have the pleasure of knowing that I have at least one friend." But the fact is As she spoke a rumble of wheels announced the returning party. The brake swept past the windows, the count and Miss Jukes followed in a pony-carriage, and Mrs. Cressingham's victoria brought up the rear of the cavalcade. Then came the sound of opening doors and the slam of lowered carriage-steps, the voices of the travellers as they entered the house. Suddenly the flow of talk stopped; there was a niysterious hush; the two ladies began to listen, their attention arrested by the unusual silence. Then followed exclamations of horror, incredulity, surprise. Instead of the crowd that would naturally have come bustling into the drawing-room, the party had dispersed; no one came near them. "What can be happening?" asked Mrs. Davenant. "Let us go and see. They rose to go; but, as they did so, the door opened. Miss Jukes, pale as a friend of the Cressinghams was killed HENRY CUNNINGHAM. From The Spectator. BEFORE BREAKFAST IN THE FEN. a ghost, came into the room with a day has broken, and at four o'clock on mysterious air and a very sombre face; a summer's morning even they are her accustomed gaiety had disappeared. scarcely awake. The early visitor to "Have you not heard?" she said in the stream-side will surprise the wild broken tones. "A most horrid thing ducks and herons before they leave has happened! The telegram was wait- their feeding-grounds for the day. In ing in the hall -a dreadful accident. that part of the Carrs with which the writer is best acquainted, the heronry lies in the centre of a thousand-acre wood, from which the birds sally in all directions to hunt the streams at night. In the early morning their grey and ghostly forms may be seen, as they stand quietly in the long meadow-grass, resting after their night's fishing, or wading about in the long, wet herbage. Seen among the white and curling vapors which lie upon the dripping aftermath, they seem like the spirits of the fen, as they slowly spread their wings and sail away towards the sunrise to their sanctuary beyond the stream. The departure of the herons is the signal for a general awakening of the main bird population of the Carrs. The tree-tops are full of rooks and jackdaws, wood - pigeons and stockdoves; and like children, their first impulse on awakening is to chatter. The rush and clatter of wings as the flocks leave the wood for their feedinggrounds is like the sound of the sea, and their numbers beyond conjecture. The fallow fields, where the roughly ploughed clods are dry and warm, are first visited, not only by the rooks, jackdaws, and pigeons, but also by the great flocks of peewits which have been ALTHOUGH Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutch engineer, drained sixty thousand acres of the fen of south-eastern Yorkshire in 1626, completing in two years a work which a commission appointed to report on the possibility of its reclamation had declared impossible, the upper levels of the "Carrs," as the great flats of Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axeholme are called, do not differ greatly from the appearance which they must have presented at the end of the last century, when John Smeaton, the builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, had shown how the last lingering surface-waters might be made to disappear. Before that time, according to a well-informed writer in the Field, the bittern; the ruff and reeve, the black-tailed godwit, the marsh harrier, the great crested grebe, and other rare water-fowl, bred com-feeding all night on the wet marshes. monly on the Carrs. But though these The last come, not for food, but, as it rarer birds have disappeared, the drain- seems, for rest and company, remaining age and enclosure of the flats, now sep- quite still and quiet, and apparently arated by deep and impassable streams, enjoying the warmth of the morning and planted with wide and enduring sun. But the great flocks of day-feedwoods by private owners, extends a ing birds are eager in search of food, natural protection to the remaining the rooks and jackdaws prying beneath species which still in countless numbers make the Carrs their home. Unlike most marsh-lands, the Carrs are neither gloomy nor deserted. But birds, not men, people the flats; and to meet them the visitor must keep early hours, and be abroad by sunrise, or in summer a little later; for it is possible to be too early for the birds, even after every clod, while the pigeons fly over each other's backs, struggling for a place in the crowd like their tame relations in a London square. Perhaps the latest birds to awaken to the business of the day are the partridges. Even in August the coveys do not seem to move till six o'clock, when they may be heard calling and making up their minds to leave their roosting-places for | feathers, lightly cushioned on the surthe first-cut stubbles. By eight o'clock face of the stream. Not even the floatin August or September, the birds have ing thistle-down lies more gracefully on ceased feeding, and fly to the river to the water, than do these little fleets bathe and drink, by some common and of feathers from the morning toilet of well-understood impulse, which brings the birds, the crisp and curling black the flocks in noisy and cheerful compa- plumes from the breast of rook and nies to the water-side. When coming jackdaw sailing by like fairy gondolas, down to drink, their flight and man- while here and there a feather from a ner of approach is altogether different pigeon's wing, with a drop of water for from that which marks their descent ballast in its curve, catches the wind at upon the fallow fields which are their every gust, and sails among the lesser morning feeding-grounds. The serious craft and dances on the ripples like business of the day is over, and they some miniature yacht. go down to the water in great compaThe pheasants and partridges also nies and processions, flying low over visit the stream to drink, though not to the ground and constantly alighting for bathe. Hidden near one of their favora short time, then rising and flying on-ite drinking-places, the writer has more wards with much cawing, chattering, than once observed the care and anxand gossip. Several different kinds iety which the wild pheasant exhibits unite in these bathing-parties. On one when bringing her brood to the water. occasion the writer saw a flock which Men are so rarely seen upon the Carrs, must have numbered at least a thou- that her fears must be due, not to the sand rooks and jackdaws approaching danger from human interference, but the water in this manner. With them to the attacks of the hawks and magwere scores of wood-pigeons, a flock of pies, foxes and stoats, which enjoy turtle-doves, and a number of peewits, almost the same freedom from disturball of which flew or alighted at the ance as the other wild creatures of same time and in the same direction. the fen. The pheasants invariably apThe stream was flowing rapidly and proach the stream from a wood near by smoothly between high embankments, a long hedgerow, which runs down to and it was only here and there that the the water, and gives complete proteccattle, or some careless weed-cutter, tion from winged enemies. The old had trampled down the edges suffi- bird then ascends the bank, and after ciently to make the access to the water some moments spent in surveying the easy for the birds. All these "bathing neighborhood with head erect and moghats," as we could see by looking up tionless, she descends and drinks, raisthe straight cut from behind the de- ing her head like a fowl after each cayed stump of the last great tree that draught. A low call then summons the stood upon the marsh before the forest brood, who descend in turn, while the disappeared, were occupied by crowds old bird once more mounts guard. If of rooks and pigeons drinking and disturbed, the whole brood run into the bathing, until others came down and fence, with a speed and silence more to pushed them forward till they were be expected from some nimble fourobliged to fly across the stream. There footed animal than in a bold and strongthey sat in long rows on the rails which flying bird like the wild pheasant. The run by the side of the dyke, drying partridges, on the contrary, drink at themselves or preening their feathers, the most open spots, flying in a body until the whole row of fencing was cov- with much noise and calling to the ered with black lines of cawing and waters, and returning as hastily when chattering birds. In no long time the their thirst is satisfied. By nine o'clock water brought down traces of the bath, the Carrs are almost deserted by the in the shape of hundreds of floating birds. IV. SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF HEINE, New Review, V. NATURE STUDIES, CXCVI. Title and Index to Volume CXCVI. Cornhill Magazine, 771 790 804 For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. TURNING THE FLOWERS. OUT in the country, where two roads met, I sat me down, with a bidden right, And a sense of comfort over me stole ; The board, though homely, was clean and white, And flowers were upon it set in a bowl. And the good wife said unto me, her guest, As she twisted the blooms in the bowl so brown: "I like to turn what are freshest and best To the side where the man of the house sits down." I looked at the flowers - so white, so red; I gazed at the happy-faced busy wife, And, "That is a nice idea," I said; "I wish we could carry it all through life. For the world would be a far happier place, And many a glint through the darkness loom, If we turned the flowers' with a tactful grace, And showed the glory instead of the gloom." NANNIE POWER-O'DONOGHUE. Chambers' Journal. ADIEU! You have a heart of fire and gold- Not mine to mix among the crowd Who worship you, and bend the knee, To sing your praises long and loud Love's silence is reserved for me. My love, that is both dumb and deep, I say Adieu because my part And every day a year of pain. WALTER HERRIES POLLOCK. Longman's Magazine. |