"Not even to hysterical affections, now "Mr. Orridge accepts your offer with and then?" thanks," said Mrs. Norbury, beckoning to "Never, since she has been in this Mrs. Jazeph to advance into the room. house." have persuaded him that you are not quite “You surprise me; there is something in so weak and ill as you look." her look and manner

"Yes, yes; everybody remarks that, at first; but it simply means that she is in delicate health, and that she has not led a very happy life (as I suspect) in her younger days. The lady from whom I had her (with an excellent character) told me that she had married unhappily when she was in a sadly poor, unprotected state. She never says any thing about her married troubles herself; but I believe her husband ill-used her. However, it does not seem to me that this is our business. I can only tell you again that she has been an excellent servant here for the last five years, and that, in your place, poorly as she may look, I should consider her as the best nurse that Mrs. Frankland could possibly wish for under the circumstances. There is no need for me to say any Take Mrs. Jazeph, or telegraph to London for a stranger-the decision of course rests with you.'

more.

Mr. Orridge thought he detected a slight tone of irritability in Mrs. Norbury's last sentence. He was a prudent man; and he suppressed any doubts he might still feel in reference to Mrs. Jazeph's physical capacities for nursing rather than risk offending the most important lady in the neighborhood at the outset of his practice in West Winston as a medical man.

"I cannot hesitate a moment after what you have been good enough to tell me," he said. 66 Pray believe that I gratefully accept your kindness and your housekeeper's offer.

Mrs. Norbury rang the bell. It was answered, on the instant, by the housekeeper herself.

The doctor wondered whether she had been listening outside the door, and thought it rather strange, if she had, that re should be so anxious to learn his decision.

"I

A gleam of joyful surprise broke over the housekeeper's face. It looked suddenly younger by years and years, as she smiled and expressed her grateful sense of the trust that was about to be reposed in her. For the first time also since the doctor had seen her, she ventured on speaking before she was spoken to.

"When will my attendance be required, sir?" she asked.

"As soon as possible," replied Mr. Orridge. How quickly and brightly her dim eyes seemed to clear as she heard that answer! How much more hasty than her usual movements was the movement with which she now turned round and looked appealingly at her mistress!

"Go whenever Mr. Orridge wants you,' said Mrs. Norbury. "I know your accounts are always in order, and your keys always in their proper places. You never make confusion and you never leave confusion. Go, by all means, as soon as the doctor wants you.” "I suppose you have some preparations to make?" said Mr. Orridge.

None, sir, that need delay me more than
half-an-hour," answered Mrs. Jazeph.
"This evening will be early enough," said
the doctor, taking his hat, and bowing to
Mrs. Norbury.
“Come to the Tiger's Head,
and ask for me.
seven and eight.
Norbury."

I shall be there between
Many thanks again, Mrs.

"My best wishes and compliments to your patient, doctor."

"At the Tiger's Head, between seven and eight this evening," reiterated Mr. Orridge, as the housekeeper opened the door for him.

"Between seven and eight, sir," repeated the soft sweet voice, sounding younger than ever, now that there was an under-note of pleasure running through its tones.

CONSUMING SMOKE FROM BAKERS' OVENS.Mr. Beadon, the magistrate at the Marlboroughstreet Police Court, has given a decision which will help to enforce the provisions of the Smoke Consuming Act. He fined a baker £5, and £5 costs, for not having any apparatus for the con

It is

sumption of smoke applied to his oven.
proved not only that it is practicable to consume
the smoke from bakers" ovens, but that the
means adopted insure a large saving of fuel.
We are glad that the bakers have had a lesson
they will probably remember.

"So the year's done with! (Love me forever!) All March begun with, April's endeavor; May-wreaths that bound me June needs must sever; Now snows fall around me, Quenching June's fever (Love me forever!)." "Ay, love me forever! The poor soul closed the book that lay open on her knee, and, through tears that made the landscape swim, looked out of the lattice by which she was sitting.

It was early autumn-autumn at the time it is sobered but not yet saddened by the thought that winter is coming. From the casement, round which clustered heavy masses of odorous clematis, spread, in the foreground, a little lovely garden, checkered with sun and shade and glowing flowers, among which the brown bees roamed all through the bright hours, while beyond, a broad, blue, distant landscape stretched itself away to

the far horizon.

She was one of those women of whom we have little experience, but who our instinct tells us at a glance have survived a great sorrow that has altered their nature, and that is ever present with them as their shadow, which they have learned to bear from sheer necessity, but which they have never accepted or got resigned to. She was not young, nor handsome, though she might once have been so. Her dress was dark, simple, strictly neat, and put on with that unconscious taste and care that marks a

sense of innate propriety and refinement, totally apart from vanity or the desire to attract; and her smooth dark hair, marked here and there with a single thread of silver, was braided under her quiet white cap.

"Ay, love me forever!" she repeated, compressing her lips over her teeth till they became bloodless. "The last words I said to him the last night I ever looked on him. O, if I could but see him once more, tell him to his face, calmly, as I could now, what a hell he has made of my life; how he has turned the current of my nature, blasted all that was best, nourished all that was worst in me, taken from me the love and trust in God and man,-0, if I could do this, then I could die in peace, were it even by his hand! Peace!—for twenty years I have been pining for the only peace I can ever hope for-that of the grave, and it will not come. Now I know, that till I have seen him, spoken to him, cursed him, I cannot even die. But that thought is something to live for: it is a fearful thing, a life without an object. No hope, no aim, no tangible desire, good or bad; and twenty years of this existence have proved too much for me, strong as I thought myself. I do not pray. God does not listen to the prayers In a corner, the tall clock ticked its of such as I am; and indeed I have no "ever never, never ever" drowsily; a thought to ask any thing of Him. He has blackbird sat still on his perch; a great afflicted me too heavily; He has laid on me tabby cat, that had long ago given over a burden He knew I was not able to bear. glaring at him, subdued, as it seemed, by I was proud; yes, and He has smitten me the passionless atmosphere of the place, lay just where I could least endure to be smitwinking with her paws tucked under her; ten.

In the quiet room within all was hushed and still as without; such a pretty room, so English, so peaceful, so homely, yet with such a touch of elegance in its simple oldfashioned arrangements. Its polished oak furniture, its dark wainscoting, its Indian china cups and bowls, its wide fire-place with steel dog-irons, its deep latticed windows, all belonged to a time gone by, and yet all were kept in a state of neatness and careful preservation, that made them as fit for service as on the day of their comple

tion.

and the very flies ceased to buzz and torment"There may be heaven, there must be hell; as they are wont to do in autumn, once Meanwhile there is our earth here-well!' ›› they get within the stilly precincts of the

room.

And outwardly quiet as the rest sat its mistress, looking out with unseeing eyes towards the horizon.

DCLXXII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XVII. 8

She got up, replaced the volume of poems on the shelf where it stood with several others, and, taking her knitting, began working with the outward placidity of one whom the habit of strong self-command for

years has enabled to perform the routine of daily occupation with ease and skill.

We must go back two-and-twenty years. Esther Eyre was then eighteen, the only child of a rich farmer, who, as well as his wife, doted on her, and fully believed her to be a marvel of all human perfection.

She was very pretty, not without cleverness, proud, wilful, headstrong, though possessed of qualities that reasonable and wholesome culture would have nurtured into virtues. Her affections were deep and strong; she was generous, unselfish, sincere, and self-devoted.

During this period she had had various opportunities of marrying well, and settling in the position to which she was born; but such a destiny was, of all others, the one least suited to her ambition. The farmers' sons who sought her alliance had coarse hands, talked agriculture, and could not, any one of them, sing Haynes Bailey's ballads. She must have a gentleman, that is to say, a man who performed no manual employment to earn a livelihood, and who was eminently genteel; Esther's notions of a gentleman going little beyond these limits.

And at the end of the two years she found a gentleman such as her dreams had presented.

But this culture was denied her. Every caprice of hers was accepted, every wish gratified, every word and act tolerated, if James Stowell was the son of a man who not applauded; and worst of all, perhaps, had begun life as a small attorney in a counshe received that dangerous degree of educa- try town, who had scraped together-no tion which calls into play a woman's vanity matter how-a certain capital, and who had and love of display, which renders her unfit finished by establishing himself as a moneyfor the exercise of simple duties, and leaves lending lawyer in London. The trade her mind as uncultivated as before. She throve, and the elder Stowell, in order to acquired, in short, a smattering of accom- secure a consideration that would insure a plishments at a provincial boarding-school, fresh supply of clients, adopted a style of and at sixteen returned to her father's house, vulgar luxury that, to a certain degree, a genteel miss, utterly unsuited to take her achieved his purpose. place in any station in society.

Poor Esther! her motto might have been, "I know nothing, and despise all things"-all things, at least, within her reach. Profoundly ignorant herself, she had no patience for the ignorance of those around her. She turned up her nose at all homely interests, occupations, and pleasures; and she had no resources within herself to supply her with others. The consequence was, an endless pining for a change of position, a discontented longing after excitement of any kind, above all, a craving to enter that paradise of fools of the middle class yclept genteel society; that mean, trifing, struggling, truly vulgar medium between the society of the unpretending grade, which comprises all who honestly and simply gain their bread by their labor, of whatever nature that labor be,-a class from which it originally sprang, and which it affects to despise, and that of the upper walks in the social scale, the members of which, in turn, despise and ridicule it, while it seeks to ape their ideas and manners in preposterous caricatures, and cringes at the feet that contemptuously spurn it.

And thus two years of Esther's life passed after her return from school.

His son soon outstripped him in the course he had adopted. Good-looking, plausible, and with a peculiar talent for suiting himself to the ideas, peculiarities, and weaknesses of those with whom he came in contact, James Stowell twisted and wheedled and wormed himself into the society of the youth of a class considerably above his own. Gaming, the turf, and other such amiable devices for the dispersion of money and credit, soon made very considerable breaches in the Stowell possessions, and led to an interview between the father and son, which terminated in the former assuring the latter, by no means politely, but very energetically, that the present debts of honor (so called) once paid, he, the son and heir, must contrive as he best could to live on a certain and not very liberal allowance.

Of course James Stowell had not the slightest notion of living on any thing of the kind, and fresh debts were contracted, which Stowell senior resolutely declined to pay. The consequence was, that James found the atmosphere of London, Newmarket, and Goodwood, wholly unsuited to his constitution, for the time being at least, and that he considered the air of Yorkshire (there is

a good deal to be done there in the horse- | house of its own, and freedom to come and dealing line) likely to be of some service to go, and dress itself, without mamma's dictahim. tion and papa's grumbling at its milliner's

So to Yorkshire he went, and somehow fell bills. in with Esther Eyre.

Times must have been very hard indeed, or the notion of marrying a farmer's daughter would have been the very last to have entered the head of our hero.

The hour of waking is ever a critical one, and generally decides a woman's destiny; for it is not all women-far from it-who ever do come to the second birth, that of the heart and soul. Those, the many, that are However, they were hard, and the notion not destined to arrive thereat possess the therefore found admission. It was an idea same notions, somewhat hardened, somewhat that cost nothing to take into consideration: more materialized even, at the end of their nothing better at present loomed in the career than at the beginning. horizon. He might try the thing cautiously, Esther began by admiring James Stowell and if the hope of a more favorable or satis-immensely, and by being extremely pleased factory dénouement presented itself, James and flattered by his marked attentions. Stowell was not the man to let any foolish Such a man was not often met with in the considerations, any quixotic scruples, inter-society to which she belonged, but in whose fere in his arrangement of affairs.

circle she felt herself degraded by moving; and vanity was the first sentiment awakened in her breast.

So Esther Eyre's little fortune was soon, in imagination, stowed in the very empty pockets of our youthful adventurer; and to Soon this gave place to a real and intense Esther herself, as the key of the coffer, noth-affection, into which she rushed with the ing less, he began to pay assiduous court.

And so at last she had found the prince who was to free her from bondage! This was perhaps Esther's first thought. It may seem strange that the earliest impression of a girl of eighteen should be a selfish and a worldly one. But I think most people who have carefully studied life, and bought their experience thereof, will have discovered the mistake which exists in supposing that it is ever in early youth that the most pure and unworldly and golden-age ideas are uppermost.

headlong impetuosity that marked her character. Stowell saw his advantage at once. and, sure of her,-for, like many women, proudly intractable in all other relations of life, she was ready to be made the slave of a lover, he began playing a game of fast and loose that bound her yet more to him, from the insecurity of her tenure, at the same time that it rendered a withdrawal on his part, should he deem it advisable to adopt such a course, all the easier.

Finally, the speculations in horseflesh, that principally led to his bending his steps Early youth craves pleasure, excitement, to that part of the country, not proving so the enjoyments that proceed from the lust successful as he hoped, and duns becoming of the eye, the gratification of the senses, as dangerously impatient, he finished by makchildren prefer butterflies to nightingales: ing up his mind to propose to the farmer's and all that tend to insure it these fancied daughter. What her reply to the propositreasures it grasps at eagerly. A few years tion was need not of course be stated. The later, the dormant soul awakes, and demands views of her father, however, were not quite possessions of more solid worth. It learns the same as her own. Apart from his blind that Love walking in the mire may be hap-affection for his daughter, Mr. Eyre was a pier than Indifference in a carriage, that a sufficiently shrewd and sensible man, and tête-à-tête over the fire may possess charms much of what he saw and heard of young such as the crowd in the ball-room never Stowell led him to mistrust his motives and know, and that certain words of earnest himself, and to look on the notion of his beheart-spoken prose may sound incomparably coming the husband of Esther with any sweeter than the strains of all the prima thing but satisfaction. donnas in civilized Europe.

For this emergency our hero was quite But in the mean while, before the woman's prepared; but he well knew Esther's influheart has awakened, it is apt to think com-ence in the household: on it he counted, and placently of being Mrs. So-and-so, with a on it he worked, exciting the chivalry and

A letter was brought her, and she paled

flattering the pride of the poor foolish girl, |ding, had its place beside the deep love, the by laying all his cause in her hands, and solemn sense of the duties of her new posileaving her to fight out the domestic battle tion, in her mind. alone. As usual, she conquered by alternate prayers and reproaches, entreaties and sulks; and started at the sight of the well-known and very unwillingly indeed, and with sor-hand. row and mistrust, was the paternal consent accorded.

And so the wedding day was fixed, and the wedding dress ordered; and Esther was perfectly happy.

It was the night before that great and memorable day, and James Stowell spent the evening as usual with his bride-elect. Things having come to a crisis now, the father had resolved to make the best of the matter. The mother, who saw only with her daughter's eyes, good woman, and had never therefore objected to the match, was shining in the reflected radiance of her child's felicity; and Esther was too deeply happy to be demonstrative of her joy.

At half-past ten, a late hour for the farm, James Stowell rose to go, and Esther accompanied him to the porch, lingering over the last "Good-night." It was June, with June's white moonlight and faint nightwinds stirring the climbing roses in the trellis, and bringing the breath of new-made hay from the meadows. A pensiveness stole over her, which James tried to laugh away; sentiment sat ill on him, and it was always the last resource to which he resorted. Nay, any one but that poor blind girl might have seen there was a touch of raillery and even impatience in his mode of treating her.

Good-night, my dear," he said; "you must let me be off now; for I have letters to write, a quantity of things to do, before I can get to bed. Don't you let yourself be getting into the dolefuls, my little wife; that's right!" as she looked up smilingly at the magic syllable. Keep up your spirits, and be looking in beauty to-morrow, do you mind? Good-night; " and he kissed her hastily, and was off without replying to the last words she whispered in his ear:

"Love me forever!"

My dear Esther," it ran, matters, which it is impossible for me to explain at this moment, render it indispensable for me to go to town by this morning's mail. How unfortunate! I'll write as soon as I can, but I don't know when that may be. Keep up your spirits.-Yours affectionately,

"J. STOWELL.' ""

No date, no address given, no means of communication afforded, no hope held out, and for regret-"How unfortunate!

She felt the bitter mockery of every word in the very inmost recesses of her soul; she knew at once that all was over forever, that there was nothing to be done or hoped for, or wondered at even; and in an instant there passed before her opened eyes a vision of those thousand minute instances of heartlessness and indifference on his part that had hitherto escaped her.

She took off her wedding dress, and packed it in a little trunk quietly and silently. All the other relics and tokens of this shattered love-they were neither costly nor manyshe burnt with his few letters; and then she announced to her parents that she meant to leave the place forever. Prayers and tears having failed to move her, she went, accompanied by her mother, to an aunt in London, with whom she remained, visited constantly by her parents, till their death, followed by that of her sole remaining relative, left her to take up her abode alone in the world.

At the age of thirty she came, a grave, staid, middle-aged woman, to settle in the cottage where I have first described her; and here, under the maiden name of her mother and aunt,-for she had cast aside her own with every other vestige of the past, except the wedding dress, fading and yellowing in the trunk,-she resided with a little The morrow came, and Esther was up servant-maid; shunning all society, all comand dressed in her bridal attire, and prepared panionship, without a friend or an interest to start for the church. Shall I confess it? in the wide world, and finding in the monoteven then a little touch of vanity, of con- onous routine of her every-day employments, scious superiority over her somewhat awed performed only for herself, varied with a and deeply-admiring bridesmaids, over the little desultory reading, sometimes of good good simple people assembled to the wed-books, sometimes of bad ones, a very insuffi