struggles on the stage, and how she had made a peaceful home for her mother and herself, and how she had first met Alec, and what they had been to each other, and he sat listening and smiling over the tips of his fingers, until she suddenly remembered that she was playing a part, and broke off with a theatrical sigh, saying, "Alas! it is all over."

"Quite so, quite so!" said the sympathetic Pig. "But why did Lord Bermondsey break it off, and when?"

Circe hesitated. It was now that she felt that it was one thing to play a part that an author has thought out and written, and quite another to improvise an unrehearsed scene. The harmless, necessary dramatic author for whom hitherto she had felt and freely expressed such divine contempt was suddenly revealed to her as more necessary than harmless. The part she could act, but she had no words. She fell back on a tame subterfuge. "I had rather say nothing about that," and she made business with the handkerchief.

"Pretty, but not effective," was the Pig's unmoved criticism. "I can see," he said aloud, "that Lord Bermondsey has behaved badly to you"-she started -"very badly," he added, with exaggerated emphasis.

"I am not here to blame Alec-Lord Bermondsey."

"And I am not here, madam," continued the Pig, raising his voice, "to defend him. I admit freely that he has treated you and your mother shamefully, contemptibly. I have a very low opinion of his Lordship."

Circe looked uncomfortably at the carpet, and Wegg gave a short bark as if to say, "I agree, and for the same reasons."

The office-boy came in and silently put a piece of paper with a name upon it before the chief. He let it fall carelessly on the table so that Circe could

not but see Alec's name. She was deeply agitated. It all seemed so unfair to the poor old gentleman. But she determined to see it through.

"There is no need," he continued, "for any further delay. Although you have not told me in so many words, madam, that your engagement is broken off, I gather that I am to take it that that is so."

Circe bowed assent, wondering in her own mind if lawyers were all such easy prey as this one.

The Pig rose from the table, and, pulling out a wide green pocket-book from an inner pocket, handed it across the table to Circe. "There, madam, is five thousand pounds, the price of my client's villainy."

To Circe this sounded absolutely and terribly real, but to Mr. Jameson it sounded as if Harvey Mutch had really gone quite off his head. He rose from his chair.

"I will count the notes," he said, "if you desire to pay my client in this unusual fashion, and give you a receipt."

"By all means, Jameson," said Harvey Mutch, crossing to the fireplace to ring a bell.

Jameson took the suspicious-looking porte-monnaie and opened it in haste. He picked out note after note and threw them on the table.

"What on earth is the meaning of this, Mr. Mutch? Why do you hand my client this trash? These are not even forged notes, they are theatrical tissue paper. Are you mad?"

And he might have been. For he stood at the fireplace grinning joyfully, his head in the air, thoroughly enjoying the scene of their amazement. And as he took the centre of their little stage, enter Lord Bermondsey, L.C., and "stops at door as if in surprise"as they say in stage directions.

"My dear Jameson," said Harvey Mutch in a kindly tone, "you are a very clever young man and an excellent

solicitor, but this case was a little outside the ordinary lines, and you came here to-day, not to settle a piece of litigation, but to take a very small part in a very small comedy. These notes came from Covent Garden. They have relieved many a distressed hero, no doubt. And as there was no breach of promise, except in a theatrical sense, the way to settle it was with theatrical notes. What happened was this. These young people wanted to get married. They thought I should refuse the money necessary for married happiness, and they hit on the expedient of a bogus breach of promise action to be settled by a payment of five thousand pounds, which I should otherwise have refused to advance. That's right, isn't it?"

Alec and Circe looked at each other to see which of them had told.

"No It

"No, no," continued the Pig. one told, or rather everyone told. was all on the surface. Why, I wager that old bull-dog knew all about it."

Wegg smiled from ear to ear, and nodded his head until his collar rattled again. Of course he knew. Was he not of their party when they drove home from Wimbledon and the plot was hatched?

"But all's well that ends well," said the Pig smiling. "My Lord, I congratulate you on your choice. Miss England has already forgiven me my little The Cornhill Magazine.

part in her comedy. Your Lordship will find in your pass-book five thousand pounds have been placed to your credit. They both mentioned that figure, eh, Jameson? My dear," he continued, going towards Circe, "“may you be very happy. I daresay you have heard my nickname"-Circe blushed"oh yes, I know it. My office boy has a careless tongue and a voice that carries. But you too have a nickname not unknown. I want you to ask this young man of yours one thing. Granted I am all he believes, could not he trust your winning ways to turn me from my brutish ways? Or was he jealous of the old man, eh? Come, Jameson, let us pull down the curtain. The dog will chaperone you two for a moment, I doubt not, whilst we go and settle a little matter of costs."

"Why, really, as to that, you know began Jameson.

"Nonsense," said Harvey Mutch, taking him by the arm and carrying him out of the room. "Let the young folk pay for their folly. Costs you shall have. Taxed costs. Taxed by Master Cupid, eh?"

And as the door closed Circe threw her arms round Alec's neck, saying, "How could you, Alec? The Pig is an old darling."

And Wegg howled a joyful epithalamium of his own.

Edward A. Parry.

On what Mr. Henry James calls the American Scene, oftener than on most others, is it apparent that one man in his time plays many parts. This was recognized by Hawthorne when, in "The House of the Seven Gables," he presented the young daguerrotypist Holgrave (who had been much else besides) as almost a national and sym; bolic figure.

In this sense, of being a man acquainted with many trades, Mr. Irvine (who is now the pastor of a notable New York church) began to be an American where many other Americans

"From the Bottom Up." By Alexander Irvine. (Doubleday, Page & Co.)

The son of an An

begin: in Ireland. trim cobbler, he was early turned out to sell newspapers. Reading and writ. ing did not come by nature, nor even by Act of Parliament, to Irish boys in his grade of life; but the aspiration for these excellences early possessed him. On scraps of leather he would scrawl mysterious inscriptions in the hope that they might by chance mean something. At these his mother, the only reader in the family, shook her head. He entered a school, but suffered so badly in the ordeal of initiation that he decided to give his mornings as well as his evenings to selling newspapers. "The extra work added a little to my

and income preserved my looks." While acting as guardian (scarecrow) of a potato field he had what he calls his first vision. We should like to quote the whole account of one of the most striking instances of "conversion" we have read. What was distinctive in the case is that the experience was not recognized as being "religious," in any sense which the term then had for him, nor associated with any religious questionings. It was merely a great and sudden quickening, and a flooding with joy:

I was sitting on the fence at the I close of the day, a very happy day. must have been moved by the color of the sky, or by the emotion produced by the lines of the hymn. It may have been both. But as I sat on the fence and watched the sun set over the trees, an emotion swept over me and the tears began to flow. My body seemed to change as by the pouring into it of some strange, life-giving fluid. I wanted to shout, to scream aloud; but instead, I went rapidly over the hill into the woods, fell on my knees, and began to pray.

conse

For

The whole account carries conviction, especially the curious first quences of this soul's-awakening. after a night of trancelike happiness the lad arose with new discriminations and desires:

I realized .. that I was in rags and dirty. I shook my mother out of her slumber and begged her to help me sew up the rents in my clothes. Ι had no shoes, but I carefully washed my feet, combed my tousled unkempt hair, and took great pains in the washing of my face. All this was a mystery to my mother. A very unusual thing ended these preparations for the day. My mother said I looked "purty," and kissed me as I went out the door.

There is a school of modern psychologists who, we fancy, would see here only an instance of the onset of adoles

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLVIII. 2500

cence producing its normal effects with dramatic suddenness and intensity, like the aloe blossoming in thunder. They might find confirmation in the youth's next "vision," the subject of which was "a beautiful city girl" who stayed a few days at the house of the landsteward, and was by the ignorant but wistful youth shown round the estate once or twice. The daughter of a florist, and educated-it was as though she had been the Queen of France, so far above him was she. It is a pretty story, naively, yet reticently told. Very naive also was the reason for his satisfaction later in being promoted to be a groom's helper: "I became the possessor of a hard hat. For two years I had instinctively longed for something on my head that I could politely remove to a lady." It is a bewitching country where such sentiments grow in the potato field.

As groom's helper he had by being occasionally employed indoors, a further glimpse into the world above him. He had not yet learned to read, for all his longings; and the shame of his ignorance returning upon him with redoubled power, drove him from "the haunts of my childhood." A halfstarved position as groom to some meagre doctor in Belfast did nothing to make him a scholar; but beatific opportunities of seeing (never of speaking to) the young city lady at church bound him to the place for three months. When she appeared at church no more he betook himself to Scotland, and worked in various coal-pits, still haunted by the desire for education. In these pits, he says, Keir Hardie was then working, and already influencing the minds of his fellows in the direction of social questioning. But

my ideal did not lead me in that direction. I was struggling to get into the other world for another reason. I wanted to live a religious life. I wanted to move men's souls as I had

moved the soul of the drunken stonemason in my home town.

By the advice of the late Prof. Henry Drummond, whom he met at a religious meeting, he left the pits and went to Glasgow. But no sort of employment could he find. And though the burden of his prayers during "the greater part of many a night spent in some alley or down by the docks" was "for a chance to work-to be clean-to learn to read," the sole issue from his distresses, and access to education, was found by enlisting.

These various changes bring us only to the author's eighteenth year. The account of them has that merit of greater simplicity, sincerity, and representativeness which nearly always belongs to the beginning of an autobiography as compared with the continuation. Not that we doubt the objective veracity of Mr. Irvine's continuation. But we sometimes wonder whether a good story, like the record of some of the fallen men whom he met in the Bowery, does not owe a certain finish, and the virtue which is denominated "snap," to his pleasure in telling it. He has many to tell, two of the best being of his own deeds of carnal violence.

From the time of his first vision he had exercised a religious vocation in serious talk with whoever would listen, and on board ship (for it was into the Navy, and not the Army, that he found he had been recruited) he associated himself with a little group of Plymouth Brethren. But all this could not debar an Irishman from the national luxury of a fight, proper provocation having been given.

Dire was the distress

of the Brethren when they found that fight he would. Yet at the crisis of the conflict, when the misguided young man had almost lost the temporary use of his eyes, one of the most religious of the group whispered to him that if he could only hold out a little longer his opponent would go under; and an

other, when the tide of blows had turned and the bully of the ship was suffering badly, shouted frantically, "Gie him brimstane, Sandy!" By this victory which was won in the name of the minor prophets, his religious destiny was gravely imperilled. For he was made a hero by the men, and taken up by the officers, and all wanted to pit him as champion against the pugilists of other ships. Howbeit, he triumphed over that temptation. Also, having beaten his man, he converted him to a better state of mind. This was a slower business; but when Billy Creedan died in the Gordon Relief expedition, his last words were, "Tell Irvine, the anchor holds!"

It was after leaving the service in 1888 that he made his way (steerage) to America. Two-thirds of the book are concerned with his fortunes there. and prolong the tale of his changing Vocations. These soon ranged froin that of bedmaker in a lodging-house of the poorest and most swarming description to that of assistant lexicographer. He places lowest in the scale of human employments that of canvassing for the sale of sewing-machines, and two weeks of it sufficed him. As a milkman he increased his social knowledge by finding his way about the lower regions of great houses. He also increased his learning by means of a Greek grammar tied open over an empty milk-can. This discipline, by the way, might have made him incapable of speaking of "a ganglia of living wires." Also we wonder whether by "the Marceline of the press" he can possibly mean the Messalina. These are trifles which have an interest for experts whose real knowledge is less than Mr. Irvine's. He confesses that he did not know what unemployment was, as a social phenomenon, till he reached New York, nor what the degradation of the worker could be till he went as a "mucker" (miner's laborer)