a decent dress; and, in a city where rags are so uncommon as in New York, this qualification is nothing like so severe a one as it would be with us. The dresses of the pupils varied from silks and broadcloth to the commonest stuffs and velveteen--but they were all scrupulously clean. There is no religious instruction given, so that children of all sects come equally; but, at the commencement of the day's work, a few verses of the Bible are read, and, I believe, the Lord's Prayer is repeated. The teachers in all the classes, except two or three of the highest boys' classes, are women. All of them struck me as intelligent, and many were very pretty and ladylike. Their salaries vary from about 50%. to 1007.; and, as their work is finished by 3 P. M. the pay seems liberal enough. The average age of the girl-pupils is from seven to seventeen; that of the boys from seven to fifteen, after which the ablest boys are sent from the schools, to receive a classical education at the Free Academy. Reading, writing, ciphering, geography, grammar, history, book-keeping for the boys, and moral philosophy for the girls, were the staples of instruction: and I could not discover that any foreign language was ever attempted to be taught.

I came in to the classes as a casual visitor, and therefore saw the working of the system in its every-day aspect. The children apparently understood very well what they were taught. I know that I heard a number of those mysterious questions asked, about what the price of a silk dress would be, containing I am afraid to say how many yards and fractions of yards, supposing that threeelevenths and five-seventeenths of a foot of silk cost so much. I believe that the answer was given rightly, and I am sure that the children explained very distinctly why they gave the answer which they did give. What struck me most was the look of intelligence and the orderly behaviour of the children. In some classes there were nearly fifty children, and yet the one mistress appeared to have no difficulty in maintaining order, almost without punishment of any kind.

The highest class of girls were engaged, when I was taken to their class-room, in the study of what was called intellectual philosophy, and were set, in my presence, to discuss the theme, whether the imagination can create, or only combine. I admit freely that they talked as much nonsense as any score of young ladiesor boys too, for that matter-always do, when they begin discussing the question of innate ideas; but they obviously knew and understood all the stock common-places and appropriate illustrations which it is proper to quote upon the subject. The teacher was obviously a strong abolitionist in her views, and propounded a question to her class, whether a New England minister, who preached pro-slavery doctrines, could be right subjectively. Nine-tenths of the class disposed of the question with more feeling than logic-by an enthusiastic negative. Indeed, the vote was unanimous, with the exception of one lazy, fat-looking girl, who had been amusing herself, during the discussion on innate ideas, by tickling her neighbour's neck with a pen, and who woke up at this question, with the remark, "Well, I guess he'd be about right anyhow." At these schools, by the way, coloured children are not admitted.

Besides the State schools, there are several free public schools, kept up by voluntary contributions. The Roman Catholics have large schools, to which they try very hard to attract the children of their own creed, as they look with great, and from their own point of view not unfounded, jealousy on the free schools. The "House of Industry" schools, too, at the Five Points, which I went over, are chiefly maintained by the Episcopalians, and seem to be a very useful institution. Situated in the very lowest quarter of New York, they are designed to educate children of a class too low to find admission elsewhere. They are, in truth, Ragged Schools; and, in order to induce the parents to let their children come, the school feeds them during school hours. In the classes I went through, there was scarcely a child born of

American parents. There were representatives of almost every foreign nation, but the majority were Germans, Irish, and Negroes; for the poor about the Five Points are too wretched to care for colour. Of course very little can be taught to such a class of children, but still they learn to read and write, and, for children, they sing beautifully. By these and similar schools, as far as I could learn, one half of the children of the "Arab" population in New York receive some kind of education, so that the proportion of the rising generation in this city which will grow up without any education is but small. In the other Free States, where there are not the great difficulties of an enormous city to contend with, the spread of education is even more universal than in New York.

To this free general education I attach extreme importance in relation to slavery. If, as seems probable, the North subjugates the South, I cannot believe that the next generation of the North (educated as it will be to an extent to which no generation in the States has been educated yet), will long submit to the stigma of slavery. Hereafter the North will have the power, and, I trust, will have the will also. There are already signs of a great change. In New York, the black population is relatively very small; and, from the connexion of the city with

the South, its pro-slavery sympathies were stronger than those of any other Northern town; but, since the secession began, public feeling has changed. I was present the other night at a meeting in aid of the slaves deserted by their masters at Port Royal. The room was crowded. There were probably some three thousand well-dressed people present, who cheered enthusiastically every expression of abolition sentiment; but what struck me most was that, sitting amidst the crowd, were numbers of blackmen and women—a thing which a few years ago would not have been tolerated at a New York meeting. Again, abolition papers are now popular; abolition lectures are frequent; the negro Douglas can lecture in the city to crowded audiences; and modified abolitionism is the fashionable opinion of polite society. There are stern facts, too, to be quoted also, as well as sentiments. An American slaver-captain has just been hung in New York, after forty years virtual suspension of the law against the slave-trade, and any attempt to excite popular sympathy in his behalf failed signally. It would be well if our own politicians, who are so fond of demonstrating, on abstract grounds, that the war going on in the Union has no bearing on the question of slavery, could look more to facts and less to theories. E. D.

66

CHAPTER LIV.

CHARLES MEETS HORNBY AT LAST.

OH for the whispering woodlands of Devna ! Oh for the quiet summerevenings above the lakes, looking far away at the white-walled town on the distant shore! No more hare-shooting, no more turtle-catching, for you, my dear Charles. The allies had determined to take Sebastopol, and winter in the town. It was a very dull place, every one said; but there was a race-course, and there would be splendid boat-racing in the harbour. The country about the town was reported to be romantic, and there would be pleasant excursions in the winter to Simpheropol, a gayer town than Sebastopol, and where there was more society. They were not going to move till the spring, when they were to advance up the valley of the Dnieper to Moscow, while a flying column was to be sent to follow the course of the Don, cross to the Volga at Suratow, and so penetrate into the Ural Mountains and seize the gold mines, or do something of this sort; it was all laid out quite plain.

Now, don't call this ex post facto wisdom, but just try to remember what extravagant ideas every nonmilitary man had that autumn about what our army would do. The minister of the King of the Dipsodes. never laid down a more glorious campaign than we did. We have had our little lesson about that kind of amusement. There has been none of it in this American business, but our good friends the other side of the Atlantic are worse than they were in the time of the Pogram defiance. Either they don't file their newspapers, or else they console themselves by saying that they could have done it all if they had liked. It

now becomes my duty to use all the resources of my art to describe Charles's emotions at the first sight of Sebastopol. Such an opportunity for the display of beautiful language should not be let slip. I could do it capitally by buying a copy of Mr. Russell's "War," or even by using the correspondence I have on the table before me. But I think you will agree with me that it is better left alone. One hardly likes to come into the field in that line after Russell.

Balaclava was not such a pleasant place as Devna. It was bare and rocky, and everything was in confusion, and the men were dying in heaps of cholera. The nights were beginning to grow chill, too, and Charles began to dream regularly, that he was sleeping on the bare hill-side, in a sharp frost, and that he was agonisingly cold about the small of his back. And the most singular thing was that he always woke and found his dream come true. At first he only used to dream this dream towards morning; but, as October began to creep on, he used to wake with it several times in the night, and at last hardly used to go to sleep at all for fear of dreaming it.

Were there no other dreams? No. No dreams, but one ever-present reality. A dull aching regret for a past for ever gone. A heavy deadly grief, lost for a time among the woods of Devna, but come back to him now amidst the cold, and the squalor, and the sickness of Balaclava. A brooding over missed opportunities, and the things that might have been. Sometimes a tangled puzzled train of thought as to how much of this ghastly misery was his own fault, and how much accident. And above all a growing desire for death, unknown before.

And all this time, behind the hill, the great guns, which had begun a fitful muttering when they first came there,

often dying off into silence, now day by day, as trench after trench was opened, grew louder and more continuous, till hearing and thought were deadened, and the soul was sick of their never-ceasing melancholy thunder.

And at six o'clock on the morning of the 17th, such an infernal din began as no man there had ever heard before, which grew louder and louder till nine, when it seemed impossible that the ear could bear the accumulation of sound, and then suddenly doubled, as the Agamemnon and the Montebello, followed by the fleets, steamed in and lay broadside-to under the forts. Four thousand pieces of the heaviest ordnance in the world were doing their work over that hill, and the 140th stood dismounted and listened.

At ten o'clock the earth shook, and a column of smoke towered up in the air above the hill, and as it began to hang motionless the sound of it reached them. It was different from the noise of guns. It was something new and terrible. An angry hissing roar. An hour after they heard that twenty tons of powder were blown up in the French lines.

Soon after this, though, there was work to be done, and plenty of it. The wounded were being carried to the rear. Some cavalry were dismounted and told off for the work. Charles was one of

them.

The wind had not yet sprung up, and all that Charles saw for the moment was a valley full of smoke, and fire, and sound. He caught a glimpse of the spars and funnel of a great liner above the smoke to the left; but directly after they were under fire, and the sickening day's work began.

Death and horror in every form, of course. The wounded lying about in heaps. Officers trying to compose their faces, and die like gentlemen. Old Indian soldiers dying grimly as they had lived, and lads, fresh from the plough last year, listed at the marketcross some unlucky Saturday, sitting up staring before them with a look of terror and wonder more sad to see than either. But everywhere all the day, where the

shot screamed loudest, where the shell fell thickest, with his shako gone, with his ambrosial curls tangled with blood, with his splendid gaudy fripperies soiled with dust and sweat, was Hornby, the dandy, the fop, the dicer; doing the work of ten, carrying out the wounded in his arms, encouraging the dying, cheering on the living.

"I knew there was some stuff in him," said Charles, as he followed him into the Crown battery; just at that time the worst place of all, for The Twelve Apostles had begun dropping redhot shot into it, and exploded some ammunition, and killed some men. And they had met a naval officer, known to Hornby, wounded, staggering to the rear, who said "that his brother was knocked over, and that they wanted to make out that he was dead, but he had only fainted." So they went back with him. The officer's brother was dead enough, poor fellow; but, as Charles and Hornby bent suddenly over him to look at him, their faces actually touched.

Hornby did not recognise him. He was in a state of excitement, and was thinking of no one less than Charles, and Charles's moustaches had altered him, as I said before. If their eyes had met I believe Hornby would have known him; but it was not to be till the 25th, and this was only the 17th. If Hornby could only have known him, if they could only have had ten minutes' talk together, Charles would have known all that we know about the previous marriage of his grandfather, and, if that conversation had taken place, he would have known more than any of them, for Hornby knew something which he thought of no importance, which was very important indeed. He knew where Ellen was.1

But Charles turned his face away, and the recognition never took place, Poor Charles said afterwards that it was

1 You must send your memory back ten months to remember a very important circumstance about Ellen and the priest in the wood. That is not my fault. If the public choose to take eighteen months about reading a book which should be read in two days, I am not to blame.