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fault, poor things! But the fact's the To same. There's the poor husbands all the time trying hard to bear it. What with the babies, and the headaches, and the rest of it, that's what it comes to the husbands are not happy. No, no! A woman can do better for a man than marry him.'

When she was angry, she always held their wives! I don't say it's all the wives' her tongue; she feared being unfair. She had indeed a rare power of silence. this day I do not know, yet I am sure that, by an instinct of understanding, she saw into my uncle's trouble, and descried, more or less plainly, the secret of it, while yet she never even alluded to the existence of such a trouble. She had a regard for woman's dignity as profound as silent. She was not of those that prate or rave about their rights, forget their duties, and care only for what they count their victories.

She declared herself dead against marriage. One day, while yet hardly more than a child, I said to her thoughtfully, "I wonder why you hate gentlemen, Martha."

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"But mayn't it be the husband's faultsometimes, Martha?"

"It may; but what better is it for that? What better is the wife for knowing it, or how much happier the husband for not knowing it? As soon as you come to weighing who's in fault, and counting how much, it's all up with the marriage. There's no more comfort in life for either of them. Women are sent into the world "Hate 'em! What on earth makes you to make men happy. I was sent to your say such a wicked thing, Orbie?" she an- uncle, and I'm trying to do it. It's nothswered. "Hate 'em, the poor dears! Iing to me what other women think; I'm love 'em! What did you ever see to make you think I hated your uncle now?" "Oh! of course! uncle!" I returned; for my uncle was all the world to me. Nobody could hate uncle!"

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here to serve your uncle. What comes of me, I don't care, so long as I do my work, and don't keep him waiting that made me for it. You may think it a small thing to make a man happy. I don't. God "She'd be a bad woman, anyhow, that thought him worth making, and he did!" rejoined Martha. "Did anybody wouldn't be if he was miserable. I've ever hate the person that couldn't do with-seen one woman make ten men unout her, Orbie?" happy. I know my calling, Orbie. Nothsuggested by my uncle being would make me marry one of them, poor things!"

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My name cause my mother died at my birth- was a curious one; I believe he made it himself. Belorba it was, and it means Fair Orphan.

"I don't know, Martha," I replied. "Well, you watch and see!" she returned. "Do you think I would stay here working from morning to night if I hadn't some reason for it? Oh, I like to work," she went on; "I don't deny that. I should be miserable if I didn't work. But I'm not bound to this sort of work. I have money of my own, and am no beggar for house-room. But rather than leave your uncle, poor man, I would do the work of a ploughman."

"Then why don't you marry him, Martha?" I said with innocent impertinence. Marry him! I wouldn't marry him for ten thousand pounds, child!"

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Why not, if you love him so much? I'm sure he wouldn't mind."

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"But if they all said as you do, Mar

tha?"

"No doubt the world would come to an end, but it would go out singing, not crying. I don't see that would matter. There would be enough to make each other happy in heaven, and the Lord could make more as they were wanted."

"Uncle says it takes God a long time to make a man!" I ventured to remark.

Miss Martha was silent for a moment. She did not see how my remark bore on the matter in hand, but she had such a respect for anything my uncle said, that when she did not grasp it she held her peace.

"Anyhow, there's no fear of it for the present!" she said. "You heard the screed of banns last Sunday."

I thought you would have a better idea of Miss Martha Moon from hearing her talk herself, than from any talk about her. To hear one talk is better than to see one. But I would not have you think she often spoke at such length. She was in truth a woman of few words, never troubled with the least verbal catarrh. Especially silent she was when any one she loved was in trouble. She would stand there for mo

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ments with a look that was the incarnation | which make me now thank him for half of essential motherhood as if her eyes my conscious soul. were swallowing up the sorrow; as if her soul was ready to be the sacrifice for the sin. Then she would turn away with a droop of the eyes that seemed to say she saw what it was, but saw also how little she could do for it. Oh, the depth of the love-trouble in those eyes of hers!

Martha never set herself to teach me anything, but I could not know Martha without knowing something of the genuine human heart. I learned from her by an unconscious assimilation. Possibly a spiritual action analogous to exosmose and endosmose takes place between certain souls.

CHAPTER III.

MY UNCLE.

Now I must tell you what my uncle was like.

The first thing that would have struck you about him was, how tall and thin he was. The next thing would have been, how he stooped; and then, how sad he looked. It scarcely seemed that Martha Moon had been able to do much for him. Yet doubtless she had done, and was doing more than either he or she knew. He had rather a small head on the top of his long body; and when he stood straight up, which was not very often, it seemed so far away, that some one said he took him for Zacchæus looking down from the sycamore. I never thought of analyzing his appearance, never thought of comparing him with any one else. To me he was the best and most beautiful of men the first man in all the world. Nor did I change my mind about him ever -I only came to want another to think of him as I did.

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His features were in fine proportion, though perhaps too delicate. Perhaps they were a little too small to be properly beautiful. When first I saw a likeness of the poet Shelley, I called out, "My uncle ! and immediately began to see differences. He wore a small but long moustache, brushed away from his mouth; and over it his eyes looked large. They were of a clear grey, and very gentle. I know from the testimony of others, that I was right in imagining him a learned man. That small head of his contained more than many a larger head of greater note, which had power with the multitude because it offered coarser mental fare. He was constantly reading that is when not thinking, or giving me the lessons

Reading or writing or thinking, he would have me, as I pleased, in the room with him; but he seldom took me out walking. He was by no means regular in his habits-regarded neither time nor seasons - went and came like a bird. His hour for going out was unknown to himself, was seldom two days together the same. He would rise up suddenly, even in the middle of a lesson - he always called it "a lesson together" - and without a word walk from the room and the house. I had soon observed that in gloomy weather he went out often, in the sunshine seldom.

The house had a large garden, of a very old-fashioned sort, such a place for the charm of both glory and gloom as I have never seen elsewhere. I have had other eyes opened within me to deeper beauties than I saw in that garden then, but my remembrance of it is none the less of an enchanted ground. But my uncle never walked in it. When he walked, it was always out on the moor he went, and what time he would return no one ever knew. His meals were no concern of his - no concern to any one but Martha, who never uttered a word of impatience, and seldom a word of anxiety. At whatever hour of the day he went, it was almost always night when he came home, often late night. At other times he preferred his own room to anywhere else.

This room, not so large as the kitchen hall, but quite as long, seems to me, when I look back, my earliest surrounding. It was the centre from which my roving fancies issued as from their source, and the end of their journey to which as to their home they returned. It was a curious place. Were you to see first the inside of the house and then the outside, you would find yourself at a loss to conjecture where within it could be situated such a room. It was not, however, contained in what, to a cursory glance, passed for the habitable house, and a stranger would not easily have found the entrance to it.

Both its nature and situation were in keeping with certain peculiarities of my uncle's mental being. He was given to curious inquiries. He would set out to solve now one now another historical point as odd as uninteresting to any but a mind capable of starting such a question. To determine it, he would search book after book, as if it were a live thing in whose memory must remain darkly stored thousands of facts, requiring only to be recol

CHAPTER IV.

MY UNCLE'S ROOM.

lected; amongst them might nestle the | such as then seemed characteristic of thing he sought, and he would dig for it him. I imagine his early history had as in a mine among the hardened dust of affected his faculties, and influenced the ages. I fancy he read any old book what- mode of their working. How indeed could ever of English history with the haunting it have been otherwise! sense that at any moment he might come upon the mention of certain of his own ancestors, of whom he would gladly enlarge his knowledge. Whether he started any new thing in mathematics I cannot tell, but he would sit absorbed, every day and all day long for weeks over his slate, then suddenly throw it down, and walk out for the rest of the day. He read Shakespeare as with a microscope, propounding and answering the most curious little questions. It seemed to me sometimes, I confess, that he missed a plain point from his eyes being so sharp that they looked through it without seeing it, having focused themselves beyond it.

A specimen of this kind of question of his occurs to me as I write.

"Why," he said, "did Margaret, in 'Much Ado about Nothing,' try to persuade Hero to wear her other rabato? Because she was afraid her mistress would find out that she had been wearing it, as she did the night before, when she personated her."

Mentioning Shakespeare, I may put down one remark I heard him make in reference to a theory which must seem nothing less than idiotic to any one who knew Shakespeare as did my uncle. It was this that whoever sought to enhance the fame of lord St. Alban's - he was careful to use the real title-by attributing to him the works of Shakespeare, must either be a man of weak intellect, of great ignorance, or of low moral perception; for it cast on the memory of a man already more to be pitied than any, a weight of obloquy no man could be capable of deserving; inasmuch as, with the gifts of the man who could write those plays and poems, with his insight into and his love of human nature, with his power of perceiving and uttering essential truth, it made him capable notwithstanding of the moral and social atrocities of which his lordship, carried away by no passion, but eager after money for scientific research, was guilty. One such as the theory necessitates its composite personage, would be a monster as grotesque as atrocious.

I mention this remark the rather that it shows my uncle could look at things in a large way as well as hunt with a knifeedge. At the same time, devoutly as I honor him, I cannot but count him intended for thinkings of larger scope than

AT right angles to the long, black and white house, stood a building behind it, of possibly earlier date, but uncertain intent. It had been used for many things before my uncle's time— - once as part of a small brewery. My uncle was positive that, whether built for the purpose or not, it had been used as a chapel, and that the house was originally the outlying cell of some convent. The signs on which be founded this conclusion I was never able to appreciate; to me, as containing my uncle's study, the wonder-house of my childhood, it was far more interesting than any history could have made it. It was a building at this time of two low stories and a high roof. Entering it from the court behind the house, every portion of it would seem to an ordinary beholder quite accounted for; but it might have suggested itself to a more comprehending observer, that a considerable space must lie between the roof and the low ceiling of the first floor, which was taken up with the servants' rooms. Of the ground floor, part was used as a dairy, part as a woodhouse, part as a store for certain vegetables, and part stored the turf dug for the use of the house from the neighboring moor.

Between this building and the house, was a smaller and lower erection, a mere outhouse. It was strongly built, however, and the roof, in perfect condition, seemed newer than the building itself. It had been raised and strengthened when used by my uncle to contain a passage leading from the house to the roof of the old chapel, in which he fashioned for himself the retreat which he justly called his study. Few must be the rooms more continuously thought and read in during one lifetime than this.

I have now to tell how it was reached. You could hardly have found the way to it yourself, even had you set yourself seriously to the task, without having in you a good share of the constructive faculty. It was my uncle's contrivance, but might well have been supposed to belong to the ancient times of the house, when a good hiding-place would have been regarded as a right laudable distinction.

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would almost any one have wandered | rafters, the one shelf projecting over that through the house looking for the door of the study.

There was a large recess in the kitchen, a chimney-corner, built out from, not into the house. Of this recess the hearth filled the whole, raised a foot or so above the flagged floor. At some later time an oblong space had been cut out of the hearth to a level with the floor, and in it an iron grate constructed for the more convenient burning of coal. Hence the remnant of the raised hearth looked like wide hobs to the grate. The use of the recess as a chimney-corner was thereby spoiled, as it was now above the level of the fire, and the coal made a very different kind of smoke from the aromatic product of wood or peat - which latter, however, was not a little used in the house still.

To the right and left within the recess, were two common, unpainted doors, with latches. If you opened either, you found an ordinary shallow cupboard, that on the right filled with shelves and crockery, that on the left with brooms and other house hold implements.

But if, in the frame of the door to the left, you touched what looked like the head of a large nail, not its door but the whole cupboard, frame and all, moved inward on other hinges, and revealed an ascending stair; this was the approach to my uncle's room. At the head of the stair you went through the wall of the house to the passage under the roof of the outhouse, at the end of which a few more steps led up to the door of the study. By that door you entered the roof of the more ancient building. Lighted almost entirely from above, there was no indication outside of the existence of this floor except one tiny window, with vaguely pointed arch, almost in the very top of the gable. Here lay my nest; this was the bower of my bliss.

Its walls rose but about three feet from the floor ere the slope of the roof began, so that there was a considerable portion of it in which my tall uncle could not stand upright. There was width enough, notwithstanding, in which to walk up and down a length of at least five and thirty feet.

Not merely the low walls, but the slopes of the roof as well, were filled with books as high as the narrow ceiling. On the slopes the bookshelves were of course peculiar. My uncle had contrived, and partly himself made them, with the assistance of a carpenter he had known all his life. They were individually fixed to the VOL. LXXIII. 3757

LIVING AGE.

beneath it. To reach the highest, he had to stand on a few steps. To reach the lowest shelves, he had to stoop at a right angle. It was almost a tunnel of books.

By setting a chair on an ancient chest that stood against the gable, and a footstool on the chair, I could mount high enough to get into the deep embrasure of the little window, whence alone to gain a glimpse of the lower world. But from the floor I could see heaven through the openings of six skylights, deep framed in books. As far back as I can remember it was my care to see that their glass was always bright, so that sun and moon and stars might look in.

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The books were mostly in old and dingy bindings; but there were also a few to attract the eyes of a child — especially some annuals, in red silk, or embossed leather, or, most bewitching of all, in paper, protected by a tight case of the same, from which, with the help of a ribbon, you drew out the precious little green volume, with its gilt edges and hoarded wealth of engravings one of which in particular I remember- -a castle in the distance, a wood, a ghastly man at the head of a rearing horse, and a white, mist-like, fleeting ghost, the cause of the consternation. My reader will not be surprised that such books should have their share in the witchery of that chamber.

At the end of the room, near the gable window, but under one of the skylights, was a table of white deal, without cover, at which my uncle generally sat, sometimes writing, oftener leaning over a book. Occasionally, however, he would occupy a large, old-fashioned easy-chair, under the slope of the roof, in the same end of the room, sitting silent, neither writing nor reading, his eyes fixed straight before him, but plainly upon nothing. They looked as if sights were going out of them rather than coming in at them. When he sat thus, I would sit gazing at him. Oh, how I loved him loved every line of his gentle, troubled countenance! I do not remember the time when I did not know that his face was troubled. It gave the last finishing tenderness to my love for him. It was from no meddlesome curiosity that I sat thus watching him, from no longing to learn what he was thinking about, what pictures were going and coming before the eyes of his mind, but from such a longing to comfort him as amounted to pain. I think it was the desire to be near him I mean in spiritthat made me attend so closely to my

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studies. He taught me everything, and I yearned to please him. But for this I could never have made the progress he praised. I took, indeed, a true delight in learning, but I would not so often have shut the book I was enjoying to the full to take up another, but for the sight or the thought of my uncle's countenance.

I think he never once sat down in the chair I have mentioned without sooner or later rising hurriedly, and going out on one of his lonely rambles.

When we were having our lessons together, as he phrased it, we sat at the table side by side, and he taught me as if we were two children finding out together what it all meant. Those lessons were a large contingent in the charm of the place; and when, as not unfrequently, my uncle would rise abruptly and leave me without a word, to go, I knew, away from the house, I was neither dismayed nor uneasy; I had got used to the thing before I could won. der what it meant. At once I would go back to the book I had been reading, or to any other that attracted me, for he never required the preparation of any lessons. It was of no use to climb to the window in the hope of catching sight of him below, for thence was nothing to be seen but high trees and a corner of the yard into which the cow-houses opened, and my uncle was never there. He neither understood nor cared about farming. His elder brother, my father, had been bred to carry on the yeoman line of the family, and my uncle was trained to the medica! profession. My father dying rather suddenly, my uncle, who was abroad at the time, and had not begun to practise, returned to take his place, but had never paid practical attention to the farming any more than to his profession. He gave the land in charge to a bailiff, and at once settled down, as Martha told me, into what we now saw him. At first, she said, she thought it was grief at his brother's death, for they were strongly attached to each other, that had taken all the pith out of him, but his depression had lasted too long to be so accounted for. Farther than that, she would say nothing concerning it. She doubtless saw, as I seemed to myself to have seen from the first, that the soul of my uncle was harassed with an undying trouble, that some worm lay among the very roots of his life. One might be pardoned for doubting if any change could ever dispel such a sadness as I often saw in that chair. Sometimes for hours he would sit there, a book in his hand, open but unregarded, and never a thought in

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his brain of the eyes of the small maiden fixed upon him, or of the world of sympathy behind them. I suspect that Martha Moon, in her silence, had pierced the heart of the mystery, though she knew nothing.

There was one practical lesson given me now and then by my uncle in varying form, which at length I involuntarily associated with the darkness that haunted him. In substance it was this: "Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it." He would often say the kind of thing, and I seemed to know when it was coming. But I heard it as a matter of course, never realizing its truth, or suspecting a day when it might have to be more than just listened to because he whom I loved said it.

I see with my mind's eye the fine small head and large eyes over mine, high above me as we sit beside each other at the deal table. He looked down on me like a bird of prey, with his hair, grey, as Martha told me, before he was thirty, tufted out a little, like ruffled feathers, on each side; but the eyes were not those of the eagle; they were a dove's eyes. "A secret, little one, is a mole that burrows," said my uncle.

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The moment of insight was come. voice seemed suddenly to say within me: "He has a secret of his own; it is biting his heart!" My affection, my devotion, my sacred concern for him, as suddenly swelled to twice their size. It was as if a God were in pain, and I could not help him. I had no desire to learn his secret; I only yearned heart and soul to comfort him. Before long, I had a secret myself for half a day, and ever after, I shared so in the trouble of his secret, that I seemed myself to possess or rather to be possessed by one, which was such a secret that I did not myself know it. But in truth I had a secret then; for the moment I knew that he had a secret, his secret, the outward fact of its existence, was my secret. And besides this secret, I had then a secret of my own. For I knew that my uncle had a secret, and he did not know that I knew. With that came the question ought I to tell him? By the instinct of love I saw that to tell him would put him in a great difficulty. He might wish to tell me never to let any one else know, and how could he do that when he had been so constantly warning me to let nothing grow to a secret in my heart? As to tell

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