Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable.THOMAS BROWNE.

AUBIN.

My birthday I make a thanksgiving of to God, that it was when it was; and so I do of my birthplace, very devoutly, as it was not to be farther west than Europe.

MARHAM.

My dear Oliver, do not thank God with a reservation. But I know you do not mean it. Besides, you will feel as though you had been born very far towards the west, if you will think of yourself as a native of what St. Clement wrote of, from Rome, as the worlds beyond the ocean.

AUBIN.

Born in a Christian era, and among Christians, nineteen out of twenty of the human race have not been; but I was. And as I was not to be one of the earliest disciples, nor a friend of St.

John's, nor a convert of St. Paul's, I am glad that I was born when I was, and not sooner. For, with my nature, it would have been ill for me to have been born within the unmitigated influence of St. Augustine, of Gregory the Great, or of John Calvin. There are scales that will weigh to the five-hundredth part of a grain; but for use they require the very temperature of the room to be minded in which they are, and in any wind they would never balance at all. Now, I think that in the religious struggles of the sixteenth century, and in the politics of the seventeenth, my judgment might perhaps have been false to me. I do think, that, if I had been born twenty years earlier, I should, as a spirit, have grown up like some sea-side trees, that branch out and blossom only on one side.

MARHAM.

Prejudice blights most of us.

AUBIN.

So it does. And instead of our charities blossoming all round us, they do so only towards certain quarters; and they are the quarters whence blow the breezes that flattered us in our opinions or interests.

MARHAM.

Perhaps it is more so with ourselves than we think; we will hope it is not, and we will endeavour it may not be so at all.

AUBIN.

I congratulate myself that my birth was when it was; for I might have been born in Greece, and yet not in Athens; in Athens, and yet not have been a Christian; in the first century, I might have been born a Christian, but have lived all my life as a sand-digger, at Rome, in what are now called the Catacombs. But I was born into a richer world than Milton was, or than Jeremy Taylor, or than Newton; for I was born into a world that was become the more glorious for their having felt, and thought, and spoken in it.

MARHAM.

You knew the name of Jesus early, and so you knew, as a boy, pure religion, and what truth there is in philosophy, and what is best in the results of science. But this you know.

AUBIN.

Yes, uncle, and I thank God for it. And next after early baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, I thank God for my mother-tongue's having been English; for by this I was made heir to the mind of Shakspeare; owner of a key to the treasurehouse of Locke's thought; one acquainted with Sir Thomas Browne's worth and oddity; free of a church-sitting under Isaac Barrow; a fishing companion of Isaac Walton's; and one to differ from Bishop Ken, and yet to love him.

MARHAM.

No, Oliver, I did not speak.

AUBIN.

The house of my birth was in the outskirts of a borough; and the front-door opened into the town, and the back-door into the country. This was a happy thing for my boyhood, because town life made me think, and the country made me feel. The town was like an atmosphere of thought when I went into it, and the country, when I was alone in it, was an ever-changing influence upon me, like a presence of awe one minute, and another minute, like a joy melting into tears; and then, again, it was as though my soul felt itself whispered by the breezes, "Come, let us away into the heavens, and worship together."

MARHAM.

Oliver, you make me feel that I have many reasons for thanking God that I have never acknowledged yet.

AUBIN.

I think it much that I have lived in some of the riper years of Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is not a little to have learned what it is that Orville Dewey preaches. It is something, too, that I have been a reader of Alfred Tennyson, and that, from over the Atlantic, I have heard Longfellow sing his ballads. And it is as though I could die, more confident of not being forgotten before God,

for having been of the same generation with John Foster, and Thomas Arnold, and Henry Ware.

MARHAM.

How do you mean?

AUBIN.

In the presence of a good man, we feel the better; and the better our mood is, the nigher God feels to us. So that, in thinking over the saints who have been of our generation, and halfknown to us, as it were, we ourselves feel the holier, in our capacities at least, and so as though God were more surely with us.

MARHAM.

And with us he is always, from birth to death; and in every moment of our lives, as much as in the first. Oliver, you look much better than you did. I wish you, and now I begin to expect for you, many happy returns of this day.

AUBIN.

Thank you, uncle. But there are many days I should be happier to see return than this, I think. I do not know though. But I will tell you what I mean. The birthday of the soul is greater than that of the body. And, besides, if a birthday is reckoned as what life was given us on, then I have had many birthdays.

MARHAM.

How have you, Oliver ?