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"Did you hear that saucy rascal, Blunt?" block, Sir Charles. You remember Locksasked Sir Charles. ley of the Welsh Rangers?"

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"Killed at Corunna, poor fellow ?" "The same. This Ned is his grandson. Let me beg your favorable regard for him." "His baggage ponies have been beforehand with you, colonel. Your grandfather was a fine soldier, sir, and I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Come and dine with me when you've seen your men to their quarters. Know Captain Annesley? I dare say he'll show you the quartermaster-gener

There was not much wind that evening; but what there was blew from the desert.al's." The air was thick with a sandy haze, nar- Ned and the aide-de-camp went their way, rowing the horizon, and rendering objects their elders returning slowly in another dieven at little distance almost as indistinct rection. as in an English fog. This sort of mist was thickened in one direction by a column of rising dust. Out of it, by degrees, emerged the leading files of a small body of mounted

men.

Having filled, so long, a post of duty so remote, Ned would have been a stranger among his comrades, had it not been for this meeting with Colonel Blunt. O'Brien was the only man of his own standing serv"Well horsed!" observed the general, ing with Napier's small but admirable force. peering through his spectacles. "Service-But the old Peninsular was a universal faable uniform and equipment. Bless me. vorite throughout it, known, esteemed, and what a few baggage ponies! What I like almost loved by all. His friendship was a to see! Know the corps ?" he asked impa-passport not only to the chief's acquaintance, tiently of the aide-de-camp. but to that of every officer in camp. Ned found himself in double sense at home. At

"No, sir."

"Tell the officer in command to halt his home in the ready brotherhood of his brother men and speak with me." officers; at home in the home-memories of the fatherly veteran.

"What's your name, sir; and what force is that ?

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"I was old Ned Locksley's recruit, my boy, and, by George, you are mine. You'd have been a college Don by this time, I believe, but for my 'listing you at Freshet. You should have taken the queen's shilling Is though, you young dog, instead of John Company's."

"I can't easily make it less, sir; but I am particular about it."

"Right, sir-quite right. The things are well slung too. M'Murdo must see these ponies."

"Your voice seems to come back to me, sir," now said the tall, thin colonel. "Did I understand you to say your name was Locksley?"

"Ned Locksley, colonel, at your service. Can't you mind the sea-mews on the Skerry P"

"You know, colonel, I said if ever I went soldiering it should be soldiering in earnest." "Yes, and sarve your impudence right, you've been thief catching and cow-keeping ever since, you see."

Ned laughed. "We shall see soldiering now, sir, I hope, at all events."

"Who'll show it you? One of old Sir John Moore's boys, at last, to say nothing of old Blunt and his queen's Light Borderers."

"No nobler tutors, colonel. They can count on an admiring pupil. Is that the "Good heavens, my dear boy!" cried the Brunswicker's book under your surtout? I old soldier in ecstasy, seizing one hand in think I see the stumpy, square outline still." both his own. 66 "The turban and the beard By George, boy! So you remember deceived me. He is a chip of a good old that, do you? Yes, that's my devotional 769

THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE.

orderly book, as ever. seyn.' Eh ?

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'Muss oft gelesen whatever race or creed, he said to Locksley,

"I owe you more for that bit of insight, colonel, into what a soldier's mind might be, than I could make words to tell. I've tried to follow that regulation clause of it myself, you see."

Out of the looser folds of his half eastern military tunic he took his little Testament and tendered it to the old officer.

"Thank God for that, Ned!" said he reverently. "It's better than the Brunswicker, since it is the Word itself. But the Greek beats me. I warn't never no scholard to brag on, and found the Latin tough enough till I got on good terms with it. All right! Come in!"

It was Captain Annesley, to say that the Trans-Nerbuddahs were to parade at day

light.

"He wants to pick a few likely nags and men for some diversion he is brooding. A march into the desert, I believe, or some such hopeful feat. There aint a vulture there, I'm told, to pick a fellow's bones even."

"But they bleach nicely," said the colonel. "I lost a few poor fellows three marches out of Aden once, and know the sort of thing." "Well, good-night, gentlemen. I needn't say the chief's a punctual party, Mr. Locksley."

"Make it clear to your sowar that we pass him over for the horse's fault alone. Tell him I know a man when I see one; and he shall be my orderly the first great fight.”

The swarthy features were radiant again at once. The Rajpoot drew his sword and kissed it in token of unalterable fidelity.

"We march at sundown for Emaumghur," then said the general. "I make no secret of it; but have sent on to warn and threaten the Ameer."

A heavy march it was in the dark night and deep sand. An awful march, next day, under the scorching sun. No forage, and scanty water, at the camping ground when night fell. Even two hundred horse were a hundred and fifty more than the desperate adventure would allow. Yet after that second sifting, when two-thirds of the cavalry were sent back, fourteen of the Trans-Nerbuddahs remained, inclusive of the one-eyed Jemadar and exclusive of their leader, Ned. Strange magic of a manly mastermind! Under a Napier that weary march in the howling wilderness was like a martial holiday. When the very camels grew faint for want of such poor prickly herbage as would satisfy their patient hunger, there was an amicable struggle between the horsemen and the undaunted infantry, for the honor of hauling up the sand steeps the dragging howitzers. For at one time the sand stood heaped and hardened almost into stone, stretching into table-lands or stiffening abruptly into ridges; at another, it swept, with mingled shells and pebbles, as if a rapidly

It was for the march to Emaumghur, that unparalleled act of happy daring, that the great soldier was picking troopers. Two hundred horsemen only were to escort into the waste less than four hundred infantry, mounted for the nonce on camels. Ned's heart bounded within him, as, one by one, the eagle-eyed veteran selected five-and-receding tide had left it, round thin streaks twenty of his men for service.

"Selection good?" he asked of Locksley when they had formed a line a little in advance of their chaffing comrades.

Ned went very carefully down it, only halting at one trooper on a showy-looking horse.

"The man's thoroughly good, general; but the horse is not equal to its appearance."

"Pick out a sounder, then."

Ned obeyed. As the proud Rajpoot horseman learnt his rejection, a tear of rage and disappointment rose to his cyes. The general's glance observed it. Master of every chord which thrilled in a soldier's breast, of

of vegetation where the gazelles found covert and the wild boars a lair. Out of one such scrubby mockery of a jungle emerged, one afternoon, to Ned's amusement, the garrulous Molony, holding at arm's length a stick, in the cleft end of which a snake was wriggling.

"Yon's a rare opheedian ye've captured, corporal!" said Macpherson, who had once done hospital-sergeant's duty, and affected scientific phrase.

"O'Fidderan, is it, thin ? Sorra the morsel more than Macpherson. The O'Fidderans is no varmint; but dacent folk, near Mallow, mee own cousins, by the mother's side. O'Fidderan, indeed!"

"Augh'm nae desirous o' geevin' offence, corporal; but that's the pheelosopher' name for serpents."

and the gathering of Napier's force had attracted him irresistibly to Scinde. He had fruitlessly solicited leave to accompany the "More's the shame for thim, miscallin' o' flying column into the wilderness, though craythurs. Couldn't they spell snake,' that volunteering for the storming party when they'd write O'Fidderan short for sarpint?" the stronghold should be reached.

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Ony rate, yon's a vara curious specimen."medicos" being few, and Max covenanting Ye'll maybe let the foreign doctor have it?" to find his own water, and to act under or"Furrin docthor, indeed! Wid his name ders as might any British assistant-surgeon, Mac something. That's a quare way to he obtained the favor denied to his Serene back a counthryman, Misther Macpherson!" patron, and was permitted, in the interests "Hoot, man! Maximeelian's the gentle- of science, to risk his life in that noble felman's name, which is nae name of ony Scot-lowship. There were two varieties of landtish clan. Augh misdoot he's a Gerrman." lizard, he assured Ned Locksley, with five of Max Gervinus was, indeed, a thorough sand-beetle, to be found in the Scindian Teuton. Blue-eyed and fair-haired, tall, desert, the securing of which, or of any of stout, and handsome, he had in nowise de- which, would amply repay him for any dangenerated from such ancestors as Tacitus ger encountered or hardship endured. But drew. His mental was in no ridiculous dis- his language and bearing made it evident to proportion to his physical stature. He might all that he was no mere crackbrained enhave been a man of mark in public life, but thusiastic sciolist. His childlike simplicfor his birth, as subject of a petty state, ity took nothing from his vigorous manliwhere cumbrous artificial restraints cramped ness, whilst his intellectual accomplishments all political activity within boundaries natu- graced without overshadowing his transparrally very narrow; where military life of- ent amiability. He spoke English very fered no prize beyond the command of a fairly, with so few peculiarities, that the small contingent, rarely called into perma- canny Macpherson, while dubbing him the nent, much less, into active existence; and " foreign doctor," showed only characteristic where commercial enterprise itself could caution in "misdoubting" of his national scarcely swell beyond the limits of a larger origin. Ned was charmed with him, with pedlaring. Too practical to float into the his mingled erudition and acuteness, with atmosphere of vague metaphysical abstrac- his conjectures and questions concerning men tions, his mind, which yet partook of the or beasts in the remoter hill-tracts and junspeculative German temper, had launched gles. Long before Emaumghur was reached, itself upon the sea of physical research and they were fast friends. That kite's nest was study. Surgeon and physician, he was a empty, as all men know, before the eagle's chemist, a botanist, and a natural historian. talons could claw the occupants. Nothing Anxious to enlarge, not in mere theory, his remained to do but to make the sticks fly, field of view, he had solicited and obtained and take wing backward, as if by scent of the post of personal medical attendant to a water, to the shifting banks of the great InSerene Highness, of royal German blood, dus flood again. The Trans-Nerbuddahs whose spirit, half military and half philo- who had not been selected, those also who sophical, was sending him upon what he were sent back on the desert march, were himself was pleased to designate a compre-all somewhat consoled on learning that there hensive-objective politico-material world'sobservation-tour. Whatever may have been the genuineness of the philosophical element in his Serenity's composition, there was a ron. Meeanee was at hand. fine full dash of hussar blood in his veins;

had been no fight after all. But Nusreddeen was right to see the grinding and setting of every sword throughout the squad

From The Saturday Review.

LIFE OF JOHN ANGELL JAMES. *

upon it.

THIS is a liberal age. Those who have lived in it long enough have witnessed many opposites brought together, and many causes of separation done away. But one distinction remains, strange to say, as sharp as ever, in spite of innumerable influences deliberately and accidentally brought to bear The old social barrier between Church and Dissent stands, as far as we can see, firm and unshaken. Low Churchmen court Dissenting ministers, disown all difference of feeling or position, call them dear brothers in pulpits and on platforms-meet, too, on solemn stated occasions affecting to be social intercourse-but, practically, nothing comes of it. Their families stand aloof. The vicar patronizes the Baptist minister, who, in his turn, compliments the churchman; but the vicar's wife has no friendship with the minister's "partner." Her daughters never flirt with his sons, or form intimacies with his girls. If accident or public duty bring them together for an hour or two, the effect is only to make all sides realize an uncongenial element, and to render them more shy of each other for the future. And as it is with the pastors, so with their congregations. The layman knows no more of the social inner life of the Dissenting minister than he ever did. How, and when, if he unbends from that peculiar guarded sectarian precision which marks

ever,

person and

portion of the religious world, as one pre-eminent for what they call "pulpit-power," who was the orator of the platform, and whose writings had a circulation which many a world-wide reputation might envy; and his history is here given with a spirit and a sense of the importance of the theme which have their effect upon the general reader. For six hundred octavo pages we are made to see things from a Nonconformist point of view. Here neither the biographer nor his subject shows even a moment's sense of depressing obscurity. Angell James does not seem to have been a vain man, but we find him regarding his own " career as the most wonderful thing he had ever known, as he contemplates the standing that has been assigned to him in this extraordinary age;" and of his congregation he can speak as of a "church on which the sun of prosperity shone with unclouded splendor;" and though this sounds to us superlative language, it is probably not more than adequate to the demands of the readers for whom the book is mainly designed, and who are justified in regarding its subject as an honor to their system, and a crowning example of what Dissent may achieve. Not that he had in him the spirit of schism and division, but, finding himself in that religious section, from the time he thought at all, he implicitly received and made the best of it. Thus he may be accepted as a favorable type of sectarianism. Its influences worked on a good

demeanor out of doors, is still a perplexity soil; his religion was genuine, zealous, deto him. He cannot help a sense of pity at voted; his practice was in strict conformity a life of obscure sacrifice which he cannot to it, and represents in all its main pointsunderstand, simply because it never touches in its strictness, in its laboriousness, in its on his experience. People may say that the uniform consistency the Puritan ideal. difference of social standing is the cause of Yet we must say it gives a view of social the barrier we have assumed, but this only life, cold and very far from generous, and removes the question a step further. Why accounting for the social isolation we have does not Dissent rise in social standing? noted from causes that lie deeper than mere Why do people leave it as they get on in the standing and position. The child who starts world? Upon all such points the very canin life under the impression that all the did, and we think able book before us throws neighbors, people who live respectably and a light. go to church every Sunday, "are sinners," and "the world" who hears the term Christian even applied as a mark of exclusiveness and separation-stands in a perfectly different relation to society, and learns wholly different lessons from it, from another who regards those around it with a sense of fellowship, as inheritors of the same traditions, as subject to the same influences, as

A good many of our readers possibly know very little of Angell James. Nevertheless, his name is a household word, and has been any time these forty years, with an influential

Life and Letters of John Angell James. Including an unfinished Autobiography. By R. W.

Dale, M.A., his Colleague and Successor. London Nisbet.

members of one vast community of which it | character, but he has to confess to certain lapses in this stage of his career. He was a boy, after all, with some of a boy's lightheartedness, struggling against the trammels gathering round him which it was the first business of the system to impose. At sixteen, he had given the cobbler "occasion to grieve over him" by going for an hour or two to an election ball-not that he could dance, but just to see what was going on. He was also "betrayed into another inconsistency by going to see a mimic play, got up by some young men of the town; " but here his conscience so sharply rebuked him, that he rushed out, expecting the beam over his head to crush him. Nor was this all:

is proud to feel part, sharing the same history, and looking forward to the same future. Religious exclusiveness in childhood -and in a sectarian community consisting mainly of one class this may be carried out without the counteracting influences which will interpose themselves in a national religion-a life of prohibitions where books, society, intercourse, and amusements are hedged round with innumerable prominent obtrusive vetoes, has a dwarfing effect on the dawning imagination, on the faculties which impart a tone of poetry to society, and sweeten life, which those who enforce it know little about, and perhaps care less, but which painfully explains a great deal which might otherwise puzzle us.

Angell James' parents, small tradespeople in Dorsetshire, were both Dissenters. His mother, he tells us we presume in deference to the popular interest in the mothers of great men-was a "good but not a great woman." He himself was sent to a common school, where he manifested so little zeal for learning that when, in after years, a schoolfellow was told he had become an eminent preacher, he exclaimed, "What, thik thick-headed fool! why he was fit for nothing but fighting." But though the future preacher showed no precocious gifts or graces, he had a distinct theory of religion in his mind derived from his mother. We see it in the history of his conversion, and in his natural use of a certain phraseology. What would be cant in others he uses with the simplicity of a native tongue. Low Churchmen who talk in the same way cannot do it as naturally; we see they are conscious of an easier.mode of saying the same thing. At the usual age, he was apprenticed to a linen-draper. Shortly afterwards, he became aware of religious impressions and placed himself under the direction of a pious cobbler. We read immediately after of a call to the ministry; and his father, who deserves throughout more tenderness than his son bestows on his memory, sends him to the Nonconformist College at Gosport, where he studied for two years, making such use of its advantages as was compatible with his being put on the "preaching list at seventeen," and being sent out to preach to village congregations.

"When I had been in Gosport a year, he writes, I was sent out to preach in some of the principal places in the county, such as Southampton, Lymington, Romsey. In the latter place I was guilty of an indiscretion which excited some prejudice against me among the serious people. One of the deacons, or principal people, gave an entertainment on the majority of his only son and child. A dance was got up, in which I joined, and manifested a degree of levity in other ways. Some of the congregation would not come again to hear me preach. I did wrong, clearly wrong; that is to say, the act was a thoughtless folly, and shows upon what slender threads hang our reputation and usefulness; yet some excuse might have been made for a youth only between eighteen and nineteen years of age."

We believe Roman Catholicism is just as rigid in the suppression of the youthful element in those set apart in boyhood for its ministry. In both cases, this accounts for a certain air and cut, the token of subjection to public opinion, before the individual character has had time to express itself in such a manner. Mr. James has to lament in the students of the college he subsequently visited, "the excess of hilarity and unsanctified levity" with which, in this their last refuge, they were apt to indemnify themselves for restraint elsewhere, and perhaps not without reason, for nature will avenge itself for unnatural restrictions. He himself, having developed a real turn for preaching, is not so much to be pitied. He had more than enough of excitement. The Congregationals have evidently a taste for boy-preachers. We read of one who owed much of his popularity to "the youthful beauty of his appearMr. James was an eminently consistent ance;" and the sensation is no doubt piquant,

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