only station in which it is a credit to be jolly."

"No one supposes you to be guilty of your own birth, Mr Forrester," continued Olivia, with unabated majesty; "but I think you might see that it places a bar to your admission here. There are certain conventions with regard to the association of ladies and gentle

men

"Exactly. But Olivia Wynter told me that she despised conventionality, as I do. And I might perhaps hint that it is not usual for unmarried ladies to have young cabmen to tea with them."

"Really, Mr Forrester," interrupted Geraldine, with heat-for she felt that this was ungrateful as coming from the favoured cabman himself "it must be evident to the densest intelligence that a cabman is in a class so far beneath us as to be in quite a different category."

"Quite so. But then, Miss Wynter has renounced class distinctions. She recognises a brother in every man she meets, and thinks of his humanity rather than his accidents. Is it possible, Miss Wynter, that your sympathies have only a downward direction, and that the unfortunate minority known as the upper classes has no claim upon your kindness? What a deal of misapplied charity there is in this world, to be sure!"

"And misapplied talent," added Geraldine. "What a pity you are not a barrister, Mr Forrester! Your clients might commit the cruellest murders with a quiet mind!"

At this moment another step was heard upon the stairs, and was succeeded by a gentle knock at the parlour-door, which Maisie opened, disclosing the form of a young lady with a sweet smile and in an elegant costume, and who appear

ed to be a stranger to the three sisters.

"What! Mark here?" she exclaimed upon seeing him; and jumping rashly to conclusions, she took it for granted that her brother's intended proposals were already accepted. "And you don't recognise me, Miss De Wynter? Don't you remember my Christmas at Northcourt? and the fun we had? and Mark kissing little Livy under the mistletoe? To think that he should fall in love with her in the disguise of a cabman after all. Dear old Lady M'Whymper told me all about it this morning, and I thought I might venture to call."

"My sister, Lady Jane Forrester," said Mr Forrester, introducing her.

"What! the milkmaid?" cried Geraldine, laughing.

66

Yes; Jane the milkmaid," replied the guest, sinking into the lounging-chair that was offered her. "Oh, it was quite true. I do milk the cows sometimes, and make the butter. Mark never fibs. Dear Miss De Wynter, I appreciate your life, and quite believe in women's disabilities, though I never admit. it to men, for fear of being thought bold and unfeminine. But I do hope that you will marry Mark— the poor fellow is so dreadfully in love."

"It happened during the first cup of tea," he explained, looking hard at the ceiling, as if taking that mute object to witness.

"The order of things was apparently reversed," commented Geraldine; "the tea stirred the spoon, instead of the spoon stirring the tea."

Olivia rebuked her sister's levity with a look of considerable majesty, and then turned a withering glance upon the suitor, whose natural

misery was tempered by a sense of humour. "This is quite new to us," she observed; "and pray, which of us does Mr Forrester intend to honour with his hand?"

"Her who showed him the greatest kindness," he replied, promptly. "Dearest Miss Olivia," he added, "my sister has precipitated things. I should never have ventured to put the decisive question so quickly. But it is my firm intention to leave no stone unturned until I have persuaded you to marry me. In fact," he added, "I will marry you." Olivia laughed a defiant little laugh, and motioned to the audacious suitor, who had approached very near to her, while Lady Jane and the other two had withdrawn under pretence of examining a picture on the easel, to keep his distance. "And do you think," she asked, "that I would marry a mere man?"

"Well," he replied, thoughtfully, "you could scarcely marry a woman, could you?"

Olivia bit her lip, perhaps to conceal a smile, and looked out of the window in the narrow recess of which they were standing, while the group devoted to the fine arts were in the other. Marriage," she said, "does not enter into our scheme of life. It was partly to avoid it that we hid ourselves from the world. I have already told you of my views and aims in life, and you must see that they are quite incompatible with marriage. How could I renounce my freedom? will never have a master."

"I am your slave."

I

"I require a slave as little as I do a master. Besides, your tastes and habits are quite different from mine. I have told you how I hate the frivolous social life of a woman in our class. I could never amuse the leisure of an idle man."

"Our tastes may not be so different as you imagine, and habits may be reformed. Dearest Olivia, believe me it was because you are so different from conventional women that I first loved you. It was then that life began for the first time to be a reality to me. I, too, am sick of frivolity and selfish amusement, and wish to be something more than a mere drone. Won't you help me in this? It was something better than Greek that I came to learn on those sweet, quiet Sunday evenings. Don't leave your task incomplete. Dearest Olivia," he added, with earnestness, "I love you so tremendously!"

Olivia had several times changed. colour during this speech, which, from obvious reasons, was spoken in low tones and very close to the listener's ear. "Pray say no more," she cried, with the expression of a thing brought to bay; "it cannot be. The lines of our lives are cast.'

But Mr Forrester, who was firmly convinced that the way to win a woman is to make resolute love to her, said a great deal more, and brought tears to his listener's eyes. All this time the other three, making more noise than is exactly expected from ladies - in fact, as the landlady's daughter commented from her post of observation at the key - hole, going on regular rampagious-discussed things in general, and finally performed a duet, the voice parts by Maisie and Lady Jane, and the accompaniment by Geraldine. What with the music, the grave discussion in the window, and a slight commotion outside the parlour - door, caused by the rapid flight of the observer of society from the keyhole, the almost simultaneous arrival of Lady M'Whymper was unheard.

"Weel!" said this good lady, entering all smiles and benevolence, "and how does the little comedy end?”

"Very lamely," replied the lover, "since, as Biron said on a similar occasion, 'Jack hath not Jill.'"

"And is Love's labour quite lost?" asked Geraldine, in a melancholy tone. "Was all that solid cake eaten and Queen's English mangled for nothing?"

"Shall I be a milkmaid, a gamekeeper's daughter, and a cabman's sister for nothing?" continued Lady Jane.

"And shall I renounce mee aversion to marriage, and play the matchmaker for nothing?" added Lady M Whymper. "I'm glad, Mark, that ye bear it like a feelosopher."

"Don't imagine, Lady M'Whymper, that I mean to give up," returned the philosopher stoutly; "I mean to marry her if she can be married." Then it was explained that Mr Forrester had received permission to improve his acquaintance with the three sisters, on condition that he made no further allusion to marriage until Olivia had taken her degree, and that at the same time he tried to make himself useful to society in some way or other. In the meantime, the De Wynters' incognito was to be strictly guarded, and the ex-cabman was only to be admitted to the celestial lour under the charge of a proper chaperon.

par

"It is a peety that ye couldn't have made things straighter," observed Lady M'Whymper, who, much as she disliked marriage in the abstract, was too much of a woman not to be disappointed at missing one in the concrete. " Come, lassies, give us a cup of tea. Leddy Jean, poor bit bairn, is just fam

ished, for she ate no lunch for excitement. I'm thinking she would like some of the good solid cake that lay sae heavy on Mark's conscience."

Tea was therefore brewed, and the cabman's own special cake appeared, to the joy of Lady Jane, who maintained that a cabman's appetite was nothing to a milkmaid's.

"I can scarcely forgive Mr Forrester for telling us that his father was a gamekeeper, and devoted in his old age to cows and pigs," Maisie said, in the course of a general conversation of a revolutionary character.

"If a man who preserves the game of half two counties is not a gamekeeper, I don't know who is," he returned. "You are forgetting your Carlyle, Miss Maisie. It is also true that my father now leaves his game to Woodman, and Jane will tell you that the affairs of Europe are nothing to him in comparison with the good management of his pig-sties and the breed of his shorthorns."

"And the brother-preacher-the Radical, socialist, and Methodist?" continued Olivia.

"I deny the Methodist. The rest are visible any day to the eye of flesh in the vicar of St Radegunda's."

"Ye suld hear the lad preach!" added Lady M'Whymper, with enthusiasm. And they did so on the following Sunday.

When Lady M Whymper's sixth cup of tea had vanished, the excabman regretfully rose with the lady guests to take his leave. "What a blank next Sunday will be!" he whispered to Olivia on saying good-bye. "How I shall miss the Greek lesson!"

"And I too," replied Olivia, with her old impetuous air; "for I did

"And I did love that Greek teacher as a teacher, of course." "The comedy will be quite perfect," Geraldine was then saying to Lady Jane; "Jack will have Jill before long, and my sister will have to assert the independence of woman in the domestic circle. How Northwynd will chuckle!"

Lord Northwynd did chuckle three years later, when his longlost sister returned to the bosom of her family as Mrs Forrester.

This occurrence was immediately preceded by the passing of Mr Forrester's celebrated Woman Emancipation Bill, which, as the young reader of this present twentieth century may have forgotten, took place in the year 1886, and is justly reckoned as the culminating glory of the glorious period known in history as the nineteenth cen

this bill was overwhelming: there were but three dissentients. Of these, one was a working-man's candidate, who justly feared that the bill might injure one of the most precious privileges of his order

that of wife-beating. The second was an atheist, who, with the hyper-sensitive conscience peculiar to atheists, feared to vote lest this action should be construed into an acquiescence in Christianity, the only religion which insists on the rights of women. The third was a relic of a now extinct class of politicians, then known as Obstructionists, who dissented merely because this class held it a duty to impede all legislation whatsoever.

"How little," said the fortunate legislator on the eve of the wedding,

-"how little did I dream that my hansom would procure me such a fair!"

THERE is no book which has been more appreciated or applauded than the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his wife. It is one of the many mémoires pour servir, which illustrate so largely that eventful period of history, and one of the few which it is a pleasure to read, opening for us, even in its most anxious strain of narrative, an escape into human nature, which, in the midst of the din and conflict, is full of refreshment and consolation. Colonel Hutchinson was on the side which has always been unpopular with poetry and romance. He belonged to the party which are supposed to be enemies to beauty and to every manifestation of art, the stern Puritans, for whom even their defenders claim no grace or gallant bearing -and was one of those who joined in the condemnation of Charles I., a man of prayer-meetings and psalmsinging. Romance, even when it takes the most favourable view of such a man, presents him to us under a semblance of awkward honesty, too good indeed for his tenets, but rude and rustic at the best, not fit to hold a place among the accomplished cavaliers, like Major Bridgenorth in 'Peveril of the Peak.'

Mrs Hutchinson's memoir, however, shows a very different phase; and the noble gentleman of her story, a stately figure, something between Chaucer's Knight and the later type of Grandison, gives a curious contradiction to all the prejudices and conventional ideas in which we have been bred. It has perhaps served the purpose of literature better to draw a broad

line of demarcation between the two parties, and represent the one as appropriating all the graces, while the other had all the piety, of the time. But nothing could be less true. No finer gentleman than John Hutchinson ever added ornament to an age, and no more tender piety than that which flourished in many of the highest Cavalier houses could be found even among the ranks of the martyrs. The latter coexisted with the most boundless depravity, living meekly under the same roof; the former held itself high amid all manners of petty machinations and bourgeois plots. We are obliged to admit, looking at both, that the lines of separation were in no way hard and dry; but that, as happens continually in human affairs, the two factions so closely opposed to each other were at bottom the same, merging on either side into an indefinite mass, which held a little for both, and which connected them by a thousand ties.

Among the women the distinction was still less complete. The prim Puritan dames, in whom fiction has always delighted, as a piquant contrast to the bravery of costume and ornament on the other side, must be sought for among the burghers, in a class altogether beneath that of the ruffling gallants who are so often supposed to find hiding and safety in the impression they made upon the daughters of their captors. Religion made no such difference in these outward details as we are pleased to suppose; and the different ranks of society held to their distinctions as