which, at such times, there seemed to spring up an unusual tenderness. In a week she was able to sit in the sunshine and talk with Mrs. Bennett, as that worthy woman sat knitting in the doorway.

It is a beautiful night. Such a one as prompts one to say: "What would I give to be on the sea before Venice or on the lake of Geneva, alone with my own thoughts." The full moon sails in a blue, cloudless sky, making the fair county of Devon a very paradise to dwell in. In the broad day when no magic moon lends poetry and enchant ment to each stream and line of hills, Devonshire is as beautiful as heart can desire. Justly is it termed the Garden of England. Go where you will you cannot find its equal; you would not want to find its superior. The hamlet of Tamerton is set down between two slight swellings of the land on the banks of the Tamar, a river not unsung, that divides the counties of Devon and Cornwall. Away in the distance, on this summer's night, can be seen above the hamlet, a thin wreath of mist about them, the silent, spreading hills of Dartmoor. Below, the waters of the Tamar, rippling brightly in the moonlight, murmuring any song that fancy asks, but ever a sweet one, flow down to the sea; past ancient baronial castles, past sylvan dells of English park, past many a point where stands a chapel ivy-covered, or a rugged tower.

On a hill above the hamlet rises the church of St. Brideaux, venerable with its eight hundred years of age; its architecture quaint and massive, its mullioned windows white in the moonlight. The moon shines as sweetly to-night as it ever did or ever will upon the overhanging gables of the little village and the fair country around. Nearly opposite Tamerton its light strikes on the old houses of the ancient borough of Saltash; further down the river, on England's battered war-vessels anchored in the stream in their old age as mementos of the past; further down still, on the formidable fortifications of the sea-port of Plymouth, with its forest of masts and thousands of lights. From over the water on this calm night are borne the sounds of the bells of Landulph,

worthy rivals of their sisters of Shandon, sung to immortality by Father Mahoney. The chiming of the bells, mingled with the flow of waters and the stirring of the breeze, the peaceful sound of the "watch-dog's honest bark," and the burst of the tawny-throated nightingale, make many a wanderer pause on the hills and in the valleys to call up hallowed memories amid the beauty of the night. The dark woods of Warleigh on the left bank looking down into the cool wave below, seem to listen in solemn thought to bell, and wind, and bird; and further out in the stream where the silvery ripples circle and run, a boat now and then is seen gliding along, manned by a fisherman, enchanted with the prospect and the stillness of the night.

On a bench beneath the very oak where John Bannock told his early love, within sight of the green whereon he played as a careless lad, in hearing of the waters which had lent a sort of romance to his neglected childhood,-beneath the stout old tree, John Bannock sits once more to-night. Beside him is the girl whom he protected from insult, perhaps saved from death. They are talking together as old friends would talk.

"Tell me, Miss Mary-I have never asked you before-how you come to fall at my door, and where you'd come from. It's none of my business, to be sure; but I don't think you'd mind telling me, would you?" "My story is short, Mr. Bannock "I can't let you call me Mr. Bannock," breaks in our friend. "We mustn't be so distant. We're only poor folk, and why not know each other better? Will you please call me John?”

"Well, 'John,' if you wish it," she says laughingly. "My story is not long. I lived some twenty miles from here, with my father and mother. My mother died when I was a little girl. Father then took to drinking, and made our home miserable."

She stopped, for a groan from John Bannock made her think he was unwell. She then remembered the troubled look she had seen on his face, and the vague rumors that had come to her of his irregular habits. She was sorry she had spoken.

on."

"My father," continued she, "lost friend after friend, and, although I had never harmed a soul in the village, the neighbors began to look upon me with distrust as the daughter of the man whose character was a by-word and a reproach to the fair name of the place in which we lived. One night my father came home from the tavern and beat me so badly that I was ill for many days. He did not improve; and so brutally was I used that people were indignant. Finally a prominent gentleman took the matter in hand, and father was arrested. He blamed me for this, and would have killed me when I came to see him in his cell. Upon my testimony would rest the charge against him. Remembering what had been when my poor mother was alive, I was unwilling to be the cause of my father's punishment. I fled from the village, not wishing any one to know who I was or whence I came. It was night when I set out, and the next day, foot-sore and fainting, I reached your door, where I fell, unable to proceed further. The man who found me here yesterday brought tidings of my father's death."

Weeping, Mary broke down; thanking her protector a thousand times for the helping hand he had stretched out to her.

John Bannock then told her the story of his life. His father died when he was too young to know what he had lost. His mother died a little later. He pointed out the graveyard from where they sat, and he deplored the life that had barred him from doing justice to her memory. While yet a boy he had been lodged in jail on the charge of stealing a watch, of which, after he was released, it was found and acknowledged that he was innocent. Until then he had been a lad of whom the village was proud. That undeserved punishment had left a sting in his heart, which hardened his nature and led him into the company of men who changed his whole character. Many a night, he told her, when the moon was shining like it was to-night, he had launched his boat and landed on the shore below Warleigh woods, to set snares for the pheasants of the Squire's preserves. Crouching down in the

No one re

ing on his nightly rounds; but never, except in one instance, had he been interrupted, and then he escaped after a hard tussle unrecognized. He pointed out the green where he had raced as a boy. He bade her listen to those bells, which had often seemed to his youthful heart in the long summer nights like the voices of angels. She could hear the wash of the river, could she not? Often had he lain in the woods to be lulled asleep by that sound; and while so lying his misspent life had come before him in its full force, and—although he would tell no one but her-he had wept to think what an honest man he might have been. But bad opinion had always met him. spected him, all feared him. Having no friends he ran deeper in his bad courses, and until a little time since he avowed-and he prayed God and man for pardon—there was scarcely a night when he had not been sodden with drink and flushed with fearful passion. The Squire and the landlord were the only persons who had ever had a kind word for him, and Underwood was his bitterest enemy. He told her of the day she came; how he had been looking at the boys at play on the green, and a great feeling of remorse had come over him-such as he had often felt alone, but never before in the sight of man. Her coming, he believed, had really saved him; and if he had done her a service she had done for him what the world could never have done. But, with God's good help, he yet hoped to live a better life.

Why relate what the reader can plainly foresee? Under the old oak tree, gnarled and storm-beaten, where he had told his love to the Mary who had died, in sight of the green and in hearing of the river, he told his love to the Mary who had altered his life. With rude and simple words he told it. Not in such dainty language as would embellish the archives of love, but with an honest warmth that would have made the cheek of the stateliest lady in the land blush with homage to his manly heart. Since John Bannock had so bravely made himself the protector of the friendless girl no one had dared to breathe a word against her good name. Her gentle face had won the hearts

of the children, her modest bearing the esteem of her elders. She had not been long in the village when no one could have been prevailed upon, much less did they desire, to speak of her in any but the highest terms. In view of John Bannock's change of conduct and his tender treatment of the girl whom he honored on his own threshold, there were shrewd heads who argued that something would come of it. When therefore on the next Sunday the bans of John Bannock and Mary Elmer were read in the old church of St. Brideaux, the crowd that flocked around John and his sweetheart testified to the popularity which he had attained, and to the esteem in which was held the bride whom he had won. The following congratulations will likewise bear witness to the satisfaction which the news of John's intended marriage created:

The Squire "John, my friend, I always said you would come out right in the end. I wish you and your bride,—yes, I must have a kiss,—all happiness. By the way, the sit

Underwood: "Bannock, your hand; I wish you joy. You have shaken my want of faith in human nature. It is better than I thought it was. You have given me a lesson, and I thank you for it. If I can ever help you in any way in my power, do not be afraid to look me up."

The landlord: "Jack, old boy, give us your fist. Mrs. Bannock to be, you've got a man for a husband. And Jack, how about the green, now, eh, old fellow? And the river and the bells? boy to play there! at the wedding."

May you soon have a You may count on me

A new headstone stands over what was once an unmarked grave. A sunburnt man often walks there when the sun is going down, and his happy wife and children walk with him. His heart is as light as when a boy he played on the green or sailed the waters of the river he loves.

John Talbois.

Few of us who met Charles Kingsley during his visit to America, will forget how sadly the news of his death, so soon afterward, fell on us as if it were the loss of an old friend. His journey came too late, when he was on the downhill of years and had less of the freshness we had always associated with the writer and the man. But we remember still the face, lighted with keen thought, the soldier-like bearing, the voice that betrayed in its hearty tone the love of the scholar for his west country dialect, and the spirit with which he chanted to us the wild Norse Sagas. His presence brought back the Charles Kingsley of our youth. We had lost in later years somewhat of the faith with which we had followed him and other noble Englishmen, as leaders in the sacred legion of progress. Grim Thomas Carlyle in his den at Chelsea, no longer a prophet, but making sour jests over the Jamaica Quashee; and Ruskin, fallen from

his early inspirations into the frothiest cynicism, had wearied us of our hero worship. We had heard, too, of the author of Alton Locke as now a sleek canon, talking in very conservative fashion of slavery and the American republic. But the visit renewed the old affection; and now the memoir, coming just after his death, gives us the whole personality of the man, his relation to the thoughts of his time, and the brave part he played from youth to age in its most stirring strifes. We have read it with an eager delight to its last page, and count it the life of a Christian workman in this England of our day, which will grow larger to all seeing eyes in each day to come.

It is, then, a fitting tribute to him that we sketch what such a life has done to help us in our aims for the same social and Christian end. If I shall linger a little on his youth, it is because few have kept the mind and heart so unchanged into manhood.

A bright picture it is, which she who knew him best has written so well in these opening pages, of the parsonage at Holne under the brow of Dartmoor, where he was born in 1819; the father, artist, natural historian and clergyman; the West Indian mother, full of poetry; and the childhood spent in the charming scenery of Devonshire. It was here he gained the tastes which never faded in the after years; his love of long walks and field sports, and with these the rare knowledge of Nature that kept him from the brute side of country training. It is delightful, in later days, when worried by the little strifes and little men of the Church, to see how he flings off all care with a glimpse of the sea at Torquay, or a fishing trip with Tom Hughes by the Scottish streams. His was the healthiest of natures. There was in him that rich humor, the necessary element of large-minded men, a bright fancy and a hunger after all living stores of literature. Yet, if he was not born to be a cloistered scholar, he was still less to be a mere man of elegant letters. His leading trait was his earnestness, the soldier-like manhood that made him, like Robertson and all of kindred temperament, accept life as a battle; a calling, as Luther translates the commission of St. Paul to his son in the faith, "to do thy knightly duty." We have all along, in the school-days at Helston, under Derwent Coleridge, and in the college experience from King's in London to Cambridge, the waymarks of his swift growth. He graduates with high honors in the classics and the mathematics; but the usual round of studies does not fetter him, and he reads everything-Porphyry and Jamblichus, Chaucer and Carlyle. He passes through an unhappy time of religious doubt, when he says hard things of the Athanasian Creed; but these measles and mumps of skepticism, as with most healthy minds, are soon over, and we find him reading for holy orders in the church.

It might seem as if this choice of the ministry was hardly the natural one for a man of his marked literary tastes. Yet his biography shows that he was not guided into that path by any counsel of others, still less by any lower thought of preferment. It was,

he says in his early letters, the profession "fitted to check the faulty side of his mind and give fullest room for his energy." There is not much likeness in him to the pale, preterhuman type of clergyman we have been taught to revere; yet perhaps his life may show us some reality beyond our pattern of cravat or manners. We have learned from him that his phrase "muscular Christianity" has not a little to do with a clear head and a warm Christian heart. His biography in the little parish of Eversley, is as sweet a picture as that of George Herbert in Bemerton. This scattered group of three hamlets near Windsor forest, made up of farmers with a sprinkling of poachers; the old church in the midst and the parsonage under the shadow of the stately fir trees, was his home from the first year of his ministry to his death. There was a charm to him in country life, and a quiet center of literary work. "I have no lust," he wrote, "for the Babylon of England or the Continent." Yet it was no rest of refined leisure. Here he labored as curate and rector in his parish duties, visiting from cottage to cottage, ready to converse with the farmer, or pitch hay with the haymaker in the field, busy with coal clubs or lending libraries for the poor, and preaching on Sundays the village sermons which were afterward to speak to all England. Here he brought his young wife, and there grew round him a household of loving children, where he found all the society he asked, until his fame gathered at the parsonage a group of the best scholars in the land. He seemed to have no breath of ambition for the clerical paradise of London; and though never rich and often straitened, he would not seek anything outside his chosen work, nor bend a conviction for an income. I know no nobler history of an unselfish ministry in our time. Indeed, it is the secret of his literary fame, as his letters show, that he looked on his novels or his poems as written for a high Christian purpose. The inspiration of his genius lay in this sense of his calling as a minister of Christ to man; and amidst his honors he always loved to come back to the parsonage with the three fir trees, the simple life among the poor, which had trained him

With this glance at the home where the young scholar found his inner growth, we can better understand the conditions in which he began his larger work as one of the leaders of the new time. Clearly to know, however, what this work was, we must spend a few words on the state of the English church at that critical period. As we look back to-day, after more than forty years of a struggle greater than any since the Reformation, we can appreciate its meaning more truly than even the most thinking man could do at the outset.

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The national church was passing through a new phase of its history. All those social problems which have so deeply stirred the mind of England, -the rise of the Chartist movement, the reforms in popular education, the growth of dissent,—had reached a point where they could not be put back. But Anglicanism of the old type had no other conception of a national establishment than as the keeper of all privileges in church or state; and the Evangelical section, once the power of a spiritual life in such a man as Wilberforce, had become as narrow in theology and in methods of religious work as the high church party. Both, in Kingsley's phrase, were impotent to meet the national want." It was out of this pressure that the great Oxford movement came. Already, when our author began his ministry, John Henry Newman, in the flush of his genius, with Pusey, Keble and other ardent scholars, had awakened the re-action which they dreamed was the Catholic revival of Eugland. We need not misjudge them at this hour. They were honest, devout schol. ars, who had studied their time through the window of their Oxford cloisters. The one idea, which gave all its real power to the Anglican movement, was that of a unity of our broken Christendom beyond the despotism of a Latin church, or the sectarian theologies of the Reformation. But they could not see that this is in truth the historic principle of Protestantism itself, which can only work out its result in the slow growth of Christian learning and social forces. Unity to them was a tradition of

church with its creed and priesthood and ritual, was the cure of all evils. It was not strange that such a movement seemed at first a grand reality; sacred art, poetry like the "Christian Year," new orders of monastic preachers and workers among the people, gave it a marvelous growth. But this ideal of a Nicene perfection had no reality outside their own fancies. It was a misreading of Christian history. The episcopate of Cyprian and the infallible councils could not be transplanted into the nineteenth century. It seemed a New Jerusalem, coming down from the primitive skies to England; but it was only another Peter Wilkins's flying island, now in Nicæa, and then in Oxford, never touching terra firma; and on its edges stood the host of Anglo Catholic, saints, in many colored vestments, chanting the Athanasian creed with all the damnatory clauses, or showering on the profane crowd below the blessings of baptismal grace. The dream had its natural awaking. Unconsciously to themselves, as we know from that "Apologia" in which Newman has laid bare each step of the movement, the intellectual leaders were borne by the tide of their church principles into Rome. We have not yet seen the end. The party survives in its second ritual stage of Mackonochies and Tooths; its thinkers are gone, yet it holds its sway by a certain real work among the poor, and by the more real charm of sensuous worship. Modern physiology has proved that in some orders of animated being there is a brisk sensitive life, after both hemispheres of the brain have been taken clean away.

It marks the character of Kingsley, that from the first he saw clearly the grounderror of the Oxford school, and was its lifelong opposer. At a glance it might be thought, that to his poetic temperament such an ideal would have been most winning. He was a reverent lover of the church; and the story of St. Elizabeth, wrought into his earliest poem of the "Saints' Tragedy," shows how the Christian past spoke to him, as to Montalembert, in every image of holy womanhood or saintly sacrifice. But with his fancy there was joined a clear English sense. No criticism on the school of New