after a luxurious lunch with a few privileged mothers in the convent, he requested somebody to fetch me. The nuns did not fail to impress the full measure of this honour upon me, and when I came into the refectory, where the bishop was enthroned like a prince, I caught a reassuring beam from my dear friend, Mother Aloysius! The bishop pushed back his chair and held out both arms to me. I was a singularly pretty child, I know. My enemy, Sister Esmeralda, had even said that I was like an angel with the heart of a fiend. A delicate, proud, and serious little visage, with the finish, the fairness, the transparency of a golden-haired doll, meant to take the prize in an exhibition. But this would hardly explain the extraordinary distinction conferred on me by a man who has passed into history,—a grave and noble nature, with as many cares as a Prime Minister, a man who saw men and women in daily battalions, and to whom a strange little girl of nine he had never spoken to, could scarcely seem a more serious creature in life than a rabbit or a squirrel. took it from the plate, and placed it in my willing grasp. "A fine and most promising little face," I distinctly heard him say to the superioress. "But be careful of her. A difficult and dangerous temperament. All nerves and active brain, and a fearful suffering little heart within. Manage her, manage her. I tell you there's the stuff of a great saint or a great sinner here, if she should see twenty-one, which I doubt.” Alas! I have passed twentyone years and years ago, with difficulty, it is true, with ever the haunting shadow of death about me, and time has revealed me neither the saint nor the sinner, just a creature of ordinary frailty and our common level of virtue. If I have not exactly gone to perdition—an uncheerful proceeding my sense of humour would always guard me from-I have not scaled the heights. I have lived my life, by no means as well as I had hoped in the days we are privileged to hope and to dream, not as loftily, neither with distinction nor success; but I have not accomplished any particular villany, or scandal, or crime that would justify my claiming an important place in the rank of sinners. I have had a good deal more innocent fun, and known a great deal more suffering, than fall to the common lot; and I have enjoyed the fun with all the intensity of the mercurial Irish temperament, and endured the other with what I think I may proudly call the courage of my race. have not injured or cheated a He human being, though I have He had a kind and thoughtful face, deeply lined and striking. I liked his smile at once, and went up to him without any feeling of shyness. He lifted me on to his knee, kissed my forehead, and looked steadily and long into my steady eyes. Then he kissed me again, and called for a big slice of plum-cake, which Mother Aloysius, smiling delightedly at me, was quick to hand him. I been greatly injured and cheated by more than I could now enumerate. There ends my scaling of the hill of virtues. Of my sins it behoves me not to speak, lest I should fall into the grotesque and delightful attitude of the sailor I once heard in London make his public confession to a Salvation Army circle. "My brothers, I am a miserable sinner. In Australia I murdered a man; I drank continually, I thieved, I ran after harlots, and led the life of debauchery. Oh, my friends, pray for me, for now I am converted and know Jesus. I am one of the just, may I remain so. But wicked and debauched and drunken as I was, there were lots more out there much worse than I." In summing up our errors and frailties, it is always a kindly comfort offered our conceit to think that there are on all sides of us "lots more much worse than we.' Unless our pride chooses to take refuge in the opposite reflection, so we prefer to glory in being much worse than others. And so ends my single interview with an eminent ecclesiastic. He kissed me repeatedly, and stroked my hair while I munched my plum-cake on his knee. He questioned me, and discovered my passionate interest in Napoleon and Josephine and the Queen of Prussia, the King-maker and the children in the Tower. And then, having prophesied my early death and luminous or lurid career, he filled my two small hands with almond-drops and toffee, and sent me away, a being henceforth of something more than common clay. From that hour my position in Lysterby was improved. I was never even slapped again, though I had had the stupendous good luck to see, unseen myself, the lay sister who had flogged me go into a cupboard on the staircase, whose door, with the key on the outside, opened outward, and crawling along on hands and knees, reached the door in time to lock her in. I was also known to have climbed fruit-trees, when I robbed enough unripe fruit to make all the little ones ill. Yet nobody beat me, and I was let off with a sharp admonishment. I went my unruly way, secretly protected by the bishop's admiration. If I did not amend, and loved none the more my tyrants, their rule being less drastic, I had less occasion to fly out at them. Besides, semi - starvation had subdued me for the while. I suffered continually from abscesses and earache, and spent most of my time in the infirmary, dreaming and reading. (To be continued.) MEN WHO HAVE KEPT A DIARY. "Velut minuta magno Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento.' "THERE is nothing, sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible." This pronouncement by the most complete hero of the most complete diarist known strikes the keynote of all memorable diaries. "The great thing to be recorded," observes Dr Johnson on another occasion, "is the state of your own mind, and you should write down everything that you remember, for you cannot judge at first what is good and bad." These unpremeditated self-confidences -the confessions of individuality-form the charm of " men who have kept a diary," the spell of "The little great, the infinite small thing the appeal of Truth en déshabillé. "In this glass," preached Atterbury of Lady Cutt's Diary, "she every day dressed her mind." It is just this "dressing of the mind" that makes diaries such interesting human documents. But, when we particularise, we find that very few surviving publications wholly fulfil these conditions of privacy and candour. Boswell himself was recommended by his dictator to retain some posthumous friend for the cremation of his own diary. There are diarists who, during their daily toilet before the glass, are more concerned with the reflections of the room than of themselves. There are, again, set diarists who masquerade in domino. There are diarists for a purpose, and diarists for no purpose. There are diarists, once more, of "Mémoires à servir," mainly interesting from their opportunities. In perusing such we may well remember the saying of George Eliot that "curiosity becomes the more eager from the incompleteness of the first information." To such curiosity anecdotal remembrancers, from the weightier type of armchair historian to the lighter specimen of after-dinner raconteur, inherently respond. For good anecdote is to good literature what wit is to wisdom, repartee to conversation, and bouquet to wine. It is at once condensed and indicative. It interprets life while it exhibits the bric-àbrac of mannerism and manners. The main qualification for every diarist none the less remains that of the legal witness. His evidence must be first-hand and absolutely sincere. And through all the varieties of tendency and form runs, even if subconsciously, the psychological thread. For us the workings of the diarist's own mind exercise a paramount fascination and restrict our choice, so that in this regard we shall afterwards instance two collec- are among his redeeming feattions of correspondence which ures. "With my eyes mighty signally reveal character,-in- weary and my head full of care formal diaries before whose how to get my accounts and "glass" the letter-writer truly business settled against my dresses his own soul. Did journey, home to supper and space permit, we might have bed," he writes in the face of mounted higher. For all an- his infirmity. So is fortitude. nalists and essayists are born There is a genuine pathos in diarists or the reverse. Herodo the words which close the diary tus is a diarist by nature; so, when blindness was threatening if less primitively, is Tacitus; the little Secretary to the Adso eminently are Froissart and miralty with its terrors. From Burnet; so, after his manner, is henceforth he "must be conMacaulay. Not so are Thucy- tented to set down no more dides or Clarendon or Gibbon. than is fit for them and all the Montaigne is a diarist; Bacon, world to know; or if there be the opposite. It is a difference anything, I must endeavour to of temperaments-the difference keep a margin in my book between the authors of the open, to add here and there a 'Spectator' and the author of note in shorthand with my own the 'Rambler,' between Gold- hand. And so I betake myself smith and Smollett, Sterne and to that course which is almost Fielding. Rousseau is a diarist as much as to see myself go even in his so-called 'Philos- into my grave: for which, and ophy'; Voltaire, a "Philoso- all the discomforts that will pher" even in his 'Notes sur accompany my being blind, the les Anglois.' good God prepare me!" Sturdy, stoical-nay, in a sense pious— petit maître, for all his foibles and frailties! His periodical headache of repentance is followed by the periodical draught of peccadillo. Though he has no deep sense of life's mystery, he does realise his accountability to God-a prosaic accountability like those official audits that so taxed his diligence. He never whimpers or makes excuse. Nor does he brave it out, like that German colonel whom Königsmarck suborned to stab Mr Thynne, and who averred, as he marched to execution, that he did not care for death a rush, and that he hoped "God would treat him like a gentleman. No, Pepys only regrets If ever a man was designed to keep a diary, it was Pepys. He is naïve and communicative to a fault. Seated in his own confessional, he unbosoms his memory and absolves his conscience. The journal was composed in cipher. Mrs Pepys could have made nothing of it; it was never apparently meant for perusal. This typical bourgeois of his day, fussy and pompous, petty and busybodying, regular in his irregularities as in his expenditure, thrifty, vain, and passionately inquisitive, would retire into his sanctum, produce the treasured pages, and find his relief in the truthful industry of his chronicle. For truth and industry MEN WHO HAVE KEPT A DIARY. "Velut minuta magno Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento.' "THERE is nothing, sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible." This pronouncement by the most complete hero of the most complete diarist known strikes the keynote of all memorable diaries. "The great thing to be recorded," observes Dr Johnson on another occasion, "is the state of your own mind, and you should write down everything that you remember, for you cannot judge at first what is good and bad." These unpremeditated self-confidences -the confessions of individuality-form the charm of "men who have kept a diary," the spell of "The little great, the infinite small thing the appeal of Truth en déshabillé. "In this glass," preached Atterbury of Lady Cutt's Diary, "she every day dressed her mind." It is just this "dressing of the mind" that makes diaries such interesting human documents. But, when we particularise, we find that very few surviving publications wholly fulfil these conditions of privacy and candour. Boswell himself was recommended by his dictator to retain some posthumous friend for the cremation of his own diary. There are diarists who, during their daily toilet before the glass, are more concerned with the reflections of the room than of themselves. There are, again, set diarists who masquerade in domino. There are diarists for a purpose, and diarists for no purpose. There are diarists, once more, of "Mémoires à servir," mainly interesting from their opportunities. In perusing such we may well remember the saying of George Eliot that "curiosity becomes the more eager from the incompleteness of the first information." To such curiosity anecdotal remembrancers, from the weightier type of armchair historian to the lighter specimen of after-dinner raconteur, inherently respond. For good anecdote is to good literature what wit is to wisdom, repartee to conversation, and bouquet to wine. It is at once condensed and indicative. It interprets life while it exhibits the bric-àbrac of mannerism and manners. The main qualification for every diarist none the less remains that of the legal witness. His evidence must be first-hand and absolutely sincere. And through all the varieties of tendency and form runs, even if subconsciously, the psychological thread. For us the workings of the diarist's own mind exercise a paramount fascination and restrict our choice, so that in this regard we shall |