who had died since the battle of Hastings. As we loathed old people in our dramatic history, except the aged lord who dies blessing a numerous progeny from time to time, all our resplendent heroes perished in romantic youth on the Spanish Main, on battle-fields, on the African coast; or rescuing Turkish princesses, or capturing Grecian isles; while their brides invariably faded away either of consumption or а broken heart at seventeen. The cemetery was peopled to excess by the time we got as far as the battle of Bosworth Field, where the last hero fell in front of the enemy before he had time to marry the maiden of his choice.

It is astonishing how little the average child approves of a natural death. The heroes must die by violence in the flower of youth, and the heroines must perish or pine away from unnatural causes on the threshold of maidenhood. Nineteen is even old and commonplace the age of glory is

seventeen.

If you entered our garden, turned into the cemetery of the L'Estranges, you would have seen layer upon layer of little wooden sticks that looked like the indication of hidden seeds, and if you stooped to read the legend, this is the sort of thing that would have greeted your eyes:

"Here lies Walter l'Estrange" (or Rupert, or Ralph, or Reginald, for we were fond of these names), "born such and such a year, wrecked off the coast of

Barbary such and such a year," or "perished in a conflict with Spanish pirates," &c.; and beside him, with day and date of birth and burial, "Here lies Edith, his beloved wife, daughter of Lord Seymour or Admiral So-and-so."

In a big ledger, recorded in Pauline's sprawling caligraphy, were the lives and characters of the imaginary dead. It was remarkable that all our heroes were as brave as lions, as modest and mild as lambs, and as stainless as Galahads. To lend relief to the monotony of their implacable virtue, we now and then invented a villain, who invariably died in a vulgar brawl or a duel. The battle-field, the Spanish Main, the rescue of Turkish princesses, and a noble shipwreck, were kept for the Galahads.

The last profile of my Lysterby days is that of a radiant and lovely Irish girl, who came from Southampton, the Mother House of the Ladies of Mercy, to stay with us until the nuns found her a situation as gover ness. Her name was Molly O'Connell : she was doubly orphaned almost since birth, her mother having died giving life to her, and her father within the following year. Everybody about her thought it very sad that her mother should have died on the very day of her birth. But I, alas! knew a sadder thing. My father who, I am told, was a very kindly, tender-hearted man, died some months before my birth. Had I been given the choice beforehand, and known what

experiences without a thrill of horror. The nuns had placed her with titled folk-Lord and Lady E., with whom lived Lady E.'s father, an old earl, a wid

Molly was the most ingenuous and garrulous of creatures. She spent her first vacation some months later with us, and kept us at recreation hour in shouts of laughter and scorn over her adventures. The old earl was the most extraordinary old man, according to her. He was always meeting her alone, here, there, and everywhere. She seemed to think it was a sort of schoolboy's game. Once he showed her in the garden, when no one was by, a splendid diamond bracelet, which he had bought for her.

sitting in his wife's place at table and still she suspected nothing.

One night, she told us, shrieking with laughter as at the height of the grotesque, Lord E. mistook her room for the nursery, and entered it in his shirt. Not the faintest feeling of anger or fear on the part of this blind, silly maid. All she did was to go into convulsions of laughter, "because he looked so ugly and so ridiculous." But it was still part of the high old game of life, where everything happens to send one into fits of laughter. That tears, that trouble, that shame and blighting misery lay in wait for her, this radiant, unconscious, ignorant, and foolish innocent could not then suspect.

Then Lady E. went up to town, and left this bewitching creature at the mercy of her husband. Molly again regarded it in the light of a capital game. The aged earl and his middle-aged son-in-law appeared to be on strained terms. The poor goose never suspected why. Lord E. insisted on her

We, too, thought it a splendid game, laughed heartily at the ridiculous figure she described Lord E. as cutting in his nightshirt, agreed with her that the old earl was a monstrous old fool to go skipping in that absurd way down the park avenues with her, putting his hand upon his heart, sighing and talking in a wild incoherent way about "the loveliest girl on earth," whom Molly, the least vain of creatures, never for one moment suspected was herself. For she was far too busy laughing at people to understand them. You had but to stand solemnly before her, and say, "It's a wet day," and off she was on a ringing cascade. What you said she probably did not understand in the least; but the expression of your eye, the

laugh.

And so the infamous nature of the pursuit of the earl and his son-in-law quite escaped her, and neither the diamond bracelet, nor Lord E. in his shirt at night in her room, awoke the faintest throb of alarm. All this to her and us was part of the eternal joke of nature. And a very, very few years afterwards, I learned, one who had loved her well and sought her far discovered her at night in the vicinity of the Haymarket, with paint upon her cheeks and lips, and the fatal brightness of consumption looking out of her hollow violet eyes.

My remembrance of the rest of my stay at Lysterby fades away upon the heavy perfume of incense in the cold aisles of the cathedral, whither we were conducted by the nuns for the breathlessly interesting offices of Holy Week. It is a long dream of sombre tones and solemn notes, which I followed in a passionate absorption in the "Offices of Holy Week," printed in Latin and English, for which I paid the sum of four shillings. I studied those I studied those offices so diligently, followed them so accurately, that afterwards I could detect to a movement, a note, a Latin word, any error or omission in the Lenten services of the procathedral of Dublin, where I must say the rites struck me as shorn of all impressiveness.

But at Lysterby the functions were rigidly correct. The evening office of Tenebræ was

vices of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday were religious excitements on which to live for months. I shut my eyes, even now in middle age, and I see again the long grey cathedral aisles dim in taper-light, altars hung in black, and the lean aristocratic visage of Father More above the surplice and violet stole, and I hear him chant in his thin, melodious voice, "Oremus, flectamus genua !" and listen again for the response, "Levate!"

I cannot precisely define my sensations in this period. Religion with me was nothing but an intense emotion nourished upon incense, music, taper-lit gloom, and a mysterious sense of the intangible. It was in the fullest meaning of the word sensuous; but while its attraction lasted, nothing I have since known could be compared with it for intensity. While under its spell, you seem to float in the air, to touch the wings of the angels, to be yourself part of the heavenly sphere you aspire to attain. Rapture itself is a mean enough word to define your emotions. And then you come back to earth with a sense of unspeakable deception and surprise. You feel hungry, and loathe yourself for the vulgar need. Your ear is buffeted by loud earthly sounds instead of the roll of the organ and the monotonous solemnity of Gregorian chant.

To realise this is to understand how so many sentimental, virtuous, and sensuous souls

seek oblivion of life in religious excitement. It is a mental and moral mixture of opium and alcohol extremely soothing to the bruised consciousness, a gentle diversion in commonplace cares that poor humanity must not be begrudged; though, as George Eliot has finely said, it is proof of strength to live and do well without this narcotic.

The return to Ireland coincides with the outbreak of the Franco-German war. A mist hangs over those terrible months, but Dublin I remember was French to a man. Every

morning my eldest sister marched us off to mass to pray for the French, and we wept profusely over each tragic telegram. Our hero Edmond was over there, fighting and lying with equal gallantry. Several noble dames had tended his wounds and offered to marry him, and he escaped from prison with the assistance of the jailer's daughter, who loved him despairingly. I recall our awed inspection of several helmets and swords brought back from the war by a quantity of heroic young Irishmen who professed to have laid the Germans low on countless occasions. I do not now know what they did out there, for there is always a great deal of Tartarin, an atmosphere of Tarascon, about the Irishman returned from abroad. But we all went down in a glorified body, dressed in our very best, to assist at the arrival of Marshal M'Mahon and his wife, who came all the way from far off France to

thank us for what they had or had not done.

Here, at the age of twelve, my childhood ends, and youth, troubled youth, begins.

in a

To stand upon the hill-top and cast a glance of retrospection down the long path travelled in all its excess of light and shadow; impenetrable darkness massed against a luminous haze through which rays of blazing glory filter, each one striking upon memory shock of prismatic hues, until the eye reaches as far back as the start from the valley,-how astonished we are at the unevenness of the road! So brilliant, so ineffectual for most of us, is this dear thing called Youth! The uneasy flutter from the nest, the wild throb of pulses, now for ever tamed, at each sharp encounter with fate; the courage, the hope, the passion-alas! how futile and how sad to eyes in middle life that see the inexorable word "failure" written across that splendid tear-blotted page of strife, of yearning, of frailty and endeavour. Seen from the hill - top, how small the big stones are that broke our path! How easy it might have been to skirt the thorn-bushes and brambles, instead of tearing an impulsive way through them, and falling so repeatedly on bleeding face and hands!

Impatience and panting courage have served to carry us through the unequal battle, and now, resting in the equable tones of middle life, how sweet a wonder seem the blackness,