"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"The last word he pronounced was-your name.'

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. I knew it-I was sure!' She knew. She was I heard her weeping, her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such

sure.

a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had ren

dered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too darktoo dark altogether. . . ."

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I looked around. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky-seemed to lead also into the heart of an immense darkness.

THERE have been few eras in which superstition has not found a congenial soil in the human mind. Unable or unwilling to rest satisfied with the plain teaching of religion, natural and revealed, mankind has ever been prone to plunge into extravagant and grotesque beliefs. It would be hard to say whether superstition has flourished more vigorously in ages of faith or in ages of infidelity. In the former, the disposition to believe much has made it easy to believe a little more. In the latter, the determination determination to believe nothing has, by a natural reaction, given place to a readiness to accept anything. Certain it is that no amount of intellectual "progress," no quantity of superior education, has hitherto sufficed to eradicate this most characteristic weakness.

Even the possession of a powerful and over- mastering intellect affords no trustworthy safeguard against the assaults of credulity. It is not alone the untutored rustic who dreads the indissoluble and mysterious connection between omen and event, or the ignorant servantgirl who expects the cards to foretell the complexion of her future sweetheart. Buonaparte cherished many secret convictions at which one can only marvel. Mr Parnell shivered with apprehension if the bedchamber allotted to him in a hotel bore the fatal number 13, or if he noticed three candles burning simultaneously in the

room. Astrology, chiromancy, and kindred sciences survived the middle ages, and for aught we can tell many an anxious inquirer to-day is busily engaged, with the aid of retort and crucible, in quest of the philosopher's stone, or in seeking to fix the site of buried treasure by means of a simple suffumigation. People pay money to have their characters told from their handwriting. No fancy bazaar is complete without its soothsayer or spaewife. This adept is, as a rule, more polite and discreet than Cadwallader in 'Peregrine Pickle.' But for an adequate fee he or she is quite prepared to frighten nervous clients into fits by predicting evils imminent or remote. In private life many ladies may be found to read your hand with the perspicacity of a Heyraddin Maugrabin, or to construct your ephemeris with the judgment of a Galeotti. They will discourse to you fluently of lines of life and health, of Jupiter, of Mercury, and, above all, of Venus. If Saturn appear combust, they will pull a long face, and their alarm for your future will know no bounds if Mars have more dignity than is rightly his in the cusp of the twelfth house. As for "scrying" in a crystal globe, do we not all know that Mr Lang finds therein his chief diversion after golf and fishing?

Many of these are, after all, comparatively respectable pastimes. Astrology, for example,

Animal magnetism, spiritualism, and faith-healing are all wrong. "They have no Christianly scientific principle" (p. 281). Homœopathy, it is true, is more indulgently treated; for Christian Science is "the next stately step beyond it" (p. 50), a compliment which we hope the homoeopathists will relish. But, upon the whole, it is plain that we are here dealing with the real old original rag-and-bone shop. All others are spurious imitations. When you ask for Christian Science see that you get it. No connection with over-the-way, and if the quality of the goods at that establishment don't please you, you are respectfully invited to favour ME with a call. Such being the pretensions of Christian Science, and Mrs Mary Baker G. Eddy posing in no less a character than that of a direct recipient of divine revelation, it is not surprising that the seclusion in which she lives should have prompted her friends to inquire, Why do you not make yourself more widely known? Her answer is replete with - modesty and self-respect.

"Could her friends know how little time the author has had in which to make herself outwardly known, except through her laborious publications, and how much time and toil are still required to establish the stately operations of Christian science, -they would understand why she is so secluded. Others could not take her place, even if willing to do so. She has therefore remained unseen at her post, working for the generations to come, never looking for a present reward” (p. 460),;

lously low sum of $3.18 per copy of the great work. It has always been the delight of 'Maga' to drag obscure merit into publicity, and this Columbian sybil is very welcome to the glory which will undoubtedly be reflected upon her from the following attempt to expound her utterances.

We say "attempt" advisedly, for he would indeed be a bold man who should pretend to grasp their meaning and significance. Compared with these oracular pronouncements Swedenborg is the plainest of plain sailing, Hegel seems to err, if anything, on the side of lucidity, and Miss Corelli's patent system of electrical demonology presents a plausible appearance of intelligibility. If you listen to the ravings of delirium, you cannot help wondering whether you are in full possession of your judgment. If you converse

with a madman, you feel your own reason begin to totter. Even so, you rise from this preposterous performance dazed and wearied as from a nightmare. The honest effort to detect a grain of sense in a cartload of such rubbish, to trace a consecutive line of thought amid such a parade of ratiocination, leaves the brain in the state so aptly likened by Mr Macwheeble or Mr Saddletree to "a confused progress of titles." Nor, her matter apart, does the author's style or language make much for perspicuity. To describe them both as turgid is to use a wholly in

quite plain to see whence her inspiration in this regard is derived.

Leaning on the sustaining Infinite, to-day is big with blessings." "The time for thinkers has come. Truth, independent of doctrines and time-honoured systems, knocks at the portal of humanity." "The looms of crime, hidden in the dark recesses of mortal thought, are every hour weaving webs more complicated and subtile." "Mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.”

We defy any one to distinguish between the voice of Mrs Eddy and the voice of Miss Toppit and Miss Codger, the two L.L.'s presented by the mother of the modern Gracchi to Elijah Pogram.

There is one other respect in which we are free to confess ourselves handicapped in deal ing with this subject. With stupefying audacity, Mrs Eddy professes to find the rudiments of her system in the Bible, and more especially in the life and teaching of the Founder of Christianity Himself. Accordingly she has not scrupled, when she finds such a course convenient or necessary, which she frequently does, to garnish her treatise with texts of Scripture, the true meaning of which she deliberately wrests to suit her own ends. Into this department it is needless to say that we do not propose to follow her. It would serve no good purpose to shock the reader by repeating her arrant blasphemies, even for the purpose of demonstrating their absurdity.

Braced, then, to some extent by the assurance that "no intellectual proficiency is requisite in the learner, but sound morals are most desirable" (Pref., p. x), and at the same time sobered by the reminder that a simple perusal of the volume will not enable one to absorb its whole "it needs to be meaning studied" (p. 40)—we proceed to grapple with "the leading factor in mind-science," to wit, the proposition that "Mind is All and matter is naught (p. 3). "Mind governs the body [though, of course, there is really no body] not partially but wholly" (p. 5). "Matter possesses neither sensation nor life" (p. 2). "Matter is nothing but a mortal illusion wholly inadequate to affect man through its supposed organic action or existence" (p. 19). Elephants and microbes, we take it, are equally mere figments of imagination, for "matter exists in human belief only, and not in the spiritual understanding of Being" (p. 107). "Spirit and its formations are the only realities

of Being. Matter disappears under the microscope of Spirit" (p. 160), which certainly shows what an odd kind of instrument the microscope of Spirit must be.

"We define matter as error because it is а false claim to life, substance, and intelligence" (p. 174). "The theory that Spirit is not the only substance and creator is pantheistic heterodoxy which ultimates [sic] in sickness, sin, and death" (p. 153).

It follows clearly that error, sin, sickness, disease, and death