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she panted and turned weird colors, kept by my side and even talked. Oh, I was tired, tired in body and mind, tired by the different shocks I had received, tired by the journey, tired by the want of food; and here I was being forced to run because this very naughty little girl chose to hide instead of going in to her lessons.

"I say this is jolly-" she jerked out. "But why need we run to the same place?" I breathlessly asked, in the vain hope of getting rid of her.

"Oh, yes-that's just-the fun. We'd get on-together-you and I-"

"No, no," said I, decided on this point, bewildered though I was.

"I can't stand washing-either-its awful-in winter-and makes one have -chaps."

"But I don't mind it in the least," I protested faintly, not having any energy left.

"Oh, I say!" said the little girl, looking at my face and making the sound known as a guffaw. The familiarity of this little girl was wholly revolting.

We had got safely through the door, round the corner past the radishes, and were in the shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy it was to hide in the tangle of little paths, and stopped a moment to look round and listen. The little girl opened her mouth to speak. With great presence of mind I instantly put my muff in front of it and held it there tight, while I listened. Dead silence, except for the labored breathing and struggles of the little girl.

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find no difference in it. "I am afraid poor Miss Robinson must have a wretched life," I said, in tones of deep disgust.

The little girl smiled fatuously, as though I were paying her compliments. "It's all green and brown," she said, pointing. "Is it always like that?"

Then I remembered the wet fir tree near the gate, and the enraptured kiss it had received, and blushed.

"Won't it come off?" persisted the little girl.

"Of course it will come off," I answered, frowning.

"Why don't you rub it off?”

Then I remembered the throwing away of the handkerchief and blushed again.

"Please lend me your handkerchief," I said humbly, "I-I have lost mine." There was a great fumbling in six different pockets, and then a handkerchief that made me young again merely to look at it was produced. I took it thankfully and rubbed with energy, the little girl, intensely interested, watching the operation and giving me advice. "There-it's all right now-a little more on the right-there-now it's all off."

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"No, it's red all over now," she replied cheerfully. "Let me get home," thought I, very much upset by this information, "let me get home to my dear, uncritical, admiring babies, who accept my nose as an example of what a nose should be and whatever its color think it beautiful." And thrusting the handkerchief back into the little girl's hands I hurried away down the path. She packed it into her pocket hastily, but it took some seconds, for it was of the size of a small sheet, and then came running after me. "Where are you going?" she asked, surprised, as I turned down the path leading to the gate.

"Through this gate," I replied with decision.

"But you mustn't-we're not allowed to go through there-"

So strong was the force of old habits in that place that at the words not allowed my hand dropped of itself from the latch; and at that instant a voice calling quite close to us through the mist struck me rigid.

"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!" called the voice. "Come in at once to your lessons -Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"

"It's Miss Robinson," whispered the little girl, twinkling with excitement; then, catching sight of my face, she said once more with eager insistence, "Who are you?"

The National Review.

"Oh, I'm a ghost!" I cried with conviction, pressing my hands to my forehead and looking round fearfully. "Pooh," said the little girl.

It was the last remark I heard her make, for there was a creaking of approaching boots in the bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I pulled the gate open with one desperate pull, flung it to behind me, and fled out and away down the wide, misty fields.

The "Gotha Almanach" says that the reigning cousin married the daughter of a Mr. Johnstone, an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their only child was born, Elizabeth.

THE GIPSY AND THE CUCKOO.

Tell me, brother, what's a cuckoo, but a roguish chaffing bird?
Not a nest's his own, no bough-rest's his own, and he's never
good man's word;

But his call is musical and rings pleasant on the ear,

And the spring would scarce be spring

If the cuckoo did not sing

In the leafy months o' the year.

Tell me, brother, what's a gipsy, but a roguish chaffing chap?

Not a cot's his own, not a man would groan

For a gipsy's worst mishap;

But his tent looks quaint when bent

On the sidesward of a lane,

And you'd deem the rain more dreary

And the long, white road more weary
If we never came again.

Would your May-days seem more fair
Were we chaps deep read in books,
Were we cuckoos, cawing rooks,
All the world cathedral closes,

Where the very sunlight dozes,

Were the sounds all organ-pealing, psalm and song and

prayer?

Ford M. Hueffer.

SONGS OF THE SEA.

England is richer in the possession of songs of the sea than any other country under heaven. The Dutchman and the Teuton have a few, of no conspicuous merit. Norway can boast of at least one fine specimen, a nautical song in every sense of the word, beginning "Mens Nordhavet bruser mod fieldbygt strand;" while the Danish "Sang for Flaaden" is terse and spirited to a degree, with a genuine salt-water smack about its half-dozen stanzas. But these stand alone among the sea rhymes of the North, and serve only to point the truth of our assertion.

That it should be so is not surprising, when we remember the love of most Englishmen for the sea, and the extent to which expressions drawn from things nautical have found their way into the common daily speech of our people. Here is a handful gleaned at random. "To keep aloof," i.e., to keep your luff when sailing to the wind, has been a term in common use on land since the days of Matthew Paris; to be "taken aback," i.e., by a sudden change of wind; to "lose one's ballast," or in other words, to grow topheavy with conceit when the centre of gravity has sunk too low; to "bear a hand;" to bring a man to his "bearings;" to have a snug "berth;" to give a man "a wide berth;" to "chop about" in shifting winds of perplexity; to "cut and run;" to "run the gauntlet" (prop. gantlope), once a well-known ordeal on ship-board; to be "half-seas over," used by writers from Swift downwards as expressive of too much drinking; to leave a comrade "in the lurch;" to be "hard up" or to "bear up for Poverty Bay;" to recognize a man by the "cut of his jib;" to "look out for squalls;" to be left "high and dry;" to "tell it to the marines;" to "go to Old Nick," or VOL. VIII. 448

LIVING AGE.

St Nicholas, the patron of sailors; to follow a thing to the "bitter end," i.e., to pay out cable till there is no more left at the bitts; to "steer a middle course;" to "steer clear" of a man; to hold on "till all's blue," i.e., till the ship has made her offing; to be ready “in a brace of shakes," i.e., before the sail has flapped three times; to "kick up a breeze;" to put things "ship-shape;"these are but a few out of many, that show how the life and familiar speech of every Englishman are salted by the briny breath of the four seas that wash his island home.

It is in the same natural environments of the British Isles that we find the origin of those incomparable sea ditties, which have been familiar as household words to our sailors since the days of Anson and the Nile, the days when line-of-battle-ships were built at Deptford Cattle Market, when for a shilling a wherry would carry you from the Pool into the midst of the Royal Navy, and Whitechapel swarmed with crimps, and press-gangs harried every tavern

From Richmond town
To Horselydown.

Who ever heard of a French sea song worthy the name? Insipid and devoid of verve, mere jingles, not fit to be put side by side with the weakest of our own; their savor is of the Seine, not of the sea, their philosophie that of a boulevard gamin rather than a blue water tar. A Frenchman can no more sing of the sea, as an English sailor knows it, than could that enfant de Paris who sang

La vie est un voyage
Tâchons de l'embellir!
Jetons sur son passage
Les roses du plaisir!

Poor, shabby, sickly stuff, as much like simply because they have "'scaped

a sea stave as rose-water is like oil of vitriol.

Seeing that nearly seven centuries have sped since England first drew up a code of naval laws, and Edward I assumed "the sovereign lordship of the sea of England and of the isles within the same," it is strange that almost until yesterday the deeds of British sailors remained unsung. Our earlier poets seem to have felt

Of the sea a reverential fear,

and to have kept aloof, even in imagination, from its terrors and grandeur. That among the poems of Chaucer and Gower we should find no songs of the sea is less surprising than their absence from our rich treasury of old-world ballads. Many a Robin Hood ballad holds its place in our folklore; there is no lack of local traditions or of poetic effusions bearing upon political events now many centuries old; but we have not one single old-time ditty commemorating an adventurous voyage or a gallant sea deed, the sights our mariners saw under the glitter of the Southern Cross, or the perils they grappled with in the white North. Englishmen in those days sailed far, and must have had many such tales to tell; but for centuries their prowess was untold in verse. All we possess is a scrap or two of doggerel, with here and there a passing allusion in the pages of Drayton or Spenser. The poets, almost to a man, have ignored the most valorous fights in which the fleets of England have been engaged and have sung naught in honor of the many bold and romantic expeditions that left her shores.

One of the earliest proper sea songs is a roystering ditty in the comedy of "Common Conditions" (1576), in which the sailors make boast of the extreme swiftness of their ship rather than of their own valor. They fear no foe,

them oft" by "swift swimming;" but we hasten to add that their craft is a merchantman and not a Queen's ship. Pepys has preserved a nautical ballad of yet earlier date, descriptive of a fight between Lord Howard and Sir Andrew Barton, a Scottish pirate, from which we learn that the naval force of England consisted at that time of but two ships of war. In the "Reliques" of Percy there is a sea stave called "The Winning of Cales," or Cadiz, but it is a dull effusion. Shakespeare has given us many snatches of old lyrics, but not one genuine song of the sea, with the exception, perhaps, of Stephano's ditty in "The Tempest":

The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I,

The gunner, and his mate, Lov'd Mall, Meg, and Marian, and Margery,

But none of us car'd for Kate, etc.

Notable sea songs surely must have been made and trolled in the spacious times of Queen Bess; but we know them not. Stuart times produced none, if we except a well-known ballad by Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl of Dorset, which has ever since been popular, no less for its lively wit and breezy flavor than on account of the circumstances under which it was composed. "To all you ladies now on land”. was written while the fleets of England and Holland, commanded by the Duke of York and "foggy Opdam," were lying within gunshot of each other off Harwich, on the evening of June 3d, 1665. Dr. Johnson, however, asserts that Dorset "only retouched or finished it on the memorable evening; but even this," he graciously adds, "whatever it may subtract from his facility, leaves him his courage." However this may be, the ballad is such as we should expect from an accomplished courtier and cavalier:

To all you ladies now on land,

We men at sea indite;
But first would have you understand,
How hard it is to write.

The Muses now, and Neptune, too,
We must implore to write to you,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.

If as a composition Dorset's stanzas cannot vie with Theodore Körner's "Sword Song," written by a camp fire two hours before he fell, we must remember that Dorset was a poet rather than a sailor, serving as a volunteer on board ship, according to a custom by which it was no uncommon thing for a high-born civilian or a military officer to take charge of a fleet; to-day he might be in command of a regiment of horse, to morrow of a three decker.

Under Cromwell something of the old Viking spirit blazed up, and in the intervals of its psalm-singing the country adressed itself to the preservation of that "sovereignty of the seas" which Grotius disputed and Selden defended. Yet Blake and his fellows went to their graves unsung. The only extant sea ballad of the Protectorate is one by Martyn Parker, a cockney rhymer, who wrote also "The King shall enjoy his own again." His verses, which are in Pepys's collection, are entitled "Saylers for my Money; a new ditty composed in the praise of Saylers and sea affairs, briefly showing the nature of so worthy a calling and effects of their industry, to the tune of the 'Jovial Cobbler.'" The poetaster makes his sailors sing of the "cares and the fears" of their calling in a strain calculated to arouse the wrath of Dibdin, and barely reaches mediocrity in fourteen stanzas, of which the opening lines are the most familiar:

Ye gentlemen of England,

Who live at home at ease, Ah! little do you think upon The dangers of the seas.

Sentiments identical with those of "A

Mariner's Glee" (temp. James I), the first stanza of which runs:

We be three poor mariners, Newly come from the seas; We spend our lives in jeopardy, While others live at ease.

Parker's song seems to have commended itself to the author of "Hohenlinden," who not only wrote for the air to which it was sung his fiery stanzas, "Ye Mariners of England"the most robust and truly national lyric in our language-but incorporated therein the refrain "When the stormy winds do blow."

The arrival of William at Torbay in the Brill was the occasion of a sea song telling of how "the conquering hero came" over the subject waters, and of his welcome "on the British shore." Four years later appeared a more muscular specimen in commemoration of Russell's victory at La Hogue. It is a right vigorous ballad from the pen of an anonymous writer, who was evidently no mealy-mouthed minstrel, but a man used to the expression of his thoughts in forcible language. Succeeding years produced little in praise of the sea, seeing that the army had the pick of the laurels, and "The British Grenadiers" was a standing dish. Two ditties by John Gay belong, however, to this period, "Black-eyed Susan," a song rather of Cupid than Neptune, and ""Twas when the seas were roaring;" each undeniably the work of a landsman, and suited rather for a spinet than for the "rough and tumble" accompaniment of wind and wave.

The Electors of Hanover cared only for the sea as a troublesome line of demarcation, beyond which lay their home. The navy cost money, and Walpole ignored it. But the popular feeling clung fast to the old love. Stories of gallant deeds at sea were still the tradition, the delight and the heritage

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