A life for a life

Yes, I hate soldiers.

I can't help writing it--it relieves my mind. All morning have we been driving about that horrid region into which our beautiful, desolate moor has been transmogrified; round and round, up and down, in at the south camp and out at the north camp; directed hither and thither by muddle-headed privates; stared at by puppyish young officers; choked with chimney-smoke; jolted over roads laid with ashes--or no roads at all--and pestered everywhere with the sight of lounging, lazy, red groups,--that colour is becoming to me a perfect eyesore! What a treat it is to get home and lock myself in my own room--the tiniest and safest nook in all Rockmount--and spurt out my wrath in the blackest of ink with the boldest of pens! Bless you! (query: who can I be blessing, for nobody will ever read this?) what does it matter? And after all, I repeat, it relieves my mind.

I do hate soldiers. I always did, from my youth up, till the war in the East startled everybody like a thunder-clap. What a time it was--this time two years ago! How the actual romance of each day, as set down in the newspapers, made my old romances read like mere balderdash: how the present, in its infinite piteousness, its tangible horror, and the awfulness of what they called its "glory," cast the tame past altogether into shade! Who read history then, or novels, or poetry? Who read anything but that fearful Times?

And now it is all gone by--we have peace again; and this 20th of September, 1856, I begin with my birthday a new journal (capital one, too, with a first-rate lock and key, saved out of my summer bonnet, which I didn't buy). Nor need I spoil the day--as once--by crying over those who, two years since,

"Went up
Red Alma's heights to glory."

Conscience, tender over dead heroes, feels not the smallest compunction in writing the angry initiatory line, when she thinks of that odious camp which has been established near us, for the education of the military mind and the hardening of the military body. Whence red-coats swarm out over the pretty neighbourhood like lady-birds over the hop-gardens-- harmless, it is true, yet for ever flying in one's face in the most unpleasant manner, making inroads through one's parlour windows, and crawling over one's tea-table. Wretched red insects! except that the act would be murder, I often wish I could put half-a-dozen of them--swords, epaulets, moustaches, and all--under the heel of my shoe.

Perhaps this is obstinacy, or the love of contradiction. No wonder. Do I hear of anything but soldiers from morning till night? At visits or dinner-parties can I speak to a soul--and 'tisn't much I do speak to anybody--but that she--I use the pronoun advisedly--is sure to bring in with her second sentence something about "the camp"?

I'm sick of the camp. Would that my sisters were! For Lisabel, young and handsome, there is some excuse, but Penelope--she ought to know better.

Papa is determined to go with us to the Grantons' ball to-night. I wish there were no necessity for it; and have suggested as strongly as I could that we should stay at home. But what of that? Nobody minds me; nobody ever did that I ever remember. So poor papa is to be dragged out from his cosy arm-chair, jogged and tumbled across these wintry moors, and stuck up solemn in a corner of the drawing-room--being kept carefully out of the card-room because he happens to be a clergyman. And all the while he will wear his politest and most immovable of smiles, just as if he liked it. Oh, why cannot people say what they mean and do as they wish! Why must they hold themselves tied and bound with horrible chains of etiquette even at the age of seventy! Why cannot he say, "Girls"--no, of course he would say "young ladies"--"I had far rather stay at home--go you and enjoy yourselves;" or, better still, "go, two of you--but I want Dora."

No, he never will say that. He never did want any of us much; me less than any. I am neither eldest nor youngest, neither Miss Johnston nor Miss Lisabel--only Miss Dora-- Theodora--" the gift of God," as my little bit of Greek taught me. A gift--what for, and to whom? I declare, since I was a baby, since I was a little solitary ugly child, wondering if ever I had a mother like other children, since even I have been a woman grown, I never have been able to find out.

Well, I suppose it is no use to try to alter things. Papa will go his own way, and the girls theirs. They think the grand climax of existence is "society"; he thinks the same--at least for young women, properly introduced, escorted, and protected there. So, as the three Misses Johnston--sweet fluttering doves!--have no other chaperon, or protector, he makes a martyr of himself on the shrine of paternal duty, alias respectability, and goes.

The girls here called me down to admire them. Yes, they looked extremely well:--Lisabel, majestic, slow, and fair; I doubt if anything in this world would disturb the equanimity of her sleepy blue eyes and soft-tempered mouth--a large, mild, beautiful animal, like a white Brahmin cow. Very much admired is our Lisabel, and no wonder. That white barége will kill half the officers in the camp. She was going to put on her pink one, but I suggested how ill pink would look against scarlet; and so, after a series of titters, Miss Lisa took my advice. She is evidently bent upon looking her best to-night.

Penelope, also; but I wish Penelope would not wear such airy dresses, and such a quantity of artificial flowers, while her curls are so thin, and her cheeks so sharp. She used to have very pretty hair, ten years ago. I remember being exceedingly shocked and fierce about a curl of hers that I saw stolen in the summer-house by Francis Charteris, before we found out that they were engaged.

She rather expected him to-night, I fancy. Mrs. Granton was sure to have invited him with us; but, of course, he has not come. He never did come, in my recollection, when he said he would.

I ought to go and dress; but I can do it in ten minutes, and it is not worth while wasting more time. Those two girls--what a capital foil each makes to the other!--little, dark, lively--not to say satirical; large, amiable, and fair. Papa ought to be proud of them;--I suppose he is.

Heigho! 'Tis a good thing to be good-looking. And next best, perhaps, is downright ugliness,--nice, interesting, attractive ugliness--such as I have seen in some women: nay, I have somewhere read that ugly women have often been loved best.

But to be just ordinary; of ordinary height, ordinary figure, and, oh me! let me lift up my head from the desk to the looking-glass and take a good stare at an undeniably ordinary face. 'Tis not pleasant. Well; I am as I was made. Let me not undervalue myself, if only out of reverence for Him who made me.

Surely--Captain Treherne's voice below. Does that young man expect to be taken to the ball in our fly? Truly, he is making himself one of the family already. There is papa calling us. What will papa say?

Why, he said nothing; and Lisabel, as she swept slowly down the staircase with a little silver lamp in her right hand, likewise said nothing; but she looked--"Everybody is lovely to somebody," says the proverb.

Query: if somebody I could name should live to the age of Methuselah, will she ever be lovely to anybody?

What nonsense! Bravo! thou wert in the right of it, jolly miller of Dee!

"I care for nobody, no, not I;
And nobody cares for me."

So let me lock up my desk, and dress for the ball.

Really, not a bad ball; even now--when looked at in the light of next day's quiet--with the leaves stirring lazily in the fir-tree by my window, and the broad sunshine brightening the moorlands far away.

Not a bad ball, even to me, who usually am stoically contemptuous of such senseless amusements. Doubtless, from the mean motive that I like dancing, and am rarely asked to dance; that I am just five-and-twenty, and get no more attention than if I were five-and-forty. Of course, I protest continually that I don't care a pin for this fact (mem., mean again). For I do care--at the very bottom of my heart, I do. Many a time have I leaned my head here--good old desk, you will tell no tales!--and cried, actually cried, with the pain of being neither pretty, agreeable, nor young.

Moralists say it is in every woman's power to be, in measure, all three: that when she is not liked or admired--by some few at least--it is a sign that she is neither likeable nor admirable. Therefore, I suppose I am neither. Probably very disagreeable. Penelope often says so, in her sharp, and Lisabel in her lazy way. Lis would apply the same expression to a gnat on her wrist, or a dagger pointed at her heart. A "thoroughly amiable woman!" Now, I never was--never shall be--an amiable woman.

To return to the ball--and really I would not mind returning to it and having it all over again, which is more than one can say of many hours in our lives, especially of those which roll on, rapidly as hours seem to roll, after five-and-twenty. It was exceedingly amusing. Large, well-lit rooms, filled with well-dressed people; we do not often make such a goodly show in our country entertainments; but then the Grantons know everybody, and invite everybody. Nobody could do that but dear old Mrs. Granton, and "my Colin," who, if he has not three pennyworth of brains, has the kindest heart and the heaviest purse in the whole neighbourhood.

I am sure Mrs. Granton must have felt proud of her handsome suite of rooms--quite a perambulatory parterre, boasting all the hues of the rainbow, subdued by the proper complement of inevitable black. By-and-by, as the evening advanced, dot after dot of the adored scarlet made its appearance round the doors, and circulating gradually round the room, completed the colouring of the scene.

They were most effective when viewed at a distance--these scarlet dots. Some of them were very young and very small: wore their short hair--regulation cut--exceedingly straight, and did not seem quite comfortable in their clothes.

"Militia, of course," I overheard a lady observe, who apparently knew all about it. "None of our officers wear uniform when they can avoid it."

But these young lads seemed uncommonly proud of theirs, and strutted and sidled about the door, very valorous and magnificent, until caught and dragged to their destiny--in the shape of some fair partner--when they immediately relapsed into shyness and awkwardness. Nay, I might add--stupidity; but were they not the hopeful defenders of their country, and did not their noble swords lie idle at this moment on that safest resting-place--Mrs. Granton's billiard-table?

I watched the scene out of my corner, in a state of dreamy amusement; mingled with a vague curiosity as to how long I should be left to sit solitary there, and whether it would be very dull, if "with gazing fed"--including a trifle of supper--I thus had to spend the entire evening.

Mrs. Granton came bustling up.

"My dear girl--are you not dancing?"

"Apparently not," said I, laughing, and trying to catch her, and make room for her. Vain attempt! Mrs. Granton never will sit down while there is anything that she thinks can be done for anybody. In a moment she would have been buzzing all round the room like an amiable bee, in search of some unfortunate youth upon whom to inflict me as a partner--but not even my desire of dancing would allow me to sink so low as that.

For safety, I ran after and attacked the good old lady on one of her weak points. Luckily she caught the bait, and we were soon safely landed on the great blanket, beef, and anti-beer distribution question, now shaking our parish to its very foundations. I am ashamed to say, though the rector's daughter, it is very little I know about our parish. And though at first I rather repented of my ruse, seeing that Mrs. Granton's deafness made both her remarks and my answers most unpleasantly public, gradually I became so interested in what she was telling me, that we must have kept on talking nearly twenty minutes, when some one called the old lady away.

"Sorry to leave you, Miss Dora; but I leave you in good company," she said, nodding and smiling to some people behind the sofa, with whom she probably thought I was acquainted. But I was not, nor had the slightest ambition for that honour: strangers at a ball have rarely anything to say worth saying or hearing. So I never turned my head, and let Mrs. Granton trot away.

My mind and eyes followed her with a half sigh; considering whether at sixty I shall have half the activity, or cheerfulness, or kindliness, of her dear old self.

No one broke in upon my meditations. Papa's white head was visible in a distant doorway; for the girls, they had long since vanished in the whirligig. I caught at times a glimpse of Penelope's rose-clouds of tarlatan, her pale face and ever-smiling white teeth, that contrast ill with her restless black eyes--it is always rather painful to me to watch my eldest sister at parties. And now and then Miss Lisabel came floating, moon-like, through the room, almost obscuring young slender Captain Treherne, who yet appeared quite content in his occultation. He also seemed to be of my opinion that scarlet and white were the best mixture of colours, for I did not see him make the slightest attempt to dance with any lady but Lisabel.

Several people, I noticed, looked at them and smiled; and one lady whispered something about "poor clergyman's daughter," and "Sir William Treherne."

I felt hot to my very temples. Oh, if we were all in Paradise, or a nunnery, or some place where there was neither thinking nor making of marriages!

I determined to catch Lisa when the waltz was done. She waltzes well, even gracefully, for a tall woman--but I wished, I wished-- My wish was cut short by a collision which made me start up with an idea of rushing to the rescue; however, the next moment Treherne and she had recovered their balance and were spinning on again. Of course I sat down immediately.

But my looks must be terrible tell-tales, for some one behind me said, as plain as if in answer to my thoughts-- "Pray be satisfied; the lady could not have been in the least hurt."

I was surprised; for though the voice was polite, even kind, people do not--at least in our country society--address one another without an introduction. I answered civilly, of course, but it must have been with some stiffness of manner, for the gentleman said--"Pardon me; I concluded it was your sister who slipped, and that you were uneasy about her," bowed, and immediately moved away.

I felt uncomfortable; uncertain whether to take any more notice of him or not; wondering who it was that had used the unwonted liberty of speaking to me, a stranger, and whether it would have been committing myself in any way to venture more than a bow or a "Thank you."

At last common-sense settled the matter.

"Dora Johnston," thought I, "do not be a simpleton. Do you consider yourself so much better than your fellow-creatures that you hesitate at returning a civil answer to a civil remark--meant kindly, too--because you, forsooth, like the French gentleman who was entreated to save another gentleman from drowning, 'should have been most happy, but have never been introduced.' What, girl, is this your scorn of conventionality--your grand habit of thinking and judging for yourself--your noble independence of all the follies of society? Fie! fie!"

To punish myself for my cowardice, I determined to turn round and look at the gentleman.

The punishment was not severe. He had a good face, brown and dark: a thin, spare, wiry figure, an air somewhat formal. His eyes were grave, yet not without a lurking spirit of humour, which seemed to have clearly penetrated, and been rather amused by, my foolish embarrassment and ridiculous indecision. This vexed me for the moment: then I smiled--we both smiled: and began to talk.

Of course, it would have been different had he been a young man; but he was not. I should think he was nearly forty.

At this moment Mrs. Granton came up, with her usual pleased look when she thinks other people are pleased with one another, and said in that friendly manner that makes everybody else feel friendly together also--"A partner, I see. That's right, Miss Dora. You shall have a quadrille in a minute, Doctor."

Doctor! I felt relieved. He might have been worse--perhaps, from his beard, even a camp officer.

"Our friend takes things too much for granted," he said, smiling. "I believe I must introduce myself. My name is Urquhart."

"Doctor Urquhart?"

"Yes."

Here the quadrille began to form, and I to button my gloves not discontentedly. He said--

"I fear I am assuming a right on false pretences, for I never danced in my life. You do, I see. I must not detain you from another partner." And, once again, my unknown friend, who seemed to have such extreme penetration into my motives and intentions moved aside.

Of course I got no partner--I never do. When the doctor reappeared, I was unfeignedly glad to see him. He took no notice whatever of my humiliating state of solitude, but sat down in one of the dancers' vacated places, and resumed the thread of our conversation, as if it had never been broken.

Often in a crowd, two people not much interested therein, fall upon subjects perfectly extraneous, which at once make them feel interested in these and in each other. Thus, it seems quite odd this morning to think of the multiplicity of heterogeneous topics which Dr. Urquhart discussed last night. I gained from him much various information. He must have been a great traveller, and observer too; and for me, I marvel now to recollect how freely I spoke my mind on many things which I usually keep to myself, partly from shyness, partly because nobody here at home cares one straw about them. Among others, came the universal theme--the war.

I said I thought the three much laughed-at Quakers, who went to advise peace to the Czar Nicholas, were much nearer the truth than many of their mockers. War seemed to me so utterly opposed to Christianity that I did not see how any Christian man could ever become a soldier.

At this, Dr. Urquhart leaned his elbow on the arm of the sofa, and looked me steadily in the face.

"Do you mean that a Christian man is not to defend his own life or liberty, or that of others, under any circumstances?--or is he to wear a red coat peacefully while peace lasts, and at his first battle throw down his musket, shoulder his Testament, and walk away?"

These words, though of a freer tone than I was used to, were not spoken in any irreverence. They puzzled me. I felt as if I had been playing the oracle upon a subject whereon I had not the least grounds to form an opinion at all. Yet I would not yield.

"Doctor Urquhart, if you recollect, I said 'become a soldier.' How, being already a soldier, a Christian man should act, I am not wise enough to judge. But I do think, other professions being open, for him to choose voluntarily the profession of arms, and to receive wages for taking away life, is at best a monstrous anomaly. Nay, however it may be glossed over and refined away, surely, in face of the plain command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' military glory seems little better than a picturesque form of murder."

I spoke strongly--more strongly, perhaps, than a young woman, whose opinions are more instincts and emotions than matured principles, ought to speak. If so, Dr. Urquhart gave me a fitting rebuke by his total silence.

Nor did he, for some time, even so much as look at me, but bent his head down till I could only catch the fore-shortened profile of forehead, nose, and curly beard. Certainly, though a moustache is mean, puppyish, intolerable, and whiskers not much better, there is something fine and manly in a regular Oriental beard.

Dr. Urquhart spoke at last; "So, as I overheard you say to Mrs. Granton, you 'hate soldiers.' 'Hate' is a strong word--for a Christian woman."

My own weapons turned upon me.

"Yes, I hate soldiers because my principles, instincts, observations, confirm me in the justice of my dislike. In peace, they are idle, useless, extravagant, cumberers of the country--the mere butterflies of society; in war--you know what they are."

"Do I?" with a slight smile.

I grew rather angry.

"In truth, had I ever had a spark of military ardour, it would have been quenched within the last year. I never see a thing--we'll not say a man--with a red coat on, who does not make himself thoroughly contempt--"

The word stuck in the middle. For lo there passed slowly by, my sister Lisabel, leaning on the arm of Captain Treherne, looking as I never saw Lisabel look before. It suddenly rushed across me what might happen--perhaps had happened. Suppose, in thus passionately venting my prejudices, I should be tacitly condemning my--what an odd idea!--my brother-in-law? Pride, if no better feeling, caused me to hesitate.

Dr. Urquhart said, quietly enough, "I should tell you-- indeed I ought to have told you before--that I am myself in the Army."

I am sure I looked--as I felt--like a downright fool. This comes, I thought, of speaking one's mind, especially to strangers. Oh! should I ever learn to hold my tongue, or gabble pretty harmless nonsense as other girls? Why should I have talked seriously to this man at all? I knew nothing of him, and had no business to be interested in him, or even to have listened to him--my sister would say--until he had been "properly introduced";--until I knew where he lived, and who were his father and mother, and what was his profession, and how much income he had a year.

Still, I did feel interested, and could not help it. Something it seemed that I was bound to say; I wished it to be civil, if possible.

"But you are Doctor Urquhart. An Army-surgeon is scarcely like a soldier: his business is to save life rather than to destroy it. Surely you never could have killed anybody?"

The moment I had put the question, I saw how childish and uncalled-for, in fact, how actually impertinent it was. Covered with confusion, I drew back, and looked another way. It was the greatest relief imaginable when just then Lisabel saw me, and came up with Captain Treherne, all smiles, to say, was it not the pleasantest party imaginable? and who had I been dancing with?

"Nobody."

"Nay, I saw you myself, talking to some strange gentleman. Who was he? A rather odd-looking person, and--"

"Hush, please. It was a Doctor Urquhart."

"Urquhart of ours?" cried young Treherne. "Why, he told me he should not come, or should not stay ten minutes if he came. Much too solid for this kind of thing--eh, you see? Yet a capital fellow. The best fellow in all the world. Where is he?"

But the "best fellow in all the world" had entirely disappeared.

I enjoyed the rest of the evening extremely--that is, pretty well. Not altogether, now I come to think of it, for though I danced to my heart's content, Captain Treherne seeming eager to bring up his whole regiment, successively, for my patronage and Penelope's (N.B. not Lisabel's), whenever I caught a distant glimpse of Dr. Urquhart's brown beard, conscience stung me for my folly and want of tact. Dear me! what a thing it is that one can so seldom utter an honest opinion without offending somebody.

Was he really offended? He must have seen that I did not mean any harm; nor does he look like one of those touchy people who are always wincing as if they trod on the tails of imaginary adders. Yet he made no attempt to come and talk to me again; for which I was sorry; partly because I would have liked to make him some amends, and partly because he seemed the only man present worth talking to.

I do wonder more and more what my sisters can find in the young men they dance and chatter with. To me they are inane, conceited, absolutely unendurable. Yet there may be good in some of them. May? Nay, there must be good in every human being. Alas, me! Well might Dr. Urquhart say last night that there are no judgments so harsh as those of the erring, the inexperienced, and the young.

I ought to add that when we were wearily waiting for our fly to draw up to tie hall-door, Dr. Urquhart suddenly appeared. Papa had Penelope on his arm, Lisabel was whispering with Captain Treherne. Yes, depend upon it, that young man will be my brother-in-law: I stood by myself, in the doorway, looking out on he pitch-dark night, when some one behind me said--

"Pray stand within shelter. You young ladies are never half careful enough o your health. Allow me."

And with a grave professional air, my medical friend wrapped me closely up in my shawl.

"A plaid, I see. That is sensible. There is nothing for warmth like a good plaid," he said, with a smile, which, even had it not been Or his name, and a slight strengthening and broadening of his English, scarcely amounting to an accent, would have pretty well showed what part of the kingdom Dr. Urquhart came from. I was going, in my bluntness, to put the direct question, but felt as if I had committed myself quite enough for one right.

Just then was shouted out "Mr. Johnson's"--oh dear, shall we never get the aristocratic t into our plebeian name!-- "carriage," and I was hurried into the fly. Not by the doctor, though; he stood like a bear on the doorstep, and never attempted to stir.

That's all.

Hospital Memoranda, Sept. 21st. -- Private William Carter, æt. 24; admitted a week to-day. Gastric fever--typhoid form--slight delirium--bad case. Asked me to write to his mother--did not say where. Mem. To inquire among his division if anything is known about his friends.

Corporal Thomas Hardman, æt. 50. Delirium tremens -- mending. Knew him in the Crimea, when he was a perfectly sober fellow, with constitution of iron. "Trench work did it," he says, "and last winter's idleness." Mem. To send for him after his discharge from hospital, and see what can be done; also to see that decent body his wife, after my rounds to-morrow.

M.U.--Max Urquhart.--Max Urquhart, M.D., M.R.C.S.

--Who keeps scribbling his name up and down this page like a silly school-boy, just for want of something to do.

Something to do! Never for these twenty years and more have I been so totally without occupation.

What a place this camp is! worse than ours in the Crimea, by far. To-day especially. Rain pouring, wind howling, mud ankle-deep; nothing on earth for me to be, to do, or to suffer, except--yes! there is something to suffer--Treherne's eternal flute.

Faith, I must be very hard up for occupation when I thus continue this journal of my cases into a personal diary of the worst patient I have to deal with--the most thankless, unsatisfactory, and unkindly. Physician, heal thyself! But how?

I shall tear out this page--Or stay, I'll keep it as a remarkable literary and psychological fact--and go on with my article on Gunshot Wounds.

In the which, two hours after, I find I have written exactly ten lines.

These must be the sort of circumstances under which people commit journals. For some do--and heartily as I have always contemned the proceeding, as we are prone to contemn peculiarities and idiosyncrasies quite foreign to our own, I begin to-day dimly to understand the state of mind in which such a thing might be possible.

Diary of a Physician, shall I call it?--did not some one write a book with that title? I picked it up on shipboard--a story-book or some such thing--but I scarcely ever read what is called "light literature." I have never had time. Besides, all fictions grow tame compared to the realities of daily life, the horrible episodes of crime, the pitiful bits of hopeless misery that I meet with in my profession. Talk of romance!

Was I ever romantic? Once perhaps--or at least I might have been.

My profession--truly there is nothing like it for me. Therein I find incessant work, interest, hope. Daily do I thank Heaven that I had courage to seize on it and go through with it, in order--according to the phrase I heard used last night--"to save life instead of destroying it."

Poor little girl--she meant nothing--she had no idea what she was saying.

Is it that which makes me so unsettled to-day?

Perhaps it would be wiser never to go into society. A hospital-ward is far more natural to me than a ball-room. There, is work to be done, pain to be alleviated, evil of all kinds to be met and overcome--here, nothing but pleasure, nothing to do but to enjoy.

Yet some people can enjoy--and actually do so; I am sure that girl did. Several times during the evening she looked quite happy. I do not often see people looking happy.

Is suffering, then, our normal and natural state? Is to exist synonymous with to endure? Can this be the law of a beneficent Providence? Or are such results allowed--to happen in certain exceptional cases, utterly irremediable and irretrievable--like----

What am I writing?--what am I daring to write?

Physician, heal thyself. And surely that is one of a physician's first duties. A disease struck inwards--the merest tyro knows how fatal is treatment which results in that. It may be I have gone on the wrong track altogether--at least since my return to England.

The present only is a man's possession: the past is gone out of his hand--wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it--in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness.

Now, I have had many cases of insanity--both physical and moral, so to speak; I call moral insanity that kind of disease which is super-induced on comparatively healthy minds by dwelling incessantly on one idea; the sort of disease which you find in women who have fallen into melancholy from love-disappointments; or in men for overweening ambition, hatred, or egotism--which latter, carried to a high pitch, invariably becomes a kind of insanity. All these forms of monomania, as distinguished from physical mania, disease of the structure of the brain, I have studied with considerable interest and corresponding success. My secret was simple enough; one which Nature herself often tries and rarely fails in--the law of substitution; the slow eradication of any fixed idea, by supplying others, under the influence of which the original idea is--at all events temporarily--laid to sleep.

Why cannot I try this plan? why not do for myself what I have so many times prescribed and done for others?

It was with some notion of the kind that I went to this ball--after getting up a vague sort of curiosity in Treherne's anonymous beauty, about whom he has so long been raving to me--boy-like. Ay, with all his folly, the lad is an honest lad. I should not like him to come to any harm.

The tall one must have been the lady; and the smaller, the plainer, though the pleasanter to my mind, was no doubt her sister. And of course her name, too, was Johnson.

What a name to startle a man so--to cause him to stand like a fool at that hall-door, with his heart dead still, and all his nerves quivering! To make him now, in the mere writing of it, pause and compel himself into common-sense by rational argument--by meeting the thing, be it chimerical or not, face to face, as a man ought to do. Yet as cowardly, in as base a paroxysm of terror, as if likewise face to face, in my hut corner, stood-- Here I stopped. Shortly afterwards I was summoned to the hospital, where I have been ever since. William Carter is dead. He will not want his mother now. What a small matter life or death seems when one comes to think of it. What an easy exchange!

Is it I who am writing thus, and on the same leaf which, closed up in haste when I was fetched to the hospital, I have just bad such an anxious search for, that it might be instantly burnt. Yet, I find there is nothing in it that I need have feared--nothing that could, in any way, have signified to anybody--unless, perhaps, the writing of that one name.

Shall I never get over this absurd folly--this absolute monomania?--when there are hundreds of the same name to be met with every day--when, after all, it is not exactly the name!

Yet this is what it cost me. Let me write it down, that the confession in plain English of such utter insanity may in degree have the same effect as when I have sat down and desired a patient to recount to me, one by one, each and all of his delusions, in order that, in the mere telling of them, they might perhaps vanish.

I went away from that hall-door at once. Never asking-- nor do I think for my life I could ask--the simple question that would have set all doubt at rest. I walked across country, up and down, along road or woodland, I hardly knew whither, for miles, following the moon-rise. She seemed to rise just as she did nineteen years ago--nineteen years, ten months, all but two days--my arithmetic is correct, no fear! She lifted herself like a ghost over those long level waves of moor, till she sat, blood-red, upon the horizon, with a stare which there was nothing to break, nothing to hide from--nothing between her and me, but the plain and the sky--just as it was that night.

What am I writing? Is the old horror coming back again. It cannot. It must be kept at bay.

A knock--ah, I see; it is the sergeant of poor Carter's company. I must return to daily work, and labour is life--to me.

Sept. 30th.--Not a case to set down to-day. This high moorland is your best sanatorium. My "occupation's gone."

I have every satisfaction in that fact, or in the cause of it; which, cynics might say, a member of my profession would easily manage to prevent, were he a city physician instead of a regimental surgeon. Still, idleness is insupportable to me. I have tried going about among the few villages hard by, but their worst disease is one to which this said regimental surgeon, with nothing but his pay, can apply but small remedy--poverty.

To-day I have paced the long, straight lines of the camp; from the hospital to the bridge, and back again to the hospital--have tried to take a vivid interest in the loungers, the football players, and the wretched, awkward squad turned out in never-ending parade. With each hour of the quiet autumn afternoon have I watched the sentinel mount the little stockaded hillock, and startle the camp with the old familiar boom of the great Sebastopol bell. Then, I have shut my hut-door, taken to my books, and studied till my head warned me to stop.

The evening post--but only business letters. I rarely have any other. I have no one to write to me--no one to write to.

Sometimes I have been driven to wish I had; some one friend with whom it would be possible to talk in pen and ink, on other matters than business. Yet, cui bono? To no friend should I or could I let out my real self; the only thing in the letter that was truly and absolutely me would be the great grim signature--"Max Urquhart."

Were it otherwise--were there any human being to whom I could lay open my whole heart, trust with my whole history;-- but no, that were utterly impossible now.

No more of this.

No more, until the end. That end, which at once solves all difficulties, every year brings nearer. Nearly forty, and a doctor's life is usually shorter than most men's. I shall be an old man soon, even if there come none of those sudden chances against which I have of course provided.

The end. How and in what manner it is to be done, I am not yet clear. But it shall be done, before my death or after.

"Max Urquhart, M.D."

I go on signing my name mechanically, with those two business-like letters after it, and thinking how odd it would be to sign it in any other fashion. How strange,--did any one care to look at my signature in any way except thus, with the two professional letters after it--a commonplace signature of business. Equally strange, perhaps, that such a thought as this last should have entered my head, or that I should have taken the trouble, and yielded to the weakness of writing it down. It all springs from idleness--sheer idleness; the very same cause that makes Treherne, whom I have known do duty cheerily for twenty-four hours in the trenches, lounge, smoke, yawn, and play the flute. There--it has stopped. I heard the postman rapping at his hut-door--the young simpleton has got a letter.

Suppose, just to pass away the time, I, Max Urquhart, reduced to this lowest ebb of inanity by a paternal government, which has stranded my regiment here, high and dry, but as dreary as Noah on Ararat--were to enliven my solitude, drive away blue devils, by manufacturing for myself an imaginary correspondent? So be it.

To begin then at once in the received epistolary form:--

"My dear----"

My dear--what? "Sir?"--No--not for this once. I wanted a change. "Madam?"--that is formal. Shall I invent a name?

When I think of it, how strange it would feel to me to be writing "my dear" before any christian name. Orphaned early, my only brother long dead, drifting about from land to land till I have almost forgotten my own, which has quite forgotten me--I had not considered it before, but really I do not believe there is a human being living whom I have a right to call by his or her christian name, or who would ever think of calling me by mine. "Max"--I have not heard the sound of it for years.

Dear, a pleasant adjective--my, a pronoun of possession, implying that the being spoken of is one's very own--one's sole, sacred, personal property, as with natural selfishness one would wish to hold the thing most precious. My dear;--a satisfactory total. I rather object to "dearest" as a word implying comparison, and therefore never to be used where comparison should not and could not exist. Witness, "dearest mother," or "dearest wife," as if a man had a plurality of mothers and wives, out of whom he chose the one he loved best. And, as a general rule, I dislike all ultra expressions of affection set down in ink. I once knew an honest gentleman--blessed with one of the tenderest hearts that ever man had, and which in all his life was only given to one woman; he, his wife told me, had never, even in their courtship days, written to her otherwise than as "My dear Anne,"--ending merely with "Yours faithfully," or "Yours truly." Faithful--true--what could he write, or she desire more?

If my pen wanders to lovers and sweethearts, and moralises over simple sentences in this maundering way, blame not me dear imaginary correspondent, to whom no name shall be given at all--but blame my friend--as friends go in this world-- Captain Augustus Treherne. Because, happily, that young fellow's life was saved at Balaklava, does he intend to invest me with the responsibility of it, with all its scrapes and follies, now and for evermore? Is my clean, sober hut to be fumigated with tobacco and poisoned with brandy-and-water, that a lovesick youth may unburden himself of his sentimental tale? Heaven knows why I listen to it! Probably because telling me keeps the lad out of mischief; also because he is honest, though an ass, and I always had a greater leaning to fools than to knaves. But let me not pretend reasons which make me out more generous than I really am, for the fellow and his love-affair bore me exceedingly sometimes, and would be quite unendurable anywhere but in this dull camp. I do it from a certain abstract pleasure which I have always taken in dissecting character, constituting myself an amateur demonstrator of spiritual anatomy.

An amusing study is, not only the swain, but the goddess. For I found her out, spelled her over satisfactorily, even in that one evening. Treherne little guessed it--he took care never to introduce me--he does not even mention her name, or suspect I know it. Vast precautions against nothing! Does he fear lest Mentor should put in a claim to his Eucharis? You know better, dear Imaginary Correspondent.

Even were I among the list of "marrying men," this adorable she would never be my choice, would never attract me for an instant. Little as I know about women, I know enough to feel certain that there is a very small residuum of depth, feeling, or originality, in that large handsome physique of hers. Yet she looks good-natured, good-tempered; almost as much so as Treherne himself.

"Speak o' the de'il," there he comes. Far away down the lines I can catch his eternal "Donna é mobile"--how I detest that song! No doubt he has been taking to the post his answer to one of those abominably-scented notes that he always drops out of his waistcoat by the merest accident, and glances round to see if I am looking--which I never am. What a young puppy it is! Yet it hangs after one kindly, like a puppy; after me too, who am not the pleasantest fellow in the world. And as it is but young, it may mend, if it falls into no worse company than the present.

I have known what it is to be without a friend when one is very inexperienced, reckless, and young.

Evening.

"To what base uses may we come at last."

It seems perfectly ridiculous to see the use this memorandum-book has come to. Cases forsooth! The few pages of them may as well be torn out, in favour of the new specimens of moral disease which I am driven to study. For instance:--

No. 1--Better omit that.

No. 2--Augustus Treherne, æt. 22: intermittent fever, verging upon yellow fever occasionally, as to-day. Pulse, very high; tongue, rather foul, especially in speaking of Mr. Cohn Granton; countenance, pale, inclining to livid. A very bad case altogether.

Patient enters, whistling like a steam-engine, as furious and as shrill, with a corresponding puff of smoke. I point to the obnoxious vapour.

"Beg pardon, Doctor; I always forget. What a tyrant you are!"

"Very likely; but there is one thing I never will allow--smoking in my hut. I did not, you know, even in the Crimea."

The lad sat down, sighing like a furnace.

"Heigho, Doctor, I wish I were you."

"Do you?"

"You always seem so uncommonly comfortable; never want a cigar or anything to quiet your nerves and keep you in good humour. You never get into a scrape of any sort; have neither a mother to lecture you, nor an old governor to bully you."

"Stop there."

"I will then; you need not take me up so sharp. He's a trump, after all. You know that, so I don't mind a word or two against him. Just read there."

He threw over one of Sir William's ultra-prosy moral essays--which no doubt the worthy old gentleman flatters himself are, in another line, the very copy of Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son. I might have smiled at it had I been alone--or laughed at it were I young enough to sympathise with the modern system of transposing into "the Governor," the ancient reverend name of "Father."

"You see what an opinion he has of you. 'Pon my life, if I were not the meekest fellow imaginable, always ready to be led by a straw into Virtue's ways, I should have cut your acquaintance long ago. 'Invariably follow the advice of Dr. Urquhart,'--'I wish, my dear son, that your character more resembled that of your friend, Dr. Urquhart. I should be more concerned about your many follies, were you not in the same regiment as Dr. Urquhart. Dr. Urquhart is one of the wisest men I ever knew,' and so on, and so on. What say you?"

I said nothing; and I now write down this, as I shall write anything of the kind which enters into the plain relation of facts or conversations which daily occur. God knows how vain such words are to me at the best of times--mere sounding brass and tinkling cymbal--as the like must be to most men well acquainted with themselves. At some times, and under certain states of mind, they become to my ear the most refined and exquisite torture that my bitterest enemy could desire to inflict. There is no need, therefore, to apologise for them. Apologise to whom, indeed? Having resolved to write this, it were folly to make it an imperfect statement. A journal should be fresh, complete, and correct--the man's entire life, or nothing. Since, if he sets it down at all, it must necessarily be for his own sole benefit--it would be the most contemptible form of egotistic humbug to arrange and modify it as if it were meant for the eye of any other person.

Dear, unknown, imaginary eye--which never was and never will be--yet which I like to fancy shining somewhere in the clouds, out of Jupiter, Venus, or the Georgium Sidus, upon this solitary me--the foregoing sentence bears no reference to you.

"Treherne," I said, "whatever good opinion your father is pleased to hold as to my wisdom, I certainly do not share in one juvenile folly--that, being a very well-meaning fellow on the whole, I take the greatest pains to make myself out a scamp."

The youth coloured.

"That's me, of course."

"Wear the cap if it feels comfortable. And now, will you have some tea?"

"Anything--I feel as thirsty as when you found me dragging myself to the brink of the Tchernaya. Hey, Doctor, it would have saved me a deal of bother if you had never found me at all. Except that it would vex the old governor to end the name and have the property all going to the dogs--that is, to Cousin Charteris; who would not care how soon I was dead and buried."

"Were dead and buried, if you please."

"Confound it, to stop a man about his grammar when he is in my state of mind! Kept from his cigar, too! Doctor, you never were in love, or you never were a smoker."

"How do you know?"

"Because you never could have given up the one or the other; a fellow can't; 'tis an impossibility."

"Is it? I once smoked six cigars a day, for two years."

"Eh, what? And you never let that out before? You are so close! Possibly, the other fact will peep out in time. Mrs. Urquhart and half-a-dozen brats may be living in some out-of-the-way nook--Cornwall, or Jersey, or the centre of Salisbury Plain. Why, what?--nay, I beg your pardon, Doctor."

What a horrible thing it is that by no physical effort, added to years of mental self-control, can I so harden my nerves that certain words, names, suggestions, shall not startle me--make me quiver as if under the knife. Doubtless, Treherne will henceforth retain--so far as his easy mind can retain anything--the idea that I have a wife and family hidden somewhere! Ludicrous idea, if it were not connected with other ideas from which, however, this one will serve to turn his mind.

To explain it away was of course impossible. I had only power to slip from the subject with a laugh, and bring him back to the tobacco question.

"Yes; I smoked six cigars a day for at least two years."

"And gave it up? Wonderful!"

"Not very, when a man has a will of his own, and a few strong reasons to back it."

"Out with them--not that they will benefit me, however--I'm quite incorrigible."

"Doubtless. First, I was a poor medical student, and six cigars per diem cost fourteen shillings a week--thirty-one pounds eight shillings a year. A good sum to give for an artificial want--enough to have fed and clothed a child."

"You're weak on the point of brats, Urquhart. Do you remember the little Russ we picked up in the cellar at Sebastopol? I do believe you'd have adopted and brought it home with you if it had not died."

Should I? But as Treherne said, it died.

"Secondly, thirty-one pounds eight shillings per annum was a good deal to give for a purely selfish enjoyment, annoying to almost everybody except the smoker, and at the time of smoking--especially when to the said smoker it is sure to grow from a mere accidental enjoyment into an irresistible necessity--a habit to which he becomes the most utter slave. Now, a man is only half a man who allows himself to become the slave of any habit whatsoever."

"Bravo, Doctor--all this should go into the Lancet."

"No; for it does not touch the question on the medical side, but the general and practical one--namely, that to create an unnecessary luxury, which is a nuisance to everybody else, and to himself of very doubtful benefit--is--excuse me--the very silliest thing a young man can do. A thing, which, from my own experience, I'll not aid and abet any young man in doing. There, lecture's over, and kettle boiled--unless you prefer tobacco and the open air."

He did not: and we sat down--"four feet upon a fender," as the proverb says.

"Heigho! but the proverb doesn't mean four feet in men's boots," said Treherne, dolefully. "I wish I was dead and buried."

I suggested that the light moustache he curled so fondly, the elegant hair, and the aristocratic outline of phiz, would look exceedingly well--in a coffin.

"Faugh! how unpleasant you are."

And I myself repented the speech: for it ill becomes a man under any provocation to make a jest of Death. But that this young fellow, so full of life, with every attraction that it can offer--health, wealth, kindred, friends--should sit croaking there, with such a used-up, lackadaisical air--truly it irritated me.

"What's the matter--that you wish to rid the world of your valuable presence? Has the young lady expressed a similar desire?"

"She?--Hang her! I won't think any more about her," said the lad sullenly. And then, out poured the grand despair, the unendurable climax of mortal woe. "She cantered through the north camp this afternoon, with Granton--Colin Granton, and upon Granton's own brown mare."

"Ha!--horrible vision! And you?--you

'Watched them go: one horse was blind;
The tails of both hung down behind.
Their shoes were on their feet'--"

"Doctor!"

I stopped--there seemed more reality in his feelings than I had been aware of; and it is scarcely right to make a mock of even the fire-and-smoke, dust-and-ashes passion of a boy.

"I beg your pardon; not knowing the affair had gone so far. Still, it isn't worth being dead and buried for."

"What business has she to go riding with that big clod-hopping lout? And what right has he to lend her his brown mare?" chafed Treherne, with a great deal more which I did not much attend to. At last, weary of playing Friar Lawrence to such a very uninteresting Romeo, I hinted, that if he disapproved of the young lady's behaviour, he ought to appeal to her own good sense, to her father, or somebody--or, since women understand one another best, get Lady Augusta Treherne to do it.

"My mother! She never even heard of her. Why, you speak as seriously as if I were actually intending to marry her!"

Here I could not help rousing myself a trifle.

"Excuse me--it never struck me that a gentleman could discuss a young lady among his acquaintance, make a public show of his admiration for her, interfere with her proceedings or her conduct towards any other gentleman, and not intend to marry her. Suppose we choose another subject of conversation."

Treherne grew hot to the ears, but he took the hint and spared me his sentimental maunderings.

Wd had afterwards some interesting conversation about a few cases of mine in the neighbourhood, not on the regular list of regimental patients, which have lately been to me a curious study. If I were inclined to quit the Army, I believe the branch of my profession which I should take up would be that of sanitary reform--the study of health rather than of disease, of prevention rather than cure. It often seems to me, that we of the healing art have began at the wrong end--that the energy we devote to the alleviation of irremediable disease would be better spent in the study and practice of means to preserve health.

Thus, I tried to explain to Treherne--who will have plenty of money and influence, and whom, therefore, it is worth while taking pains to inoculate with a few useful facts and ideas--that one-half of our mortality in the Crimea was owing, not to the accidents of war, but to the results of zymotic diseases, all of which might have been prevented by common sense and common knowledge of the laws of health, as the statistics of our sanitary commission have abundantly proved.

And, as I told him, it saddens me, almost as much as doing my duty on a battle-field, or at Scutari, or Renkioi, to take these amateur rounds in safe England, among what poets and politicians call the noble British peasantry, and see the frightful sacrifice of life--and worse than life--from causes perfectly remediable.

Take, for instance, these cases, as set down in my note-book. Amos Fell, 40, or thereabouts, down with fever for ten days; wife and five sons; occupy one room of a cottage on the Moor, which holds two other families; says, would be glad to live in a better place, but cannot get it; landlord will not allow more cottages to be built. Would build himself a peat hut, but doubts if that would be permitted; so just goes on as well as he can.

Peck family, fever also, living at the filthiest end of the village; themselves about the dirtiest in it; with a stream rushing by fresh enough to wash and cleanse a whole town.

Widow Haynes, rheumatism, from field-work, and living in a damp room with earthen floor, half underground; decent woman, gets half-a-crown a week from the parish, but will not be able to earn anything for months; and what is to become of all the children?

Treherne settled that question, and one or two more. Poor fellow, his purse is as open as his heart just now; but among his other luxuries he may as well taste the luxury of giving. 'Tis good for him; he will be Sir Augustus one of these days. Is his goddess aware of that fact, I wonder?

What! is cynicism growing to be one of my vices? and against a woman too? One of whom I absolutely know nothing, except watching her for a few moments at a ball. She seems to be one of the usual sort of officers' belles in country quarters. Yet there may be something good in her. There was, I feel sure, in that large-eyed sister of hers. But let me not judge--I have never had any opportunity of understanding women.

This subject was not revived, till, the tobacco-hunger proving too strong for him, my friend Romeo began to fidget, and finally rose.

"I say, Doctor, you won't tell the governor--it would put him in an awful fume?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh--about Miss you know. I've been a great ass, I suppose; but when a girl is so civil to one--a fine girl, too-- you saw her, did you not, dancing with me? Now isn't she an uncommonly fine girl?"

I assented.

"And that Granton should get her, confound him! a great logger-headed country clown."

"Who is an honest man, and will make her a kind husband. Any other honest man who does not mean to offer himself as her husband, had much better avoid her acquaintance."

Treherne coloured again; I saw he understood me, though he turned it off with a laugh.

"You're preaching matrimony, Doctor, surely. What an idea! to tie myself up at my age. I shan't do the ungentlemanly thing either. So good-night, old fellow."

He lounged out, with that lazy, self-satisfied air which is misnamed aristocratic. Yet I have seen many a one of these conceited, effeminate-looking, drawing-room darlings, a curled and scented modern Alcibiades, fight--like Alcibiades; and die--as no Greek ever could die--like a Briton.

"Ungentlemanly,"--what a word it is with most men, especially in the military profession. Gentlemanly,--the root and apex of all honour; ungentlemanly,--the lowest term of degradation. Such is our code of morals in the Army; and, more or less, probably everywhere.

An officer I knew--who, for all I ever heard or noticed, was himself as true a gentleman as ever breathed; polished, kindly, manly, and brave--gave me once, in an argument on duelling, his definition of the word: "A gentleman--one who never does anything he is ashamed of, or that would compromise his honour."

Worldly honour, this colonel must have meant, for he considered it would have been compromised by a man's refusing to accept a challenge. That "honour" surely was a little lower thing than virtue; a little less pure than the Christianity which all of us profess, and so few believe. Yet there was something at once touching and heroic about it, and in the way this man of the world upheld it. The best of our British chivalry--as chivalry goes--is made up of materials such as these.

But is there not a higher morality--a diviner honour? And if so, who is he that can find it?

'Tis over--the weary dinner-party. I can lock myself in here, take off my dress, pull down my hair, clasp my two bare arms one on each shoulder--such a comfortable attitude!--and stare into the fire.

There is something peculiar about our fires. Most likely the quantity of firewood we use for this region gives them that curious aromatic smell. How I love fir-trees of any sort in any season of the year! How I used to delight myself in our pine-woods, strolling in and out among the boles of the trees so straight, strong, and unchangeable--grave in summer, and green in winter! How I have stood listening to the wind in their tops, and looking for the fir-cones, wonderful treasures! which they had dropped on the soft dry mossy ground. What glorious fun it was to fill my pinafore--or in more dignified days my black silk apron-- with fir-cones; to heap a surreptitious store of them in a corner of the school-room, and burn them, one by one, on the top of the fire. How they did blaze!

I think I should almost like to go hunting for fir-cones now. It would be a great deal more amusing than dinner-parties.

Why did we give this dinner, which cost so much time, trouble, and money, and was so very dull? At least I thought so. Why should we always be obliged to have a dinner-party when Francis is here? As if he could not exist a week at Rockmount without other people's company than ours! It used not to be so. When I was a child, I remember he never wanted to go anywhere, or have anybody coming here. After study was over (and papa did not keep him very close either), he cared for nothing except to saunter about with Penelope. What a nuisance those two used to be to us younger ones: always sending us out of the room on some pretence, or taking us long walks and losing us, and then--cruellest of all--keeping us waiting indefinitely for dinner. Always making so much of one another, and taking no notice of us; having little squabbles with one another, and then snubbing us. The great bore of our lives was that love-affair of Francis and Penelope; and the only consolation we had, Lisabel and I, was to plan the wedding, she to settle the bridesmaids' dresses, and I thinking how grand it would be when all is over, and I took the head of the table, the warm place in the room, permanently, as Miss Johnston.

Poor Penelope! She is Miss Johnston still, and likely to be, for all that I can see. I should not wonder if, after all, it happened in ours as in many families, that the youngest is married first.

Lisabel vexed me much to-day; more than usual. People will surely begin to talk about her--not that I care a pin for any gossip, but it's wrong--wrong A girl can't like two gentlemen so equally that she treats them exactly in the same manner--unless it chances to be the manner of benevolent indifference. But Lisabel's is not that. Every day I watch her, and say to myself, "She's surely fond of that young man." Which always happens to be the young man nearest to her, whether Captain Treherne or "my Colin," as his mother calls him. What a lot of "beaux" our Lisa has had ever since she was fourteen, yet not one "lover"--that I ever heard of; as, of course, I should, together with her half-dozen very particular friends. No one can accuse Lis of being of a secretive disposition.

What, am I growing ill-natured, and to my own sister? a good-tempered, harmless girl, who makes herself agreeable to everybody, and whom everybody likes a vast deal better than they do me.

Sometimes, sitting over this fire, with the fir-twigs crackling and the turpentine blazing--it may be an odd taste, but I have a real pleasure in the smell of turpentine--I take myself into serious, sad consideration.

Theodora Johnston, aged twenty-five; medium looks, medium talents, medium temper; in every way the essence of mediocrity. This is what I have gradually discovered myself to be; I did not think so always.

Theodora Johnston, aged fifteen. What a different creature that was! I can bring it back now, with its long curls and its short frocks--by Penelope's orders, preserved as late as possible;--running wild over the moors, or hiding itself in the garden with a book,--or curling up in a corner of this attic, then unfurnished, with a pencil and the back of a letter, writing its silly poetry. Thinking, planning, dreaming, looking forward to such a wonderful, impossible life: quite satisfied with itself and all it was to do therein, since

"The world was all before it where to choose:
Reason its guard, and Providence its guide."

And what has it done? Nothing. What is it now? The aforesaid Theodora Johnston, aged twenty-five.

Moralists tell us, self-examination is a great virtue, an indispensable duty. I don't believe it. Generally, it is utterly useless, hopeless, and unprofitable. Much of it springs from the very egotism it pretends to cure. There are not more conceited hypocrites on earth than many of your "miserable sinners."

If I cannot think of something or somebody better than myself; I will just give up thinking altogether; will pass entirely to the uppermost of my two lives, which I have now made to tally so successfully that they seem of one material: like our girls' new cloaks, which everybody imagines sober grey, till a lifting of the arms shows the other side of the cloth to be scarlet.

That reminds me in what a blaze of scarlet Captain Treherne appeared at our modest dinner-table. He was engaged to a full-dress party at the Camp, he said, and must leave immediately after dinner--which he didn't. Was his company much missed, I wonder? Two here could well have spared it--Cohn Granton and Francis Charteris.

How odd that until to-night Captain Treherne should have had no notion that his cousin was engaged to our Penelope, or even visited at Rockmount. Odd too, that other people never told him. But it is such an old affair, and we were not likely to make the solemn communication ourselves; besides, we never knew much about the youth, except that he was one of Francis's fine relations. Yet to think that Francis all these years should never have even hinted to these said fine relations that he was engaged to our Penelope!

If I were Penelope--but I have no business to judge other people. I never was in love, they say.

To see the meeting between these two was quite dramatic, and as funny as a farce, Francis sitting on the sofa by Penelope, talking to Mrs. Granton and her friend Miss Emery, and doing a little bit of lazy love-making between whiles. When enters, late and hurried, Captain Treherne. He walks straight up to papa, specially attentive; then bows to Lisabel, specially distant and unattentive (I thought, though, at sight of her he grew as hot as if his regimental collar were choking him); then hastens to pay his respects to Miss Johnston, when lo! he beholds Mr. Francis Charteris.

"Charteris! what the--what a very unexpected pleasure!"

Francis shook hands in what we call his usual fascinating manner.

"Miss Johnston!"--in his surprise Captain Treherne had quite forgotten her--"I really beg your pardon. I had not the slightest idea you were acquainted with my cousin." Nor did the young man seem particularly pleased with the discovery.

Penelope glanced sharply at Francis, and then said--how did she manage to say it so carelessly and composedly--

"Oh yes, we have known Mr. Charteris for a good many years. Can you find room for your cousin on the sofa, Francis?"

At the "Francis," Captain Treherne stared, and made some remarks in an abstract and abstracted manner, At length, when lie had placed himself right between Francis and Penelope, and was actually going to take Penelope down to dinner, a light seemed to break upon him. He laughed--gave way to his cousin--and condescended to bestow his scarlet elbow upon me, saying as we went across the hail--

"I'm afraid I was near making a blunder there.--But who would have thought it?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"About those, there. I knew your sister was engaged to somebody--but Charteris! Who would have thought of Charteris going to be married. What a ridiculous idea!"

I said, that the fact had ceased to appear so to me, having been aware of it for the last ten years.

"Ten years! You don't say so!" And then his slow perception catching the extreme incivility of this great astonishment, my scarlet friend offered lame congratulations, fell to his dinner, and conversed no more.

Perhaps he forgot the matter altogether--for Lisabel sat opposite, beside Cohn Granton; and what between love and hate my cavalier's attention was very much distracted. Truly, Lisabel and her unfortunate swains reminded me of a passage in Thomson's Seasons, describing two young bulls fighting in a meadow:--

"While the fair heifer balmy-breathing near,
Stands kindling up their rage."

I blush to set it down. I blush almost to have such a thought, and concerning my own sister; yet it is so, and I have seen the like often and often. Surely it must be wrong; such sacred things as women's beauty and women's love were not made to set men mad at one another like brute beasts. Surely the woman could help it if she chose. Men may be jealous, and cross, and wretched; but they do not absolutely hate one another on a woman's account unless she has been in some degree to blame. While free, and showing no preference, no one can well fight about her, for all have an equal chance; when she has a preference, though she might not openly show it towards its object, she certainly would never think of showing it towards anybody else. At least, that is my theory.

However, I am taking the thing too seriously, and it is no affair of mine. I have given up interfering long ago. Lisabel must "gang her ain gate," as they say in Scotland. By-the-bye, Captain Treherne asked if we came from Scotland, or were of the celebrated clan Johnstone?

Time was, when in spite of the additional t, we all grumbled at our plebeian name, hoping earnestly to change it for something more aristocratic--and oh, how proud we were of Charteris! How fine to put into the village post letters addressed, "Francis Charteris, Esq.," and to speak of our brother-in-law elect as having "an office under Government!" We firmly believed that office under Government would end in the Premiership and a peerage.

It has not, though. Francis still says he cannot afford to marry. I was asking Penelope yesterday if she knew what papa and his first wife, not our own mamma, married upon? Much less income, I believe, than what Francis has now. But my sister said I did not understand: "The cases were widely different." Probably.

She is very fond of Francis. Last week, preparing for him, she looked quite a different woman; quite young and rosy again; and though it did not last, though after he was really come, she grew sharp and cross often--to us, never to him, of course, she much enjoys his being here. They do not make so much fuss over one another as they did ten years ago, which indeed would be ridiculous in lovers over thirty. Still, I should hardly like my lover, at any age, to sit reading a novel half the evening, and spend the other half in the sweet company of his cigar. Not that he need be always hankering after me, and "paying me attention." I should hate that. For what is the good of people being fond of one another, if they can't be content simply in one another's company, or, without it even, in one another's love? letting each go on their own several ways, and do their several work in the best manner they can. Good sooth! I should be the most convenient and least troublesome sweetheart that ever a young man was ever blessed with; for I am sure I should sit all evening quite happy--he at one end of the room and I at the other, if only I knew he was happy, and caught now and then a look and a smile--provided the look and the smile were my own personal property, nobody else's.

What nonsense am I writing? And not a word about the dinner-party. Has it left so little impression on my mind?

No wonder! It was just the usual thing. Papa as host, grave, clerical, and slightly wearying of it all. Penelope hostess. Francis playing "friend of the family," as handsome and well-dressed as ever--what an exquisitely embroidered shirt-front, and what an aerial cambric kerchief! which must have taken him half-an-hour to tie! Lisabel--but I have told about her; and myself. Everybody else looking as everybody hereabouts always does look at dinner-parties--ex uno disce omnes--to muster a bit of the Latin for which, in old times, Francis used to call me a "juvenile prig."

Was there, in the whole evening, anything worth remembering? Yes, thanks to his fit of jealousy, I did get a little sensible conversation out of Captain Treherne. He looked so dull, so annoyed, that I felt sorry for the youth, and tried to make him talk; so, lighting on the first subject at hand, asked him if he had seen his friend, Dr. Urquhart, lately?

"Eh--who? I beg your pardon."

His eyes had wandered where Lisabel, with one of her white elbows on the table, sat coquetting with a bunch of grapes, listening with downcast eyes to "my Colin."

"Doctor Urquhart, whom I met at the Cedars last week. You said he was a friend of yours."

"So he is; the best I ever had," and it was refreshing to see how the young fellow brightened up. "He saved my life. But (or him I should assuredly be lying with a cross over my head, inside that melancholy stone wall round the top of Cathcart's Hill."

"You mean the cemetery there. What sort of a place is it?"

"Just as I said--the bare top of a hill, with a wall round it, and stones of various sorts, crosses, monuments, and so on. All our officers were buried there."

"And the men?"

"Oh, anywhere. It didn't matter."

It did not, I thought; but not exactly from Captain Treherne's point of view. However, he was scarcely the man with whom to have started an abstract argument. I might, had he been Dr. Urquhart.

"Was Doctor Urquhart in the Crimea the whole time?"

"To be sure. He went through all the campaign, from Varna to Sebastopol; at first unattached, and then was appointed to our regiment. Well for me that! What a three months I had after Inkerman! Shall I ever forget the day I first crawled out and sat on the benches in front of the hospital, on Balaklava Heights, looking down over the Black Sea?"

I had never seen him serious before. My heart inclined even to Captain Treherne.

"Was he ever hurt--Doctor Urquhart, I mean?"

"Once or twice, slightly, while looking after his wounded on the field. But he made no fuss about it, and always got well directly. You see, he is such an extremely temperate man in all things--such a quiet temper--has himself in such thorough control--that he has twice the chance of keeping in health that most men have--especially our fellows there, who, he declares, died quite as much of eating, drinking, and smoking as they did of Russian bullets."

"Your friend must be a remarkable man."

"He's a--a brick! Excuse the word--in ladies' society I ought not to use it."

"If you ought to use it at all, you may do so in ladies' society."

The youth looked puzzled.

"Well, then, Miss Dora, he really is a downright brick--since you know what that means. Though an odd sort of fellow too; a tough customer to deal with--never lets go the rein; holds one in as tight as if he were one's father. I say, Charteris, did you ever hear the governor speak of Doctor Urquhart, of ours?"

If Sir William had named, such a person, Mr. Charteris had, unfortunately, quite forgotten it. Stay--he fancied he had heard the name at his club, but it was really impossible to remember all the names one knew, or the men.

"You wouldn't have forgotten that man in a hurry, Miss Dora, I assure you. He's worth a dozen of--but I beg your pardon."

If it was for the look which he cast upon his cousin, I was not implacable. Francis always annoys me when he assumes that languid manner. For some things, I prefer Captain Treherne's open silliness--nothing being in his head, nothing can come out of it--to the lazy superciliousness of Francis Charteris, who, we know, has a great deal more in him than he ever condescends to let out, at least for our benefit. I should like to see if he behaves any better at his aforesaid club, or at Lady This's and the Countess of That's, of whom I heard him speak to Miss Emery.

I was thinking thus--vaguely contrasting his smooth, handsome face with that sharp one of Penelope's--how much faster she grows old than he does, though they are exactly of an age!--when the ladies rose.

Captain Treherne and Cohn rushed to open the door--Francis did not take that trouble--and Lisabel, passing, smiled equally on both her adorers. Cohn made some stupid compliment; and the other, silent, looked her full in the face. If any man so dared to look at me, I would like to grind him to powder.

Oh! I'm sick of love and lovers--or the mockery of them--sick to the core of my heart!

In the drawing-room I curled myself up in a corner beside Mrs. Granton, whom it is always pleasant to talk to. We revived the great blanket, beef, and anti-beer question, in which she said she had found an unexpected ally.

"One who argues, even more strongly than your father and I, my dear--as I was telling Mr. Johnston to-day at dinner, and wishing they were acquainted--argues against the beer."

This was a question of whether or not our poor people should have beer with their Christmas dinner. Papa, who holds strong opinions against the use of intoxicating drinks, and never tastes them himself, being, every year, rather in ill odour on the subject. I asked who was this valuable ally?

"None of our neighbours, you may be sure. A gentleman from the Camp--you may have met him at my house--a Doctor Urquhart."

I could not help smiling, and said it was curious how I was perpetually hearing of Dr. Urquhart.

"Even in our quiet neighbourhood, such a man is sure to be talked about. Not in society perhaps--it was quite a marvel for Cohn to get him to our ball; but because he does so many things while we humdrum folk are only thinking about them."

I asked what sort of things? In his profession?

"Chiefly, but he makes professional business include so much. Imagine his coming to Cohn as ground-landlord of Bourne hamlet, to beg him to see to the clearing of the village pool? or writing to the lord of the manor, saying that twenty new cottages built on the moor would do more moral good than the new county reformatory? He is one of the very few men who are not ashamed to say what they think--and makes people listen to it too, as they rarely do to those not long settled in the neighbourhood, and about whom they know little or nothing."

I asked if nothing were known about Dr. Urquhart? Had he any relations? Was he married?

"Oh no, surely not married. I never inquired, but took it for granted. However, probably my son knows. Shall I find out, and speak a good word for you, Miss Dora?"

"No, thank you," said I, laughing. "You know I hate soldiers."

'Tis Mrs. Granton's only fault--her annoying jests after this fashion. Otherwise, I would have liked to have asked a few more questions about Dr. Urquhart. I wonder if I shall ever meet him again? The regiments rarely stay long at the Camp, so that it is not probable.

I went over to where my two sisters and Miss Emery were sitting over the fire. Miss Emery was talking very fast, and Penelope listening with a slightly scornful lip; she protests that ladies, middle-aged ladies particularly, are such very stupid company. Lisabel wore her good-natured smile, always the same to everybody.

"I was quite pleased," Miss Emery was saying, "to notice how cordially Captain Treherne and Mr. Charteris met: I always understood there was a sort of a--a coolness, in short. Very natural. As his nephew, and next heir, after the Captain, Sir William might have done more than he did for Mr. Charteris. So people said, at least. He has a splendid property, and only that one son. You have been to Treherne Court, Miss Johnston?"

Penelope abruptly answered, "No;" and Lisabel added amiably, that we seldom went from home--papa liked to have us at Rockmount all the year round.

I said wilfully, wickedly--maybe, lest Miss Emery's long tongue should carry back to London what was by implication not true--that we did not even know where Treherne Court was, and that we had only met Captain Treherne accidentally among the camp-officers who visited at the Cedars.

Lis pinched me: Penelope looked annoyed. Was it a highly virtuous act thus to have vexed both my sisters? Alack! I feel myself growing more unamiable every day. What will be the end of it?

"First come, first served," must have been Lisabel's motto for the evening, since, Captain Treherne reappearing, scarlet beat plain black clear out of the field. I was again obliged to follow, as Charity, pouring the oil and wine of my agreeable conversation into the wounds made by my sister's bright eyes, and receiving as gratitude such an amount of information on turnips, moor-lands, and the true art of sheep-feeding, as will make me look with respect and hesitation on every leg of mutton that comes to our table for the next six months.

"O, Colin, dear Colin, my Colin, my dear,
Who wont the wild mountains to trace without fear,
O, where are thy flocks that so swiftly rebound,
And fly o'er the heath without touching the ground?"

A remarkable fact in natural history, which much impressed me in my childhood. What is the rest?

"Where the birch-tree hangs weeping o'er fountain so clear,
At noon I shall meet him, my Colin, my dear."

What a shame to laugh at Mrs. Grant of Laggan's nice old song, at the pretty Highland tune which ere now I have hummed over the moor for miles! Since, when we were children, I myself was in love with Colin! a love which found vent in much petting of his mother, and in shy presents to himself of nuts and blackberries: until, stung by indifference, my affection

"Shrunk
Into itself, and was missing ever after."

Do we forget our childish loves? I think not. The objects change, of course, but the feeling, when it has been true and unselfish, keeps its character still, and is always pleasant to remember. It was very silly, no doubt, but I question if now I could hove anybody in a fonder, humbler, faithfuller way than I adored that great, merry, good-natured schoolboy. And though I know he has not an ounce of brains, is the exact opposite of anybody I could fall in love with now--still, to this day, I look kindly on the round, rosy face of "Colin, my dear."

I wonder if he ever will marry our Lisa. As far as I notice, people do not often marry their childish companions; they much prefer strangers. Possibly, from mere novelty and variety; or else from the fact that as kin are sometimes "less than kind," so one's familiar associates are often the furthest from one's sympathies, interests, or heart.

With this highly moral and amiable sentiment--a fit conclusion for a social evening, I will lock my desk.

Lucky I did! What if Lisabel had found me writing at---one in the morning! How she would have teased me--even under the circumstances of last night, which seem to have affected her mighty little, considering.

I heard her at my door, from without, grumble at it being bolted. She came in and sat down by my fire. Quite a picture, in a blue flannel dressing-gown, with her light hair dropping down in two wavy streams, and her eyes as bright as if it were any hour rather than 1.30 A.M., as I showed her by my watch.

"Nonsense! I shall not go to bed yet. I want to talk a bit, Dora; you ought to feel flattered by my coming to tell you, first of anybody. Guess now--what has happened?"

Nothing ill, certainly--for she held her head up, laughing a little, looking very handsome and pleased.

"You never will guess, for you never believed it would come to pass, but it has. Treherne proposed to me to-night."

The news quite took my breath away, and then I questioned its accuracy. "He has only been giving you a few more of his silly speeches--he means nothing. Why don't you put a stop to it all?"

Lisabel was not vexed--she never is--she only laughed.

"I tell you, Dora, it is perfectly true. You may believe or not--I don't care--but he really did it."

"How, when, and where, pray?"

"In the conservatory; beside the biggest orange-tree; a few minutes before he left."

I said, since she was so very matter-of-fact, perhaps she would have no objection to tell me the precise words in which he "did it."

"Oh, dear, no; not the smallest objection. We were joking about a bit of orange-blossom Colin had given me, and Treherne wanted me to throw away; but I said 'No, I liked the scent, and meant to wear a wreath of natural orange-flowers when I was married.' Upon which he grew quite furious, and said it would drive him mad if I ever married any man but him. Then he got hold of my hand, and--the usual thing, you know." She blushed a little. "It ended by my telling him he had better speak to papa, and he said he should, to-morrow. That's all."

"All!"

"Well?" said Lisabel, expectantly.

It certainly was a singular way in which to receive one's sister's announcement of her intended marriage; but, for worlds, I could not have spoken a syllable. I felt a weight on my chest--a sense of hot indignation, which settled down into inconceivable melancholy.

Was this indeed all? A silly flirtation--a young lad's passion--a young girl's cool, business-like reception of the same--the formal "speaking to papa," and the thing was over! Was that love?

"Haven't you a word to say, Dora? I had better have told Penelope. But she was tired, and scolded me out of her room. Besides she might not exactly like this, for some reasons. It's rather hard; such an important thing to happen, and not a soul to congratulate one upon it."

I asked, why might Penelope dislike it?

"Can't you see? Captain Treherne roving about the world, and Captain Treherne married and settled at home, make a considerable difference to Francis's prospects. No, I don't mean anything mean or murderous--you need not look so shocked-- it is merely my practical way of regarding things. But what harm? If I did not have Treherne, somebody else would, and it would be none the better for Francis and Penelope."

"You are very prudent and far-sighted: such an idea would never have entered my mind."

"I daresay not. Just give me that brush, will you, child?"

She proceeded methodically to damp her long hair, and plait it up in those countless tails which gave Miss Lisabel Johnston's locks such a beautiful wave. Passing the glass, she looked into it, smiled, sighed.

"Poor fellow. I do believe he is very fond of me."

"And you?"

"Oh, I like him--like him excessively. If I didn't, what should I marry him for?"

"What, indeed!"

"There is one objection papa may have: his being younger than I--I forget how much, but it is very little. How surprised papa will be when he gets the letter to-morrow!"

"Does Sir William know?"

"Not yet; but that will be soon settled, he tells me. He can persuade his mother, and she, his father. Besides, they can have no possible objection to me."

She looked again in the mirror as she said this. Yes, that "me" was not a daughter-in-law likely to be objected to, even at Treherne Court.

"I hope it will not vex Penelope," she continued. "It may be all the better for her, since, when I am married, I shall have so much influence. We may make the old gentleman do something handsome for Francis, and get a richer living for papa, if he will consent to leave Rockmount. And I'd find a nice husband for you, eh, Dora?"

"Thank you; I don't want one. I hate the very mention of the thing. I wish, instead of marrying, we could all be dead and buried."

And, whether from weariness, or excitement, or a sudden, unutterable pang at seeing my sister, my playfellow, my handsome Lisa, sitting there, talking as she talked, and acting as she acted, I could bear up no longer. I burst out sobbing.

She was very much astonished, and somewhat touched, I suppose, for she cried too, a little, and we kissed one another several times, which we are not much in the habit of doing.--Till, suddenly, I recollected Treherne, the orange-tree, and "the usual thing." Her lips seemed to burn me.

"Oh, Lisa, I wish you wouldn't--I do wish you wouldn't."

"Wouldn't what? Don't you want me to be engaged and married, child?"

"Not in that way."

"In what way, then?"

I could not tell. I did not know.

"After the fashion of Francis and Penelope, perhaps? Falling in love like a couple of babies, before they knew their own minds, and then being tied together, and keeping the thing on in a stupid, meaningless, tiresome way, till she is growing into an elderly woman, and he--no, thank you; I have seen quite enough of early loves and long engagements. I always meant to have somebody whom I could marry at once, and be done with it."

There was a half-truth in what she said, though I could not then find the other half to fit into it, and prove that her satisfactory circle of reasoning was partly formed of absolute, untenable falsehood, for false I am sure it was. Though I cannot argue it, can hardly understand it, I feel it. There must be a truth somewhere. Love cannot be all a lie.

My sister and I talked a few minutes longer, and then she rose and said she must go to bed.

"Will you not wish me happiness? 'Tis very unkind of you."

I told her outright that I did not think as she thought on these matters, but that she had made her choice, and I hoped it would be a happy one.

"I am sure of it. Now go to bed, and don't cry any more, there's a good girl, for there really is nothing to cry about. You shall have the very prettiest bridesmaid's dress I can afford, and Treherne Court will be such a nice house for you to visit at. Good night, Dora."

Strange, altogether strange!

And writing it all down this morning, I feel it stranger than ever, still.

I will set down, if only to get rid of them, a few incidents of this day.

Trivial they are--ludicrously so--to any one but me: yet they have left me sitting with my head in my hands, stupid and idle, starting, each hour, at the boom of the bell we took at Sebastopol--starting and shivering like a nervous child.

Strange! there, in the Crimea, in the midst of danger, hardship, and misery of all kinds I was at peace, even happy: happier than for many years. I seemed to have lived down, and nearly obliterated from thought, that one day, one hour, one moment--which was but a moment. Can it, or ought it, to weigh against a whole existence? or, as some religionists would tell us, against an eternity? Yet, what is time, what is eternity? And what is man, measuring himself, his atom of good or ill, either done or suffered, against God?

These are vain speculations, which I have gone over and over again, till every link in the chain of reasoning is painfully familiar. I had better give it up, and turn to ordinary things. Dear imaginary correspondent, shall I tell you the story of my day?

It began peacefully. I always rest on a Sunday, if I can. I believe, even had Heaven not hallowed one day in the seven--Saturday or Sunday matters not; let Jews and Christians battle it out!--there would still be needful a day of rest; and that day would still be a blessed day. Instinct, old habit, and later conviction always incline me to "keep the Sabbath"--not, indeed, after the strict fashion of my forefathers, but as a happy, cheerful, holy time, a resting-place between week and week, in which to enjoy specially all righteous pleasures and earthly repose, and to look forward to that rest which, we are told, "remaineth for the people of God." The people of God. No other people ever do rest, even in this world.

Treherne passed my hut soon after breakfast, and popped his head in, not over welcomely, I confess, for I was giving myself the rare treat of a bit of unprofessional reading. I had not seen him for two or three days--not since we appointed to go together to the General's dinner, and he never appeared all the evening.

"I say, Doctor, will you go to church?"

Now, I do usually attend our airy military chapel--all doors and windows--open to every kind of air, except airs from heaven, of which, I am afraid, our chaplain does not bring with him a large quantity. He leaves us to fatten upon Hebrew roots, without throwing us a crumb of Christianity; prefers Moses and the prophets to the New Testament; no wonder, as some few doctrines there, "Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you," "He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword!" would sound particularly odd in a military chapel, especially with his elucidation of them, for he is the very poorest preacher I ever heard. Yet a worthy man, a most sincere man: did a world of good out in the Crimea; used to spend hours daily in teaching our men to read and write, got personally acquainted with every fellow in the regiment, knew all their private histories, wrote their letters home, sought them out in the battle-field and in the hospital, read to them, cheered them, comforted them, and closed their eyes. There was not an officer in the regiment more deservedly beloved than our chaplain. He is an admirable fellow--everywhere but in the pulpit.

Nevertheless, I attend his chapel, as I have always been in the habit of attending some Christian worship somewhere, because it is the simplest way of showing that I am not ashamed of my Master before men.

Therefore, I would not smile at Treherne's astonishing fit of piety, but simply assented; at which he evidently was disappointed.

"You see, I'm turning respectable, and going to church. I wonder such an exceedingly respectable and religious fellow as you, Urquhart, has not tried to make me go sooner."

"If you go against your will, and because it's respectable, you had better stop away."

"Thank you; but suppose I have my own reasons for going?"

He is not a deep fellow; there is no deceit in the lad. All his faults are uppermost, which makes them bearable.

"Come, out with it. Better make a clean breast to me. It will not be the first time."

"Well, then--ahem!" twisting his sash and looking down with most extraordinary modesty,--"the fact is, she wished it."

"Who?"

"The lady you know of. In truth, I may as well tell you, for I want you to speak up for me to her father, and also to break it to my governor. I've taken your advice and been and gone and done for myself."

"Married!" for his manner was so queer that I should not have wondered at even that catastrophe.

"Not quite, but next door to it. Popped and been accepted. Yes, since Friday I have been an engaged man, Doctor."

Behind his foolishness was some natural feeling, mixed with a rather comical awe of his own position.

For me, I was a good deal surprised; yet he might have come to a worse end. To a rich young fellow of twenty-one, the world is full of many more dangerous pitfalls than matrimony. So I expressed myself in the customary congratulations, adding that I concluded the lady was the one I had seen?

Treherne nodded.

"Sir William knows it?"

"Not yet. Didn't I tell you I wanted you to break it to him? Though he will consent, of course. Her father is quite respectable--a clergyman, you are aware; and she is such a handsome girl--would do credit to any man's taste. Also, she likes me--a trifle!"

And he pulled his moustache with a satisfied recognition of his great felicity.

I saw no reason to question it, such as it was. He was a well-looking fellow, likely to please women; and this one, though there was not much in her, appeared kindly and agreeable. The other sister, whom I talked with, was something more. They were, no doubt, a perfectly unobjectionable family; nor did I think that Sir William, who was anxious for his son to marry early, would refuse consent to any creditable choice. But, decidedly, he ought to be told at once--ought indeed to have been consulted beforehand. I said so.

"Can't help that. It happened unexpectedly. I had, when I entered Rockmount, no more idea of such a thing than--than your cat, Doctor. Upon my soul, 'tis the fact! Well, well, marriage is a man's fate. He can no more help himself in the matter than a stone can help rolling down a hill All's over, and I'm glad of it. So, will you write and tell my father?"

"Certainly not. Do it yourself, and you had better do it now. 'No time like the present,' always."

I pushed towards him pens, ink, and paper, and returned to my book again; but it was not quite absorbing; and occasional glimpses of Treherne's troubled and puzzled face amused me, as well as made me thoughtful.

It was natural that having been in some slight way concerned in it, this matter, foreign as it was to the general tenor of my busy life, should interest me a little. Though I viewed it, not from the younger, but from the elder side. I myself never knew either father or mother; they died when I was a child; but I think, whether or not we possess it in youth, we rarely come to my time of life without having a strong instinctive feeling of the rights of parents--being worthy parents. Rights, of course modified in their extent by the higher claims of the Father of all, but second to none other; except, perhaps, those which He has Himself made superior--the rights of husband and wife.

I felt, when I came to consider it, exceedingly sorry that Treherne had made a proposal of marriage without consulting his father. But it was no concern of mine. Even his "taking my advice" was, he knew well, his own exaggeration of an abstract remark which I could not but make; otherwise, I had not meddled in his courting, which, in my opinion, no third party has a right to do.

So I washed my hands of the whole affair, except consenting to Treherne's earnest request that I would go with him, this morning, to the little village church of which the young lady's father was the clergyman, and be introduced.

"A tough old gentleman, too; as sharp as a needle, as hard as a rock--walking into his study, yesterday morning, was no joke, I assure you."

"But you said he had consented?"

"Ah, yes, all's right. That is, it will be when I hear from the governor."

All this while, by a curious amatory eccentricity, he had never mentioned the lady's name. Nor had I asked, because I knew it. Also, because that surname, common as it is, is still extremely painful to me, either to utter or to hear.

We came late into church, and sat by the door. It was a pleasant September forenoon; there was sunshine within and sunshine outside, far away across the moors. I had never been to this village before; it seemed a pretty one, and the church old and picturesque. The congregation consisted almost entirely of poor people, except one family, which I concluded to be the clergyman's. He was in the reading-desk.

"That's her father," whispered Treherne.

"Oh, indeed." But I did not look at him for a minute or so; I could not. Such moments will come, despite of reasoning, belief, conviction, when I see a person bearing any name resembling that name.

At last I lifted my head to observe him.

A calm, hard, regular face; well-shaped features; high, narrow forehead, aquiline nose--a totally different type from one which I so well remember that any accidental likeness thereto impresses me as startlingly and vividly as, I have heard, men of tenacious, fervent memory will have impressed on them, through life, as their favourite type of beauty, the countenance of their first love.

I could sit down now, at ease, and listen to this gentleman's reading of the prayers. His reading was what might have been expected from his face--classical, accurate, intelligent, gentlemanly. And the congregation listened with respect, as to a clever exposition of things quite beyond their comprehension. Except the gabble-gabble of the Sunday-school, and the clerk's loud "A-a-men!" the minister had the service entirely to himself.

A beautiful service--as I, though in heart a Presbyterian still, must avow. Especially, when heard as I have heard it-- at sea, in hospital, at the camp. Not this camp, but ours in the Crimea, where, all through the prayers, guns kept booming, and shells kept flying, sometimes within a short distance of the chapel itself. I mind of one Sunday, little more than a year ago, for it must have been on the ninth of September, when I stopped on my way from Balaklava hospital, to hear service read in the open air, on a hillside. It was a cloudy day, I remember; below, brown with long drought, stretched the Balaklava plains; opposite, grey and still, rose the high mountains on the other side of the Tchernaya; while, far away to the right, towards our camp, one could just trace the white tents of the Highland regiments; and to the left, hidden by the Col de Balaklava, a dull, perpetual rumble, and clouds of smoke hanging in the air, showed where, six miles off was being enacted the fall of Sebastopol.

Though at the time we did not know; we, this little congregation, mustered just outside a hospital tent, where I remember, not a stone's-throw from where we, the living, knelt, lay a row of those straight, still, formless forms, the more awful because, from familiarity, they had ceased to be felt as such--each sewn up in the blanket, its only coffin, waiting for burial--waiting also, we believe and hope, for the resurrection from the dead.

What a sermon our chaplain might have preached! what words I, or any man, could surely have found to say at such a time, on such a spot! Yet what we did hear were the merest platitudes--so utterly trivial and out of place, that I do not now recall a single sentence. Strange, that people--good Christian men, as I knew that man to be--should go on droning out "words, words, words," when bodies and souls perish in thousands round them; or splitting theological hairs to poor fellows, who, except in an oath, are ignorant even of the Divine Name,--or thundering anathemas at them for going down to the pit of perdition, without even so much as pointing out to them the bright but narrow way.

I was sitting thus, absorbed in the heavy thoughts that often come to me when thus quiet in church, hearing some man, who is supposed to be one of the Church's teachers, delivering the message of the Church's Great Head--when looking up, I saw two eyes fixed on me.

It was one of the clergyman's three daughters; the youngest, probably, for her seat was in the most uncomfortable corner of the pew. Apparently the same I had talked with at Mrs. Granton's, though I was not sure--ladies look so different in their bonnets. Hers was close, I noticed, and decently covering the head, not dropping off on her shoulders like those I see ladies wearing, which will assuredly multiply ophthalmic cases, with all sorts of head and face complaints, as the winter winds come on. Such exposure must be very painful, too, these blinding sunny days. How can women stand the torments they have to undergo in matters of dress? If I had any womankind belonging to me--pshaw! what an idle speculation.

Those two eyes, steadfastly inquiring, with a touch of compassion in them, startled me. Many a pair of eager eyes have I had to meet, but it was always their own fate, or that of some one dear to them, which they were anxious to learn: they never sought to know anything of me or mine. Now, these did.

I am nervously sensitive of even kindly scrutiny. Involuntarily, I moved so that one of the pillars came between me and those eyes. When we stood up to sing, she kept them steadily upon her hymn-book, nor did they wander again during church-time, either towards me or in any other direction.

The face being just opposite, in the line of the pulpit, I could not help seeing it during the whole of the discourse, which was, as I expected, classical, laboured, elegant, and interesting--after the pattern of the preacher's countenance.

His daughter is not like him. In repose, her features are ordinary; nor did they for one moment recall to me the flashing, youthful face, full of action and energy, which had amused me that night at the Cedars. Some faces catch the reflection of the moment so vividly that you never see them twice alike. Others, solidly and composedly handsome, scarcely vary at all, and I think it is of these last that one would soonest weary. Irregular features have generally most character. The Venus di Medici would have made a very stupid fireside companion, nor would I venture to enter for Oxford honours a son who had the profile of the Apollo Belvidere.

Treherne is evidently of a different opinion. He sat beaming out admiration upon that large, fair, statuesque woman, who had turned so that her pure Greek profile was distinctly visible against the red cloth of the high pew. She might have known what a pretty picture she was making. She will please Sir William, who admires beauty, and she seems refined enough even for Lady Augusta Treherne. I thought to myself, the lad might have gone farther and fared worse. His marriage was sure to have been one of pure accident: he is not a young man either to have had the decision to choose, or the firmness to win and keep.

Service ended, he asked me what I thought of her; and I said much as I have written here. He appeared satisfied.

"You must stay and be introduced to the family: the father remains in church. I shall walk home with them. Ah, she sees us."

The lad was all eagerness and excitement. He must be considerably in earnest.

"Now, Doctor, come--nay, pray do."

For I hesitated.

Hesitation was too late, however: the introduction took place: Treherne hurried it over; though I listened acutely, I could not be certain of the name. It seemed to be, as I already believed, Johnson.

Treherne's beauty met him, all smiles, and he marched off by her side in a most determined manner, the eldest sister following and joining the pair, doubtless to the displeasure of one, or both. She, whom I did not remember seeing before, is a little sharp-speaking woman, pretty, but faded-looking, with very black eyes.

The other sister, left behind, fell in with me. We walked side by side through the churchyard, and into the road. As I held the wicket-gate open for her to pass, she looked up, smiled, and said--

"I suppose you do not remember me, Doctor Urquhart?"

I replied, "Yes I did": that she was the young lady who "hated soldiers."

She blushed extremely, glanced at Treherne, and said, not without dignity--

"It would be a pity to remember all the foolish things I have uttered, especially on that evening."

"I was not aware they were foolish; the impression left on me was that we had had a very pleasant conversation, which included far more sensible topics than are usually discussed at balls."

"You do not often go to balls?"

"No."

"Do you dislike them?"

"Not always."

"Do you think they are wrong?"

I smiled at her cross-questioning, which had something fresh and unsophisticated about it, like the inquisitiveness of a child.

"Really, I have never very deeply considered the question; my going, or not going, is purely a matter of individual choice. I went to the Cedars that night because Mrs. Granton was so kind as to wish it, and I was only too happy to please her. I like her extremely, and owe her much."

"She is a very good woman," was the earnest answer. "And Colin has the kindest heart in the world."

I assented, though amused at the superlatives in which very young people delight; but, in this case, not so far away from truth as ordinarily happens.

"You know Cohn Granton;--have you seen him lately--yesterday I mean? Did Captain Treherne see him yesterday?"

The anxiety with which the question was put reminded me of something Treherne had mentioned, which implied his rivalry with Granton; perhaps this kind-hearted damsel thought there would be a single-handed combat on our parade-ground, between the accepted and rejected swains. I allayed her fears by observing, that to my certain knowledge, Mr. Granton had gone up to London on Saturday morning, and would not return till Tuesday. Then, our eyes meeting, we both looked conscious; but, of course, neither the young lady nor myself made any allusion to present circumstances.

I said, generally, that Granton was a fine young fellow, not over sentimental, nor likely to feel anything very deeply; but gifted with great good sense, sufficient to make an admirable country squire, and one of the best landlords in the county, if only he could be brought to feel the importance of his position.

"How do you mean?"

"His responsibility, as a man of fortune, to make the most of his wealth."

"But how?--what is there for him to do?"

"Plenty, if he could only be got to do it."

"Could you not get him to do it?" with another look of the eager eyes.

"I?--I know so very little of the young man."

"But you have so much influence, I hear, over everybody-- that is, Mrs. Granton says.--We have known the Grantons ever since I was a child."

From her blush, which seemed incessantly to come, sudden and sensitive as a child's, I imagined that time was not so very long ago--until she said something about "my youngest sister," which proved I had been mistaken in her age.

It was easier to talk to a young girl sitting forlorn by herself in a ball-room, than to a grown-up lady, walking in broad daylight, accompanied by two other ladies, who, though a clergyman's daughters, are as stylish fashionables as ever irritated my sober vision. She did not, I must confess; she seemed to be the plain one of the family: unnoticed--one might almost guess, neglected. Nor was there any flightiness or coquettishness in her manner, which, though abrupt and original, was quiet even to demureness.

Pursuing my hobby of anatomising character, I studied her a good deal during the pauses of conversation, of which there were not a few. Compared with Treherne, whom I heard in advance, laughing and talking with his usual light-heartedness, she must have found me uncommonly sombre and dull.

Yet it was pleasant to be strolling leisurely along, one's feet dropping softly down through rustling dead leaves into the dry, sandy mould which is peculiar to this neighbourhood: you may walk in it, ankle-deep, for miles, across moors and under pine-woods, without soiling a shoe. Pleasant to see the sunshine striking the boughs of the trees, and lying in broad, bright rifts on the ground here and there, wherever there was an opening in the dense green tops of those fine Scotch firs, the like of which I have never beheld out of my own country, nor there since I was quite a boy. Also, the absence of other forest trees, the high elevation, the wide spaces of moorland, and the sandy soil, give to the atmosphere here a rarity and freshness which exhilarates, mentally and bodily, in no small degree.

I thank God I have never lost my love of nature; never ceased to feel an almost boyish thrill of delight in the mere sunshine and fresh air.

For miles I could have walked on, thus luxuriating, without wishing to disturb my enjoyment by a word, but it was necessary to converse a little, so I made the valuable and original remark "that this neighbourhood would be very pretty in the spring."

My companion replied with a vivacity of indignation most unlike a grown young lady, and exceedingly like a child--

"Pretty? It is beautiful! You never can have seen it, I am sure."

I said, "My regiment did not come home till May; I had spent this spring in the Crimea."

"Ah! the spring flowers there, I have heard, are remarkably beautiful, much more so than ours."

"Yes;" and as she seemed fond of flowers, I told her of the great abundance which in the peaceful spring that followed the war, we had noticed, carpeting with a mass of colour those dreary plains; the large Crimean snowdrops, the jonquils, and blue hyacinths, growing in myriads about Balaklava and on the banks of the Tchernaya; while on every rocky dingle, and dipping into every tiny brook, hung bushes of the delicate yellow jasmine.

"How lovely! But I would not exchange England for it. You should see how the primroses grew all along that bank; and a little beyond, outside the wood, is a hedge-side, which will be one mass of bluebells."

"I shall look for them. I have often found bluebells till the end of October."

"Nonsense!" What a laugh it was, with such a merry ring. "I beg your pardon, Doctor Urquhart--but, really, blue-bells in October! Who ever heard of such a thing?"

"I assure you I have found them myself, in sheltered places, both the larger and smaller species; the one that grows from a single stem, and that which produces two or three bells from the same stalk--the campanula. Shall I give you its botanical name?"

"Oh, I know what you mean--harebell."

"Bluebell; the real bluebell of Scotland. What you call bluebells are wild hyacinths."

She shook her head with a pretty persistence.

"No, no; I have always called them bluebells, and I always shall. Many a scolding have I got about them when I used, on cold March days, to steal a basket and a kitchen knife, to dig them up before the buds were formed, so as to transplant them safely in time to flower in my garden. Many's the knife I broke over that vain quest. Do you know how difficult it is to get at the bulb of a bluebell?"

"Wild hyacinth, if you please."

"A bluebell," she laughingly persisted. "I have sometimes picked out a fine one, growing in some easy soft mould, and undermined him, and worked round him, ten inches deep, fancying I had got to the root of him at last, when slip went the knife; and all was over. Many a time I have sat with the cut-off stalk in my hand, the long, white, slender stalk, ending in two delicate green leaves, with a tiny bud between--you know it--and actually cried, not only for vexation over lost labour, but because it seemed such a pity to have destroyed what one never could make alive again."

She said that, looking right into my face with her innocent eyes. This girl, from her habit of speaking exactly as she thinks, and whether from her solitary country rearing, or her innate simplicity of character, thinking at once more naturally and originally than most women, will, doubtless, often say things like these.

An idea once or twice this morning had flitted across my mind, whether it would not be better for me to break through my hermit ways, and allow myself to pay occasional visits among happy households, or the occasional society of good and cultivated women; now it altogether vanished. It would be a thing impossible.

This young lady must have very quick perceptions, and an accurate memory of trivial things, for scarcely had she uttered the last words when all her face was dyed crimson and red, as if she thought she had hurt or offended me. I judged it best to answer her thoughts out plain.

"I agree with you that to kill wantonly even a flower is an evil deed. But you need not have minded saying that to me, even after our argument at the Cedars. I am not in your sense a soldier--a professed man-slayer; my vocation is rather the other way. Yet even for the former I could find arguments of defence."

"You mean, there are higher things than mere life, and greater crimes than taking it away? So I have been thinking myself, lately. You set me thinking, for the which I am glad to own myself your debtor."

I had not a word of answer to this acknowledgment, at once frank and dignified. She went on--

"If I said foolish or rude things that night, you must remember how apt one is to judge from personal experience, and I have never seen any fair specimen of the Army. Except," and her manner prevented all questioning of what duty elevated into a truth--"except, of course, Captain Treherne."

He caught his name.

"Eh, good people. Saying nothing bad of me, I hope? Anyhow, I leave my character in the hands of my friend Urquhart. He rates me soundly to my face, which is the best proof of his not speaking ill of me behind my back."

"So that is Doctor Urquhart's idea of friendship! bitter outside, and sweet at the core. What does he make of love, pray? All sweet and no bitter?"

"Or all bitter and no sweet?"

These speeches came from the two other sisters, the latter from the eldest; their flippancy needed no reply, and I gave none. The second sister was silent: which, I thought, showed better taste, under the circumstances.

For a few minutes longer we sauntered on, leaving the wood and passing into the sunshine, which felt soft and warm as spring. Then there happened--I have been slow in coming to it--one of those accidents, trivial to all but me, which, whenever occurring, seem to dash the peaceful present out of my grasp, and throw me back years--years, to the time when I had neither present nor future, but dragged on life, I scarcely know how, with every faculty tightly bound up in an inexorable, intolerable past.

She was carrying her prayer-book, or Bible I think it was, though English people oftener carry to church prayer-books than Bibles, and seem to reverence them quite as much, or more. I had noticed it, as being not one of those velvet things with gilt crosses that ladies delight in, but plain-bound, with slightly soiled edges, as if with continual use. Passing through a gate, she dropped it: I stooped to pick it up, and there on the fly-leaf I saw written-- "Theodora Johnston."--Johnston.

Let me consider what followed, for my memory is not clear.

I believe I walked with her to her own door, that there was a gathering and talking, which ended in Treherne's entering with the ladies, promising to overtake me before I reached the camp. That the gate closed upon them, and I heard their lively voices inside the garden-wall while I walked rapidly down the road and back into the fir-wood. That gaining its shadow and shelter, I sat down on a felled tree, to collect myself.

Johnson her name is not, but Johnston. Spelled precisely the same as I remember noticing on his handkerchief--Johnston, without the final e.

Yet, granting that identity, it is still a not uncommon name; there are whole families, whole clans of Johnstons along the Scottish border, and plenty of English Johnstons and Johnstones likewise.

Am I fighting with shadows, and torturing myself in vain? God grant it!

Still, after this discovery, it is vitally necessary to learn more. I have sat up till midnight, waiting Treherne's return. He did not overtake me--I never expected he would--or desired it. I came back, when I did come back, another way. His hut, next to mine, is still silent.

So is the whole camp at this hour. Refreshing myself a few minutes since by standing bareheaded at my hut-door, I saw nothing but the stars overhead, and the long lines of lamps below; heard nothing but the sigh of the moorland wind, and the tramp of the sentries relieving guard.

I must wait a little longer; to sleep would be impossible till I have tried to find out as much as I can.

What if it should be that--the worst? which might inevitably produce--or leave me no reason longer to defer--the end?

Here it seemed as if with long pondering my faculties became torpid. I fell into a sort of dream; which, being broken by a face looking in at me through the window, a sickness of perfectly childish terror came over me. For an instant only--and then I had put away my writing-materials and unbolted the door.

Treherne came in, laughing violently. "Why, Doctor, did you take me for a ghost?"

"You might have been. You know what happened last week to those poor young fellows coming home from a dinner-party in a dog-cart."

"By George I do!" The thought of this accident, which had greatly shocked the whole camp, sobered him at once. "To be knocked over in action is one thing; but to die with one's head under a carriage-wheel--ugh!--Doctor, did ye really think something of the sort had befallen me? Thank you; I had no idea you cared so much for a harum-scarum fellow like me."

He could not be left believing an untruth; so I said my startled looks were not on his account; the fact was, I had been writing closely for some hours, and was nervous--rather.

The notion of my having "nerves" afforded him considerable amusement. "But that is just what Dora persisted--good sort of creature, isn't she? the one you walked with from church. I told her you were as strong as iron and as hard as a rock, and she said she didn't believe it; that yours was one of the most sensitive faces she had ever seen."

"I am very much obliged to Miss Theodora--I really was not aware of it myself."

"Nor I either, faith! but women are so sharp-sighted. Ah, Doctor, you don't half know their ways."

I concluded he had stayed at Rockmount; had he spent a pleasant day?

"Pleasant? ecstatic. Now, acknowledge--isn't she a glorious girl? Such a mouth--such an eye--such an arm! Altogether a magnificent creature. Don't you think so? Speak out, I shan't be jealous."

I said, with truth, she was an extremely handsome young woman.

"Handsome? Divine. But she's as lofty as a queen--won't allow any nonsense; I didn't get a kiss the whole day. She will have it we are not even engaged till I hear from the governor; and I can't get a letter till Tuesday, at soonest. Doctor, it's maddening. If all is not settled in a week, and that angel mine within six more--as she says she will be, parents consenting--I do believe it will drive me mad."

"Having her, or losing?"

"Either. She puts me nearly out of my senses."

"Sit down then, and put yourself into them again. For a few minutes, at least."

For I perceived the young fellow was warm with something besides love. He had been solacing himself with wine and cigars in the mess-room. Intemperance was not one of his failings, nor was he more than a little excited now; not by any means what men consider "overtaken," or, to use the honester and uglier word, "drunk." Yet, as he stood there, lolling against the door, with hot cheeks and watery eyes, talking and laughing louder than usual, and diffusing an atmosphere both nicotian and alcoholic, I thought it was as well on the whole that his divinity did not see her too human young adorer. I have often pitied women--mothers, wives, sisters. If they could see some of us men as we often see one another!

Treherne talked rapturously of the family at Rockmount--the father and the three young ladies.

I asked if there were no mother.

"No. Died, I believe, when my Lisabel was a baby. Lisabel; isn't it a pretty name? Lisabel Treherne, better still--beats Lisabel Johnston hollow."

This seemed an opportunity for questions, which must be put; safer put them now, than when Treherne was in a soberer and more observant mood.

"Johnston is a Border name. Are they Scotch?"

'Not to my knowledge--I never inquired. Will, if you wish, Doctor. You canny Scots always hang together, ha! ha! But I say, did you ever see three nicer girls? Shouldn't you like one of them for yourself?"

I!

"Thank you--I am not a marrying man; but you will find them a pleasant family, apparently. Are there any more sisters?"

"No!--quite enough, too."

"Nor brothers?"

"Not the ghost of one!"

"Perhaps"--was it I, or some mocking imp speaking through my lips--"perhaps only the ghost of one. None now living, probably?"

"None at all that I ever heard of. So much the better; I shall have her more to myself. Heigho! it's an age till Tuesday."

"You'd better go to your bed, and shorten the time by ten hours."

"So I will. Night, night, old fellow--as they teach little brats to say, on disappearing from dessert. 'Pon my life, I see myself the venerated head of a household, and pillar of the state already. You'll be quite proud of my exceeding respectability."

He put his head in again, two minutes after, with a nod and a wink.

"I say, think better of it. Try for Miss Dora--the second. Charteris one, me the other, and you the third. What a jolly lot of brothers-in-law! Do think better of it."

"Hold your tongue, and go to your bed."

It was not possible to go to mine, till I had arranged my thoughts.

What he stated must be correct. If ot