He shall pay dearly for sending me to this barbarous, wretched nook of Great Britain. Sent out of the way of bad companions, I suppose-sent into retirement to break the naughty boy of his troublesome habits!the ungovernable beast stinted of his provender, that he may be tamed and subdued! Tamed indeed! they little know me. Look! there is a letter I got yesterday from Theresa's hypocritical, canting, Puseyite husband, taking advantage of our relationship to say 'a few words of warning to one whom the world and sinful associates have led astray!' A Puseyite, indeed! daring to lecture me !—a poor, puling, pining, whining, lackadaisical Puseyite, that is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Such a hybrid of Romanism, and Anglicanism, and schism, and heresy, and dissent without the name, to talk about his priestly authority! But I wrote him a settler last night. I told him there were three things I detested and despised-Birmingham jewellery, gooseberry champagne, and Puseyism. The mean, pitiful, black-coated fellow!"

Basil was silenced by the appearance of his dinner, which he found sad fault with, but which, nevertheless, he seemed to enjoy amazingly. The bottled porter he said was flat, and he deplored the good Burgundy that he had made up his mind to buy, just before the row" began; still he drank much more of the abused beverage than his anxious wife liked to see. All the evening he talked on in the same strain, menacing Theresa and her husband, defying his father, and finding extensive fault with the place, the house, the furniture, and the arrangement of things generally. Lilian spoke only to be contradicted and treated as an ignorant simpleton; all her labours, all her thoughts, all her pretty devices seemed thrown away. Nothing pleased Basil; and at last he smoked his cigar in sulky silence, and drank such copious draughts of almost un

diluted spirit, that Lilian's heart quailed within her. Poor Lilian! that one week seemed to have made Basil ten times worse than before; she could only be silent, and pray earnestly for better days to come.

She went up to bed with a heavy heart: she felt a sickening sense of disappointment as she paused at the landing-window to look out on the night. The clouds had rolled away-the moon and the stars were shining brilliantly in the blue, placid sky. "So will the clouds of care and sorrow roll away in God's good time," said Lilian, softly to herself, and joy and beauty will shine again on the weary heart; but perhaps not in this life. Well! what then? this life is but an atom of time compared with the eternity of the life to come!"

CHAPTER XXV.

NEW HOPES.

"Christian! this world is not thy rest;
Think thou art on a troubled main
That must be cross'd, tho' rough the waves,
Thro' perils, tempests, toils, and pains.

"Heaven is thine haven! Christ thy star,
Who guides thee o'er the rolling deep;
The magnet that attracts thy bark,

When the weak heart sinks down to sleep.

"Think that the port is closer, as

Each sad or happy hour is past;

Ere long the heavenly towers will rise,

And on death's stream their shadows cast."

"SACRED YEAR," E. J. W.

THAT long, dreary winter! how heavily the dull, dismal days went by. Storm, and mist, and wet without, and gloom and sadness within. Basil began to write his

book-the book that was to stamp his fame as an author -the book that was to circulate with the rapidity of slander-the book that was to be in all men's hands, and upon all men's tongues, and that was to rival and finally eclipse "David Copperfield," "Jane Eyre," and "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Basil, however, refused to carry on his labours in the common sitting-room, and Lilian selected a small upper chamber, which she fitted up with infinite pains, and with no small satisfaction to herself; for already her pretty crimson table-cloth displayed two small islands and an extensive continent of ink; already the carpet had been subjected to rubbings and scrubbings and ablutions of hot water, and Bridget had prophesied that by Christmas everything in the room would be as black as sin.

Still she felt very lonely, when, as soon as breakfast was over, Basil marched away to his study, never stopping to consider how she would employ or amuse herself till they met again. It was no weather for outdoor exercise; the roads and lanes were almost impassable, and often Lilian found herself compelled to abandon even her walk to church. Sometimes the mist came down so heavily that she was afraid of wandering out of her way; and twice the mud was so soft and so deep that with great difficulty she managed to extricate herself, and go back home with such goloshes and such a dress-skirt as she had never before even faintly imagined. She saw very little of her friends at the vicarage. Basil showed no inclination to cultivate their acquaintance, and the season and the weather were equally opposed to anything like continuous intercourse. Now and then Miss Williams came up the muddy, windy hill, and spent a pleasant hour by Lilian's solitary hearth; and often the little footboy from the vicarage, who could not speak ten consecutive words of

English, came up to Bryndyffryn with a kind note and a new book from his mistress to Mrs. Hope, and Bridget listened, in alternate disgust and wrath, to the wonderful clatter, the loud gutturals, and, what seemed to her English sense of propriety, the too free joking and laughing between the Cambrian youth and his stout, untidy-looking country women. Certainly the Welsh women do hold all their conversations in alto; a stupid Saxon might suppose every word to be fierce invective and unmitigated scolding.

So every morning, when Basil went upstairs to his literary labours, Lilian went to the kitchen, a practice which Bridget strenuously insisted on; for, as she sagaciously observed, "If a mistress looks after things in the kitchen, larder, and pantry, one hour out of the twenty-four, things will not go very far wrong, and she will have no need to give up her playing, and drawing, and reading, in order to go peeping and ing into affairs that have been neglected, and are consequently in arrears, and she and her servant or servants, be they one or many, will go on the more comfortable; for no good servant dislikes the watchful eye of a reasonable mistress, and a bad domestic is better out of the house at once."

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So Bridget reasoned; not that she intended her mistress to refrain from inspecting her domestic concerns at any time that it might be needful; but she further remarked, "When people had a thing to do, and they thought to do it any time, it was very like it would be done no time at all; and a time for everything, and everything to its time, was as good a rule for the lady of the house as the old adage, a place for everything,' etc."

And so Lilian fell into the habit of fully discharging her domestic duties before reading, practising, or study were allowed their turn. At first she watched Bridget's

manipulations in the culinary art, then she made an attempt herself; and, long before the dreary winter melted into sunny spring-time, she had become quite an adept in the science of household confectionery and plain, economical cooking. She even improved on Bridget's celebrated soup, that cost so little, and yet was acceptable to a gourmand; and Basil, little knowing whose skilful hands had contrived the delicious and inexpensive repast, declared his table was better served than in the days when he could afford a professed cook.

Then, when all was completed, Lilian divested herself of her print apron, rearranged her dark braids of hair, and sat down to her studies. Her habits of promiscuous reading had prevented anything like serious forgetfulness of the knowledge acquired in school-days; but she began now to perceive that the education she believed finished six years before was in fact barely begun; that the edifice which she flattered herself had long ago been built up perfect and complete, had scarcely risen above the foundations, and was in fact hardly discernible amid the confused heap of scaffolding which desultory reading and shallow, straitened school studies had necessarily produced. It was astonishing how much she found to investigate in little things with which she once imagined herself quite conversant, but whose surface, she was now assured, had been merely skimmed.

She began a thorough course of history, taking notes as she went, making many researches by the way, in order to comprehend fully the minutes of historical detail. And this course of study became so charming, that to her fervent, earnest nature there was danger of becoming too completely engrossed in its pursuance. How it delighted her to find things, which had formerly been incomprehensible or obscure, gradually growing clear and distinct; how pleasant it was to feel