drought, laying waste all nature, a tigress starving and distracted,— unable really to suckle the young cubs dependent on her, he bethought "There is no other way but one. Lo, if I feed her, who shall lose but I?" and a 'willing victim' gave his life for theirs. "Let me alleviate what of this world's woe I can," being the burden of his tale of life.

..

Was there here some key to Arthur's strange choice of abode? taking in of such an untrained waif and stray as Alice? as well as acting nurse and teacher to those children? helpmeet to his wife? nay, perhaps, in the very choice of that wife,—a fatherless, helpless, penniless, —and even amongst the Potticarys somewhat class-despised,—widow with three other tender, helpless human beings dependent on her? Had he,—if in his young, blind impetuous way,—been also trying to do what little he still could to mend the misery of the world around him, after such a break with all the ordinary ties of life and duty as that of thirteen months ago! She remembered with Freda the old saying of a former tutor, that Arthur “ had every sense but common sense;❞ also, how in his bright, eager, promising boyhood, his mother would push back his hair and call him her " Don Quixote;” sometimes, to others, not himself, her "Sintram." Well, perhaps he might yet fight his way back through what must, to nature, be in many ways these most self-forgetting works to fuller faith; might yet, in the world to come, meet that mother, and as victor in the fight, if armour-dinted, and only just not wounded unto death-the mother who had been spared the bitterest sorrow this life could have held for her; this declension of her darling son from the path which she had always so fondly pictured his pursuing; from the work which she, at least, had never had any doubt had been “given him to do;" from that state of life to which in her sight he had undoubtedly been called; that succession to his father's priesthood and ministry amongst CHRIST's people which she,—a truly good and pious woman,―had, all his life long, believed as divinely appointed for this eldest son, as the like Patriarchal or Aaronic Church succession of old.

Thus it was but the natural following out of his mother's sense of natural duty that had made George, a year ago, at his father's bidding, put by, and uncomplainingly, the secular career for which he had hitherto been preparing, and go straight from Cooper's Hill to college instead of out to India. If the exchange had cost him much, he had suffered and given no sign. He was no "Don Quixote" nor

"Sintram," no chivalric knight-errant in anybody's eyes, nor wished to be. At present he looked down, with some ill-concealed contempt and pity, on these poor feckless beings, wasting their lives in tilting at windmills and seeking weird adventures, whilst neglecting the, in reality, far more pressing needs and duties of every-day life. But if his own obedience to a sudden and unwelcome call to take up a deserter's work and burden were, after all, but a blind following of the old "Brayscombe traditions" of implicit obedience to the powers that be,-to that old code of duty, of which Sir Charles had spoken to the self-engrossed Kathleen, would it be without its reward, even in this life? as a sacrifice leading its maker one rung higher up the ladder of life, and so better fitted for the higher life-work now before him. It was the same old family code of duty to which Dulcibella had responded, if with breaking heart, five years ago; and Amy if in a lesser degree, but two, when letting her father decide it was impossible she should be married at a week's notice, and after only a six weeks' engagement, upon Captain Lawson's ship, "The Nausicaa," being so suddenly ordered to Australia. Perhaps not only would George Erle the elder have been,—if all the past could but have come over again,more tender and considerate with his elder daughters and also more patient with his eldest son, but also more scrupulous in at once transferring the younger George's thoughts from a civilian to a clerical future as their one aim and duty. And yet he might, in all honesty, have had the benefit of the excuse pleaded for the far greater sinners and offenders of eighteen centuries ago, "And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it."

THOUGHTS ON ALL SAINTS' DAY.

I LIKE that old belief that each soul from its birth
A holy angel guards through all the toils of earth,
Who when our life is sad with sorrow and despair,
Gives us the strength we need our load of pain to bear.

When Satan seeks our hearts from virtue to allure,
Our guardian angel strives to make us good and pure,
But deeply is he pained when yielding to the foe,
We will not hear his voice speaking in accents low.

Do angels haunt this world, hidden from mortal eye?
Say, can the dead we loved e'er come down from the sky,
To visit once again the friends they loved so well?

I like to think 'tis so: it may be: who can tell?

When sleep has closed the eyes, and in some blessed dream,
A friend whom we have lost, to talk with us does seem,
Although the body sleeps, do two souls union hold?
When dreaming of the dead, do we themselves behold?

What art can paint the scene, the joy what tongue can tell,
When we again shall meet old friends beloved so well,
And wand'ring by their side our GoD and King shall see,
And learn to realise what bliss GOD's Heaven can be?
L. R. R.

A HOUSE OF REST.

A HOUSE of Rest. At first sight, one would hardly be prepared to expect that it was dedicated to children. The name seems more naturally to connect itself with age. It sounds like a promise of repose to limbs that are tired and worn out, at the end of the journey, to backs which are bowed beneath the load they have carried through a lifetime. Childhood and Rest are almost contradictory terms. Is not the restlessness of childhood, the craving for movement and action in some form or other, one of its chief characteristics, the one of all others which most perplexes and astonishes those who have themselves lived long enough to have forgotten what it is to be young? Nevertheless within the walls of the modest little Institution named above are to be found those who prove sufficiently that the name is not inappropriate. There are little limbs which crave for rest ere they have well learnt their use. There are little travellers who sink by the wayside ere they have well started on their journey. There are those who have to lay down their arms before striking a blow in the battle of life. You meet such little ones sometimes—few and far between, thank God, in proportion to the hale and strong-in the homes of the well-to-do. But among the lowest classes, unhappily, such cases are the reverse of rare. Accidents are continually occurring which might perhaps have been prevented by care, but care, under ordinary circumstances means time and attention, and these are just what the poor have not

in their power to bestow. Want of proper nourishment, too, weakens little limbs and impoverishes little frames, and thus predisposes to injury. Medical men are well aware that, in a vast proportion of cases, it is by sheer neglect that the children of the poor are so often allowed to grow into permanent cripples, and that if they could be taken into a comfortable home and well nursed and tended for a period longer or shorter, as the case may be, the timely aid thus afforded would save many a little one from the fate of growing up a burden to himself and others, and turn him into a sturdy bread-winner instead. Such cases are not for the hospitals. Either the complaint is too lingering in its nature, or it is not immediately bad enough—though often more surely and painfully fatal in its results than more acute diseases. What they require is a Home in which care and good nursing can accomplish more for them than medicine or science.

An attempt to supply this want in one of the parts of London where it is most needed, has been made by the Sisters of S. Saviour's Priory at Hackney. In that densely populated and poverty-stricken locality they have taken a small house and fitted up ten little beds with which a beginning has been made. It is needless to say that the beds were immediately filled, and have been ceaselessly occupied, and though the little Institution is not yet more than a year old its value has been fully proved. Ten beds! why a bundred, if they had them, would be always occupied, and there would still be other cases waiting for admission. The merest glance at the occupants of the ten little beds suffices to show the visitor who is familiar with the children's hospitals that they are a different class of sufferers in this Home. There in the very first bed is a child of three years old with crooked legs and a distorted spine, who the doctor says would not be eligible for a hospital. It requires to lie on its back and have cod liver oil and good nourishing food-but how is it to get what it requires? The mother is a costermonger, out all day, the father the same. Here in this Home, where it has been for the last two months, it has got all these things together with kind and careful nursing, and now it is just beginning to use its limbs a little. Next it is a little rosy bright-faced fellow of three who looks so well and cheery now that it is hard to believe, as we are told, that two months ago when he came into the home he was despaired of. The Sisters found him in a wretched room where were two other children all recovering from the measles, and in which the mother, a poor mechanic's wife, was hourly expecting her fourth con

finement. He was lying in a dark corner, wailing and moaning, in a cradle much too small for him, with his little thin wasted legs hanging over the edge, so weak he could not bear to be touched. He was carefully taken up and carried to the Home, where by tenderness and careful nursing he has been snatched out of the very jaws of death, and seems likely to grow into a strong and healthy boy.

Another case especially noticed as a still more forcible instance of injury arising from neglect, was a baby of some eighteen months with a breast-bone grown into the shape of the letter V, and its spine all crooked from being tied into a chair. The mother was obliged to go out to work and left her child under the care of a neighbour, who adopted this rough and ready mode of keeping it quiet. When brought into the Home it could not move its arms, but it also seems in a fair way to recover now.

The successful results that have already, in so short a time, attended the undertaking thus modestly begun, and the constant and pressing applications that are made for admission into it, will reveal the crying want that exists for such a Home on a larger scale. Surely when the want is made known, there are those who will come forward to help this good work. There are no expenses of staff, or nurses or management in this little Institution. The good Sisters do the nursing and management entirely themselves, and a doctor in the neighbourhood gives his services gratuitously, so that every penny that may be contributed goes direct to the maintenance of the sick children. By careful and economical management, the Sisters have reduced the average expenses to about 7s. 6d. a week for each child, including medicine. Fifty small donations of that value will suffice to maintain a cot the whole year round, filled with a constant succession of little patients rescued from starvation and the terrible fate of growing into permanent cripples. Greater than it has ever previously been since our last hard winter with all the aggravating causes of distress amongst the poor, is the number of these little victims of neglect, for whom a few such contributions would furnish a hospitable shelter in the House of Rest.

We earnestly commend this Institution to the notice of our readers, -to those whose little ones are gathered round them in buoyant health and spirits, in homes which echo with the sound of merry voices will you not teach them to help to lighten the misery of those other little ones who have no share in even the least of the comforts they enjoy? Their own Christmas will be none the less happy for it

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