and thick bread-and-butter.

Sundays at one.

There was also cold stalled ox on

In those days life was a simple matter to the children: their days and their legs lengthened together; they loved, they learned, and they looked for a time that was never to be,- when their father and mother should come home and live with them again, and everybody was to be happy. As yet the children thought they were only expecting happiness.

George went to school at Frant, near Tunbridge Wells, and came home for the holidays. Dolly had a governess too; and she used to do her lessons with little Rhoda in the slanting schoolroom at the top of Church House. The little girls did a great many sums, and learned some French, and read 'Little Arthur's History of England' to everybody's satisfaction.

Kind Lady Sarah wrote careful records of the children's progress to her brother, who had sent them to the faithful old sister at home. He heard of the two growing up with good care and much love in the sunshine that streamed upon the old garden; playing together on the terrace that he remembered so well; pulling up the crocuses and the violets that grew in the shade of the white holly-tree. George was a quaint, clever boy, Sarah wrote; Dolly was not so quick, but happy and obedient, and growing up like a little spring flower among the silent old bricks.

Lady Sarah also kept up a desultory correspondence with Philippa, her sister-in-law. Mrs. Vanborough sent many minute directions about the children: Dolly was to dine off cold meat for her complexion's sake, and she wished her to have her hair crimped; and George was to wear kid gloves and write a better hand; and she hoped they were very good, and that they sometimes saw their cousin Robert, and wrote to their uncle, Sir Thomas Henley, Henley Court, Smokethwaite, Yorkshire; and she and dear papa often and often longed for their darlings. Then came presents: a spangled dress for Lady Sarah, and silver ornaments for Dolly, and an Indian sword for George with which he nearly cut off Rhoda's head.

MY FATHER'S MOTHER

From Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs. Copyright 1894, by Harper

Ο

& Brothers

NE'S early life is certainly a great deal more amusing to look back to than it used to be when it was going on. For one thing, it isn't nearly so long now as it was then; and remembered events come cheerfully scurrying up one after another, while the intervening periods are no longer the portentous cycles they once were. And another thing to consider is, that the people walking in and out of the bygone mansions of life were not, to our newly opened eyes, the interesting personages many of them have since become: then they were men walking as trees before us, without names or histories; now some of the very names mean for us the history of our time. Very young people's eyes are certainly of more importance to them than their ears, and they all see the persons they are destined to spend their lives with, long before the figures begin to talk and to explain themselves.

My grandmother had a little society of her own at Paris, in the midst of which she seemed to reign from dignity and kindness of heart; her friends, it must be confessed, have not as yet become historic, but she herself was well worthy of a record. Grandmothers in books and memoirs are mostly alike,- stately, old-fashioned, kindly, and critical. Mine was no exception to the general rule. She had been one of the most beautiful women of her time; she was very tall, with a queenly head and carriage; she always moved in a dignified way. She had an odd taste in dress, I remember, and used to walk out in a red merino cloak trimmed with ermine, which gave her the air of a retired empress wearing out her robes. She was a woman of strong feeling, somewhat imperious, with a passionate love for little children, and with extraordinary sympathy and enthusiasm for any one in trouble or in disgrace. How benevolently she used to look round the room at her many protégés, with her beautiful gray eyes! Her friends as a rule were shorter than she was, and brisker, less serious and emotional. They adopted her views upon politics, religion, and homœopathy, or at all events did not venture to contradict them. But they certainly could not reach her heights, and her almost romantic passion of feeling.

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

(1860-)

HE writings of Charles G. D. Roberts are distinguished by an imaginative quality, which in its most perfect expression elevates them to a high plane of originality; and even in its fainter manifestations lends charm to them. This quality is instinct in both his prose and his verse; like a subtle fragrance it attracts and eludes the reader, who will return to his poems and his stories when works of more palpable excellence are forgotten. He is an exquisite poet of the minor order; his limitations are well defined, but within them he is complete and satisfying. The writer of 'An Epitaph for a Husbandman' and 'The Deserted City' has not the range of the earth and sky; but the fields which are his he has made beautiful.

He is still a young man, so judgment of his work must take account of the unknown element of the future. He was born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1860; and was the son of a Church of England clergyman, from whom he received his early education. After graduation from the University

of New Brunswick, he became in 1879 head- CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS master of Chatham Grammar School.

Two

years later he edited the Toronto Week for a short time. In 1885 he was appointed professor of modern literature in King's College, Windsor. He has lately resigned his chair to devote himself entirely to literature. His first volume of poetry is entitled 'Orion and Other Poems.' 'In Divers Tones' appeared in 1887, and subsequently 'Songs of the Common Day,' and 'The Book of the Native.'

Much of Mr. Roberts's most finished and significant work appears in these two last-named volumes. Songs of the Common Day' contains an ode on the Shelley centenary, entitled 'Ave,' which attains in parts to a high degree of impassioned strength and beauty. This collection includes also a number of sonnets; in which form of verse he is peculiarly successful, understanding as he does the spiritual requirements of the sonnet, its temper of restraint, its frugal music. 'The Book of the Native' is rich in poems most characteristic of

the author's peculiar gifts. These are not alone a delicate sense of melody, and a sympathetic understanding of the requirements of the various verse forms: they include those endowments without which true poetry cannot come into being,-passion, insight, sympathy. Mr. Roberts's poems of nature are warm with life. To him

"Life is good and love is eager

In the playground of the sun.»

In his 'Epitaph for a Husbandman' this simple, objective exultation in nature's bounties gives place to the recognition of the silent companionship of man with Mother Earth and her creatures. The poem bears about it the cool gray air of the twilit farm, the kindly scent of the soil. The pathos of this, as of other of his poems, is hidden in the general and the impersonal. It is the pathos of all human life,-running its course, coming back at last to the great Mother, as a child at evening. The sailor, "wooing the East to win the West," whose "will was the water's will"; the farmer in his fields, the child among "the comrade grasses," return to sleep on the bosom of nature.

His lyrics are graceful and full of melody: there is the rush of the tide in the movement of The Lone Wharf'; the passionate heart of the night throbs in the first two verses of the Trysting Song.' His ballads have not the same beauty; although there are lines in them, as in all of his poems, of the true poetical quality.

Mr. Roberts's prose possesses the same imaginative quality as his verse, though its manifestation is along different lines. In 'Earth's Enigmas,' a volume of unique short stories, there is contained some very subtle work. The scenes of these tales are nearly all laid out of doors, in Canadian regions with which the author is familiar: nature is less a background in them than a wild, disturbing element, a gigantic actor in the scene itself. In two of them, The Young Ravens that Call upon Him,' and 'Strayed,' there is no trace of a human footstep. The wandering lonely winds of the wilderness are the very spirit of these stories. In The Perdu' and 'The Stone Dog' there is a certain weird imagination, which seems unlike anything but the strange quality which informs the works of Poe. The former has a mysterious beauty which impels a re-reading, although the tale seems nothing in itself. In this entire collection, Mr. Roberts exhibits a high degree of sensitiveness to nature, although not always without that mixture of the pathetic fallacy which seems inevitable in the attitude of the present-day generation towards the natural world. Mr. Roberts's latest book, "The Forge in the Forest,' is an Acadian romance; being the narrative of the Acadian ranger, Jean de Mer, Seigneur de Briart. Like his short stories, it is instinct with the spirit of the wilderness.

STRAYED

12297

From 'Earth's Enigmas.' Copyright 1895, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co. N THE Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there was a young ox of splendid build, but of a wild and restless nature.

He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large, darkred, all muscle and nerve, and with wide magnificent horns. His yoke-fellow was a docile steady worker, the pride of his owner's heart; but he himself seemed never to have been more than half broken in. The woods appeared to draw him by some spell. He wanted to get back to the pastures where he had roamed untrammeled of old with his fellow-steers. The remembrance was in his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to feed together on the sweet grassy hillocks; and of the clover-smelling heats of June, when they would gather hock-deep in the pools under the green willow shadows. He hated the yoke, he hated the winter; and he imagined that in the wild pastures he remembered, it would be forever summer. If only he could get back to those pastures!

it.

One day there came the longed-for opportunity; and he seized He was standing unyoked beside his mate, and none of the teamsters were near. His head went up in the air, and with a snort of triumph he dashed away through the forest. For a little while there was a vain pursuit. At last the lumbermen gave it up. "Let him be!" said his owner, "an' I rayther guess he'll turn up ag'in when he gets peckish. He kaint browse on spruce . buds an' lungwort."

Plunging on with long gallop through the snow, he was soon miles from camp. Growing weary, he slackened his pace. He came down to a walk. As the lonely red of the winter sunset began to stream through the openings of the forest, flushing the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grew hungry, and began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss which roughened the tree-trunks. Ere the moon got up he had filled himself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a little thicket for the night.

But some miles back from his retreat a bear had chanced upon his footprints. A strayed steer! That would be an easy prey. The bear started straightway in pursuit. The moon was high in heaven when the crouched ox heard his pursuer's approach. He had no idea what was coming, but he rose to his feet and waited.