Catholic faith is Catholic. That there is a Protestant section in our Church is not our fault, but the fault of our Church's rulers; we do not belong to that section; the Roman church does not hate its Protestantism more than we do. But we can no more help it than Rome can."

Thus Fernando, really moving, hardly knew it, and was not moving with complacent gusto. This was the state of things when, at last, he went to school again.

He chose the school for himself, and was allowed to do so for this reason: under the will of his grandfather, old Mr. Burscough, long dead, a little money was to come to him when he should be twenty-one; in 1875 he was seventeen, four years short of it. But he wrote to the old lawyer who was his guardian under the will (whom, by the way, he had never seen), and asked if, out of the money that would be his in four years, enough might be paid at once to enable him to go to a public school. The old gentleman replied without delay and said that the proposal was too sensible a one for him to reject. He seemed to think it odd that a lad who was enjoying himself immensely at home, staying about in pleasant houses and practically enjoying all

the delights of being grown up, should want to go back to lessons and schoolmasters, deliver up the keys of his young-mannish freedom and be again amenable to rules and punishments. But it was an excellent resolve, and he (Mr. Gordon) could only applaud and help it; the money would be forthcoming.

So, as Fernando was to pay the piper, he was allowed to call the tune and left free to choose the new school for himself.

I will call it St. Wolstan's; and say that it was a new school, one of a large group that together made up a college or corporation. St. Wolstan's was in the Midlands and in the diocese of Lichfield where Fernando's first school had been, and of which diocese his English grandfather had been a beneficed clergyman.

It has the reputation, as all the schools of that corporation had, of being strongly High Church, but not ritualistic. The main object of the schools was to provide a definitely Anglican education, it being recognised that the ordinary public school might, and often did, fail to do that. Of all that, and even of his own school, St. Wolstan's, as little as possible will be said here; though the writer of these papers thinks highly of the corpora

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tion and of his own school, and would gladly pay a fuller tribute to the excellence of its whole spirit and discipline. If he speaks hurriedly of what he would like to praise at length, it is not because he is willing to give only a meagre and grudging acknowledgment, but he has long known that the less he identifies himself with St. Wolstan's the better is St. Wolstan's pleased-and that not out of any ill-will to himself, but for reasons of public policy. The society, which we may call the Corporation of St. Augustine, was from its inception accused of Romanizing tendencies, an accusation by the way singularly wide of the mark; for the schools were steeped in the Anglican, anti-Roman spirit; but there the accusation was; and it was just such a sort of blot upon the escutcheon of St. Wolstan's as the school's enemies would make the most of, that one of its lads would develop into a Passionist Monk and another into a Prelate of the Roman Church. Therefore, the school has ignored the perverse fact as far as possible; and here the connection will not be insisted upon more than can be helped. So far from having condoned Fernando's offence in "submitting to Rome" it is fair to say that St. Wolstan's has betrayed no

sign of forgiving it after six and thirty years. That is why the school must here pass under a pseudonym, whereas Fernando's former school has been mentioned without the need of any alias. In the grammar school of King Edward VI at Lichfield, Fernando's portrait in the habit of a Protonotary of the Roman Church holds an honoured place, and to the school magazine he is a regular contributor. His affection for both schools is unaffected by these accidents, and the memory of both is for ever enshrined in his heart: though he was a happier boy at the school which is unwilling to remember him than he was at that which so faithfully refuses to forget him.

It was in September, 1875, that he entered at St. Wolstan's.

He found a beautiful building built on the flat top of a hill in a beautiful country, in the lovely heart of the rich England Midlands, the region which the genius of George Eliot has somehow made to seem more typically English than any other. Within an easy walk was a village where "Adam Bede " is said to have lived; the screen in whose noble church (ancient and once Catholic, of course) he is said to have made or to have

restored. To that village Fernando often walked, and in that church he often prayed for the soul of Hetty Sorrel. “A character in a novel?" Perhaps, but assuredly a real sinner behind whose fictitious name lay a soul needing all that prayer could do for it.

After all these years, nine and thirty of them, Fernando can call back-nay not call back but suffer to come back unsummonedthe stillness of that empty church, empty not only with its weekday emptiness of folk, but lonely in it emptiness of the exiled Christ of the Tabernacle; the silence within, the silence outside, only pointed and noted by the whisper of a soft September breeze the far, far cry of a pheasant in deep woods; the barking of some homestead dog from a farm set among opulent meadows-Mr. Poyser's farm, perhaps.

If Fernando prayed for them all, Adam's soul, and his father's, Seth's and Dinah's, were not they for whom those names stand asleep in the green churchyard outside, they or others on whose needs his prayer might fall? As time goes on, and the hurry of life increases, we find it hard to find time to pray even for all who ask it; but we need not grudge a lad his charity, though it went