these streets some gift of hearing seemed to descend upon him. He passed out of his abstraction suddenly and became attentive to the fragmentary utterances of the passers-by.

"You'll do it for him, won't you?" said one man anxiously to another; "it's a matter of life and death!"

"Of course, of course," interrupted the other. "Now don't

forget that you've a ticket for the theatre to-night."

"Good weather for the washing," said one of two women who brushed past him at the moment somewhat rudely, endangering, by their quick movements, a jug of milk, which a very dirty, pretty little girl was carrying. He paused a second to look at the child ere he turned the corner of the street, for her sweet little face was full of profound abstraction-caused, he soon saw, by the endeavour to carry the milk safely while eating a cake which she held in the other hand. while he stayed to watch her, he caught some words from a group of gentlemen who had met at the corner of the street.

And

"We are not alarmed at the size of the undertaking," said one, in a full, comfortable tone, nor are we anxious to spare outlay."

"But," said another, in a more independent voice, "we must look at the matter in a public sense; how will the general pocket like the expense ?"

"Hang the public!" exclaimed a third, with a shrug of the shoulders and a laugh. "Let us keep to business; we shall make a good thing out of it."

"And really," said the first voice, with a softness that suggested the portly proportions of its owner, "it is but a trifling matter to the individual members of the community. We don't demand much from each."

He heard no more of what they said, for he was startled by the sound of a very different voice. It was a hoarse, low murmur close beside him.

"Bah!-'twas a dirty job after all! I should have done it thoroughly, and left no trace!"

A miserable man, moving under the shadow of the wall, and muttering to himself with eyes bent upon the ground. The author's startled movement attracted his attention, and, meeting the gaze of interested eyes, he quickly moved on, and vanished into darker shadow.

The author reflected within himself as he went homewards, and his amazement was great. These people! How differently they thought from himself! Upon what different subjects their minds dwelled. They were not absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful in God's universe-they were not following out any idea of loveliness. Each sentence which had caught his ear had carried to him a strange sense of the individual selfhood of each life out of which it had come to him. Those persons whom he had met were passing on their way, unmindful of the glories of the world in which they lived-unmindful of the very sun which rode royally above them, save as it made them hot, or dried their washed linen, or served to save their candles. The man who held the theatre ticket in his hand was full of something which he was urging on his friend; while the friend would think of nothing but the theatre ticket which he had just given away. The women were incapable of considering anything but soapsuds; the pretty child, who was to him a vision of heaven-sent beautifulness, was wholly absorbed by the conflicting thoughts of the cake in one hand-to be eatenand the milk jug in the other-to

be safely carried. And the grave gentlemen whom he had lingered near as they stood talking at the corner of the street-were they occupied in wonder at the grace which God had exhibited in his creations? No; they spoke of speculations and finance-the soapsuds of their existence.

And the man who skulked in the shadow, and muttered strange incoherencies to himself-what was his thought? Not of the mercy of his Creator in still granting him a sunlit life his mind wandered into some dim and harassed contemplation of his hidden crime.

The author rushed home, and shut himself within his solitary chamber.

"This, then, is my lack!-I do not understand my fellow men. I have analysed myself, not them. I have taken out of my own soul, and given to them. Perchance if I take from out theirs and give to them, then they will the better appreciate my art; and, surely, this is the noblest part of the task which is mine. The study of man is the grandest study possible to the artist!"

And so, pondering in his room, a passionate desire filled him to understand and reproduce the souls which surged so thickly in the city around his isolated chamber.

to plunge into the mysterious depths of the human heart.

All through the dark and solitary hours of the night he entreated Heaven for this boonpraying that this experience should be given him, which, as he believed, would enable him to consummate his art and perfect his work.

"I have loved God-I have loved Nature," he murmured to himself, as he sank down at last into a weary slumber. "My life will be complete when I know and love man."

He slept until the dawn arose and with its pale light illuminated his chamber. He awoke when its first rays entered-awoke suddenly, and with a start of fear, for a strange sound entered his ears: a dim, hoarse murmur, as of many voices-voices afar off, yet not altogether indistinct.

He sat, with clasped hands of wonder, and a heavenly smile irradiated his face.

"And my wish is granted me!" he exclaimed. "Then indeed it is to be my happiness to grasp my art utterly, and show to men the beautifulness of life by its means!"

He bowed his head to listen and distinguished the voices; and as the light grew stronger the sounds became more audible, so that he could hear the words which were uttered, and understand their meanings.

The day increased, and men busied themselves with their manifold duties and pleasures; but the author sat still in his room, with hands clasped, and his face filled with continually changing emotion.

For the voices of men who were so busied all around him grew clamorous in his ears and deafened him, not by volume of sound, but by the wonder of their meaning. For, as the speech of the multitude

became intelligible to him, he began to understand its desires and its life. Whispered words of malice penetrated his ear-private conversations in which evil plottings were divulged cries of pain and shame from out the seething slums of the city-the shoutings of reckless and ungoverned mobs. These sounds all mingled in his ears, and filled his mind with chaos. Utterances which were elegant in form and happy in expression-yet carried a sting of cruelty and unkindness within them-floated from out of drawing rooms and entered softly into his consciousness; and almost ere he had grasped their meaning they were succeeded by the inarticulate cries of drunken quarrellers or the muffled complaints of prisoners.

And, most horrible of all to the sensitive soul of the author, there came to him now and then a halffamiliar voice. The man whom yesterday he had seen giving away the theatre ticket to-day revealed the hideousness of selfish deeds which he masked-to himself as well as to others-by small and showy acts of grace. The women he heard brawling in fierce and unwomanly fashion; the speculators he heard raise their voices in keen altercation or lower them in hypocritical amiability, or in the intensity of the passion of moneygetting-mingling with these came the harsh voice of the man who hid himself within the shadow; it rose above the others, and all the hatefulness of his crime was laid bare before the aghast and sickened listener. The foul story was interrupted by a shrill wail of momentary but vivid sorrow: the pretty child, whose voice should have no tones but those of sweetness and delight, lifted up the cry of babyish and passionate grief.

And as the day waned and the twilight descended, bringing with it rest and quiet to the beasts of earth and the flowers of nature, there came no peace to the absorbed listener. Instead of quiet came a more confused noise; and the author's face grew agonised as he heard.

"Oh, Heavens !" he cried out at last, raising his own voice amid the yells and cries and murmurings which ceaselessly sounded around him; "oh, Heavens, in mercy close my ears! No longer can endure!"

I

He cast himself upon his couch in a passion of horror, and his wish brought its fulfilment. A great silence fell upon him. The world was still. No longer did the voices from the houses and streets enter his chamber. The silence came but just in time.

"Another moment and I must have gone mad," he said to himself, rising and leaning from the window, that he might again feel the sweet air and reassure himself of the existence of the silent sky. But soon he started back and went to his table.

"I will write," he cried, "while the madness is still on me. Men shall behold the foulness of their own hearts if my pen is strong enough to show it to them.”

Through the long night he wrote, words that might have been written in tears or blood for the deep sadness that was in them; for many another night he wrote until at length he had relieved his soul of its horror, and shaken from himself the fever of other men's lives.

He sent out his work to the world, while he himself remained shut in his solitary room.

was

But not for long. He visited, aroused, besieged. In a word, he was famous.

"This fanciful author," wrote the critics, "has at last given us something real, strong, and lifelike," and they went to see him, and found a man who smiled dimly

in answer to their words of congratulation.

No longer was the author lonely, unknown, or poor.

He had succeeded!

A SINGULAR speculation has been opened by a follower in the wake of the recorded observations-not the theories of Darwin and Carpenter. Knowing nothing, as he avers, of science, he has but allowed his "metaphysic wit" to fly over certain small facts of life; and the result is a cluster of plausible theories and deductions which have at least the merit, if it be in anywise a merit, of novelty.

as

We can only afford to give in a very sketchy and imperfect manner a chain of reasoning such the author of "Erewhon " presents to us in his present very bizarre work.*

The amoeba is about the simplest type of animal known, a minute mass of living jelly; yet the jelly speck can extemporise a stomach by wrapping its soft body round a nutritive particle, and a foot by the projection of its protoplasmic substance. Dr. Carpenter observes as cited in the work before us : "Suppose a human mason to be put down by the side of a pile of stones of various shapes and sizes, and to be told to build a dome of these, smooth on both surfaces, without using more than the least possible quantity of a very tenacious, but very costly, cement, in holding the stones together. If he accomplished this well, he would receive credit for great intelligence and skill. Yet this is exactly what these little jelly specks' do on a

most minute scale; the 'tests' they construct, when highly magnified, bearing comparison with the most skilful masonry of man. From the same sandy bottom one species picks up the coarser quartz grains, cements them together with phosphate of iron secreted from its own substance" [should not this rather be (says Mr. Butler), "which it has contrived in some way or other to manufacture"?) and thus constructs a flask-shaped 'test,' having a short neck and a large single orifice. Another picks up the finest grains, and puts them together, with the same cement, into perfectly spherical 'tests' of the most extraordinary finish, perforated with numerous small pores disposed at pretty regular intervals. Another selects the minutest sand grains and the terminal portions of sponge spicules, and works them up together-apparently with no cement at all, by the mere laying of the spicules-into perfect white spheres, like homoeopathic globules, each having a single-fissured orifice.

And another, which makes a straight, many-chambered 'test,' that resembles in form the chambered shell of an orthoceratitethe conical mouth of each chamber projecting into the cavity of the next-while forming the walls of its chambers of ordinary sand grains rather loosely held together, shapes the conical mouth of the successive chambers chambers by firmly