Others might plough, and reap, and sow, Or trundle their dead in a winding-sheet; But he, through rapture, and pain, and wrong, Ave Maria! VI. When thunder growled from the ravelled wrack, And ocean to welkin bellowed back, And the lightning sprang from its cloudy sheath, And tore through the forest with jagged teeth, Then leaped and laughed o'er the havoc wreaked, The idiot clapped with his hands, and shrieked, Ave Maria! VII. Children mocked, and mimicked his feet, Ave Maria. VIII. One year when the harvest feasts were done, Ave Maria! IX. They stirred up the ashes between the dogs, Ave Maria! X. Idiot, soulless, brute from birth, He could not be buried in sacred earth ; To which none ever came nigh to say, Ave Maria! XI. When the meads grew saffron, the hawthorns white, And the swallow outraced the racing wave, Sprouted a lily, straight and high, Such as She bears to whom men cry, Ave Maria! XII. None had planted it, no one knew Was crowned with a snow-white diadem,- Was written by God in veins of gold, XIII. "Ave Maria!" Over the lily they built a shrine, Where are mingled the mystic bread and wine ; That is snugly nestled 'twixt deep and down. Ave Maria. XIV. Hunchbacked, gibbering, blear-eyed, halt, The gentle's pity, the cruel's scorn, Ave Maria? ALFRED AUSTIN. Carità. CHAPTER XXXVII. WHILE Oswald went Ag about the streets so lightly, and thought so pleasantly of his prospects, another mind, still more agitated than that of Cara, was turning over and over all he had done for the last five or six weeks, and all that he might be about to do in the future. nes in her convent, with all her routine of duties -with the little tinkling bell continually calling her to one thing or another, to matins or evensong, to "meditation," to this service or that, to choir practice, to dinner and tea and recreationcarried a tumult of fancies about with her, which no one, except perhaps Sister Mary Jane, guessed. Oswald would have stood aghast could he have seen into that little ocean of excited feeling, where the waves rose higher and higher as the hours went on, and sometimes a swelling tide almost swept the thinker herself away-though indeed he would have been so unable to understand it that the inspection would probably have taught him little. How easily he took all this, which was so tremendous to her! and that not only because of the difference betwen man and woman, but because of the fundamental difference in temperament, which was greater still. Agnes had known but little that was lovely or pleasant in her life. Her rectory-home was neither; her father and (mother and brothers and sisters were all vulgar and common place, struggling for existence, |