were suitable to other persons, if only those other persons had the good sense to see this; but the young men of the present day were very headstrong, and indeed quite incomprehensible to him, the Earl.

To speak the plain truth, nothing would have delighted him more than to find Lord Glenant appreciate as fully as he, the Earl, did the many merits and surpassingly good qualities of Miss Bethnal. The Earl even thought that, if she had stayed at home, she might have succeeded Ruth Sumner as the feminine private secretary to his lordship.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

CASIMIR'S ILL-SUCCESS IN LOVE.

HAT a passionate love we all have for novelty! I remember, when I was a child, that another child (I "Give

am afraid it was not a girl) used to say,

me something pretty, give me something new." And the child always dwelt less upon the pretty than upon the new. In fact, custom and novelty divide the world between them. Goëthe says somewhere (Goëthe, who always goes down into the depths of things) that we take, as it were, a new lease of life, when we commence any new epoch in our lives. If we have a new office, a new career, a change of country, we grandly ignore the past. New religions demand new

eras to date from; and the Caliph Omar, a savage in most respects, was a statesman when he instituted the Hegira, and determined that the day of Mahomet's flight from Mecca to Medina was the date from which all good Mahometans should thenceforth reckon the course of time.

Even disaster is sometimes robbed of half its bitterness by the novelty which accompanies it.

Every one of the actors whom we have brought upon the stage in this tale felt what I have just been describing. Casimir's great enterprise gave new zest in life to all of them. Even dear old Lord Lochawe felt this zest most keenly. Neglecting, to the astonishment of his colleagues, his own work, and ceasing, much to their delight, to interfere with theirs, he devoted all his time to researches connected with emigration. He began these researches before leaving town, and while at Loudenham, devoted all the leisure that he had there to completing these researches. He routed up all the notes that he had made in former days on this subject.

He undertook the task of forming a library which Casimir was to carry out with him. To contemplate the amount of dulness which this collection of books contained, would be something which would appal ordinary men. But more than this, Lord Lochawe busied himself in writing what he called "An Emigrant Chief's Manual;" but which Lord Glenant, whose sense of the ludicrous was not rendered extinct by the depression of spirits under which he now laboured from Maggie's indifference to him, was wont to call "Dr. Watts amongst the Savages," or "Hannah More in the Bush."

No people enjoy novelty more than young girls, who for the most part have somewhat of a monotonous life. Even Lady Alice thought less about Charlie Ashurst and the future that was in store for her; and, as for Ruth, her one thought, day and night, was what she could do to contribute to the success of Casimir's enterprise, and to make it safer and easier for him.

Ruth chiefly gave her mind to the choice of

the young peasant women who were to accompany the emigrants, and to making arrangements for them. She knew full well how much of the success of the undertaking depended upon the women who would be connected with it. She was not one of those very foolish virgins who dream the anti-utopian dream that life is to be made more felicitous by making women equal to men. She knew that men had the bigger brain, the stronger arm, the larger mind, and the soul more open to justice. Not the less, on that account, did she think that the career for women was not substantially inferior to that for men. Had it been her good fortune (and she longed that it had been) to accompany this band of emigrants as Casimir's wife, what noble work would have fallen to her lot-to soothe, console, and, sometimes, to direct by loving counsel, the husband of her fond imagination. She pictured him coming home at evening-time to his sorry hut, wearied and depressed by all the difficulties and jealousies that beset the founding of a new colony, and thought how she might, on such