the speculation — might not turn out so good as I expected; but there was always room for a large margin of hope. My father hadn't made a bad bargain for once in his life. "Afterwards," resumed Lizzie, breaking a short silence, in which unspeakable wonder at the cool master of wickedness of whom she spoke possessed me, "in his peculiar way, not as if he were trying to do it, but artfully, as he does everything, he managed that every one-his wife, Keezie, the few tradespeople who come to the house, the neighbors in the village, the people at Bollerton-should believe this. But not even that, not the rudeness of Keezie, or the coarse hints of Isabella, or the curious eyes I met out of doors, which I soon learned to expect, were to be compared to his own manner." I could well believe it. "Where the others can only touch roughly and clumsily, he can say things, and always politely and smoothly, which cut like knives. He pretends to think that I am proud of my position, such as he assumes it to be, and treats ms with a mock courtesy that is the cruellest indignity. Oh, Mrs. Markenfield, you have seen him do this once or twice, and yet you know nothing!" "Lizzie, if it had turned out useless to appeal to your father, there was still Mr. Hazlit. Why not have told him? Why not say that you could not submit to such degradation, and then go at once? Rough and money-griping as he was, surely he would have liberated you without forfeit ?" Her head dropped low, her hands half hid her face as she whispered, "I did tell him. I spoke to him then. All that for shame I could tell him, he knew." "Well?" "He was too coarse-fibred to understand that what was not true should be such agony to me to be accused of. He told me that I ought to laugh in my sleeve; that it was Septimus's turn now, but it would be mine one day." She was going to say something more; but just then our ears caught the "shuffleshuffle" of feet outside. "I won't stay any longer." Lizzie rose quickly. "I only meant to come in to see how you were. I shall go back to my own room now, for I'm afraid I've tired you with too much talking. Isabella is there, lying down, and doesn't seem disposed to get up, although she is sadly in my way. Oh, Mrs. Markenfield, if you knew what a relief it is to me that you are here! I have been a terrible coward at the idea of 66 She quitted me, just as Keezie appeared, full of words. Everything was at sixesand-sevens this day; fire out, and nothing handy." The vigor-bestowing food, although I could scarcely eat it, gave me the renewed energy I wished for. To the old woman's dismay, I insisted afterwards on rising forthwith. Before all, I longed to see George Hazlit. Peradventure, my mind might yet be eased by his lips from the burden which last night had cast upon it. Then, also, if Lizzie needed an encouraging voice or friendly aid, I should be at hand. When I first saw myself in the glass, scared, troubled eyes looked from a pale face touched with two spots of feverish color. My appearance gave me a shock - warned me painfully that my utmost efforts would be needed if I meant to bear It was with a sink. bravely through whatever might befall before I left the house. ing of the heart that I saw George go round the path, and heard the yard door bang behind him when I was only halfdressed. I The place may not really have been much quieter than on other days; it is generally quiet, but it seemed oppressed with a weight of stillness. The closed blinds, with the view of outside life appeared also to shut out all communication with it. stole with awe past the room where the dead man lay, intending to betake myself to the parlor; but when only a few steps from the door, which was ajar, I became aware of the presence of the person whom I could not for the world have encountered, sitting with his back towards me, writing at the table. My tread was too light to cause him to turn round. I was saved thus from meeting his glance, or hearing his voice; but it was with a noiselessness that only my impulse to shun him could have lent me, that I went on, opened the hall door, and slipped into the garden. The day was a cool, bright one of early September. Very sweet and fresh its air If the sunshine that was, and every added moment I drew it in, it stimulated me. caught the rustling leaves, or the bloom of the gay flowers of later summer, were utterly wasted on my notice then, without doubt they had an unperceived effect upon me. As I wandered about, careless where my feet strayed, in the medley of my thoughts, I saw first the doctor drive up, | lap, and subside into outwardly tranquil and after remaining some time go away waiting. I traversed the floor hurriedly, again, and then a policeman, accompanied repeatedly went to the window, or listened by the lad who used to draw Mr. Hazlit's at the door, making broken conjectures at chair, come to the gate. In both cases short intervals. Once, as I listened I there was a delay until Keezie brought distinguished the voices of Septimus and the key and unlocked it; George had left the policeman in conversation; and they by the yard and might be unaware of this did not sound from up-stairs but from the unusual proceeding. I understood that kitchen, with Keezie's shrill tones striking possibly that was unsecured, for the in a contribution of astonishment. kitchen window overlooked it, and Keezie was there to fix a dragon's eye upon all exits. I had determined to seat myself on the garden-chair, and wait there until George returned, when I saw Lizzie in the parlor waving her hand furtively for me to ap proach. I had hardly joined her when she began quickly : Something is the matter, Mrs. Markenfield, and I don't understand it. Isabella left me alone a few moments upstairs, and then came back and said Keezie wished to speak to me, particularly, in the kitchen. So I went directly, and Keezie laughed in my face and said, Are you fool enough to think anybody wants your opinion about anything, now? It isn't you that's mistress here, Miss Waylen! I didn't answer; I thought it was strange, and I went back again. My bedroom door was locked; I knocked, and shook it, but to no purpose. I can't tell if there is any one inside or not, but I believe the message was a trick, to get me out." I responded to her puzzled disquiet by a question: "Did you know that there is a policeman in the house?" "A policeman!" she was greatly as tonished. "Why, I wonder? The doctor has been! it can't have anything to do with Mr. Hazlit's death. For, though it came suddenly at last, it was expected. Septimus must be at the bottom of it." "I don't know, Lizzie; I can't think. wish his brother was in the house." "So do I." I "Is there anything in your room," I hazarded, "which Mr. Hazlit might wish to get? Anything that he would be likely to use peculiar measures to obtain ?" Lizzie half hesitated. We had been in uncertainty nearly an hour when footsteps tramped down the passage. Then the door opened and the policeman, a stout, stolid man, with a large, whiskered face, followed Septimus into the room; after them, Keezie. Septimus saw me and hesitated: "I didn't know you were here, Mrs. Markenfield. May I trouble you to go into another room, or the garden for a few minutes?" I had risen. Of my own accord I should have done as he asked, so dreadful was his presence to me. Lizzie prevented me. She drew near to my chair, and detained me by holding my hand. I could measure the beatings of her heart by the convulsive contractions of her grasp. "Don't go. I pray, I beg you to stay here!" "Why?" returned Septimus; his ordinary suavity in speaking was changed to an abrupt savagery, his smoothness turned to a coarse ferocity. "It will do you no good. And in common shame, if you haven't long since got rid of such a thing, I should think you would prefer the absence of this lady." "No," said Lizzie; her voice was scarcely audible, but was not devoid of a touch of resolution. "I have asked Mrs. Markenfield to be with me. I knew this must come. But I did not think the discovery would have been made by you." Ha ha!" Septimus broke into a laugh, at which even the stolid constable shifted uneasily. "By whom, then? By yourself, perhaps; very probably by yourself!" "I have written to my father, and sent the letter to the post by the gardener this morning. I expect him early to-morrow." "Ha ha!" Septimus laughed again. "He will find nothing there. He may "The old receiver is to prepare to wel ransack every place in my room, and he come his daughter at short notice; her will meet nothing to reward his pains. It post having become vacant. Johns, we is his motive that is inexplicable to me." might have spared the trouble of searchThe wish I felt that George would re-ing up-stairs, and Mrs. Hazlit had better turn, grew stronger as time progressed. Lizzie is more patient than I. She had more foundation for uneasiness, and yet she could sit down, clasp her hands in her be told she need look no further. We know the depositary of what is missing." "Kee-kee-kee! "cackled Keezie, glaring at Lizzie, whose face began to grow the picture of wonder; which I perused in "What is the meaning of all this? - first time I have ever seen her do so, "I deny every word you say. Send me "No motive," continued Lizzie, her voice trembling at this sound of insulting contempt;"no motive for taking stealthily what I had a rightful claim upon." A stir went through the room; but we -even Septimus. all waited in silence, There was a prolonged pause before the girl's next words. "Because," she almost whispered, as she drew back, and caught my hand again, "for years - for far the greater part of the time that I have lived in this house - I have been your father's wife." From The National Review. RADICALS AND THE UNEARNED INCRE MENT. "The meaning? Why it means that we have been a pack of fools all along, and that a deceitful jade has managed to trick us. The reason of her worming herself into a dotard's confidence, her prowlings by night, her comings in and goings out which you elected to call me unmanly and cowardly for watching and trying to cut off, is explained; Miss Waylen is a clever schemer, and, either with or without my father's knowledge, she has robbed us, - robbed us of more of our It is the opinion of many people whose property than I can tell. Last night I which it judgment is entitled to respect, that theofound that the strong room gave me as much trouble to enter as if I retical reasoning, however sound or clear, had been a thief myself is stripped as can do little to check or regulate demobare almost as a miser's board. There is cratic demands and movements. For this nothing there but dusty papers. And the opinion there is a good deal to be said. I thief is that harmless young woman there, will, theremore, endeavor to state it more with her fawning manner, and her sham explicitly, and with as much force and tears, and her modesty that goes off or on fairness as if I held it myself. It amounts, Whenever a democracy, as it suits her turn. She has shipped the I think, to this. spoil off to her father, by her own telling or a class assuming to represent it, fixes he is coming to take her away to-morrow; its desires on any given change, it does so and the pair meant, no doubt, to divide in obedience, not to any logical theory, the plunder. But not so, my girl; instead of going home you will see the inside of Bollerton prison to-night, and there will be police despatched to rummage your father's hole before he has started to fetch you." To this speech we had all listened all but Keezie, whose hands accompanied it with notes of triumphant admiration in mute stupefaction. Was the accusation true? Was this the key to Lizzie's tears? And was the theft connived at by her employer, or unknown to him? If she was guilty, how clumsy the scheme; and how soon, and shamefully, it had been discov ered! But Lizzie dropped my hand. A burning red took the place of her former pallor. She stepped forward, and, for the but to the pressure of inconveniences or hardships, either new or newly realized,' or else to the promptings of newly conceived ambitions. It is in the condition of a man who, for one cause or another, has come to feel a certain attitude intolerable, and is nervously uneasy, or in actual pain, till he changes it; or else it is in the condition of a man who, having looked for years with apathetic admiration at some fine neighboring property, is suddenly roused to energy by the belief, false or true, that he can, if he will only exert himself, make this property his own. In neither case has theoretical reasoning anything to do with the matter. What prompted the French peasantry to burn the chateaux of the seigneurs was not a series of syllogisms, but a miserable sys sound reasoning may sometimes be of incalculable influence. It may be able to show that if the concession demanded be refused, there are stronger forces to back up that refusal than are at all apparent on the surface; or that, if the concession were granted, it would have disastrous consequences. Still the fact remains that there are certain democratic movements which cannot be checked by theories, for the simple reason that they do not originate in theories. tem of taxation. What animates the move- | perfectly useless to disprove the right to ment of the Irish tenantry against their take. But even when confronted with landlords is not any zeal on behalf of cases which are apparently of this kind, abstract justice, but a belief that it is pleasantly practicable to add to their own incomes. Theoretic reasoning will, indeed, do one thing. When once any democratic desires have been excited and developed by circumstances, it will contrive to supply them with some theoretic justification. It will cover their nakedness with a rustling robe of sophistries, and enable them to show an heroic front to the world. But if used by the opposite party to strip this robe away, it will merely reveal sores which it cannot cure, and irritate a savage without doing anything to disable him. When a man's shoe pinches him, you cannot reason him into comfort; when a jackass sees your cabbages grow under his nose, you cannot by reason keep him back from eating them. For this opinion, I repeat, there is a good deal to be said; and there is a good deal to be said for it because there is some truth in it. But it is not the whole truth. It probably contains not more than one-third of the whole truth. I will point out and discriminate what the truth it contains is. It is certainly true in some cases, and it is absolutely untrue in others. Democratic demands and movements, even though they may seem to point all of them in the same direction, are in reality of very different origin. Some of them do originate in the way that has just been indicated, in absolute inconvenience or distress; or else in the perception that certain possessions or privileges are in the hands of people who are no longer capable of defending them. Now movements that originate in absolute inconvenience or distress, I am quite prepared to admit, cannot be stopped by reasoning. I will say still more I will say that they ought not to be stopped at all. But though they ought not to be stopped, and though reasoning cannot stop them, they require guidance; they may take either a fortunate form or a fatal; and sound reasoning is required for rightly guiding them. Again, with regard to such demands for concessions as originate in the perception that it is not possible to resist them, no abstract reasoning will induce a democracy to abandon them; and it is idle to say that the democracy ought to abandon them. No class can retain permanently any desirable position or possession on the mere sufferance of the others; and where there is present the might both to take and keep, it is But there are others of a kind precisely opposite. They do begin in theory, and it is theoretical belief which sustains them. Instead of a consciousness of hardship generating some social creed, some social creed generates a consciousness of hardship. A man is conscious of hardship if he is hungry, and has little to eat. It is true there is no theorizing there. This is one case. The following is quite another. If the Tichborne claimant believes in his own claim, he is conscious, and rightly conscious, of hardship in being kept out of his own; but supposing this belief to be false, and that he had never himself entertained it, there could have been no more hardship in his being a butcher and not a baronet than there is in a man being a baronet and not a king. Whatever sense of hardship there is in the claimant's mind is caused by a theory, and by nothing else but a theory, entertained by himself with regard to his own rights. And here we have a perfectly accurate type of a large amount, and a growing proportion, of our modern democratic discontent. We need not go far for an instance. The familiar Irish question will supply one. We have it on the authority of Mr. Parnell himself that one of the principal means used in promoting the agrarian revolt of the tenantry was the instilling into their minds a new economic theory, which did not nec essarily involve any personal indignation against the landlord, but which placed their relations and obligations to him in an entirely new light. And there is every reason to believe that Mr. Parnell spoke the truth. It may be true also, as I represented the objectors saying, that the Irish movement, to a great extent, represents simple cupidity; but no one can doubt, who examines the question care. fully, that this cupidity was set free, was inspired with courage, and was put in action, by theory; and that most, though not all, of its present force is derived from some theory that it coincides with, and represents, justice. And of all the most dangerous move ments that embarrass the present and threaten the future the same thing may be said. Of some the origin is theoretical altogether; in the case of all, theory plays In a certain the most important part. sense men's desires are, and always have been, as limitless as their fancies. Who would practise moderation if he owned Aladdin's lamp? But these desires are, and always have been, kept in subjection by a knowledge, in some degree common to all, of what is possible, and of what is not possible. The moment, however, the limits of possibility are theoretically widened, desires hitherto stagnant rush into the new space, as the air rushes into a vacuum, generating new force, and causing a new commotion. It was in this way that America was discovered and colonized. In this way thousands were ruined by the South Sea Bubble. In this way has been established every new religion; and in this way arise the most important of those demands which characterize the democratic parties, who consider themselves to be the parties of progress. The supposed limits of possibility are widened by theory in one direction or another; and in that direction there is an attempted That any such movepopular movement. ment is independent of passion, nobody would contend for a moment. Theory works by passion. Its power consists in this, that it rouses passions that would else be dormant, and would sink to sleep again if theory did not keep them wakeful. A good deal of nonsense is talked about trusting the democracy, and almost as much nonsense about distrusting it. The truth lies between the two ways of regarding it. It is utterly untrustworthy in some ways; it is, on the whole, trustworthy in others; and if we may trust it in anything, we may most emphatically trust it in this that when not goaded by some new and exceptional suffering it will never move so much as a step forward without the guidance of something which it takes for reasoning. Reasoning of some sortwhether bad or good, false or true-is the lantern which shows the democracy some path ahead, some objects to desire, some supposed way of arriving at them. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the history of modern Socialism. Though there is no movement whose leaders appeal more directly to passion, there is no movement whose leaders have found it more necessary to fortify their appeals with elaborately reasoned theory. No Passion in popular movements generally |