another.

The last packet had evidently been made up a long while ago. It was stamped with the crest which the Vicar had given up using eight or nine years before. Mrs. Keston dropped on her knees beside the trunk, and turned up the contents feverishly. The entire bottom was lined thick with stamped envelopes and postcards. She shrank back as if her own belongings burned her. If only it had been an ordinary servant! If only it hadn't been Anne Carter !

"I've been looking for you," said a voice. The Vicar stood at the open door. "What's the matter?" He was coming in. Mrs. Keston made an involuntary movement with her hands, to prevent his looking into the trunk. But he was already staring down on that varied assortment of all the stationery he had used for the past ten years. He said. nothing for some moments. Mrs. Keston had looked away. Presently she was conscious of his stooping and taking up the lacquer box. "Did you ever see this before?" he said.

"No."

"I had it when I was a boy. When I put it away in the long cupboard years ago both the hinges were broken."

"Dear, this may be another one. You know how forgetful you are about details."

The Vicar shook his head with the ghost of a smile.

"No, this was given to me by" he broke off suddenly and looked on the underside. "There's a letter I scratched on it when I was twenty."

"She thought it was an old thing you'd thrown away," Mrs. Keston urged.

Her husband turned abruptly, and looked at the capacious drawers in the old press. "When you go through those you may find other

'old things.'"

"No, no!" Mrs. Keston's voice was almost a cry. "There's nothing there but Anne's own clothes. James," she added, in a lower voice, getting up hurriedly from off her knees, "let us go downstairs. I-I-think I'll let Maria do the packing."

"Very

The Vicar hesitated a moment, and then laid down the box. well," he said. But he took it up again and studied the faded lacquer. "I'm sure you're mistaken," said his wife. "This box hasn't broken hinges." She took it out of his hands to demonstrate the fact.

"No, the hinges have been mended," he said. But she had lifted the cover to show him. He stared. The box was full to overflowing with postage stamps.

"James! James!" his wife whispered, looking from the box to his face and back again into the box, "you're not thinking all these--"

"H'm," said the Vicar, turning them over. "They are not in sheets, you see. They are all pulled apart as I have them in the drawer downstairs."

"But she-she may have had some fad about saving her money in that form. She may have bought them one or two at a time—through all these years."

The Vicar shook his head. "There are only the kinds here that I keep. Penny, halfpenny, twopence-halfpenny, and sixpenny ones for telegrams."

"O, why, why didn't she burn all this hoard!" Mrs. Keston wailed. "She wasn't taken by surprise."

"My dear," said the Vicar, "the reason we are taken so much by surprise is that we have supposed the servant code and ours to be the same. Anne Carter was the product of centuries of servitude. She looked upon these things as her perquisites. Hoarding them was an act so natural to her thrift, and so permissible in her position, that in the great preoccupation of dying, she forgot all about it."

"We mustn't let her sons know," Mrs. Keston whispered, hastily piling up the stationery. "We must get all this out of sight." She seized the lacquer box.

"No, no," said the Vicar, "leave that. We can't be quite sure about the stamps."

C. E. RAIMOND.

Vol. XV.-No. 85.

C

D'

EEP in the pleasant green heart of the pleasant Isle of Wight a little brook flows under a small footbridge in a narrow sequestered lane. Its first spring is scarce a mile thence, at the foot of yonder downs that bound the still green vale dotted with elms and farmsteads, through which my stream flows very straight and still and dark, scarcely stirring the water-plants that border it, and scarcely wide enough to separate the cattle that browse on either side of it. Standing on the bridge, one sees it stealing along all its length; so small yet so strong, so inevitable; so apparently abiding and steadfast, yet so full of movement and life. Gently and softly as an infant's breath it comes, yet so persistently; no power on earth can turn its onward course; it may be dammed, diverted, tapped, embanked, carried here, carried there, but not turned back; it is the quiet pulse of that valley's life and as constant as the flow through a live creature's heart. It flows for ever by an immutable decree; it is young and fresh and childlike, and yet so very, very old; not indeed quite as old as the hills, just a little younger than those sweet grey-green downs crested with pines that shed its waters from their flanks. Not even frost stills this little, wilful, persistent brook, the iron touch that sometimes strikes Windermere to stone and binds. great rivers in adamantine plate, spares the quiet flow of my little brook, and only adorns its edges with bright jewel-work of diamond and silver. It scarcely ever overflows, though rumours occasionally hint that the lane is under water. One hears them with incredulity, waits a day or two, and finds the little voice in the wilderness saying the same thing to the silence and wearing the same face as before, though the lane has gathered mud. Half a furlong distant, at the roots of some elms, is a spring, whence rises a small sister brook, which, spreading across this same lane in the careless, casual manner that is one of the charms of my little brook, is spanned by another footbridge, and thence, darting behind the hedge, runs laughing along among thick-matted cress and

iris, till it is caught at right angles and blended with the first brook. Just at their blending in the meadow, the united streams spread across this wide bit of lane, unchecked by the stout rail-fence that keeps the cattle in, and, narrowing under the footbridge, flow on beneath a thick pleaching of golden willow boughs to the river and sea, the latter only six miles away.

And here begins its richest song, here on the stones beneath the bridge, beneath the shadow of willow boughs, a soft golden warble, infinitely soothing and restful to tired brains and weary hearts. What does it say in its low, liquid voice, always changing yet ever the same, sliding from tone to tone, eluding the ear and passing into silence, but quickly recapturing its ancient note and beginning all over again and again, till the senses are hypnotised with pleasant sound and the charm of Lethe steeps the brain in peace? It is always warbling, summer and winter, night and day, and always telling the same mysterious tale; you cannot turn away from it, because of the promise in those elusive notes, ever beginning and threatening to reveal the secret it always keeps. The dawn hears it, looking down upon its dimpled face, mystery looking upon mystery, each unsolved; the mysterious dawn, cold and silver-grey, above the dark, warm shoulder of grey-castled hill; the violet dawn, staining the blue zenith, blushing to rose and crimson shot with gold, and laying soft bars of bloom above the east; the first long sunbeam tipping the western downs and gilding their pines, hears the brook's joyous, petulant warble through the silence of winter and now the melodies of spring. Birds sing and pause, and sing again, in many a varied capricious strain, but the brook warbles on, telling the same half-told tale again, and again. That is part of its charm. Wake at any hour of night, and be sure the clear golden voice is singing beneath moon, or stars, or the dark. vault of night, even though great rains may be rushing along the valley, or strong winds roaring and bending the woods before them, white snowstorms whirling or silver rime-flakes softly settling upon every blade of sedge and every stem of willow and hedgerow. The golden voice warbles on, untroubled by change, always charged with mysterious meaning, laden with the Sphinx-riddle none can solve. "Men may come and men may go," said Tennyson's nameless stream, “But I go on for ever." And that is all the brook had to tell him, beyond describing its external self.

Empires and creeds come and go, hopes and fears, strifes and

joys pass by in spring bloom and summer verdure, winter storm and autumn glory, without abstracting one tone from that gentle undersong upon the pebbles. Blood may stain the clear wave, but not still the soft warble. Blood has stained it, and much sorrow has looked upon it. Yet its course is brief; not "by twenty thorps, a little town, and half a hundred bridges," but merely along the vale at the foot of the castled slope, by a cottage weathered into splendour of purple and gold, where it expands to a pond by the crimson-stemmed withy bed, and where little moor-hens dart from the sedge, with their peculiar sharp, wild cry, across its breast, and swans brood upon their own reflected beauty, and great yellow globe flowers mirror themselves in spring. Half a furlong further on, entering the village, it turns a mill-wheel, and again flowing out over a lane by a bridge below the grey church tower that has been looking at it for nearly five hundred years, meets a spring, diamond clear, unfailing in any drought, unfrozen in any frost. And now there is sorrow in store for my stream; for, having undertaken the service of man, it shares his defilement and degradation as it flows by the thick-housed village sloping to its brink and crossing it. Here is another pond, with floating swans, garden banks, and thick-leaved trees; and here my little stream, grown grave, forgets to sing, and consents to send its vital waters, imprisoned in pipes and wells, to sustain some twelve thousand people, though it is still but half a mile from the willow-edged footbridge where its song was so rich and soft.

Having fulfilled this serious duty, it resumes its joyous warble as it dances out under another wooden footbridge into a lane, receiving another spring, and thence along the side of the high road where horses and cattle pause gladly to drink its bright vitality, and whence it plunges beneath the road, through gardens and meadows, by another osier bed, golden this time, to a mill-dam overgrown with sedge, the haunt of swans and moor-hens. Through meadows again, to another mill-dam, overshadowed by elms and lofty willows, under which it glides with a deep, slow, majestic current, dark and clear. Blue masses of forget-me-not border it on one side, where sheep browse and cattle feed, on the other is a public footpath and few flowers. This mill turned, with a slower and graver motion and scarce-heard murmur, the stream passes under thick orchard boughs, and circles a small town from west of south to a little east of north, turning three more mills as it goes, and being still scarcely three miles from its