Undine (1928):

a machine-readable transcription

Schreiner, Olive (1855-1920)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

Undine

        All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.

        All apostrophes are encoded as '.

        Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are encoded as "-" and em dashes as —.

• French

• 07-Dec-1998
  W. Charles Morrow, contributing editor.
  
  • finished encoding and proofing
  
  
• 03-Jan-1999
  Perry Willett, general editor.
  
  • finished OCR scanning, encoding and editing
  
  

UNDINE

BY

OLIVE SCHREINER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY S.C. CRONWRIGHT-SCHREINER NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

M CM XXVIII

UNDINE COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY S.C. CRONWRIGHT- SCHREINER PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

• I. A Queer Little Child 1
• II. Undine's Jottings 33
• III. The Man with the Mouth 51
• IV. Going to Chapel 56
• V. A Sunny Afternoon and a Wild Night 71
• VI. Greenwood 82
• VII. Lovers 111
• VIII. Beautiful Snow 135
• IX. Trodden Snow 144
• X. Melted Snow 155
• XI. A Clever Little Man and a Poor Little Fool 160
• XII. Sold Her Love 176
• XIII. A Very Wicked Woman 181
• XIV. On Board Ship to South Africa 216
• XV. In an Ox Waggon 242
• XVI. New Rush 280
• XVII. Little Irons 308
• XVIII. Little Irons and a Digger 335
• XIX. Albert Blair 358
• XX. Alone with the Stars 365

INTRODUCTION

        Some years before her death Olive Schreiner said to me that, if ever a biography of her were to be written, she would like me to write it, or, failing me, her "oldest and best friend," Havelock Ellis.

        I was in London when she died, and wrote to Ellis as soon as possible. Telling him of her wish, I asked him if he would write the biography. This he found himself unable to do, but offered to place at my service all the information he had if I would undertake it. Without delay I engaged quarters near him and got to work. At our first "business" meeting, he brought up the subject of an unfinished novel of Olive's, much to my surprise, for I had never even heard of it. This was Undine, the manuscript of which she had placed in his hands in 1884, shortly after they met. I had the manuscript typed and left the original and a carbon copy with him.

        But the novel was not complete; the concluding part was missing. On my return to South Africa in March, 1921, I found the missing section among

my wife's papers. It consisted of twenty-two foolscap sheets in two separate lots (being pages 410 to 432 of the whole manuscript of the novel) which connected up unbrokenly with what preceded it. The handwriting is in Olive's large, strong, rapid style, an approximate specimen of which is given on page 228 of her Letters. The paper is faded and the matter is clearly a final revision. At some time this manuscript had been posted to "Miss O. Schreiner, c/o Advocate Schreiner, Cape Town," by her mother, whose handwriting is unmistakable. From the official cancellation of the postage stamps I cannot now make out when or where it was posted. The stamps are Cape Colony stamps, long out of date. Well weighing all the facts within my knowledge, I think, however, that the novel was completed in South Africa before she left for England in 1881, that the now-recovered missing section consists of the two parts mentioned in Olive's letter to Ellis of the 20th November, 1884 (given later), that it was taken by her to her mother at Seymour at the end of 1876 (as mentioned in her Ratel Hoek journal later), and left there, or that she left it with her mother in Grahamstown as she passed through on her way to England in February, 1881, and finally that her mother posted it to Advocate Schreiner from Grahamstown after Olive's return to South Africa (which was in November, 1889). There is another interesting fact in connection with this manuscript:

on a wrapper tied round the roll I found Olive's description of its contents, written in ink in her own handwriting, "Bit of early novel when I was about 16 years."

        We now come to the actual writing of the novel.

        The Kimberley Diamond Mine was discovered in July, 1871. The great rush that at once set in towards it soon caused it to be called New Rush, a name it retained until the Camp at the Diamond Fields was proclaimed as Kimberley in July, 1873.

        Olive's brother Theo (later a Senator) was one of the early diggers who joined the Camp at New Rush. He was followed by his sister Ettie (later the temperance orator), while their youngest brother, Will (later Prime Minister of Cape Colony), used to travel up from Cape Colony to spend his school holidays working with Theo on his claims. Like other diggers, the Schreiners lived in tents near the edge of the mine, where Kaffir "boys," under an overseer, worked the claims. Theo himself supervised the "washing" and personally did the "sorting."

        In 1872 Olive went to visit her brother and sister. Setting out from the little village of Hertzog where her parents lived, not far from Grahamstown, and travelling by passenger coach the hundreds of miles to the Diamond Fields, she arrived at New Rush early in December. During her stay she lived in tents as the others did. There was no other shelter;

and a "pretty time" they had of it in the dust, the heat, the violent thunderstorms and the myriad fleas of the Camp.

        The first mention of Undine appears in her New Rush journal on the 18th June, 1873: "I have finished the first Chapter of Undine Bock this morning."¹ At the time she was eighteen years and three months old.

        It must not, however, be inferred from this entry that she had only then begun the novel. Among her papers I found (and still have) a small, cheap, paper-covered child's exercise book, part of which she had used for doing her juvenile sums. The colour and condition of the paper, the writing, spelling, and other factors about this little book of sixteen pages indicate, in my opinion, that its contents considerably antedate the manuscript of the book we now have. But they are without doubt part of the novel; for practically the whole of the little one's "scribble" is included in Undine as we now have it.

        After this entry of the 18th June the next reference to the novel is in her Hertzog journal of the 3rd November, 1873. She "has not yet finished the first chapter of A Queer Little Girl."

        From May, 1874, to the end of February, 1875, she was acting as governess at Colesberg. Her journal of this period contains no reference to
___________________

¹This is her only use of the title Undine Bock; thereafter she omitted the Bock.

---

Page xi

Undine. However, as will presently be seen, she was just about finishing the first draft of it.

        In March, 1875, we find her employed at the farm Ganna Hoek (that portion styled Klein Ganna Hoek in the Life), teaching the children of Mr. and Mrs. Stoffel Fouché, Dutch farmers. This farm lies in the Karoo mountain-veld of Cradock (Cape Colony) about twenty-five miles southwest of the village and at that time some two hundred miles from the nearest railway. Here, possibly, Olive wrote the whole of the second draft of Undine, except for the revision of parts of Ratel Hoek, a farm about sixty miles away, near Tarkastad, in 1876.

        A full description of the whole of Ganna Hoek, belonging mainly to the Fouchés and the Cawoods (Olive's intimate friends), is given in the Life (pages 103-120). From these pages I now give an extract with photograph, describing the room in which she lived and wrote while engaged on this novel:

        "It is the little room under the flat roof of the lean-to the window of which may be seen between the aloe and the ladder; to the right of the ladder is the baking-oven with the kitchen chimmey above it. The door of the oven is through the kitchen wall; the oven is built of brick and has no chimney; a huge fire is made in it, the 'live' coals are then scraped out, the bread is put in and the door closed; in competent hands, this style of oven (universal in the old days) is most excellent, especially for bread, in which the Boer women excel. It will be seen that there was a wall between Olive's room and the kitchen and

---

Page xii

that these two rooms as well as some other out-rooms were not in the main part of the house but in a flat-roofed lean-to, the roof of which has some stones on it to strengthen its edges against the wind. The front of the house is where the tree stands over the left of the lean-to. In the gable may be seen the door of the loft. Olive's window faces almost north and looks straight up a kloof on the steep side of the mountain, which begins within a few yards. The room was mud-floored and ceilingless. It leaked badly; when the rain was heavy Olive used to put an umbrella over herself and lead the water out of the room by making a small furrow in its mud floor. The room contained a primitive bedstead, a box to hold her clothes, and nothing else (except Mill's Logic to read); she used to wash in the little stream in the kloof near by until she secured a basin. Such was the room in which the greater part of Undine, the forerunner of The Story of an African Farm, was written, and almost certainly part of An African Farm itself too. A little way up the kloof, on which her window looked, were great rocks and a pool of water from which the garden was irrigated.... Here large wild trees grew, and here she often saw what she always called 'the long-tailed monkeys,' of which she was very fond, as well as many other untamed veld creatures."

        The first reference to Undine in her Ganna Hoek journal is in June, 1875: "I mean to try and finish the first copy by the end of July and to have it written out [i.e., revised] by the end of August." Then in July she writes: "Have got Undine on board ship" (on her way from England to South Africa). In September: "I am at Mrs. Snappercap's" (a char-

---

---

Page xiii

acter of the novel).... "Mean to try and finish Undine by the end of this month, and write it out next." In October: "Undine is at New Rush. Hope to get it done by the end of the year." At the end of December she has "nearly finished Undine." On the 26th January, 1876: "Afternoon, I have finished Undine; I must read out or correct and new-write if I can and get it done before I leave." Her last entry at Ganna Hoek is in April, 1876: "I have made up my mind not to have Undine published, not yet at least."

        She left Ganna Hoek at the end of April, 1876, and went as governess at Ratel Hoek. Soon after this she is writing Thorn Kloof, the first title given to the novel afterwards to be known as The Story of an African Farm. In July, 1876, she enters in her journal that she has not yet decided whether to finish Undine or Thorn Kloof first, and adds (apropos of Undine): "I have just finished reading over as far as I have written her out (a very wicked woman) and I am not disgusted," and she hopes to take the completed novel to her mother at the end of the year. On the 23rd September, 1876, we have her last reference to Undine: "I think I shall finish and read over Undine tomorrow. Then to the new work [Thorn Kloof]."¹

        Olive first met Havelock Ellis in March, 1884.
___________________

¹ The extracts from her journals do not comprise all her references to Undine.

I.

A QUEER LITTLE CHILD

        All these parts compose a picture in which, when looked at by daylight, it were hard work to find the slightest trace of beauty; but tonight, penetrated in

every nook and corner by the cold white light of an almost full moon, there is a strange weird beauty, a beauty which the veriest sheep-souled Boer that ever smoked pipe or wore vel-skoen, might feel if he had but one ray of light left in him.

        It was a silent night. Even the great dogs had crept to sleep under the old tent-waggon, and nothing living or moving was to be seen except a small child and a smaller ape who were perched in one of the gaps of the stone wall.

        There they had sat for the last hour, never moving but very busy cogitating, if one might judge from the grave expression of both faces. Likely the smaller pondered on the dire injustice of tying him up all day and giving him orange peel in place of orange pulp, and uncracked almonds, which all the world knew he could not break. His thoughts might have been the most profoundly philosophical, however, if judged by the appearance of his small black countenance--abstruse inquiries into the nature, origin, and destiny of the moon, whose course he was following with eyes hardly less grave and earnest than the large brown pair above him.

        He was wrapped up in the end of the small blue pinafore which the child had on, the only parts visible being the small wizard-like face and a small black hand, with which he held his chin and every now and then raised for a soft sympathetic pat of the little white hand that served as chin-rest

to the white, dark-eyed face above him. The child might have been ten years old, but she looked much less as she sat there, perched on the top of a large round stone with her thin little legs drawn up under her in a queer little fashion of her own.

        "Socrates," she said, presently. The monkey turned his soft brown eyes and fixed them full on hers.

        "I wish we knew," said the child.

        Socrates gave a long sigh in answer and turned the gaze of his great sad eyes back to the slowly moving moon.

        "Come to prayers, come to prayers," shouted a stentorian voice from one of the back windows, and Socrates' reflections for that night were ended. He was tied up to his stand; and with a kiss on the crown of his little grey head the owner of the blue pinafore left him and went into the house.

        The house, as we have said, was Dutch, built in the true Dutch style, with one large front room, from which opened six or eight cabin-like apartments to serve as bedrooms; and with that indispensable of all Dutch farmhouses overhead--a great loft.

        In the front room were two large glass cupboards let into the wall, which in the days of their old Dutch proprietor had been wont to contain dolls, earthenware, and all the wealth and glory of the household, and which even now, in spite of their

being filled with books, had an uncomfortably Dutch appearance. The room was well furnished, and lighted by a great lamp standing on the centre-table. Before it, with an open Bible and Prayer Book, sat the farmer: an English Africander with nothing worthy of remark about him, if it were not the unusually fine development of his tall muscular figure and the unusually large amount of yellow hair upon his face. There were five others in the room--his wife, a delicate, refined, fair little woman who reclined on the sofa--his son, handsome and bright-eyed, and now home for the holidays--and two little Dutch girls, grey-eyed, yellow-haired, pudding-faced, who were here to share with his step-daughter the instruction of the very stiff and upright individual who sat on a chair near the door. This individual wore three curls on each side of her head and carried a large wart on the tip of her chin.

        "Late for prayers again, Undine," she said, as the owner of the little blue pinafore slipped in at the door and took her way to the nearest seat.

        No one else took any notice of her entrance, and the chapter being finished they kneeled down to pray. Undine did not listen to the prayer but to the great red clock overhead, that was ticking away such solemn words, the child thought, as she bent below it:

        "Another week gone, another day gone. What

have you done? We never come back, we moments; we fly, but we never return, never, never, tick, tick. What have you done with us? If you do the best you can with all the rest of us, you can never bring one of us back, never, never, tick, tick."

        Undine tried to listen to the prayer, but the old clock's voice was louder.

        "Tick, tick," cried the inexorable old clock, "what good have you ever done? How are you better able to die now than you were last week? You are nearer death, but are you ready, ready, ready, tick, tick, tick?"

        Undine tried to listen to the prayer again, and she caught these words: "Thousands, O Lord, are going to destruction every moment."

        "Yes, yes, yes," said the clock, "tick, tick, hell, hell, going, going, going, thousands, thousands, thousands, tick, tick, tick, tick."

        She could kneel there while the old clock told only of her own sins and fate, but now--when every tick talked of half the world, for whom there was no help, no hope, who were going, going, going--she felt as though she were being suffocated and the walls and roof were throbbing and coming down on her. She leaped up from her knees, and was recalled to a sense of things present only by being very sharply pulled onto them again. Fortunately the prayer was almost ended, and when they rose there were at once so many human voices trying to

make themselves heard that the voice of the old wooden prophet was quickly drowned.

        "Undine, my dear, I really must report your conduct to your mamma; it really is most reprehensible," said the stiff and upright individual. "You surely have time enough in which to run about; you might forget your play and worship God, when you come here. Your mamma thinks so. Do you not?"

        The lady thus appealed to not only fully endorsed the opinion, but also, on hearing the nature of the offence, ordained that henceforth the offender's seat should be in the centre of the room, beside her stepfather, and so to speak under the eye of the assembly. This was intended as a direful chastisement, but the child's thoughts were still occupied with the ominous tickings of the old clock, and she would have cared nothing just then if they had sentenced her to sit next some savage king of Timbuctoo who makes his meals off little girls. She stood there before them, with the end of the blue pinafore twisted round one small arm which the other was nursing and patting as tenderly as if it had been Socrates.

        "Really, Undine, you are the hardest child to manage. There is no need to put on that look of proud indifference; go to bed at once and let me see no more of you tonight," said her mother; and the child took up her light and went. Soon she had put it out and crept into bed, but she could not forget the old clock; and how dark the room was! Perfect,

boundless, endless darkness it might be, for anything she could see; like that silent darkness which surrounds poor lost souls and is all the answer they get when they cry aloud to God. She pulled the cover over her head and buried it under the pillows; but whoever has tried these means of dodging disagreeable thoughts knows how signally they always fail. She found this out; for by and by a small white face showed itself above the blankets and a pair of troubled eyes looked out into the surrounding darkness.

        "Dear God! great God!" cried the little child, covering her face with both hands, "You who are so very happy and great and strong, who can do all things, O dear God! save them. They are going, going, forever, forever, O God! God!"

        She lay still for some minutes and then burst forth again, this time in a perfect agony:

        "O God! great God! save just one soul tonight because I pray. I know that I am wicked and will never be saved, but I pray with faith; save, oh save one soul, for my prayer. Great God! God! God!"

        She sat up and buried her face in both her trembling hands. What was the use of her praying--she who did not love God, who could not believe, who could never be saved? How easy it was to understand how the great Son of God could come down to die for souls. The child felt that night as though she, too, could have died to save only a few, a few

souls from the great company of the God-hated who were passing over the edge to darkness. How many had gone since she came into that room tonight! How many through the long dim ages of the past! The old Greeks and Romans, and the wild millions of Asia; and how many would pass over long after she had taken her place in the great company and vanished into sin and woe forever! Before and behind her seemed to stretch a chain of endless pain and anguish.

        After a time she lay down and tried to close her eyes and drop asleep; but now it seemed as if already she had passed into that unknown land, prepared by God for the souls at whom he laughs. In Dante's hell there were fire and fellowship, earth and pain, but in hers there was nothing so merciful or so material. She seemed in a wide void in which there was only endless space and blackness, and she had not even two hands, the one of which might touch the other and in touching find fellowship; and when she cried aloud her voice fell dead upon the air. There was only emptiness, and black space, above, around, below, and she was one alone. Oh, how the silence ached! One throb of pain, one touch, one sound, how blessed they would be.

        An indescribable terror seized the child. Such must be death, eternal death, the death of the wicked, changeless and everlasting as the throne of the God who made it. She crept out of bed trem-

bling and lay down on the cold mud floor; that at least was hard and solid, and it seemed to calm her. She pressed her face onto it, and a few burning tears fell on it; then she lay as still as though she were asleep. How comforting it was, that solid earth; but it was dead and cold, and she would like the touch of something warmer; so after a time she got up and, noiselessly opening the door, stood in the large front room. It was dark and quite still but for the ticking of the old clock and the sound of her own breath. She stood for a minute listening; then she crept on till her fingers touched a door at the far end of the room. After a little pressure it opened, and she went in. There were two beds in the room, both occupied, and she kneeled down at the foot of the nearest and stretched out her hand. It came in contact with what she was in search of--a small foot, soft and warm and full of life. She held it for some moments in both hands, and then, afraid of waking the sleeper, rose to go, noiselessly and softly as she had come.

        How the owner of the foot--one of the grey-eyed, cheese-faced little Dutch girls--would have wondered and been mystified, could she have watched the proceedings of her little white-nightgowned visitor, who, feeling her way softly by chairs and tables, soon found herself again in her own room.

        She was comforted, but not sufficiently; so she

drew from between the mattresses on her bed a small brown New Testament. Pressing it close to her side with one little arm, with the other she dragged a large wooden chair to the window; and with its aid, and that of a stool, climbed up into the window seat. Pushing her hand through a broken pane, she sent the heavy wooden shutter flying back on its hinges. A flood of white moonlight fell into the room, and the face of the moon herself looked in--on the little tumbled bed and the whitewashed walls and the mite of a thing, with its little white nightgown and bare feet, perched up in the window.

        The mite of a thing closed her eyes tight and opened her book, turning the leaves over and over again, and at last brought down a small finger upon one of them. She opened her eyes and stooped down to read by the moonlight the words on which it had alighted; they were these--"Which was the son of Melchi, which was the son of Addi, which was the son of Cosam, which was the son of Elmodam, which was the son of Er."

        She closed the book and sat looking at the cover in silence, with very much the expression of Socrates when lost in the contemplation of a nut he had vainly endeavoured to crack. Faith is strong, however, and reason weak, at ten years; so the brown comforter was opened again; and, after the fashion of the Apostles and good men of old, Providence was appealed to.

        This time the words were these--"Strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many I say unto you shall seek to enter in, and shall not be able."

        She did not close the book this time but sat looking at its open pages with her eyebrows slightly bent; then she caught the book up tightly in one hand and flung it from her with such force that it left the story of its journey written in a large brown dent on the whitewashed wall opposite. She threw her head down on the window seat and cried long and bitterly; but by and by, when she grew quieter, she sat up and pressed her little burning cheek against the window pane. How calm and still the outside world was; so far removed from all passion and strife, damnation, fire and brimstone; so strong, so self-contained. How peacefully the great round stones lay resting on each other. Through that subtle sympathy which binds together all things, and to stumps and rocks gives a speech which even we can understand, the night spoke to the little child the sweet words of comfort which she had looked for in vain in the brown Testament. She left off thinking and only sat and listened, and the sweet night wind blew in through the broken pane and touched her softly, till the weary eyelids closed and the little head found rest once more on the window seat.

        Of course Undine was late next morning, late even for Sunday morning. Socrates, in despair of ever getting his breakfast, sat disconsolate on the

top of his box, making believe to eat his tail, and every now and then raising his hands to his head and slowly rubbing them across his forehead, as if still suffering from the effect of too much moonlight thought.

        It was going to be a sweltering day; even now it gave one an unpleasant sensation to look at the little hills of red round stones scattered here and there and acting the part of great reflectors; as though man and herb were not desiccated and burnt red enough without their help. Indoors the blue flies buzzed. In spite of the soothing effect of more than half-closed shutters all sat down to breakfast feeling mortally aggrieved, though hardly knowing in what respect, and, according to their several dispositions, desiring to have it out with some one or lapsing into silence.

        When Undine came to the table she was met with the usual: "Late again, my dear; surely going to bed when you do, you might get up a little earlier. It is this sleeping so much that makes you so incurably stupid. Sannie and Annie were up hours ago," said the governess, casting an approving glance at the two little maidens opposite, who by their earnest patronage of mutton chops and fat were incontrovertibly proving their Africander origin.

        "They went to bed much later than you and were up earlier, and have done their hair much better than you," continued her instructress, whose ideas were so truly correct, feminine, and orthodox, that

they might all have been placed in an ordinary breakfast saucer and left there forever, without the least fear of their ever running over.

        The meal being ended, the farmer went out to bully the herdsmen for not having let the sheep out earlier, and to saunter about till the heat should drive him in; while his wife hied to the nether regions, where bitter and clamorous war was being waged between Hendrik and Gobalee as to the possession of the sheep's-head-and-feet. The two little Dutch girls stood in the kitchen doorway, and for once the dawning of a light, which if it had arisen might have been called animation, shone in their placid countenances as they drank in every word and even now and then inserted one.

        Undine collected some bits of bread, took half a green mielie¹ and a cup of water, and, putting on her great brown kappie, went out to visit Socrates in the yard. He was glad of the contents of cup and plate, but quickly satisfied himself and began playing with his mielie,² now throwing it from him with disdain and gazing up into the sky with an air of deep abstraction, as though completely unconscious of its existence, then seizing it up, taking a bite and hugging it to him, with an expression of earnestness so comical it might have set a Methodist
___________________

¹ The mielies ("corn") being on the cob.

parson laughing on his way to class meeting. Undine did not laugh; she sat down on the ground beside him and looked at him, wondering if he really felt so happy, or only played so wildly because his heart was heavy. She wondered if he ever wished to be anything in the wide world but himself, and yet didn't see anything that he liked better; wondered if he ever longed to die, and yet wished never to die, and nothing in the world ever to die; wondered if it made him feel queer to look up at that little white fleecy cloud in the blue sky overhead; wondered what the little cloud meant and how it came there and why it came there, and why anything was where it was, and why the world was the world, and the sun the sun, and she, she; and why-- She could not wonder any more, for two strong hands were shaking her so that the little white cloud, Socrates, the blue sky and red earth, were all jumbled up together.

        "Do you wish to ruin your complexion completely, you wicked child, that you sit here staring up into the sky as if you had never seen it before and were bereft of all your senses? Get your kappie from that ape and come into the house at once."

        For Mr. Socrates had possessed himself of the large brown kappie and seemed in no hurry to restore it. Finds are keeps according to the code, and it was only after a world of persuasion had been lavished upon him that he very gingerly descended

from his box and, with an air of melancholy resignation and a touch of condescension, delivered it to its owner. Then he sat gravely following with his eyes the little blue pinafore and brown kappie as they vanished into the house, and, there being nothing left worth his looking at, he then clambered up into his box to take a doze.

        The sheep's-head-and-feet quarrel had been settled, and when Undine entered the front room she found the two little Dutch girls demurely seated on two chairs with their hymn books in their hands, learning their Sunday lessons. Undine, too, got her hymn book down from the shelf, but instead of following the virtuous example before her, she placed her book on the floor, laid herself across a chair, and in this very highly unorthodox position had just composed herself to learn, when she was asked if she had not yet rested enough and were going to sleep again. Of course there was nothing for it but to sit up and learn away steadily till the hour arrived at which, every Sunday morning, the three scholars were marched off into a side room to receive such religious instruction as was suited to their limited capacities and tender years. The first part of the program, which consisted in the recitation of lessons, was soon over. Then bibles were produced. The little brown Testament was not one of them--false friend it might sometimes be, but friend for

all that, and not to be brought out for common eyes to gaze on.

        The stiff and upright individual sat in a large armchair, and before her the two little Dutch girls on high-backed riem-bottomed chairs, while Undine took possession of a green waggon-chest that stood near the door.

        The chapter chosen for their perusal and consideration was the twenty-fifth of Matthew, and when it was concluded each was in turn required to ask some question bearing on its contents. The eldest of the Dutch girls--on whom the heat, the darkness of the room, and the exertion of spelling out the long English words had had an almost stupefying effect--sat for some moments gazing at the face of her oracle with an expression of hopeless vacancy. At length a happy thought occurred to her: Were the virgins men or women? The mental effort required for the birth of this question seemed so completely to have exhausted all her powers of mind as to make it highly probable that the reply of the oracle was lost upon her and that she remained forever in total ignorance on the momentous subject of her inquiry.

        It was now the turn of number two, who, with astonishing brightness, asked if the bridesmaids wore white muslin dresses and carried eau-de-Cologne bottles in their pockets. This searcher after truth having been satisfied, it was Undine's turn to in-

quire and learn. But that young lady sat upon the green box, noiselessly tapping it with her heels and fixing on the skin carpet that attention which should have been bestowed on her worthy instructress.

        "Well, Undine, my dear, what have you to ask?"

        "I understand that chapter," said Undine, without raising her eyes to the face of her interlocutor.

        "You do, my dear! Well, then I suppose we had better reverse the order of things and I will question you. What was the oil which was generally burnt on all such occasions in the East?"

        "I don't know," said Undine, very composedly.

        "I thought that you understood everything that this chapter contained. I very soon find that you do not. You are wofully ignorant, my dear," said the teacher.

        "I did not notice that there was anything said about the kinds of oil," responded Undine; "otherwise I should not have said that I understood it."

        The questioner was fairly at her wits' end, but she shifted her ground. "What does the thirty-first verse speak of, my dear?"

        "The judgment of the world," said Undine.

        "And what does he say to the good people on his right and the bad on his left hand?"

        "He says to the good people, 'Come, you blessed, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world'; and to the others, 'Go, you cursed, into the everlasting fire'."

        "And what lesson does this teach us, my dear?"

        "That God has prepared a heaven for the people he means to save and a hell for the people he means to burn," said Undine, very gravely, never raising her eyes from the carpet on which they rested.

        There was a pause; then came the remark: "Hardly the right way of putting it, my dear. It teaches you that you should be a very good little girl, so that when you die God may take you to heaven and not send you to hell to burn forever and ever."

        "I would much sooner be wicked and go to hell than be good only because I was afraid of going there," said Undine, now raising her eyes from the carpet and fixing them on the horror-stricken countenance of her instructress.

        "Undine!" gasped forth that unfortunate individual. "Undine, what do you mean? You were always an evil and wicked child, but you grow viler every day."

        "Yes," said Undine, getting off the box, with a face alternately as red as the sprigs on her little print dress and as pale as her little white pinafore--"yes, I don't want to go to heaven, and, if God wants to, he can send me to hell and I will never again ask him not to, never. I know I'm very wicked, but I'm not half so wicked or so cruel as he is. Nothing is, not even the devil. The devil is glad when we go to hell, but he did not make us

on purpose to send us there, and he did not make hell, and he did not make himself, and I'm sorry for him. I believe he tries to be good and God won't let him, that's what I believe," said Undine, who, with her wild dark eyes and clenched hands, looked more like some spirit who had just arrived from the regions of which she spoke than a carefully-brought-up little Christian receiving her Sunday lesson.

        If she had been Medusa her gaze could not more completely have paralysed her opponent, who sat there as if turned into stone; while the two little pudding-faces looked from one to the other with wild astonishment in their big grey eyes.

        Undine clasped her little hands behind her and walked slowly out of the room.

        It was the first time that she had ever given utterance to the evil thoughts with which her small and, as she believed, devil-ridden soul was haunted; they were fiendishly evil thoughts, all of them, she knew; but, if they were hers, why should she not give them utterance?

        Her little heart swelled so it well nigh suffocated her, but it was with a sense of freedom and strength that she was pacing up and down her little room, when she heard the key turn in the door.

        It was pleasant enough to think of having a day all to herself with no fear of interruption and no company but her books; but to think of that clink of the key and know that, wishing it or not, she was

a prisoner, made her stamp her feet upon the ground as she walked up and down and to rebel in her bitter little heart against all powers, human and divine.

        The world was not the place for her, she was feeling persuaded; she was not fit for it. Why then had she been made so bad, and put into it? It was no use saying she ought to be good; she couldn't. The devil did not come to other people and make them think such thoughts as he made her. She felt herself very much aggrieved by these attacks from the infernal regions, and presently became very wrathful. Then reaction set in and she grew sleepy. Lying down upon the floor, she was soon sound asleep, dreaming of the glorious time when she would be a woman and would know everything and be loved by everyone, and when she would be free.

        The ringing of the dinner bell wakened her; and, finding that nothing in the shape of food was sent her, she kneeled down before her little bookshelf in search of refreshment of another order. There were delicious fairy tales--Arabian Nights whose old torn pages seemed to emit an odour of myrrh and roses caught from the gardens of Bagdad--Hans Andersen's beautiful song in prose about the mermaid and the young prince--but these and others were of course not to be looked at. It would have hurt the child's conscience as much to have read a fairy tale on Sunday as to have told a lie; one of the crimes which always came to haunt her in the dark watchful

hours of the night was her having read, on one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday afternoon, a part of that story of "The Mermaid and the Prince."

        So Undine, rebel though she was, touched not, looked not, at the wicked thing, but from its hiding-place behind the other books brought forth a large, dull-coloured, leather-bound volume.

        It was A Careful and strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of Will, which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame, by Jonathan Edwards, A.B. They would have laughed at her for reading such an old man's book and one with so grandiloquent and lengthy a title, so it was always stowed safely away behind the others where there was no fear of its being discovered by prying eyes. The faded ribbon place-marker had already found its way into the middle of the book, and the child was soon deeply absorbed in sections eight, nine and ten of section two, in part three. She did not get through more than these, for each sentence was found so pregnant with profound and misty thoughts that she was obliged to read it carefully, and often re-read it, before it could be dismissed.

        There was a strange contrast between the little reader and her great brown book as she sat there on the floor on that Sunday afternoon. The child so warm, with the wild blood dancing in every vein,

looking out so eagerly into the world, so ready to give and take--the book so old, so dead, with the life thoughts of another generation petrified in its old yellow leaves, now probably being read for the last time.

        The book had belonged to her own father, who, much to the grief of his father, had turned aside from the paths of truth and Arminianism, to the ways of Calvinism and error, and in those evil ways had died.

        About three o'clock the key turned and one of the little Dutch girls put her face in at the door.

        "You can come out when you like," she said. Undine did not even raise her eyes from the book, determining to show that she by no means objected to being made a prisoner in her own room; and she would in all probability have remained where she was until called to tea, had she not suddenly remembered Socrates. Of course pride must be swallowed and his wants attended to; so with an air of extreme indifference she made her way through the front room and, having got a mug of water and thrown a large damp towel over the brown kappie, went out into the yard.

        She found Socrates lying on the floor of his box, quite exhausted with the heat and very glad to get under the shade of the damp towel. Loosening him from the stand, she carried him down to the little dam, where, under the scant shade of the willow-

tree, her brother Frank lay reclining on his back. He had thrown open his jacket and waistcoat, more from force of habit than from reason, one would think; for the wind, like the breath from an oven, seemed, in place of cooling, to blight and desiccate all it touched. He was a fine specimen of an English Africander, tall and broad, with a fair handsome face, though rather sleepy-looking just now as he lay with his legs raised against the trunk of the old tree and his hat pulled half over his eyes. With one hand he kept it there while with the other he picked up small bits of baked earth wherewith to pelt the miserable ducks who, red, dirty, and hot, were endeavouring to swim in diluted mud by way of improving their condition.

        Undine sat down close to the trunk of the tree, for that cast a small shadow if the branches did not; and for some minutes nothing was said.

        "Had him that time," muttered Frank at last, as a more than usually lucky hit caught the old drake in the eye.

        "I wonder why you do that," said Undine; "everything is miserable in the whole world."

        The only response to this observation was another throw, but presently he said, "So you've been in the wars today, little woman, eh?"

        Undine made no reply, but stroked Socrates softly the wrong way.

        "Too bad to make you go without your dinner, little woman, wasn't it?"

        "I don't mind that one bit," said Undine, "but I wish I had never been born. I'm miserable, and nobody loves me."

        "Why, I do, and we all of us do, though you are such a queer little coon," answered Frank lazily.

        "Yes, that's just it," said Undine, gravely tying Socrates' tail into a knot as she spoke, much to that gentleman's dissatisfaction. "Yes, that's just it; you only care about me because I'm your sister; you call me queer and strange; you don't like me one bit--only Socrates."

        "Well, that is good. How do you know that Socrates likes you, and not the bread and butter you bring him?" asked Frank.

        "I know he likes me," answered Undine, very indignantly. "Can't I see it? Don't I know it? When we sit together of an evening, I can feel he is thinking just what I am, and when I talk to him he understands me. That is what I hate," said Undine, twisting at the tail more vigorously than ever; "people don't know anything about it, and they say he hasn't got a soul. How do they know, I should like to know? If only people would not talk till they knew, I think the world would be a much nicer place."

        Frank said nothing, but laughed, and directed a bit of mud straight at the tip of Socrates' black nose,

who merely opened his eyes and closed them again very solemnly.

        "I wish I were one of those ducks," remarked Undine, presently.

        "I don't; they look hot," said Frank; "and I thought you said, just now, everything in the whole world was miserable."

        "Yes, but not so very miserable because they don't think; at least, perhaps they do; but they've no bibles, you see, and I don't think the devil ever tempts them. It would not be worth his trouble, they are so small."

        "If he paid visits only on account of size, I expect you would not see much of him," said her brother, with an amused expression on his face. "Are bibles your great trouble?"

        "Yes," said Undine, unhesitatingly. "Sometimes I feel quite good, and I am sitting and reading, and I come to something that is quite different from what it was somewhere else. Then the devil makes me think, How can two things that say the opposite both be true? And then I feel wicked and I can't go on reading any more. Sometimes, too, when I'm praying and I feel as though I loved God very much, I remember all at once how it says in the Bible that he never forgives anyone for nothing, but always makes some one suffer pain first; and I remember all the other cruel things it tells about him; and then I hate him, and for a long time I can't pray again.

Oh dear!" she said after a little pause. "I wish the world belonged to me. I would make it much better; I would let all the devils out of hell and love them and make them good, so there would be no one to tempt the people any more. Did you ever feel so wicked as I do when you were little like me?" asked Undine, looking earnestly at him, as though with the vague hope that his answer might be in the affirmative.

        "No, I should rather think not," was the answer. "I used to make little clay oxen and train kids in an old box and enjoy myself; that is what I used to do when I was your age."

        Undine heaved a little weary sigh and looked at the ducks. "I wonder if there are any people in the world who feel like I do and who have such wicked thoughts," she said at last.

        "Of course there are, and much wickeder, too; there are people who don't believe the Bible is true, or anything else, and they write books also."

        "Do they?" said Undine. "I wish I could read them. Have you ever?"

        "No," said Frank; "it's too much bother; but I will, when I'm a man;" and pulling his hat lower over his eyes, he either made believe to do so or really went to sleep.

        Undine did not go away, but sat at his feet, nursing Socrates and watching the ducks, till the koppies

began to cast long shadows and the fast cooling air told that sunset was not far off.

        By and by the back door of the house opened and the whole family appeared equipped for their Sunday evening walk--all, with the exception of the smallest Dutch girl, who, complaining of a headache, was left to keep Undine company.

        "Take care of everything; get into no mischief; and above all remember that it is Sunday," were the parting injunctions which they received as the group, which now included Frank, moved off.

        The two children stood still watching them till they passed out of sight. Then Undine, after crying and praying half the night, and reading Edwards and meditating half the day, began to discover that, she was neither anchorite nor saint, but only a very young animal with much wild blood in its young veins that needed circulating. It may have been the evening's cool that made her conscious of this, for it seemed to have an inebriating effect upon Socrates, who leaped, grinned, and turned somersets in a manner truly astonishing.

        "I wonder," said Undine, "if Socrates and I were to run a race, which of us would beat"; and without waiting for a reply, she set about testing the matter at once. With one end of his chain held firmly in her hand they set off, but had not gone thirty paces when it had slipped out and Socrates, chain and all, was making his way to the nearest koppie, with

jingling, screeching and leaping, much to the mingled horror and delight of his little pursuer. The delight soon vanished, however, for, the koppie reached, Mr. Socrates felt himself quite in his own element, and absolutely refused to be cozened by soft words or specious promises. Seating himself on the top of a large round stone, he would very leisurely stretch out his legs, scratch himself, and then look up into the blue sky with an air of melancholy abstraction; this till his breathless pursuer was within half a foot of him; then, with a whirl, a cry, and a somerset, off to another and more inaccessible stone, round which his little pursuer might dance and beseech in vain, leaping to catch the tip of the chain he left hanging almost within reach of her fingers. It is uncertain how long this game might have continued had not the idea entered Socrates' small head that more fun might be got from scampering over the roofs at home than by remaining where he was.

        Accordingly, he was off like an arrow, while Undine followed him breathlessly, minus one shoe and with more rents in her garments than could well be counted. Arrived at the house, she found the exemplary Sennie standing exactly where and as she had left her; except that she had placed one finger in her mouth and partly turned her head to look at Socrates, who was now on the roof of the house,

busily occupied in pulling out thatch and working away with the greatest dispatch and precision.

        Undine quickly saw that, if this were allowed to go on for many minutes, he would have worked his way into the loft and perhaps to a bloody death as the reward of his evil deeds.

        What was to be done? She looked at the little Dutch girl in despair; the little Dutch girl looked at her.

        "He is naughty," said that little maiden at length, and then slowly replaced the finger she had taken out of her small mouth. Undine turned away in disgust; there was no help to be got from her, and nothing for it but to climb the roof herself and capture him.

        With much difficulty a long ladder was brought which reached just to the top of the wall; and this was soon mounted. Once there, how to get on to the ridge was the question; for at every touch the old thatch crumbled away by handfuls, and she had not crawled many inches before it seemed inevitable that she should soon find herself deposited among the skins in the loft or with the thatch upon the ground.

        "You will fall down and die," said the little Dutch girl, very deliberately, as she watched Undine's perilous ascent with almost as much interest as Socrates, who had now taken his seat on one of

the gables, and with his chin resting on his hand was contemplating her movements most attentively.

        Undine took no notice of either, but continued to climb, doing more harm at every move than Socrates in twenty. The ridge was gained at last, after infinite trouble, but not so Socrates. He waited till her fingers touched his tail; and then, with that appendage cocked high in air, walked off very quietly to the other gable, where he ensconced himself far more comfortably than his little pursuer found it possible to do at hers. There was no getting down again, for the first step down would have been on the ground; there was nothing to be done but sit still and wait. Consequently the appalling and shocking spectacle which met the eyes of the upper powers, on their return home, was Undine, shoeless, kappieless and torn, seated on the ridge and holding on with one arm to the gable, while at the other end Socrates, with clanking chain and tail in air, was dancing a true devil's quadrille. Never were worthy parents and instructors, on their return from a quiet Sabbath ramble, met by so horrific and wrath-rousing a sight.

        A second ladder was quickly got and Undine safety deposited upon the ground, where she was instantly marched off into the house to answer for her evil conduct.

        "How did you get into this plight, you wicked, wicked little girl?" said her mother.

        Undine stood with her hands crossed and her eyes fixed on the one little white toe that had forced its way out of the stocking.

        "I did not mean to," she said, feeling very contrite and not a little ashamed of herself.

        "Did not mean to! Of course not! You never mean to do anything that you do. The wind loosened Socrates and blew you both up onto the roof of the house! Of course it did; we all know that it did."

        Undine felt very much inclined to say that she was sorry and was not going to do so any more; then she remembered that saying so might make her punishment less, so she stood still and looked down at her toe.

        The lean and lanky individual now struck in her note.

        "Undine, my dear Undine," she said in a very low and subdued voice, "if you continue this course of action, what will become of your immortal soul? What will become of it?"

        This was too much for Undine who had stood still to receive her bullying, filled with contrition and repentance; it raised all the evil in her nature. "I know I'm wicked and I don't care, and I don't care what becomes of my soul, and I'm not afraid of anything," said Undine, lifting up her face and throwing back her long tangled hair defiantly.

        "Was there ever in this world so evil disposed

and ungodly a child?" said her spiritual guide, shaking her head solemnly. "Go to bed, Undine; go to bed; I shall say no more to you."

        "Good-night," said Undine and she walked off to her room with almost a smile upon her face. But once there and alone, she flung her tired little body across the foot of the bed and cried bitterly.

        "Oh, I wish I was dead! I wish I was dead! There is nobody like me, and nobody loves me. Oh, I wish I was dead!" And at last, without undressing, fell asleep.

II.

UNDINE'S JOTTINGS

        My brother Frank lolled beside us on the grass, pulling flowers to pieces and showering the leaves over Aunt Margaret's golden hair and white dress. He had changed in the three years that had passed since last I saw him, and had grown noble and handsome enough, I thought, even to possess the beautiful woman on whom his eyes were resting. In my estimation no one else was worthy to own her; certainly not my grandfather, whom I could not learn to like. He reminded me, when I first saw him, of the ox hides so often seen lying near the little dam at home, which had once been damp but by dint of lying in the sun had been reduced to a stone-like mass of wrinkles and lines; and he was so tall and thin. For a long time I never could see him rise from his seat without having recalled to my mind the image of an earthworm creeping out of the ground, which

unfolds and unfolds itself to unimagined lengths. He had more resemblance to the skin than to the earthworm, however; for he was mentally as ossified and incapable of growth as any ox hide under the sun. Only in connection with Aunt Margaret did there seem a trace of softness in his nature, and it could not be otherwise. Nature gives to a few persons to have the influence of sunshine on all they touch--silently softening, warming, melting it--and she was one. I worshipped her; for in those days I had not eaten of the tree of knowledge, and worshipped and thought perfect all I loved.

        I did not care for my grandmother nor yet dislike her. She was a weak, nervous little old woman, who had had all the soul pressed out of her long ago, and whose trembling little hands I never saw at rest for an instant, except she were asleep.

        On that summer afternoon we three sat there, feeling very happy. They because they were together, and I because the roses were beautiful and the sky blue and they glad. The work had dropped from my hands and I had just got into a delicious dream, in which rosebuds, princes and spirits were largely concerned, when Frank tossed a great white rosebud into my face.

        "At your old work again," he said, laughing. "You've no idea," turning to Aunt Margaret, "what evil thoughts are always fermenting in that little innocent-looking head. It's my decided opinion that

in a pre-state of existence she was a Buddhist philosopher, or something else equally disagreeable and full of contemplations, and at her rebirth she did not become quite rejuvenised or lose all her old habits; otherwise I can't account for her," said Frank, turning round onto his back, while Aunt Margaret and I laughed.

        "It's all very well to laugh," he continued, "but she is awfully bad, much worse than I am. She is only a little girl and she has not any right to have thoughts at all. It's all very well for me to think that it's a hard state of affairs when a poor fellow has to be called into existence for the purpose of being sent to fire and brimstone; but it does not do for her; it's highly improper, highly," said Frank, rolling round onto his face again.

        Aunt Margaret opened her big blue eyes and looked at me. I had been so shy and said so little since I came there, that I think they all thought me a particularly childish child; and I was glad of it. I was young, but I had learnt a little worldly wisdom--enough to tell me that, if a man is unfortunate enough to have ideas of his own, he had best keep them to himself. I was tired of being called queer and strange and odd, and all those other epithets which I had so learned to hate; and here was Frank dragging all my weaknesses out into the sunshine that the old names might be branded on me again. What I should have said I don't know,

but at that moment, greatly to my joy, our expected guests arrived. They consisted of a parson, his wife, an old young lady, and a certain Jonathan Barnacles, whose wife had been a cousin to my father. All these had come to assist in the stirring up of the deadened consciences of my grandfather's congregation.

        From behind our wall of roses we could, without being seen, observe and criticise them as they walked up the long garden path.

        The advance was led by the Rev. Joseph Goodman and his portly spouse, both tall, both fat: she decidedly good looking, with large brown eyes and a Roman nose; he, decidedly greasy and with a dirty white choker. I was struck dumb with horror at the way in which the good lady turned her head from side to side, evidently bent, as I thought, on discovering our whereabouts, but, as I afterwards learnt, merely from a long-acquired habit and a wish to overlook no one.

        Close at their heels was a little angular figure, dressed in a very fashionable and juvenile manner, whose head and face were completely enveloped in a blue gauze veil. Frank said she had taken to attending revivals and staying to prayer-meetings only since the arrival in their circuit of a young assistant preacher whose mother she was old enough to be.

        The rear was brought up by Jonathan Barnacles,

Esq., at whom I looked with more interest; for, after the Dutch fashion, might he not be called a relation of mine? He was a lean, bony man of about two-and-forty, with large calm blue eyes, lanky and scanty hair and beard, and an enormous mouth--a mouth that seemed forever hungering and seeking after something. I wished he were no connection of mine when I looked at it, little child though I was. Looked at from the lip upwards, he might have been an angel; looked at from the lip downwards, he might have been a devil. He was dressed then--and I never, in all the years I knew him, saw him in anything else, except on Sundays--in a rusty brown jacket and a pair of dark green-and-blue-plaid trousers. To me those trousers have become so a part of the man that I can never see any like them without being unpleasantly reminded of him.

        As soon as the visitors had gone into the house Aunt Margaret rose to follow them, and Frank and I were left alone. He asked me if I were going to the revival meeting that evening. "You had better," he said; "it's great fun. I always do: I take my notebook and pencil; one hears things worth remembering sometimes. Besides, you'll get into hot water if you don't go, and pretend to be edified, too. There are just three grand crimes according to your grandfather's creed--to give expression to an idea that has not been propounded at least one hundred times before you were born; to believe in the pos-

sible salvation of a Roman Catholic; and to absent yourself from a little heaven below:
"I have been there, and still would go,
'Tis like a little heaven below--" hummed Frank as he rose to go into the house, where he would no doubt look up his "Golden Light," as he nicknamed Aunt Margaret.

        I went to the revival meeting that evening, for I had never been to one before. Aunt Margaret and I started some time after the others, so we had a pleasant long walk all to ourselves. Frank, in spite of the sage advice of the morning, did not go. I suppose, having got what he wanted, he did not care whether he pleased my grandfather or not, and could not make up his mind to leave an easy chair and cigar for "those purgatorial Methodist planks," as he irreverently called the straight-backed pews in my grandfather's chapel.

        We walked on in silence at first through the quiet twilight. At last I said: "Do you like going to revival meetings? Do they do you good, Aunt Margaret?"

        "I don't know that they ever did," she said, hesitating a little, "but Christ does show himself wonderfully sometimes; and I feel, if only one soul is saved, it must be God's own work and I must help it. Think, if only one soul be saved from endless pain and sin, what a glorious work."

        The twilight gave me boldness, so I said, "I wish you could feel as I do, that our Father will let nothing he has made be lost forever. As long as I believe as you do I could not love him, nor serve him; but since I have left off looking to the Bible, and listen to what he says in my own soul, I love him and I am happy."

        "I wish you could make me think so too," she said, "but I know it is wrong even to say so. If once we listen to our own hearts and use our reason, we go away from God. Yet do you know, if some one whom I loved very much were to die not loving Christ, I think--I am sure, I should go mad, quite mad. It is so terrible that you cannot pray for them, that you cannot do anything for them when once they are gone. We must pray for them now, now," she said, with a passionate earnestness that astonished me; she was so bright and placid generally.

        I looked up into her face, and I fancied there were tears in her eyes, but I could hardly tell, for it was so dark. I knew of whom she was thinking, and long after I remembered her words.

        The chapel was dimly lighted. Only round the pulpit there were two or three candles, whose light served to make clearly visible the three principal actors in the scene about to be performed.

        In front of the pulpit stood Cousin Jonathan, and when he spoke I could look at nothing but that mouth, that dreadful mouth, that seemed to have

a horrible fascination for me. On his right he was supported by the Rev. Joseph Goodman, who stood with eyes turned heavenwards and fat hands folded meekly across his greasy and distended waistcoat. On his left stood my grandfather, his cold hard eye engaged in critically examining the scattered occupants of the different pews.

        The proceedings were opened by the singing of a hymn, in which the torments awaiting all mankind, except that infinitesimal portion who are believers in Christ, were set forth vividly, and in no bad verse. That being ended, my grandfather engaged in prayer. The prayer was very much in the same key as the hymn had been, but a little bolder and weaker. When it was ended Brother Vickers prayed. He was one of those who most frequently called Frank's notebook into requisition; and if my grandfather's way of treating fire and brimstone was cool and calm, so certainly was not his. The good man fairly worked himself into a profuse perspiration and dragged away at the pew-back before us with both hands and with such fervent energy that I momentarily expected to see him fly, pew-back and all, against my head.

        Brother Vickers' prayer ended, another hymn was sung, and then Brother Jones was called upon.

        Some men must think the Almighty very ignorant, for they never kneel down to speak to him without feeling themselves called upon to explain to him

the whole plan of salvation, creation, and damnation: subjects on which, one might almost suppose, he would be better informed than themselves. Brother Jones was one of these. It may have been that my mood was not very charitable that evening, but it certainly seemed to me that, in place of praying to any other being, he was laying out for his own personal edification and satisfaction the whole circle of his theological knowledge.

        When we rose from our knees, before Cousin Jonathan gave out the next hymn, Mr. Goodman came forward and told us that, if the spirit of God had touched any of our hearts during the preceding prayers, we were requested to come up.

        "Do come up, dear friends, do come up," he said.

        The hymn finished, the spirit still remaining inactive and no one having accepted the invitation, it was repeated a second time, more urgently than at first.

        "Do come up, dear friends, do come up. While Brother Stiles engages in prayer, do come up."

        Brother Stiles began, Brother Stiles ended; no one moved.

        Before Brother Stubbles engaged, the invitation was again renewed:

        "The time is young, dear friends. Will no one begin? Will no one come up?"

        No one would; so Brother Stubbles began. Between every verse of the hymn that followed Mr.

Goodman continued to ask, at last almost with tears, if no one would come up, if no one would lead the way. "Do come, do come," he cried, as he moved both hands unctuously to and fro; and my heart was touched with pity for the unfortunate man. I looked round the chapel anxiously to see if there was no sign of an upward movement, but could discover none.

        Brother Snappers, who prayed next, seemed to have been moved in the same way, for he scolded quite rabidly: If there were any there that evening (and he knew there were such) whose hearts God had touched, let them beware! If they refused to accept the invitation, if they refused to come up, that night, that very moment, the spirit of God might leave them; and that day year, or that day month, or that day week, nay, by that time tomorrow, they might be in that place from which there would be no coming up forever. He did not say so, but he left one the impression that he would not have many tears to weep if such were the case.

        Brother Goodman himself prayed next, a rambling, meandering sort of prayer, which would have been just as suitable at a funeral, a coronation, or a wedding.

        Then Cousin Jonathan, after a last vain appeal, closed the meeting with a prayer; and that prayer, sweet, tender and earnest, seemed strangely out of harmony with the rest of the evening's proceedings.

'Twas like entering a silent sunny cove after being tossed among black breakers. He prayed for those who had not yet felt the love of Christ, that to them it might speak with its glorious power, till at length, perfect in purity, they might become but the living reflection of that unfathomable love. Perfect purity, perfect truth; through every sentence the yearning for it breathed; and when we rose from our knees and I looked up into his face, I could not see that the mouth was always craving something; I looked only at the serene eyes and brow.

        When the meeting was over we all walked home rather silently, for it had been a failure to all of us. As for myself, I had made up my mind, even in spite of Cousin Jonathan's beautiful prayer, never to attend another; never, come what would. On our way home the Goodmans turned in to have a chat at Brother Vickers's, Frank and Aunt Margaret went for a stroll on the beach, and when we got to the house my grandfather and Cousin Jonathan took themselves off to the study. There was nothing else to be done, so I curled myself up at one end of the great parlour sofa with Wolf's fairy tales. I still enjoyed them as much as I had done when I was eight years old, though I had such an old, old-womanish feeling sometimes.

        Presently my grandmother and Miss Mell came in and sat down at the other end of the room. I think they soon forgot my presence; Miss Mell kept

up a constant flow of talk, while my poor nervous little grandmother put in a timid little yes or no when she thought it required, and pulled away at the fringe of her crochet wrapper. She was old and not beautiful, but she looked so beside Miss Mell who sat opposite her in her juvenile dress, with her wrinkles and her sharp nose and chin, over which the skin was drawn so tightly that a little more would surely have caused it to crack. At first I was too much engrossed by my book to pay any attention to what they said; but when my tale was ended I sat and listened.

        "A pity she praises up those great fat girls so," Miss Mell was just saying of Mrs. Goodman. "They are the ugliest girls in the village, but she can't see it. She has a very good opinion of herself, too," continued Miss Mell, seeing that my grandmother gave no response; "and she imagines there is no other minister's wife to be compared with her, and I know that she takes good care never to go where there is any infectious disease, and--"

        Here the door opened and Mrs. Goodman's face, with its beaming smile, presented itself. "Did you think I was very long gone, dear?" she said to Miss Mell; and, kissing my grandmother affectionately, added, "It was a shame to leave you, but the dear good creatures would have it so, and I came back to you just as soon as I could, dear, just as soon." She seated herself close to my grandmother and, taking

one of her hands, proceeded to pat, smooth, and caress it during the whole of the conversation which ensued.

        "What were you talking about, dears, when I came in? I am sure it was something very entertaining; Miss Mell's conversation always is so entertaining. As Sarah Jane said to me yesterday afternoon: 'Oh, Ma! There comes Miss Mell. Shall we not have a nice afternoon!' And we had a pleasant time. Had we not, my dear?"

        "Very. Did I tell you that Alice Brown had come back?" asked Miss Mell.

        "No, dear, you did not; but when I was up at Mrs. Barnacles' this morning she told me of it, and that she has grown into such a beautiful girl! Is it true?"

        "Beautiful!" said Miss Mell, with a sharpening in her voice that made it very fit company for her nose. "I should beg to be excused from such beauty! She's as large as an elephant and a great deal coarser, and as for her forest of hair--the best thing she could do with it would be to cut it off; it's as black and coarse as a horse's tail!"

        "I don't know what she looks like," said Mrs. Goodman, shaking her head, "but she's been very badly brought up."

        "Brought up!" interrupted Miss Mell. "Why, she has not been brought up at all. They were the lowest people in the place till they got this money

left them, the lowest and the poorest; and she is the worst of them. Did you ever hear of that affair with young Mr. Blair?"

        "No, my dear, I heard nothing," said Mrs. Goodman, in her great interest for a moment forgetting to caress my grandmother's hand.

        "It's about two years ago now," said Miss Mell. "Mr. Albert Blair was swimming in the great pool near Brown's house and got cramp. He called for help, and the girl (she was then about fifteen) happened to hear him. You will hardly credit it, but in place of going for some one, she actually had the immodesty to tear off her own clothes and leap in; and, as if that were not enough, she actually carried him in her arms up to their house. You may believe me, for I had it all on the best authority; my servant was very intimate with the Browns in those days, and she told me all about it. She said, too, that he sent her ever so many presents afterwards, and thought nothing of stopping to speak with her in the streets--the brazen-faced creature."

        "Is it possible, my dear!" said Mrs. Goodman. "How wanting in modesty and self-respect! How very shocking!"

        "It's not the worst thing we shall hear of her, mark my words," said Miss Mell, with a gleam of intense satisfaction in her grey eyes as she gave utterance to this prediction; which, considering its nature, was by no means unlikely of fulfilment.

        "Ah! this is a sad, sad, wicked world," said Mrs. Goodman, gazing fixedly at the wall opposite and shaking her head slowly. "As I said to Sarah Jane only this morning, if once we depend on our own weak selves how miserably we shall fail, fail, fail!"

        Miss Mell, not perceiving the exact bearing of these remarks on the subject in hand, sat still; but my grandmother uttered a timid, "Yes."

        "Ah! you may well say yes, dear. I have had a dreadful blow this evening. Oh, it is a wicked, wicked world in which we live. If my dear girls had not given their hearts to Christ, I should tremble for them, yes, even for them"; and the tears that had been gathering in the good woman's eyes rolled slowly down her cheeks.

        "What have you heard?" said Miss Mell, who already scented something good.

        "Oh, you know all about it, no doubt, dear--about Dr. Harper, who I always thought such a dear, good man, and Mrs. Harvey."

        "Dr. Harper and Mrs. Harvey! I've heard nothing," said Miss Mell.

        "You don't say so, my dear! I'm so grieved I said one word about it. I made sure you knew it all. You know I never talk about such things, never, never; but, oh! it is the saddest, saddest thing I've heard for a long, long time; though I always knew that that Mrs. Harvey was not a good woman. I said so long ago--at the time she left our chapel for

the church. Mrs. Lovedy was nursing her when her first boy was born, and she told me things, dear, dreadful things; she said--" and there followed the relation, in minutest detail, of things such as I had not even dreamed of, whose hideous shadow had never yet been thrown across my young life. From my lonely African home I had brought an ignorance of evil (and of that which, holy and pure in itself, man's folly has made so) that might have been thought strange in a child of six years. Much that had been cause of vague speculation and wonder was made clear to me that night, and I was wretched; for, alas! is it not the old, old story--that the tree of knowledge is the tree of pain, and that, "In the day wherein thou eatest thou shalt surely die" stand written on every fruit of the wonderful tree?

        The gentlemen came in after a time to say good-night, and I slipped off the sofa and went to my own little room, for I did not feel in the mood to be spoken to by anyone.

        When I got there, it somehow seemed that all was changed; nothing looked as it used to look; the very light did not produce its old effect when it shone on the white bed curtains; and my beautiful bunch of roses told quite a different tale from that which it had whispered in the morning. I felt sour and bitter, and I took the poor bunch I had gathered with such care and flung it out of the window; then I partly undressed and sat down upon the floor and

set my candle down opposite me. It did me good to look at its wicked red flame flicker and flare. Before that night I had often felt sympathy with my candle; but then it had seemed to me a poor soul always striving to grow higher, and never succeeding; now it looked red and bad, like the new world that had been opened to me. This was a wretched earth, and perhaps, after all, there was a place of endless sin and therefore of endless pain; it would only be the world a little more worldly, I thought.

        Aunt Margaret came in to wish me good night just then; she had a crimson wrapper over her head, so I knew she had just returned from the beach. She looked more beautiful than ever and happier than I had ever seen her; but she seemed to have changed, just like the roses and the light.

        "I thought I should find you in bed," she said, stooping down over me. "Which are you studying--your little bare toes or the candle?"

        "Neither," I said; "but I wish I was not a woman. I hate women; they are horrible and disgusting, and I wish I had never been born rather than to be one."

        "Why, darling, what is the matter now? I am very glad I am a woman; it is so sweet"; and a soft smile played round her mouth as she spoke.

        "Did you like the revival meeting this evening?" she asked me after a pause.

        "No. It was horrible. I am never going to another," I answered, briefly.

        "Oh yes, you will. You will make papa so angry if you do not."

        "I can't help it," I answered. "There are some places that make one wicked, and it's not right to go to them. I feel tonight as if everyone in the world were a hypocrite, and I shall be one too, if I go to these places just for the sake of pleasing some one else--as bad as Miss Mell and Mrs. Goodman.

        "You are tired tonight, darling; tomorrow things will look brighter to your poor little eyes. You have sat up too late. Good night, sweet;" and she went out and I was left alone with my red light. I soon got chilly and sleepy and crept into bed.

        I remember that day because, first, on it the joy and peace I had lived in for two years began to break; because on it I first entered the shadow of that cloud in whose darkness I was to walk for years, hoping nothing, believing nothing, trusting nothing.

III.

THE MAN WITH THE MOUTH

        Undine, as soon as she was dressed, ran down to the beach; there the tiny waves danced laughing on the sides of the big ones, which in their turn chased and overtook one another, tossing their heads high into the sunny air and turning to white foam, or making a mad dash for the land and dying away in laughing ripples on the sand.

        On such a morning, on this side of twenty, with no ghosts to haunt one and come in between the happy sunshine and the eyes, who would not forget that there are such things as revival meetings, and good people who always say one thing and mean another, and jealous old maids and unfaithful wives, and dry hippopotamus-hide-like old men? Who would not forget that underneath this green, laugh-

ing, merry old world lies fire and brimstone, into which a fall from any rock may send one in a moment? Undine forgot this and everything, and grew at last as wild as the dancing waves. She had brought poor George Macdonald with her for company, but now she threw him down upon the sand, where the waves caught him and made fine sport of his Unspoken Sermons and almost ran away with them; while she leapt from rock to rock, and finally pulled off her shoes and stockings, the better to keep her footing and capture the queer little beings which every wave left behind it in the rocky hollows.

        She was very busily securing an extraordinary little monster, with a multiplicity of tails and feelers, and, with her head some two feet lower than her feet, was in no small danger of having an unexpected bath in the shallow pool, when she heard a voice at her elbow.

        Rising to her feet with some difficulty and throwing back the wild hair from her eyes, she saw, standing beside her none other than the man with the green-plaid trousers and the mouth--Cousin Jonathan.

        He asked what she was looking for; and when he understood very soon captured the queer little fish.

        The presence of a second person had in an instant taken all the exhilaration and life out of the morning and brought her back to the disagreeable human

world, in which wild hair, wet clothes, and bare feet were terribly disgraceful things. She felt conscience-stricken and looked down into the little pool, wishing she were one of the little fishes swimming there.

        Cousin Jonathan held out the fish he had just caught with one hand; in the other he had poor George Macdonald, looking almost as wet and disreputable as its mistress.

        "I find your name in this book, so I suppose you must have dropped it," he said as he gave it to her. "The waves were very nearly stealing it, as I fear they may you one of these days, if you continue such a very zealous little naturalist."

        "I'm not a naturalist; I don't know anything about fishes or about anything else," stammered Undine, hardly knowing what she said.

        Cousin Jonathan smiled, not an unpleasant smile of ridicule, but one of quiet amusement.

        "They say, when we know our own deficiencies they are half rectified. You would like to know all about a strange little fellow like this, would you not?"

        "I would like to know something about him," she answered, the kind, quiet manner of her companion already beginning to set her at her ease. "When I was at home I used to try and learn a little about plants and insects, but I never had anyone to help me and I had not the right books."

        "Perhaps I could help you a little," he said; "at

least I am sure I could, with books; but if you do not wish to study them, what makes you take such trouble to catch them?"

        "I don't know," said Undine, "but I never see anything beautiful without wanting to have it, especially if it's very hard to get. It's not beautiful now," she said, turning over the poor little fish in her hand.

        "I never can see some beautiful things without wishing for them," he said, and when he spoke those words he spoke the truth.

        He helped her over the rocks, with that respectful kindness with which even little children like to be treated; and, when they reached the beach, sat down beside her and let his talk wander on, from a description of the nature and habits of the little creature in her hand to that wonderland which the microscope makes visible; and Undine sat and listened till she forgot his mouth and forgot even her own bare toes.

        "We must go home to breakfast," he said at last, and Undine went in search of her shoes and stockings. Cousin Jonathan never forgot when it was time for a meal.

        On their walk home he changed the conversation and tried to draw her out; for the study of character pleased him, and he felt attracted by the queer, babyish, womanish creature. She was an orphan, too, and almost friendless, and he pitied her. More-

over, had she not looked lovely as she stood there on the rocks with the hot blood in her cheeks and her exquisite little feet clinging to the rough stones. Cousin Jonathan liked beautiful things--of the feminine gender.

        Undine as she trotted beside him had little idea that he or anyone else could see anything in her to admire; but with a woman's quick perception she felt intuitively that whatever she might say, it was all right, it would be well received; and accordingly her ideas and words flowed forth in such a stream as would have astonished anyone who knew her as the shy awkward child in whose throat even yes and no seemed usually to stick.

        Undine passed the day almost entirely in Cousin Jonathan's society. Aunt Margaret was busy, and when she had time to spare was with Frank, who was returning to college the next day. In the evening Cousin Jonathan left, for his wife was an invalid and he could never be from home long. At parting he told Undine that he would send her books and that, in return, she was to write and tell him what she thought of them. When he walked down the garden path, she stood looking after him and feeling almost as though an old friend were going.

IV.

GOING TO CHAPEL

        Undine herself could hardly have traced the gyration of the thoughts that were tossing in her own

small head, but the result was an unalterable determination that she would go to chapel no more. It was her duty, yet she could not go, she thought; and wondered wearily if she were always to be afflicted with senses of duty driving her into paths where no one else would or could walk.

        The Goodmans and Miss Mell had been asked out to tea, so there were none but the family round the table that evening.

        "You must make haste," said Mr. Roch, "and get your tea done; the meeting begins in three-quarters of an hour."

        "You must take care to wrap yourself up warmly," said the grandmother; "you are not accustomed to our climate yet."

        "I am not going," said Undine.

        "What do you say?" asked her grandmother, in whose throat the words stuck so fast that not even Frank, who sat next her, could hear them.

        "I am not going to the meeting this evening," she answered, staring very hard at her plate as she spoke.

        "Do you feel ill tonight, dear? You look very pale," said Aunt Margaret.

        "I am quite well, thank you; but I would rather not go tonight."

        "I wish all my household to be there," said the dried hide, straightening and elongating himself in his seat.

        "Perhaps she wishes to stay with Frank, as it is the last evening," said the poor nervous little grandmother in an apologetic little whisper.

        "Frank is going with Margaret," said the dried hide, with his leathery, intonationless voice. It sounded so terrible to Undine and filled her with such tremblings, that the brown Wesleys and Fletchers in the little bookcase behind her grandfather seemed to go up to the ceiling and come slowly down to the floor, and she wondered if everyone in the room could not hear her heart beat.

        "I would rather not go, I don't mind staying alone at all," she said at last.

        "Why do you not wish to go?" said her grandfather, fixing his cold eyes upon her.

        "I don't think it is--I mean--I don't get any good from going, and, I--would--rather--stay--please." Her voice had almost died away as she spoke the last words.

        "Why do you not wish to go?" repeated her grandfather in his usual calm voice.

        The blood came back to Undine's cheek, and with it her spirit rose.

        "Because it would be wicked of me," she said, and then, feeling that anything would be better than the silence that ensued, she went on, "I can't go and pretend to be serving God when all--"

        "Be silent," said her grandfather. "Little children who act in this manner should be whipped and

taught how to behave themselves. It is a pity you are not a few years younger, Undine."

        The child looked up at him, with eyes almost blinded by rage and hatred, and trembling in every limb; then suddenly there came to her a thought--the thought of One who bore all things in meekness, wrongs in silence, who returned cruelty with acts of mercy, and the hatred of evil with the love of a god. Through long years of ceaseless dreaming he had become to her no vague shadowy existence of the long past, but a present living reality, ever aiding and ever sympathising, to whose influence were ascribed all her higher thought and better feeling, no matter from what source they arose. She thought of him, and no answer rose to her lips; and in place of the fury only a cold fainting at her heart was left. She sat here so quietly, breaking up into little bits the bread in her plate, that Frank, remembering the Undine of the old African days, gazed at her in astonishment, expecting an outburst. None came; and when her grandfather rose from the table and told her to get ready she quietly went to obey him.

        "Conquered," thought the old man as he put his coat on in the hall; but perhaps he would hardly have thought so could he have seen what was passing in the heart of the conquered. "It is very hard and bitter to have to go after all this, but because it is bitter it must be right to go just this once, at

least as a punishment to myself." So she reasoned as she walked beside him on the way to the little Methodist chapel.

        The meeting passed for Undine very much as the last had done; only that this evening, on the seat in front of her, sat a tall, gaunt old woman in a black bonnet who from time to time pushed and pulled at the shoulder of the sallow girl who sat next her, in an endeavour to drive her up to the rails every time the invitation was uttered afresh.

        "I don't want to go," the poor creature whispered, drawing back; and she would, Undine thought, have kept her ground had it not been for Mrs. Goodman, who, leaning over the back of the bench, whispered loudly in her ear, "Go up, my dear; go up."

        The girl looked round with a startled expression. It seemed as though all things, above, around, below, were combining to send her "up." The poor preacher calling from the rails, the prayers hurling anathemas at those who did not accept the invitation, the hand of her companion persistently applying physical force in the direction of salvation, the mysterious voice from the gloomy depths behind urging her upwards: these were forces which she had not strength to resist, and rising slowly she went up.

        Undine wondered what she found to tell him when Mr. Goodman's greasy head was bent down over her.

        She was the only fruit that evening, but as they

walked home Mrs. Goodman expressed her joy that the blessed work of Christ had begun and that she had been the humble instrumentality in his hands for beginning it.

        "A word in season, my dear Mrs. Jones, a word in season; let us be thankful when the dear Lord allows us to speak a word in season, allows us poor weak voices to speak a word for him."

        Mrs. Jones, whose road lay in the same direction, was accompanying them part of the way. She fully acquiesced, and at parting begged Mrs. Goodman to come and spend the next day with her. Mrs. Goodman was deeply grieved, but the next day they were returning to Greenwood; she would not see more of her dear Mrs. Jones. That lady was, in her turn, deeply grieved at hearing this, and bargained that Sarah Jane and Elizabeth Ann should be sent over to spend a week with her.

        Mrs. Goodman said there was no one in the world with whom she would so gladly have her treasures as her dearest, oldest, friend, and they should surely come. Mrs. Goodman's dearest always was the person whom she happened to be addressing at the moment.

        They parted with an affectionate embrace, and Mrs. Goodman was still wiping her cheek from the traces of Mrs. Jones's rather moist salutation when she remarked: "What a dear, good creature Mrs. Jones is! What a pity she should think so much of

dress at her age; and oh, the adornments of the outer man, what are they, my dear Miss Mell, what are they?"

        "Yes, indeed," said Miss Mell, "yes, indeed."

        "And her poor husband, my dear," continued Mrs. Goodman, "he can't stand it, my dear, he can't stand it. Did you notice the really superb silk she had on--really superb."

        "I don't think it was silk; it was alpaca," said Miss Mell.

        "Alpaca, my dear! You are quite mistaken. She sat close to the rails, and I was looking at it from the time she came in till we went out, and what a lovely brown it was."

        "I think you are mistaken about the silk," said Miss Mell, determined not to yield her point.

        "I know it's silk, my dear," replied Mrs. Goodman. "We were in the middle of the first prayer when she came in, and I heard the rustle of the silk as soon as ever she opened the door. I thought, 'Whoever is that!' So I just looked up as she went by."

        "Well, it might be," said Miss Mell. "I know she is as extravagant as she is stingy."

        "Yes, it's a great pity; she is such a dear, good creature," said Mrs. Goodman, with much earnestness; "it is a sad, sad pity she should be so close: the fly, the fly in the pot of ointment, my dear. Ah!

that fly!" And so the good souls continued their conversation all the way home.

        Arrived there, Undine ran away to her own little room, tonight to study not her candle, but the little brown Testament. She sat reading a little and dreaming a great deal till she had worked herself into a state of beatific felicity; and in this state Aunt Margaret found her when half an hour after she entered the room.

        "What is making you so happy?" she asked. "You look like one of the little angels I used to dream about long ago."

        "Nothing," answered Undine, the golden light fading as quickly from her face as it was from her heart. Heaven on earth is only found in perfect solitude, whether by saint or by poet; and 'tis only a step from the heights of the celestial mountains to the depths of the valleys below.

        When Aunt Margaret had left her she began slowly to pull off her boots; and it seemed as though the thought of last night, mingled with today's bitter feelings, all came back to her.

        She could just catch the sound of her grandfather's voice as it rose in prayer from the room below; and as she sat there listening, the old hobgoblins of doubt who had been silent for so many months began their dance over her once more. They asked the old unanswerable questions, and new ones, more unanswerable still; and dared even to lay profane hands

on the words that had just been transporting her into the seventh heaven.

        When, however, the prayer below was ended and she had got into bed, she put these suggestions of the evil one from her. She had been reading too much, she had been thinking too much, she had been turning her eyes away from Christ. For a whole month she would touch no book but His word and think no more, and so resolving she fell asleep.

        The cloud, the little cloud, at first no larger than a man's hand, waxed greater as the months went by--grew in the end to be so thick and heavy that at last even Aunt Margaret's sunshine was absorbed by it.

        Undine went quietly to chapel Sunday after Sunday; and a meek, sweet, quiet child she was, they all said, even if rather dull and stupid. They little knew how those still eyes made food of their every action; how forever they were being hung in the balances and dismissed to have that unchanging "Tekel" written up against them in her mind.

        She kept her resolution, and except when at her lessons allowed no book to tempt her but her little brown Testament; that she pored over daily for hours, just as she had done in her little whitewashed sanctum at home.

        Was the Testament most to blame, or the inherent wickedness of her own small heart, or the good women with whom she came in contact in her grand-

father's house who, when not in chapel or talking of their neighbours, were thanking the Lord that they were not as their sisters in the mire?

        Whichever it might be, at the end of three months this small heathen in a Christian land had made up her mind to go no more to chapel, had come to the conclusion that neither prayer-meetings nor their cousins, the class-meetings, were the gates of the Golden City, but rather the entrances to that other way that, beginning with a short circumbendibus, at last leads one straight to the gates of the city whose walls are of groans and whose pavements of sighs.

        Having now a very decided hankering after that Golden City and a very decided impression that she was bound for it, it could not but be that she should eschew those entrances. She did not believe that at the gates of the Golden City stands a great winged angel:

        "How old are you?" he asks of the applicant for entrance.

        "Thirteen years."

        "Have you always tried to do as your conscience told you? But, no, stay. Had you no one who gave you bread and butter and shoes?"

        "Yes."

        "Oh, then they kept your conscience. If you only tried to obey them-- Well and faithfully done, enter into joy, and sit down on a throne."

        This was what she did not believe; and so one Sunday morning she came downstairs with a laggard step and slow.

        When she got to the door of the breakfast room she ran back again, to pray one prayer more, for it was a terrible mountain she had to cross that morning.

        The window of the breakfast room was wide open and the morning light forced its way in, gilding for once the brown Wesleys and Fletchers in the bookshelf, and playing over the little bunch of flowers Aunt Margaret had put beside her plate. She ate little, and before breakfast was half over had strewed the carpet with the leaves of her broken flowers.

        Aunt Margaret wondered what was wrong with her little niece, and made vain conjectures; while Undine kept repeating to herself the nice little speech she had prepared to make to her grandfather, which she had even taken the trouble to write down the night before by way of strengthening her memory. She would tell him that she could not go to chapel, because it did her harm; but she would tell it him so humbly and in such terms that even he must forgive her.

        But alas for human plans! Every time she essayed to begin, the words stuck fast in her throat; the precious moments sped and breakfast was over without one syllable of her carefully prepared little

oration's having got further than the region of her heart, where it lay, heavy as lead.

        When, however, her grandfather had risen to go, and had passed out into the passage, she also rose quickly and, standing in the doorway, said, "Grandfather."

        He turned round slowly and fixed his cold eyes on her.

        "What is the matter?" he asked.

        Seek of the dumb an answer, and you will as easily find it as Undine the words of her precious and laboriously concocted little speech. They had hopelessly vanished and gone, and in their place came only these--"I am not going to chapel."

        "I thought I had given you clearly to understand, Undine, on a previous occasion, that I wished you always to go. I allow no disregard of my wishes in this house." So saying, he turned round to enter his study, but Undine passed him quickly and stood in the doorway before him.

        "I am not going," she said. "It is a wicked cruel world in which one human being has power over another, but you cannot make me do what I think is wrong; and if I go to chapel just because I fear you I shall be a hypocrite like all the others who go there; and I will not. All people who love Christ should keep away from such places, which only bring disgrace and shame upon his name. If he came

to earth today he would denounce them as he did the pharisees and priests in his day. It's all a mockery and an empty show, and I shall never go again, never, never."

        Her words followed one another in a quick incoherent stream while she pounded away vigorously with one little hand in the palm of the other, till both were furiously red. Her grandfather stood silently looking down at her. In his heart horror and wonder largely mingled with hatred were moving, but his face told nothing. For one moment he felt a wish to strike her, but she scared him, as she had often done her old opponents, by her wild earnestness. He looked at her again, and then, without making an effort to enter his study, walked out the front door, conquered for the first time in his life; conquered by a little child.

        And Undine, the conqueror? Alas! Has not the victor's fate been, from the beginning, to lie down and weep? She went out into the garden and dropped down onto the soft green turf among the rose trees.

        The sweet Sunday bells were ringing loud; through the clear morning air their music came to her, sounding strangely soft and sweet now that she knew they would never summon her again. For all others they were calling, but they had no word for her; she was one alone, without kinship or fel-

lowship among men--so she said in her bitterness. Had she been born with a curse over her head? Would it be so wherever she might go, that her hand should be against every man, and every man's hand against hers? Or was she really so much worse than others that, wherever she might go, love and sympathy would be denied her? Would she have to walk on alone, alone, unloved, misunderstood, right on to the end?

        She was sobbing and digging away with her toes into the soft earth when Aunt Margaret came and kneeled down beside her.

        "Go away," said Undine, fiercely. "I am alone. Leave me alone."

        "Undine darling, what have I done to you? What has anyone done to you? Undine, you say you love Christ and are trying to be his child. Don't you think you were wrong to speak as you did just now?"

        Undine threw from her the soft hand that was caressing her hair, and said, though more gently, "Please go away"; and Aunt Margaret rose and left her.

        Long after, Undine thought, with tears bitterer than those she then shed, of the hand she had thrown from her that morning; but they were bitter enough to the little child--the little child, who had not yet found out, as we all must sooner or later, that the path through life in which each soul must tread is

single; that no two walk abreast; that where one soul stands, never has stood, and never shall stand, another; but that each man's life and struggle is a mystery, incomprehensible and forever hid from every heart but his own.

V.

A SUNNY AFTERNOON AND A WILD NIGHT

        The grass was rich with great golden-eyed flowers, and he picked them as he lay there, to fasten in the golden hair of the woman he loved--long silky yellow hair that hung about her, soft and fleecy as the small white cloud that lay dreaming far away to seaward.

        Undine, sitting a little apart with her book, looked up ever and again to watch them; they were pleasant to look at as the blue sky overhead or the green grass and shimmering light below. Every now and then she caught a word of their conversation; they were making little plans for the spending of the long good years that were coming to them, when they two should be always together. At las