wandered off among the rocks and left me forlorn in the garden. A robuster and less sensitive nature would have laughed down all these small troubles, and have scampered into their midst imperious and importunate. A healthier child, with sensibilities less on the edge of the skin, not cursed with what the French call an ombrageux temper, would have broken through this unconscious hostility, and have captured her place on the domestic hearth-would probably not have been aware of an unfriendly atmosphere. But this same morbid sensitiveness, mark of my unblessed race, has been the unsleeping element of martyrdom in my whole existence. "Meet the world with a smile," said a wise and genial friend of mine, "and it will give you back a smile.' But how can one smile with every nerve torn in the dumb anguish of anticipated pain and slight? How can one smile burdened by the edged sensibilities and nervousness of sex and race, inwardly distraught and forced to face the world, unsupported by fortune, family, or friends, with a brave front? It is already much not to cry. But I shed all my tears in childhood, and left my sadness behind me. When the bigger troubles and tragedies came, as they speedily did, I found sustainment and wisdom in arming myself with courage and gaiety, and so I faced the road. I had then, as ever since, plenty of pleasure to temper unhappiness, plenty of bright rays to guide me through the obscurities of sentiment and suffering. An unfailing beam of humour then and now shed its smile athwart the dim bleak forest of emotions through which destiny bade me cut my way. . One dark moment of peculiar bitterness now makes me smile. I record it as proof of the tiny mole-hills of childhood that constitute mountains. It shows the kind of booby I was, and have ever been, but none the less instructs upon the nature of infant miseries. We were walking along the road one afternoon with Miss Kitty. A public vehicle tore down the hill led by four horses, three white and one brown. We were four: I the eldest, and my three pretty step-sisters. Birdie shouted "Oh, look at the three lovely white horses! That's us three. Angela is the brown horse." I regarded this choice as a manifest injustice. There was no reason on earth that I should be a brown horse any more than one of my step-sisters. I was angry and sore at what I deemed a slight, and cried— "I won't be the brown horse. I'll be one of the white horses, or else I'll go away and leave you." "No, you won't, and you may go if you like. We don't want you. We're three nice white horses." Here was an instance when I might have laughed down the exclusiveness of these proud babies. But no. I must turn back, and walk home alone, sulky and miserable, nursing my usual feeling of being alone in a cold universe. An hour of terrible fright for all of us was the morning Birdie fell into Colamore Harbour. We were coming down from Killiney Hill, a lovely spot more prosperous lands might envy us. Birdie walked inside, in a pretty short frock of pale green alpaca, and a new hat with red poppies among the ribbon. In those days Birdie and I ran it closely as infant beauties. Her hair was a shade more flaxen than mine, and the roses of her cheeks a shade paler. She was fatter, too, and less vapoury; but I carried the palm as an ethereal doll, with a classic profile. Alas! the promise of that period was never fulfilled. Both profile and pride of beauty vanished on the threshold of girlhood, to make way for the appearance of a dairymaid in their distinguished stead. The wall of Colamore Har bour was protected by an iron chain that swung low from the big stones that divided the festoons. Birdie's foot slipped, and the child in a twinkling tumbled over, and plunged, with a hollow crash, into the heavy grey sea. Happily there were bathing-women and fishermen within hail, and as quickly as she had taken an unexpected bath, Birdie was once more in our midst, dripping like a Newfoundland, white and shaking with terror. One of the big boys took her up in his arms and tenderly carried her home. We all followed, awed and hysterical. on the gravel path in a woeful state-her wet green skirt clinging to her little legs, the discoloured poppies of her hat flat upon the wet ribbon. "Change that child's clothes," said my mother, indifferently, as if she were all her life accustomed to the sight of a terrified child rescued from the deep, and went on talking to the gardener. It would be a bold and inhuman assertion to make, and certainly one I am far from maintaining, that harsh treatment is the proper training of children. But my mother's method has undoubtedly answered better than that of many a tender or self-sacrificing mother. It built us in an admirable fashion for adversity, -taught us to rely upon ourselves, taught us, above all, that necessary lesson-how to suffer and not whine. It is only when I observe how feebly and shabbily a spoiled woman can face trouble and pain, that I feel one may with reason cherish some pride of the power of enduring both with a smile. And when, stupefied and shamed, I contemplate the petty trickeries to which worldliness and untruthfulness can reduce a woman, the infamous devices a slender purse can drag educated ladies into, thus am I partially consoled for the sufferings of childhood. It is much, when one fronts battle, to have been reared in an atmosphere of absolute rectitude, of truthful and honourable instinct. It is a blessing indeed when love includes all this. But bleak as My mother was standing in the front garden talking to the gardener, when the party marched in upon her. She frowned as Birdie was deposited the start was, I would not have had it otherwise at the cost of to a Scottish mother. Kings these great and virile virtues. And since it would appear that the Irish habit of boasting is an incorrigible weakness, and that even in these democratic days my people still persist in descending from kings who have slept in peace over seven hundred years, and may without any extravagant scorn of fact be presumed to have passed for ever into the state of legend, I am glad to acknowledge the priceless debt of common-sense are all very well in their way, especially if they happen to be reigning; but when one learns as authentic fact that an Irish journalist has offered an article to an unknown editor, accompanied with a letter stating that the blood of seven kings runs in his veins, one feels that such a race is all the more rational for a little foreign blood to modify the imperishable and universal blight of royalty. CHAPTER XXVII.-A DISMAL END OF HOLIDAYS. For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually shot a man. He was a figure of romance, if ever there was one. He went about with long boots, and an opera-glass slung over his shoulder. He had lovely dark blue eyes, which Pauline described as Byronic, and lisped most captivatingly. He was a kind of adopted relative, and, as a special correspondent, has passed into history. He became our elder brother, and in the years to come solaced himself in camp by regarding Agnes as a lost early love. We lay about him on the grass as he told us the tales of the Wonderful Nights. Better still, he invented adventures of his own almost as alarming and enthralling. He told us that he had been to Persia, which was not true-but no matter. We believed in the Persian princess who had swung her His fear of my mother filled us with a rapturous sense of comradeship, though this fear was quite foolish, for my mother never concealed her preference for his sex, and to men was always as amiable as she was the reverse to us. He beamed and joked with her, but was careful to scan her visage, on the look-out for the first symptoms of storm. The bolt fell rudely upon his shoulders the day he lamed the horses, and did some damage to the waggonette. I never knew what she said to him; but it must have been exceedingly bitter and unbearable, for his cheeks were as white as paper, and his eyes as black as sloes. He was penniless for the moment, and down on his luck, which makes a man more nervously sensitive to slight than in his happier hours. My stepfather was sorry for him; but, remembering the horses, was relieved to send him off to Spain with a new outfit and the inevitable operaglasses. "I shall never forget the old Dalkey garden," he said to Agnes, on the morning of his departure, quite as sentimentally as if he were talking to a grown-up young person. The rascal was always playing a part for his own imagination, and even a slip of a girl of fourteen was better than nobody to regret after a three weeks' stay in a romantically situated house. It was stronger than him. He could not exist without a fancied love-affair on hand. In the Carlist War, where he claimed to have saved the colours of Spain, rejected the hand of an Infanta, and lent his last five-pound note to Don Carlos, which that illustrious person forgot to return,-'tis a way, he would say musingly, with princes, -as he started for battle, he pathetically adjured his comrades to cut off a lock of his blue-black hair and send it to Agnes, with the assurance that his last thought was given to her. In the pauses of battle he actually entertained himself by composing an imaginary correspondence with an ardent and amorous Agnes, which he read aloud to his dearest friend, with tears in his voice. But that, as Mr Kipling in his earlier manner would say, is quite another story, and has nothing to do with the tale of little Angela. I had no time to lament this fresh eclipse of romance, for Miss Kitty was busy preparing my things for Lysterby, and two days after Edmond's sentimental farewell and departure, I myself most dolefully had said a bitterer good-bye to the rocks and harbour and hills of Dalkey, and had been transported into the town house, to see Mrs Clement for the last time, and, along with her, make my farewell visit to Kildare. It was a grievous hour for poor Nurse Cockrane. Jim, her husband, who was down at Wexford two months ago when I came back from Lysterby, had returned a fortnight earlier with death in his eyes. When we got down at the post-house, the soft fine rain of Ireland was drizzling over the land. A few steps brought us to the top of the green, with the slit of water along the sky and two wild swans visible through the pearl mist. All the blinds of nurse's windows were drawn down, and I instantly recalled a like picture the day Stevie dropped out of life. The door was open, and a group of working men, in their Sunday suits, were talking in undertones. "What has happened?" asked Mrs Clement, alarmed. 'Troth, ma'am, an' 'tis a bad day for herself," said one. "A power of ill-luck," said another. "A fine young man struck down like that in the flower of youth." Mrs Clement hurried inside, and I followed her in excited silence. In the familiar old parlour, with the china dogs and the green spinet, dear kindly nurse sat back in the black horse hair arm-chair, sobbing and moaning in the frantic way peasants will when grief strikes them, and around her in voluble sympathy women hushed and exclaimed and ejaculated, "Glory be to God!” "But who'd think of it?" "Poor Jim! but 'tis himself was the good poor crathur." I advanced hesitatingly, abashed and frightened by such an explosion of sorrow-I who always went under a bed to weep lest others should mock me. Not then or since could I ever have given expression to such expansive and boisterous feeling, restrained by a fierce and indomitable pride even at so young an age. Nurse caught sight of me, and held out both hands. I encircled her neck with my arms, and pressed my cheek against hers, and when her sobs had subsided, she stood up, holding me still in a frenzied clasp. "Come, darling, and look at him for the last time. Poor Jim! He loved you as if you had been his own, his very own, for sure never a child had he." She took me into Stevie's room, the best bedroom, and on the bed lay a long rigid form. I hardly recognised the dear friendly Jim of my babyhood, on whose knee I so often sat, in the pallid emaciated visage, with the lank black hair round it, and the moustache and beard as black as pitch against the hollow waxen cheek. The same candles were alight upon the table in daytime, and the air yielded the same heavy odour of flowers as on that other day I had penetrated into this room, and found Stevie in his coffin. I shuddered and clung to nurse's skirt, sick with a nameless re |