one was coming from that direction. The dogs had disappeared, but she could still hear them barking, and it was not angry barking. She listened intently, and caught the sound of a feeble footstep coming along the road; then she heard a continual low talking. Well she knew the step and voice-they were her husband's, and he was talking to the dogs. She raised herself

and called.

'Aye, aye, I know,' said the voice. You be quiet, you be quiet.' She tried to get up, but once in the tarpaulin, it was not easy for her to get out of it; so she lay still in the ditch, and began to explain in her shrill voice :—

'The wheel come off, and what the folks 'll do for their things I should like to know! And there's Mrs. Gundry's candles burning in the cart against anyone should come by, and here's Godwin's tarpaulin in the ditch with me, and he wanted it tonight most particular; and the horse is all right, but the wheel come off, and I've hurt my foot and couldn't walk.'

Then you be quiet and lay down,' said old Saxton, feebly. 'I'm a'most done, S'lina, I can't listen to no talking. I knew 'twas that wheel; I put it off, and put it off, ever since last Saturday. I'm so weak now, I hadn't the strength to do it. 'Twasn't your fault. You drink this, S'lina.' He pulled a bottle of tea out of his pocket.

Selina put her mouth to the bottle, and sucked with eagerness. 'Well, that was good of you,' she said; 'I've been wanting a cup of tea beyond everything. But why didn't you send someone along, instead of killing yourself like this?'

It was just like old Saxton; whatever he did, he must do himself, and in his own way. He growled, but it was at himself.

'I spoke rough to you to-day, S'lina,' he said. Perhaps he would have said more, but she cut him short:

'Now, we can't neither of us move any more, so you come along in here with me and the dogs, and we'll keep warm till daylight anyhow.'

By this time the old horse had found out his master, and was snuffling about his coat affectionately. Saxton took a large chunk of bread out of his pocket, and began to feed the horse, talking to him all the while, and stroking his nose. Only when this duty was done did he creep into the tarpaulin by his little wife's side the dogs crept in too: Puss settled herself down again, and in a minute or two all was still.

'I'm a'most done, S'lina,' said the old man presently; 'I feel

as if the whole world was atop of my head, and all them stars.'

You go to sleep, then,' she answered. 'You keep warm and go to sleep, and we'll be back for Christmas dinner to-morrow. I'll get Dick Smith to take the parcels round, and go up to Godwin's to tell him to send down for the tarpaulin.'

Silence for a while. Then he began to talk again.

'Forty year last Michaelmas! And I spoke a bit rough to you this morning, S'lina.'

'You just go to sleep; there's something for you,' she said, and turned and gave him a hearty kiss.

'We haven't done much o' that,' was his answer, 'since we went a-courtin' forty year ago last Michaelmas.'

'Forty year,' he repeated at intervals, and I'm a'most done. I'm very near done for, S'lina.'

At last he seemed to fall asleep. Little Selina was half frightened, but her pain was easier, and at last she fell asleep too. It was an odd family party in the ditch under the tarpaulin-husband and wife, and dogs and cat, and the old horse asleep with his head down close by. The moon rose into a cloudless sky, and looked down at them through the bare and motionless boughs of the elms above them.

At six o'clock the postman, driving down from Northstow, came to a dead halt at the spot. The candles had burnt away long ago, but the moon showed him the broken-down cart, and the horse, and the tarpaulin in the ditch. He called out and awoke Selina, who knew not in the least where she was. She had been dreaming of a certain village in the east country, and of brothers and sisters, some dead, some vanished out of sight and almost out of memory; and of a young carpenter's apprentice with light blue eyes, who had one day asked her to 'walk with him.'

The dogs jumped out of their nest, and began to bark. The postman got down, disengaged one of his lamps, and stepping into the ditch, uncovered the tarpaulin. Selina's bright black eyes peered out at him; she began to recollect what had happened. But the old man beside her lay numb and speechless. His eyes were closed, and he hardly seemed to breathe. He had spent the last of his strength in his solitary search for his faithful little wife; the second stroke had come.

W. WARDE FOWLER.

THE CATHEDRAL OF SWIFT.

OUTSIDE there is a wild sky and scudding clouds; now a wisp of lovely silver floating on the pitchy dark; again the Lady Moon herself sailing serenely into view, only to be swallowed up at once by the remorseless night. The streets are so wet that, looking sideways at them with a reflection of light upon them, they are like the bed of a river. The booth-owners in Patrick Street are indoors. As one goes down this most picturesque slum, one has glimpses, across flaring gas-jets and merchandise, of cheap crockery and gaudy prints, tin cans and sheeps' heads, old clothes and looking-glasses, of snug interiors with redshawled women comfortable by their fires; for it is no evening for customers. If it were fine the booths would be flanked by stalls in the street for the sale of fish, vegetables, and coarse meat; there would be a noise of much high-pitched conversation from neighbour to neighbour-placid children would be amusing themselves on the kerb, and inquiring dogs sniffing in the gutters. But it is too wild for even the dogs, and we have the street to ourselves, and receive many a curious glance as the flaming gas-jets throw us into prominence. It is like the Ghetto of a foreign town, gay-coloured and fantastic.

Within the Cathedral how different it is! St. Patrick's lies so low, that, having descended that hill to it, one goes down steps to its interior. Those low-lying streets follow the course of a subterranean river, the Poddle, which having slipped away from its father, Dodder, out in a green and pleasant place, sinks to be a Dublin sewer. Its waters used to rise many feet in St. Patrick's before the Cathedral was restored by Sir Benjamin Guinness. In the Cathedral the night has blotted out the stained windows little by little. There are lights up in the choir for the Evensong, but the side aisles and transepts are in midnight dark. There is scarcely a flutter of light where we are sitting, close to the brass lozenge underneath which the dust

His bust by

of Swift lies neighbouring the dust of Stella. Roubillac is dark, and its terrible inscription 'Here, where fierce indignation no more can lacerate his heart.'

There are myriads of empty chairs between us and the far-off lights and voices. We twain are the congregation, with a pair of sightseers who come in for ten minutes and retire, and one who goes tip-toe down the aisle, the darkness having spoilt his sightseeing. The Dean and the choristers make a little pageant for themselves every evening at the dusk, filing in a white-robed procession up the nave and the chancel.

The darkness which had blotted out the jewels of the windows helped the candles to light up the banners of the Knights of St. Patrick over the oak stalls. Other banners tattered with years. of field service flapped like bats in the darkness over our heads. The rain beat against the clerestory windows, but no other sound came from outside to disturb the silver singing.

One's whole thoughts were of Swift and his 'fierce indignation,' which indeed was the keynote of his strange and terrible personality. One thought of him in the old Deanery across the roadway outside the night Stella was buried, and the darkness closed over his life. He was too ill to go to her funeral, and he sat there behind the Deanery windows, with one knows not what vultures tearing at his heart. He had so often written the story of his life from day to day for her eyes. Now he eases himself as he can by writing down the things he loved in her.

'Fanuary the 30th; Tuesday,' he writes: 'This is the night of the funeral which my sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine of the night, and I am removed into another apartment that I may not see the light in the church which is just over against the window of my bedchamber.'

He had begun to write the record the night she died, but broke off with the entry, 'My head aches, and I can write no more.' Her softness of temper, her courage, her wit, her modesty, her beauty-he writes it all down that night when by torchlight they are laying her to rest. It was his last good-night to her to whom he had so often inscribed in playful tenderness, 'Night, dearest little, M.D.,' or 'Night, dearest rogue, M.D. ;' and he had passed into a night which was never to lift from him and his memory.

He had a dozen or more sensible years to live, the idol of the Irish, and especially of the Dublin populace, which on his first coming had been ready to stone him. He gave them little thanks outwardly for their adoration; yet for them, too, the fierce

indignation had lacerated his heart, and forced him into utterances whose savage half-jest hid a terrible earnest. For years he foresaw that he should die withered at the top like the blasted elm-tree in Phoenix Park he pointed out to a friend. His last bitter beneficence was to leave his money to found the Dublin madhouse which is called after him 'Swift's Hospital.' He died

of a terrible form of brain disease, and I have read that after his death it was discovered a quantity of water lay upon his brain. Now and then he had a flash of reason. Once catching sight of himself in a glass he sighed 'Poor old man,' in mournful selfpity.

One turns back to the pages of his 'Diary to Stella,' and to his earlier life, as a relief from the harrowing picture of his madness. It is waste of breath to discuss his relations with Stella, any more than those with Vanessa, or that Varina of his early days to whom he genuinely offered marriage, who was his neighbour when he held the little living of Kilroot in Antrim, and whose brother was his chum at Trinity College, Dublin. Stella was the one woman for him, the one who was able to move him to tenderness. Some of the entries in the Diary reveal this brooding tenderness. Once he refers to some trouble of her eyes: 'I am almost crazed that you vex yourself for not writing. Cannot you dictate to Dingley and not strain your little dear eyes? It is the grief of my soul to hear that you are out of order. Pray be quiet, and if you will write, shut your eyes and write just a line and no more, thus:-"How do you do, Mrs. Stella? This was written with my eyes shut . . ." And then Dingley may stand by and tell you whether you are too high or too low.' How different this is from the coldly intellectual flirtation with Vanessa!

He was never very happy, not long ago at Moor Park, in the stately home of Sir William Temple and Dorothy Osborne. He was secretary to Sir William, his patron, and Stella was the black-eyed, black-haired child of the housekeeper. Even then he was little M.D.'s writing-master,' and it is with a reminiscence of the teaching-days no doubt that he rallies her over her spelling long afterwards. 'Who are those "Wiggs" who think I have turned Tory?' 'Which "Wiggs?" And are you sure you do not mean Whigs?' But in Moor Park days he was a proud disconcerted gentleman whose position as hanger-on of a great man irked him. Sir William must have been changeable of temper, for we read how long after Swift cried out to Bolingbroke