I do not want your money, dearest; say that you will give up Charlot, and everything shall be made easy for you. I will take care that they shall not lock you up.'

Gabrielle was deeply touched. She shrank from Pierre's love, but it was sad to think that she had made him unhappy ; she wanted to escape from him, but she could not add by any abruptness to his pain. She heard footsteps; Pierre, however, seemed unconscious of them as he spoke again.

'You will do as I ask, my Gabrielle?'

'Good evening, Mademoiselle,' a sharp voice said. 'Good evening, Monsieur Pierre.'

Léocadie nodded as she passed by them, and went on up the hill.

'Adieu!' Gabrielle said, and she ran off as swiftly as she could. Pierre stood looking after her till she was out of sight: then he muttered one of his father's Breton oaths, and turned away.

(To be continued.)

A QUIET HAVEN.

WITHIN a land-locked harbour
The little village lies,

Before the broad untroubled bay,

Above the tranquil skies;
Sheer at the back the mighty hills
With solemn mien look down,

And seem to spread their sheltering arms
About the tiny town.

Here in content and quiet

From busier life withdrawn,

The craftsman plies his simple trade,

And the farmer reaps his corn. There come no ships from foreign lands To anchor in that bay

Nor any travellers cross those hills

With news from far away.

Here neighbour weds with neighbour,
And early lovers meet

Who played as little toddling bairns

In the long village street:

Back to the house where he was born
The young man brings his wife,
And the old walls tell anew the tale
Of Love and Death and Life.

In every changing decade

Some girl in youthful pride, Some lad in hot ambitious haste,

Seeks the great world outside:

Like a pebble plashing in a lake,
Like a wavelet on the shore,

They pass and leave a vacant place,
For these return no more.

Here News creeps in belated—-
For the clamour of debate,
The victories of an Army

Or the ruin of a State
Count only as a fireside tale,

A story that will keep

While the farmer scans the price of grain,
And the shepherd tells his sheep.

Perchance the strife and tumult

Of the great world's unrest
May quicken into fuller life
Man's noblest and best-
Yet here a tired heart may stay,
And brain and nerves unstrung,
Find balm and healing in a land
Where yet the Earth is young.

A world-forgotten village,

Like a soul that steps aside Into some quiet haven

From the full rush of tide.

A place where Poets still may dream,
Where the wheels of Life swing slow,
And over all there broods the peace

Of centuries ago.

CHRISTIAN BURKE.

HOMES FOR THE LITTLE ONES.

'But the young, young children, O, my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!

They are weeping in the playtime of the others,

In the country of the free.'-E. B. BROWNING.

IF the saying be a true one, that 'Happy is the woman who has no history,' it is equally true to say, 'Unhappy is the woman who has had no happy childhood'-i.e. no golden age, back in the far distanceaye! and all the more golden for that, perhaps-an age with a nursery in it stored full of sunshiny memories. For it is the nursery that to my mind is most prominent in a bona fide childhood.

Let me just glance backwards down the vistas of many years, until I see that warm bright nook, the very earliest of early recollections. Not long ago I was asked whether I knew Brighton, and my answer was: 'When I was four years old it was my home, but all that I can remember about it is one winter afternoon in our nursery; there was a cheery fire at one end of it, windows looking straight out seawards, tea on the table; and through the door, opposite the windows, I can see a gracious presence entering the room, with a furry goat in one hand and a magnificent elephant in the other for myself the one, for a younger brother, seated on the floor, the other. Said younger brother screamed at said elephant, and would have none of it. Alas! he is now away in the land of elephant and jungle, with less hair on his head even than in those infantine days!

Later on, I can see a nursery belonging to a one-storied, white verandahed-house, standing in a beautiful garden; a low-pitched room, with a window at either end of it; against the wall stood a doll's-housetreasure of treasures !—where two elder sisters carried out a small drama of social life, full of ceaseless interest to their junior, who used to sit outside the gates with wide open eyes and ears, privileged sometimes to hold one small doll, and make it walk upstairs and seat itself on a dainty drawing-room chair. From one window we looked down into the yard, and had a bird's-eye view of the dog then reigning, usually a rough terrier; the stables were there too, and the rabbits, and sometimes our staunch ally the gardener. road, where occasionally a wandering and exhibit its fascinating scenes for the amusement of five children, a nurse, and a nursemaid. The other window looked upon leads and a

Over the stable-gates was the
Punch and Judy' would stop

chestnut-tree overspreading a garden-wall, and in the wall a little green door leading into garden shrubberies bordering fair lawns. The leads were the meeting ground for birds of all sorts—our pensioners on winter mornings. Blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinches, tomtits, robins, all assembled there for our crumbs. My earliest ornithological studies were made from that window.

There are vivid recollections, too, of the high nursery-guard, over which the aforesaid younger brother and myself used to roast apples at the end of a string even to make a piece of toast hanging over that guard had an untold delight about it, mainly, I fancy, because we felt then almost over the border-land that lay between us and that forbidden fire-region. In that same room I can remember how, at bedtime, when waiting for our nurse to have finished her preliminary arrangements, we used to sit together at the nursery-table with an old brown Bible of our father's open before us, reading a Psalm. We were by no means 'goodygoody' children, but I am quite sure we should not have gone to bed happily without performing that function. The foreign address written under our father's name, the date, which seemed to us almost prehistoric, certain pressed tulip-leaves, crisp and faded from age-all had a mysterious meaning about them which to our small minds intensified the solemnity of that little evening reading together.

There came a day of lamentation-the day when our old nurse left us and the new nurse came; the new nurse becoming in her turn the older retainer of the two, for eighteen years is no short record of a most faithful service. Only the other day, after her death, a letter came from that brother in the land of elephant and jungle, saying: 'I shall never forget how good she was to me the first night she was with us, when I cried miserably after our old nurse.'

Recollections of nursery days might go on ad infinitum, for as the first children grow up they still delight in running up from their schoolroom to have a romp with the little ones in the nursery, or to tell them a story by the fireside. And so long as a nursery lasts—at least, so it was in the home I look back upon-the nursery-day dawned with a visit from the father on his way down to breakfast, and closed with the shadow of the mother bending over each crib and bed, as the children drifted into the land of dreams.

And now, what are the children's lives that have no bright homesurroundings, no sunny nursery days? Certainly they are not golden; grave and gray, to say the least, and many of them worse than colourless. What becomes of the children of the poor in large towns, left with only one parent, the bread-winner, who is obliged to go out to work all day? Don't we all know the pale, anxious face of the prematurely-aged little elder sister, kept away from school constantly that she may 'mind the baby'? What becomes of a family of little ones,