Oh, yes! but I think we'll be goin' over your side to-morrow or after."

"And where were you to-day, my little man? "

"Postin' bills, Sir! And lookin' out for a field where we'd put up the Show; and maybe your Reverence saw two horses on the road as you came?

leg!

"A big bay horse, and a small white pony lame in the hind

"They are in the shade of the bushes over near the turn of the road."

"Thank your Reverence. Maybe when we go to your side, you'll let me throw one or two of my tumbles for you." Then, touching his cap, and whistling to Brian Boru, he left me. Taking advantage, whilst talking to a poor beggar woman toiling slowly against the biting blast, I looked after him. He moved his arms and feet, and carried his body in such a way, as if there was not a bone in the whole frame-work, but that the entire system was simply a compound of sinews and thews. It didn't seem as if he were walking in December weather; in fact walking seemed not a labour at all, though from the distance of the places where he had been "postin' bills," he must have travelled many miles that day.

It put a new resolve in me, to see him walk so lightly. I turned and directed my steps towards "the Show beyond." There was an ordinary van; I knew afterwards that this was the living, cooking, and sleeping apartment of the company. A marquee of rough, discoloured canvas occupied an "idle bit of

"hard by. As I approached one or two whelps and some curs of low degree gave a quick watchful barking. A soft-faced middle-aged woman put a part of her portly person and not scrupulously clean face out over the half-door of the van. She bowed her head very respectfully; and two children, one at either side of her, did the same beneath her circular arms. I answered her salute, and she smiled.

"You are Catholics, ma'am?"

"Oh yes, Father, thanks be to God."

"Will you be staying long in this district?

"

"Well, your Reverence, we have a great many little mouths to feed; "and she brought more distinctly to view the two

faces that had been peering from under her arms; and like their mother they were soft, pleasing, and not scrupulously well-washed,-"A great many little mouths to feed; and we must be always on the move to pick up something for them."

"And have you many children? Because I'd like to teach them."

"Oh! God bless your Reverence, sure you did so before; and the minute Susie saw you-come here, Susie,-the minute Susie saw you, didn't she know you, and she was glad!" Susie here gave me a nod and a smile; I smiled in answer to the child. "And the letter you gave my man, when you let him play in the school, did him a world of good ever since; and we have been far and near, your Reverence."

"Now shall I see the children to-morrow? children?

You will come,

They smiled, and the mother answering, said: "We may want some of the boys, Father, as we'll be shifting. But Susie will take all the rest to you. And as soon as the boys settle down the Show and the shooting gallery, they will go to you too."

There were young people there of every age, from twenty downwards. You could hardly believe how many of them had not made their First Communion or First Confession. Susie, having fallen sick on their travels, was put into a Workhouse Hospital; and the good nuns being there, she had made her First Communion. I never felt such happiness in teaching children, as I did in teaching them. We sat in the sacristy; and the white pony with the lame hind leg gave us many a laugh, when he was hauled in (not bodily) to illustrate, in a homely way, some sacred dogmatic truth.

R. O. K.

"N

THE RETURN TO NATURE

OTHING is so soothing as the company of an affectionate child," says Zimmerman, the author of a book that was translated into every language in Europe, and one that in these restless and strenuous times is quite likely to obtain a new vogue. Certainly this good German philosopher and physician, the friend of Frederick the Great and an intimate of George III, knew very well that nothing is so irritating as the company of a fractious child; but to say this was unnecessary. Zimmerman who wrote a dissertation De Irritabilitate, as well as On Solitude, realized that few men need to be reminded of the things that disturb, even if they do not destroy the peace of life, but that very many require to be told of the joys and happinesses that their want of reflection, and too often their preference for baser pleasures, cause them to lose.

There is no need to insist upon the complexity of modern life, or upon its restlessness. The most strenuous people upon earth are beginning to recognize the evil of killing themselves in order to live. Many decades ago their thinkers-poets and philosophers-warned them in language that is now all but classical of the wickedness of wasting their lives in the attempt to heap up that gold which is the least joy-giving substance the world contains. Thoreau, Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and many others, tried to show them that the progress with which they were enamoured was not worth the sacrifice of happiness and peace which it always involves. Proud as they are of these writers, the bulk of the American people are content to see the works of Thoreau, Emerson and Holmes upon their shelves. They do not care to live in

The sunny street that holds the sifted few.

Even the gentle Holmes hits them too hard. He is a national possession and his books are bought and sold; but even when they are read their message is not heeded-except by the wise, and the wise are seldom, if ever, found with the majority. Yet what a gain to their nation if only they would heed their poet's teaching :

Don't catch the fidgets: you have found your place

Just in the focus of a nervous race,

Fretful to change, and rabid to discuss,

Full of excitements, always in a fuss;

Think of the patriarchs: then compare as men
These lean-cheeked maniacs of the tongue and pen!
Run, if you like, but try to keep your breath;
Work like a man, bnt don't be worked to death;

And with new notions-let me change the rule-
Don't strike the iron till it's slightly cool.

Well, if the majority will not hear Holmes and the prophets, will they be presuaded by the moderns? Perhaps they will. For when an ever-increasing minority begins to listen to the truth and to absorb it so avidly that they must needs give it forth at the corners of the streets, there is hope-even for a nation of would-be millionaires. For, mark you, an ever-increasing minority often means a coming majority.

A new note is struck in American literature, and one that bears such a close resemblance to that intoned by our best last century writers that it is being hailed with gratitude. our popular writers are taking up a new melody and declaring that isolation is the balm of life, and better for the constitution than the spice of variety. "If I had the power," says Mr. Mowbray, "I would provide padded cells for society, and shove the youngest of its votaries into them regularly, and turn the key on them, merely to increase the average of human life. I am more and more convinced that the Frenchman was right who said that progress is a disease, and that eventually society will die of civilization. It is fast losing the power and the privilege of taking breath. The path to heaven is choked with late dinners, and we are forgetting the route."

The writer of the words we have quoted, a widower, was compelled to return to nature in order to save his life. He enjoyed the best of opportunities of testing the truth of Zimmerman's dictum concerning the soothing effect of the companionship of an affectionate child, for the only regular house-mate the man had for an entire year was his own little son. The experiment succeeded and ended even more happily than it began. His method was that of Thoreau-with many important differences. To lead a life that is wholesome, sweet, and natural it is not necessary to become a wild man of the woods, still less a misanthrope or a misogynist. The true return to nature means the rejection of a spurious civilization for a genuine one; the giving up of a complex system of life for one so simple and so refined that

Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude.

To shun the loud and the blatant, the affected and the artificial, the ostentatious and the pretentious, the vulgar and the snobbish, the gratification of the senses for the cultivation of the soulthese are the conditions necessary to the happiness of the individual and to the well-being of the many, whether they live in a city square or in the depths of the country.

"Nature is my oldest friend," writes the Lady Bedingfield of a bygone period. More courageous than many of her contemporaries, once her duties to her royal mistress and to society were performed she cultivated her oldest friendship, keeping herself as far as possible from that artificial atmosphere which, as Paul Bourget says, is made up of ennui and vanity, folly and stupidity. But then she was one who knew that nature never yet betrayed the heart that loved her-unless that heart tried to divorce the created from the Creator, or attempted to identify the fringe of the garment of God with His Uncreated Substance.

Broad minds and light hearts have those who turn away from the life of cities, and broad minds mean large as well as light hearts, unbiassed views and unprejudiced sympathies.

Those who live in daily communion with sky and ocean and wide land spaces grow to be dreamers of large dreams that infuse the commonplace with something of the wonderful." Every city is a prison, a penal settlement, an area in which servitude and suffering meet one at every turn. The very dress of the poor prisoners appals one by its rigidity, by its hard and unyielding lines and contours, and this in whatever division or category the convict finds himself. Indeed you may almost lifer" by the shape of his tall hat and the cut of his

tell a
frock coat.

"I promise myself many pleasures in seeing you here," writes Southey to Matilda Betham, "in showing you how very happy a man may be upon very scanty means who cares nothing for the pomps and vanities of the world, and preserves a boy's heart when the grey hairs are beginning to show themselves." Yet this was written by one of the hardest workers, perhaps the most industrious scribe England has ever known. We owe much to dreamers of the right quality, and we ought to be thankful that some men are sent into the world to dream beautiful dreams for the benefit of their fellow-men; but unlike his friend Coleridge, Southey was no mere visionary. A modern journalist may well be appalled at the thought of the daily output of the man who in spite of incessant labour tried to preserve the heart of a boy.

We should expect to find the modern popular novelist holding a brief for life in big cities, yet how often is he the