I shall not re-enter the Abbey House after my wife's funeral; you will be sole and sovereign mistress of all things from that hour." He kept his word. He was chief mourner at the quiet but stately burial under the old yew tree in Beechdale churchyard. When all was over, he got into a fly and drove to the station at Lyndhurst road, whence he departed by the first train for London. He told no one anything about his plans for the future; he left no address but his club. He was next heard of, six months later, in South America. Violet had telegraphed for her old governess directly after Mrs. Carmichael's death, and that good and homely person arrived on the day after the funeral to take up her abode with her old pupil as companion and chaperon until Miss Tempest should have become Mrs. Vawdrey and would have but one companion henceforward in all the journey of life. Rorie and Vixen were to be married in six months; Mrs. Carmichael had made them promise that her death should delay their marriage as little as possible. You can have a very quiet wedding, you know, dear," she said. "You can be married in your travelling-dress-something pretty in gray silk and terry velvet, or with chinchilla trimming if it should be winter. Chinchilla is so distinguished-looking! You will go abroad, I suppose, for your honeymoon-Pau or Monaco, or any of those places on the Mediterranean." It had pleased her to settle everything for the lovers. Violet remembered all these speeches with a tender sorrow; there was comfort in the thought that her mother had loved her according to her lights. It had been finally settled between the lovers that they were to live at the Abbey House. Briarwood was to be let to any wealthy individual who might desire a handsome house surrounded by exquisitely arranged gardens and burdened with glass that would cost a small fortune annually to maintain. Before Mr. Vawdrey could put his property into the hands of the auctioneers, he received a private offer which was in every respect satisfactory. Lady Mallow wished to spend some part of every year near her father and mother, who lived a good deal at Ashbourne, the duke becoming yearly more devoted to his Chillingham oxen and monster turnips. Lord Mallow, who loved his native isle to distraction, but always found six weeks in a year a sufficient period of residence there, was delighted to please his bride, and agreed to take Briarwood, furnished, on a seven years' lease. The orchid-houses were an irresistible attraction, and by this friendly arrangement Lady Mallow would profit by the alterations and improvements her cousin had made for her gratification when he believed she was to be his wife. Briarwood thus disposed of, Rorie was free to consider the Abbey House his future home, and Violet had the happiness of knowing that the good old house in which her childhood had been spent would be her habitation always till she too was carried to the family-vault under the old yew tree. Vixen and Rorie were married in the spring, when the forest-glades were yellow with primroses, the mossy banks blue with violets, and the cuckoo was heard with monotonous iteration from sunrise to sundown. They were married in the little village church at Beechdale, and Mrs. Scobel declared that liamentary fame for him, full of large hopes about the future of Ireland. She looked forward complacently to the day when she and Lord Mallow would be reigning at Dublin Castle, and when Hibernian arts and industries would revive and flourish under her fostering care. Miss Tempest's wedding was the prettiest | only ambitious for her husband, greedy of parthat ever had been solemnized in that small Gothic temple. Never, perhaps, even at Easter-tide, had been seen such a wealth of spring-blossoms, the wildings of the woods and hills. The duchess had offered the contents of her hothouses, Lady Ellangowan had offered wagon-loads of azaleas and camellias, but Vixen had refused them all she would allow no decorations but the wild flowers which the school-children could gather-primroses, violets, blue-bells, the firstlings of the fern tribe, cowslips, and all the tribe of innocent forest-blossoms, with their quaint rustic names, most of them as old as Shakespeare. Among Roderick's wedding-gifts was one from Lord Mallow-Bullfinch, the best horse in that nobleman's stable. "I know your wife would like you to have her father's favorite hunter," wrote Lord Mallow. "Tell her that he has never been sick or sorry since he has been in my stable, and that I have always taken particular care of him for her sake." Among Violet's presents was a diamond bracelet from Lady Mallow, accompanied by a very cordial letter; and almost the first visit that the Vawdreys received after they came home was from Lord and Lady Mallow. The first great dinner to which they were bidden was at Briarwood, where it seemed a curious thing for Rorie to go as a guest. Matrimony with the man of her choice had wondrously improved Mabel Ashbourne. She was less self-sufficient and more conciliating; her ambition, hitherto confined to the desire to excel all other women in her own person, had assumed a less selfish form. She was now From afar there comes news of Captain Carmichael, who has married a Jewish lady at Frankfort, only daughter and heiress of a well-known money-lender. The bride is reported ugly and illiterate, but there is no doubt as to her fortune. The captain has bought a villa at Monaco-a villa in the midst of orange-groves, the abandoned plaything of an Austrian princess--and he has hired an apartment in one of the new avenues, just outside the Arc de Triomphe, where, as his friends anticipate, he will live in grand style and receive the pleasantest people in Paris. He too is happy after his kind, and has won the twenty-thousand-pound prize in the lottery of life; but it is altogether a different kind of happiness from the simple and unalloyed delight of Rorie and Vixen in their home among the beechen woods whose foliage sheltered them when they were children. MISS M. E. BRADDON. ENGLAND AND HER CHILDREN. ANOBLE lord who spoke some time ago is full of the fire of ingenuous youth; and when he has modelled the ideas of a lively imagination by further experience, he will be an ornament to his country in either house. He has said that the Americans are our children, and how can they revolt against their parent? He says that if they are not free in their present state England is not free, because Manchester and other considerable places are not represented. So, then, because some towns in England are not represented, America is to have no representative at all. They are "our children;" but when children ask for bread, we are not to give a stone. Is it because the natural resistance of things and the various mutations of time hinder our government, or any scheme of government, from being any more than a sort of approximation to the right, is it therefor that the colonies are to recede from it infinitely? When this child of ours wishes to assimilate to its parent and to reflect with a true filial resemblance the beauteous countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our constitution? Are we to give them our weakness for their strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of slavery, which we are not able to work off, to serve them for their freedom? EDMUND BURKE. THE SUBLIME. THE feeling of the sublime is acknow ledged on all hands to be intimately connected with the idea of the infinite. In the formation-or, rather, in the attempt at the formation-of this idea the mind shows in a very striking manner both its strength and its weakness. In expanding any image spatially it finds itself incapable of doing anything more than representing to itself a volume with a spherical boundary; in following out its contemplation in respect of time the image is of a line of great length, but terminating in a point at each end. But where the mind shows its weakness, there it also exhibits its strength. It can only imagine this bounded sphere and outline, but it is led to believe in vastly more. It strives to conceive the infinite, but ever feels as if it were baffled and thrown back. But, while the mind cannot embrace the infinite, it feels, at the place where it is arrested by its own impotency, that there is an infinite beyond. Looking forth, as it were, on the sky, it can see only a certain distance, but is constrained to believe that there is much more beyond the range of the vision-nay, that, to whatever point it might go, there would still be a something farther on. "If the mind," says John Foster, "were to arrive at the solemn ridge of mountains which we may fancy to bound creation, it would eagerly ask, 'Why no farther? What is beyond?'" It is here that we find the origin and genesis of such idea as the mind can form of the infinite, and of the belief, to which it ever clings, in the boundless and eternal. Now, whatever calls forth this exercise of the mind and the feeling of awe awakened by it may be described as sublime. So far as picturesque objects are concerned, the imaging-power of the mind rejoices to find that it can print them upon its surface. But there are objects which it tries in vain to picture or represent: the imaging-power is filled, but they will not be compressed within it. Everywhere in nature are there scenes which are "like an invitation in space Boundless, a guide into eternity." A vast height, such as a lofty mountain, is a step to help us to this elevation of thought Love. JAMES M'COSH, LL.D. ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN FLAG. THE and emotion. The revelations of astronomy | dom lightened and warmed by an infinite. awaken the feeling, because they carry out the soul into far depths of space, but without carrying it to the verge of space. The discoveries in geology extend the mind in much the same way by the long vistas opened of ages which yet do not go back to the beginning. Every vast display of power evokes this overawing sentiment: we see effects which are great arguing a power which is greater. The howl of the tempest, the ceaseless lashing of the ocean, the roar of the waterfall, the crash of the avalanche, the growl of the thunder, the shaking of the very foundation on which we stand when the earth trembles, all these fill the imagination, but are suggestive of something more tremendous behind and beyond. For a similar reason the vault of heaven is always a sublime object when serene; we feel, in looking into it, as if we were looking into immensity. Hence it is that a clear, bright space in the sky or in a painting always allures the eye toward it: it is an outlet by which the mind may, as it were, go out into infinity. But, whatever may suggest the infinite, there is, after all, but one Infinite. The grandest objects presented to our view in earth or sky, the most towering heights, the vastest depths, the most resistless agencies, —these are but means to help us to the contemplation of Him who. is "high-throned above all height," whose counsels reach from eternity to eternity, and who is the Almighty unto perfection. They are fulfilling their highest end when they lift us above this cold earth and above our narrow selves to revel and lose ourselves in the height and depth, the length and breadth, of an infinite Wis sent States. The origin of the stripes, I think, if searched out, would be found to be a little curious. All I know upon that point is that on the 4th day of July, 1776, after the Declaration of Independence was carried, a committee was appointed by Congress, consisting of Mr. Jefferson, Dr. Franklin and John Adams, to prepare a device for a seal of the United States. This seal, as reported, or the device in full, as reported, was never adopted; but in it we see the emblems, in part, which are still preserved in the flag. The stripes, or lines, which on Mr. Jefferson's original plan were to designate the six quarterings of the shield, as signs of the six countries from which our ancestors came, are now, I believe, considered as representations of the old thirteen States, and with most persons the idea of a shield is lost sight of. You perceive that by drawing six lines or stripes on a shield-figure it will leave seven spaces of the original color, and, of course, give thirteen apparent stripes; hence the idea of their being all intended to represent the old thirteen States. My opinion is that this was the origin of the stripes. Mr. Jefferson's quartered shield for a seal device was seized upon as a national emblem, that was put upon the flag. We have now the stars as well as the stripes. When each of these was adopted I cannot say; but the flag, as it now is, was designed by Captain Reid and adopted by Congress. ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS. GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERA IT TURE. T is impossible to contemplate the annals of Greek literature and art without being struck with them as by far the most extraordinary and brilliant phenomena in the history of the human mind. The very language, even in its primitive simplicity, as it came down from the rhapsodists who celebrated the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, was as great a wonder as any it records. All the other tongues that civilized man has spoken are poor and feeble and barbarous in comparison with it. Its compass and flexibility, its riches and its powers, are altogether unlimited. It not only expresses with precision all that is thought or known at any given period, but it enlarges itself naturally with the progress of science, and affords, as if without an effort, a new phrase or a systematic nomenclature whenever one is called for. It is equally adapted to every variety of style and subject -to the most shadowy subtlety of distinction and the utmost exactness of definition as well as to the energy and the pathos of popular eloquence; to the majesty, the elevation, the variety, of the epic and the boldest license of the dithyrambic no less than to the sweetness of the elegy, the simplicity of the pastoral or the heedless gayety and delicate characterization of comedy. Above all, what is an unspeakable charm, a sort of naïveté is peculiar to it, which appears in all those various styles, and is quite as becoming and agreeable in a historian or a philosopher-Xenophon, for instance-as in the light and jocund numbers of Anacreon. Indeed, were there no other object in learning Greek but to see to what perfection language is capable of being carried, not only as a medium of communica tion, but as an instrument of thought, we see not why the time of a young man would not be just as well bestowed in acquiring a knowledge of it-for all the purposes, at least, of a liberal or elementary education-as in learning algebra, another specimen of a language or arrangement of signs perfect in its kind. But this wonderful idiom happens to have been spoken, as was hinted in the preceding paragraph, by a race as wonderful. The very first monument of their genius-the most ancient relic of letters in the Western worldstands to this day altogether unrivalled in the exalted class to which it belongs. What was the history of this immortal poem and of its great fellow? Was it a single individual, and who was he, that composed them? Had he any master or model? What had been his education, and what was the state of society in which he lived? These questions are full of interest to a philosophical inquirer into the intellectual history of the species, but they are especially important with a view to the subject of the present discussion. Whatever causes account for the matchless excellence. of these primitive poems, and for that of the language in which they are written, will go far to explain the extraordinary circumstance that the same favored people left nothing unattempted in philosophy, in letters and in arts, and attempted nothing without signal, and in some cases unrivalled, success. Winkleman undertakes to assign some reasons for this astonishing superiority of the Greeks, and talks very learnedly about a fine climate, delicate organs, exquisite susceptibility, the full development of the human form by gymnastic exercises, etc. For our own part, we are content to explain the phenome |