when she first heard the tidings of his return. But now she once more lost her spirits, and became pale and silent as before.

"Why, Kitty,' said I, not hesitating to rally her upon a point which a few weeks ago it would have been cruelty to touch upon, it is a very poor compliment to Fred to wear those melancholy looks; he will expect a smiling welcome and the same bright merry face that you were wont to greet him with.'

Then she burst into tears and sobbed out that that was the very thing that made her sad; her brightness and her merriment, she felt, were gone, and her youth and beauty too. Fred was faithful, doubtless, but the girl who had won his love was no longer in existence, and only this sad substitute for her awaited him; here she pointed piteously to her changed self, with which it was likely enough, she said, he would be far from satisfied. Of course I told her that since the change, if change there were, had taken place on his account, it should only make her dearer to him; and even added, in my desire to comfort her, that it was to be hoped that Fred him self would not be quite the man he was; but my arguments made as little way with her as reason usually does with women. Indeed, her very trouble was curiously characteristic of the sex; for who, being male, could bear disappointment and almost despair itself for years, like a gentle saint, and then, when the sun shone forth at last, make himself miserable about the loss of a few pounds of flesh and the acquisition of a grey hair or two.

I will do Fred the justice to say that these defects in dear Kitty, if he ever noticed them, made no sort of difference in his devotion to her, which was as great on his return as it had ever been, though perhaps of a graver and more earnest kind. And it was astonishing, when this was made plain to her, how quickly the woman began to grow into the girl, 'as though a rose should shut and be a bud again.' On their marriage day the bridegroom, indeed, poor fellow, looked many years older than the bride, for the disgrace of his father had sunk deep in him; and even the great kindnesses of the Messrs. Halland had something of bitterness in them, inasmuch as they were reminders of it.

As for me, I had expected a little coldness from my former friend on account of my want of faith in him, but that idea was dissipated at the very first clasp of his hand. 'How could you have thought me otherwise than guilty, Frank, when I as good as told you so myself, by releasing Kitty from her engagement?' 'Yet she did not believe it!' said I.

But then,' returned he simply, she is an angel.' When I think of what she suffered, and how long and all alone (since she alone believed in him), and how she went on doing her duty (even

VOL. XXXV. NO, CXL.

G G

to her brother) without heart or hope, I am quite of Fred's opinion, And this it is, I say (when the young couple rally me upon not taking a wife), which makes me so hard to please. It is also partly their fault that I remain a bachelor, for we all live together, and so happily that I do not desire a change; indeed, I openly accuse them of conspiring to spoil me, and keep me single, that I may be always the bachelor uncle, who shall leave ten thousand pounds apiece to each of their children. As they have four at this present writing, it will be necessary for me to amass a considerable fortune to accomplish this. I seldom talk to Fred (for divers reasons) about the times when we were junior clerks together; but I did ask him once to explain that mystery of the music hall, whence I certainly saw him emerge, though he so confidently asserted he had been at home all night. Well,' he said, 'you might have seen me in the crowd about the doors, for I passed by there on my way from Chancery Lane, where I had been to leave a parcel.'

'A parcel in Chancery Lane, at midnight! No, my dear Fred, that really will not do.'

Then he laughed and blushed, and said, 'Well, you needn't tell Kitty about it; but the fact is, when my poor father declined to consent to our marriage, I determined to save all I could, and began to work out of office hours at copying for law stationers' 'Then those were the "windfalls!"' interrupted I.

'Yes; when I had earned a pound or two, I could not help giving Kitty a percentage of it.'

And that was why he had looked so haggard and weary; not from the stings of conscience, but through sitting up o' nights, driving the quill!

Upon the whole I am inclined to think, quite apart from the prosperity that has at last befallen him, that Frederic Raynor was worth waiting for, and that Patient Kitty (as I always call her) has been well rewarded for her fealty.

Summer Songs.

I.

Now cuckoos call,

And May is white, And love thrills all

With warm delight.

Earth laughs and blooms And glows with joy, No winter glooms

Her soul annoy.

Her skies, her flowers,

Her larks above,

Bid joy be ours,

Bid ours be love.

II.

Rose, flush and glow,

Clasped by warm noon;

Blush glad to know

The passion of June. Through gray hours soon

Sifts the white snow;

Now, clasped by June,

Rose, flush and glow.

Heart, glow and thrill
In love's dear June;

Chill blasts will shrill,
Gray skies come soon.

With passion's noon
All thy life fill;

In love's dear June,

Heart, glow and thrill.

III.

Songs, songs, blooms of my brain,
Blossom, blossom; on lawn and in lane,
Hawthorns the day

Whiten with may ;

Flowers of my fancy then blossom again.

Songs, songs, sweetness unknown,

Fancy watches your fairness alone;
Roses are here,

With them appear;

Be, to the Summer, your beauties too shown.

Songs, songs, sisters of light,

Lilies, lilies, woo you to sight,

With them, the noon,

With them, sweet June,

Glad with new music and dreams and delight.

W. C. BENNETT,

The Mystery of Edwin Drood.'

6

IN the Cornhill Magazine' for February 1864, Charles Dickens, speaking of the work which had been left unfinished by the great writer who died on Christmas Eve 1863, said, Before me lies all that he had written of his latest story, . and the pain I have felt in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour of his powers when he worked out this last labour.' In June 1870, not six years and a half after Thackeray's death, the poet Longfellow wrote thus of the work left unfinished by Dickens: 'I hope his book is finished. It is certainly one of his most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful of all. It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand, and left it incomplete.' As we all know, the pen had so fallen. The Mystery of Edwin Drood' was not to be unravelled by the master-hand which had interwoven its seemingly tangled skeins. How Dickens would have worked out the story we can never know. It has even been said by one who had better opportunities of knowing what Dickens had planned than any other, save perhaps one alone, that the evidence of matured designs never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the distance never to be reached, was wanting here: it was all a blank.'

Yet I venture to think that Forster was mistaken in regarding the story as all a blank' in this respect. The tone in which the leading characters are spoken of, should leave no one familiar with Dickens' manner in the least doubtful as to the general nature of the fate which was at the end to be allotted to them. We hear the pleasant final fortunes of Crisparkle and Tartar in the ringing notes in which their earlier doings are described, as clearly as we hear the sad yet noble fate of Neville Landless in the minor key in which he is spoken of, and in which he speaksexcept when roused to fury by Edwin Drood, maddened, like himself, with the wine which Jasper had drugged. But besides the indications of these tones, there are subtle indications, sufficient for the guidance of the understanding reader, not, indeed, as to the exact nature of the path along which the story was to be conducted, but as to its general direction and its final goal.

Let us consider some of these.