LOVE ABIDES.

Он, they were clear and cloudless,
Those days of long ago,

Which shed upon life's springtide
A never-fading glow;

In that bright dawn of day, love,

Which woke our hearts' first song, When all the world was gay, love, And you and I were young.

Our love hath not grown colder
Since first we learned to woo ;
For time can bring no old age

To hearts that still beat true.
Those days have passed away, love,
Yet not for them we long,
Though all the world was gay, love,
And you and I were young.

The charms that years have woven
So deftly round us too,
The joys, which now we cherish,
Then, love, we never knew ;
For ever since that day, love,

New treasures still unfold,
Though all is not so gay, love,
And you and I are old.

W. J. STEWART.

IRISH PRIDE.

By the Author of "Not all Fiction," "Whilst the Snowflakes Fell," etc.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE RUSTIC BRIDGE.

THE September sunset gleams slantingly over an extensive, undulating park, backed by a glorious escent of the mountain, and interwoven by a broad stream, that chatters to its green banks, and murmurs softly under the old wooden bridge, against whose mossgrown parapet are leaning two individuals. They are brother and sister the youngest almost the last survivor of the proud race who for centuries possessed the surrounding lands, and dwelt within the grey castellated walls which rise loftily in the foreground.

De Burgh Towers the massive pile is styled, owned by De Burghs no longer. Its bill of sale and consequent change of proprietorship have just been effected, forbidding the loiterers on the bridge to call henceforth home' the abode wherein their fathers lived, and they themselves were born and reared.

A peculiarly Irish fate pronounces the general verdict; and verily as to the fact we must agree, affixing, however, a query as to what distinctive trait of race this fate may be attributed, seeing that Ireland's population is as mixed in descent as that of England, and more so than that of Scotland or of Wales. These luckless De Burghs, par example, retraced their name and lineage to the AngloNormans, that people characterised by contemporaneous historians as "more Irish than the Irish themselves"- id est, more rapacious, ferocious, uncivilised, perhaps more extravagant. At any rate, whether hereditary or acquired in their adopted nationality, this special family had during many generations developed and practised most efficiently a talent for spending money, and as relations seldom left them any, they were much too aristocratic to marry any, and it was very certain they never made any; so it came quite naturally and expectedly to pass, that after experiencing the successive preliminary conditions of embarrassment, debt, mortgage, they finally lost everything-"lost" being here understood in its common but improper Irish definition; for lost (English) means accidental deprivation, whereas the De Burghs saw their possessions float from them piecemeal, with eyes recklessly indifferent even to the present, utterly regardless of what the future might bring-that future which must make the present to some of their posterity.

Sternly the spirit of the old Sinaistic denunciation, "I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children," attends and follows humanity. The children in the case under immediate discussion, innocent of the fault, were yet doomed to expiate it. To their parents had appertained the pleasure-such as it was-of wanton expenditure, and running into irretrievable debt. To them seemed fastened the life-long penalty of poverty and dependence. Cold, cruel destiny for the brother and sister to contemplate this fair September evening, as silently they stand side by side, apparently thinking the same thoughts, engagel in the same monotonous occupation of watching the rippling face of the water. What do they see there? What visions, shadowy, vague, is fancy conjuring out of each tiny wavelet? What memories of the past, dreams of the future, are floating through the young minds, whose windows are bent so persistently on the swift, clear current, as now with snowy crest it foams over stone and shingle; now with a fluttering leaf thrown by autumn's despoiling hand on its bosom, it still pursues its way, on, on to its home, in the distant ocean.

Possibly that last picture illustrates rather vividly to one of the gazers the involuntary position he himself occupies on the perilous wave of misfortune; for Frank De Burgh suddenly demolishes his own and his sister's Chateaux en Espagne, and breaks the silence by exclaiming :

"Very dull work, this; are you not cold, Cecy? The sun is setting."

"But not set yet," she answers, lifting her eyes from the stream to where, above the firwood, rise the mountains, their summits crowned with the crimson and gold clouds of eventide, "This is the last time, remember, Frank, that we shall ever look at those hills, or lean against these dear old railings again.”

"Yes, I know," Frank sighs, but his sanguine temperament reasserts itself quickly. "It may not be the last time, Cecy; what if I find lots of gold in Australia, return rich, and buy it all back again?"

"Buy it all back again." She repeats the words in a gladder tone, a light breaking in the sad, earnest eyes. "Frank, could that be possible?"

"Of course; provided when the time comes its new owner be willing to part with it. Perhaps, though, he may unluckily grow as fond of it as we are."

"Oh, I am sure he will not. Harriet says he quite agreed with Uncle Oliver that it was a desolate, ill kept old place."

"Yes, he is a friend of Uncle Oliver's (happy man), and is, moreover, head of the big agency firm, Lindores and Lindores, that do business for half the landed world, and are swimming in riches.

He was magnificently indifferent about this little cabin and cabbage garden, spending just half an hour, I believe, investigating the whole

concern."

"And yet bought everything: furniture, pictures-even the old portraits.

"Wanted ancestors probably. Pity our crest and arms were not auctioned too," said Frank, half contemptuously, half jestingly. "Cecy, do look more cheery. Why cannot you the see the fun of it?"

Because I feel so utterly, utterly miserable!"

"Poor little Cecy! I wish you were coming to Australia with me, or that Harriet could take you to Africa."

"I don't want to go with Harriet. I wish I could go with you to Australia."

“But that is past wishing, Cecy. Grandmamma-the terrible grandmamma, as Harriet calls her-would not hear of such an arrangement. Now you have taken your farewell look, come."

Entwining his sisters arm within his, he half drew her down a dark pathway, leading to the house where (by the kind sufferance of Uncle Oliver's friend), its late owners had been permitted to stay till Frank's Australian outfit should be completed. All was ready now. Boxes packed, corded, even directed, stood in the wide vaulted hall, whose tesselated floor echoed drearily each footfall, as the two entered and crossed to the drawing-room, a spacious apartment panelled in oak, its time-worn massive furniture carved of the same sombre wood, and upholstered in velvet, faded by years into a misty indefiniteness of hue and texture. Certainly it seemed a queer freak of the buyer of De Burgh Towers, to include in his purchase such cumbrous, thread bare appendages; still queerer to wish to possess a series of old family portraits which had hung on the walls so long that they seemed part of them, and from out whose tarnished frames smiling ladies, coifféed almost as elaborately as nineteenth-century belles, courtly gentlemen in powdered wig and sword, looked calmly, indifferently down on their young ruined descendants.

All the living descendants are assembled beneath the painted ancestral gaze now; for in addition to Frank and Cecile, there stands by the mantelpiece the elder sister, the lately married Harriet. Very beautiful she is, tall, stately, commanding, with waves of auburn hair, rose-tinted cheek, and eyes whose radiance mocks the fire-light. Those eyes-that complexion, hair, and regal bearing had been Harriet's sole dowry, and had won her the admiration of a certain rather elderly, and very cross Mr. Fitzherbert, home on leave from his governorship in South Africa, whom she forthwith accepted and married, simply because he was rich, and heir presumptive to a title.

Riches and a title, that dual consummation of bliss, had formed Miss De Burgh's one ideal, one day-dream, one aspiration in life, in acquisition whereof, and considering such a very fair exchange, she offered beauty and grace. They were literally all she could offer; for besides being portionless, this beautiful being who looks physically as if nature had moulded her for an Empress, is intellectually incapable of standing with credit in the most junior class of the most ordinary national school. Not that she is a fool. Who dare apply that epithet to any one accomplishing a given rôle in life? (Her's had been to get married.) She is only uneducated, uncultured. Of the three R.'s it would be difficult to say which she hated most or practised least. She could not, for any consideration, localise her future home in South Africa, or tell whether it might be soonest reached by sailing round Cape Horn, or directing a train through the middle of India, or following the usual route thither. All she knows is that it must be a hot climate, as she had to order such dozens and dozens of muslins in her trousseau, and she would have preferred moirés and silks. Her brain or mind, or soul, or whatever may be the seat of comprehension and emotion is divided into three compartments, labelled respectively, "self," "dress," "admiration." The first compartment is the largest and best filled, the third, the smallest, for next to that physically peerless self, Harriet Fitzherbert loves adorning same individual. This, the last day she may spend in her girlhood's home, the last of Frank's stay in Ireland, she has devoted to trying on all manner of new costumes, coiffures, etc., etc.; and since it became time for her recently acquired French maid to pack away these treasures, she has been cogitating such future matters, as the amount of admiration (masculine), and envy (feminine), her beauty will excite in the colony. Whether the sun there will spoil her complexion, and how being styled "Her Excellency," and "Your Excellency" will sound, at which felicitous speculation she pauses before the mantelpiece mirror to contemplate therein Her Excellency. "Charming!" despite "the broken reflection" yielded by the glass, which displays across its surface a long seam or cleft, received at the hands of the late De Burgh, who looking into it once, when drunk and not overpleased with the representation afforded, instantly administered a sound knock to the unflattering thing, anathematising it unreservedly for making him so ugly. Cleft or whole, however, it could not make Harriet ugly, and in wrapt worship of her fair double, after a good half hour's homage she still stands as her brother and sister enter. She turns slightly. "Oh, here you are, at last. Such a time as you have been out! I am dying for tea. What have you been doing?" (The beautiful being's style of conversation is rather exclamatory and disjointed.)