'Pray, pray, my lad, say nothing more about it,' said Jack's guest. I honour 'I honour you for your feeling. I do indeed. Remarkably good cigars those. Old Lord-but I mustn't mention names when I am going to be abusive-the old chap we have just been staying with in the Midlands had the most villainous bad smokes he insisted on inflicting upon his guests.'

And so the rotten ice was passed."

They talked of shooting grizzlies in California in the 'Sixties; of Ellen Terry's début; of cricket when Lillywhite played; of adventure in the far-off islands of the South Seas; of the Gold Rush to Ballarat; of Paris in the Commune; of India in the Mutiny times.

Jack's guest had been everywhere, had done everything, and spoke of all he had seen and done with the modesty of the man who has really lived and not taken life second-hand from the pages of a sixpenny magazine.

Perhaps it was because of this, or because the Pommery's pernicious moral effect was growing weaker, that, as they talked, the host's slumbering conscience gave signs of an awakening. Eagerly he followed his guest from topic to topic, from adventure to adventure, vainly trying to place' him, to discover his identity. It was only as they said Good-night that the Trehernes' guests told them that Good-night must also be Good-bye.

'We sail to-morrow, you see,' said the old lady. We must go home.' And with her gracious smile she added, 'It is good to feel that our last night in England has also been our pleasantest one.'

To Jack his guest said, as he warmly wrung his hand,

'It was indeed like your father's son to ring us up, Jack, my boy. It has been an unforgettable evening.'

The bells of the guests' hansom were jingling up Queen's Gate. Jack and his wife turned into the library where syphons and decanters stood on the table, and the silver box from which the old man had just taken his parting cigar.

And now, Jack, tell me who in the world these two charmers are,' said his wife. You were a wretch to invite them without telling me, and it was a perfect providence that those two fat old bores never came, but I entirely forgive you. Only why did I never hear of them before ? '

'My dear girl,' said her husband impressively, Do you ask me who they are?

'Don't be silly,' said his wife. 'Tell me.'

'All I can tell you is,' said Jack,

that I have not the faintest notion. Not the very faintest. To my sorrow I never met them before, and I fear I may never meet them again.'

'But you rang them up!' said his wife.

Nary a ring,' said Jack.

But you are an impostor. Was it all a mistake? Did they come to the wrong house?'

'I imagine so,' said Jack. 'I am beginning to feel a bit of a sweep. But as they entered the room, Satan entered into me, and it was such a lark I really couldn't help it.'

6

6

They were dears,' said his wife.

They were,' said he, and they had a rattling good dinner.'

'Oh, Jack, how could you be such a wretch! I am ashamed. Supposing they find out?

They won't, my angel. They sail to-morrow.'

'But sail where ? '

That,' said Jack,' is their secret. I must have a cigar. What's this?-By Jove !-Good Heavens! Oh, I say, by Jove!

An envelope lay in the cigar box, and on the envelope was a simple superscription :

For poor Susan.'

It was not sealed, and inside it were two crisp bank notes, each for ten pounds.

It was some little time before Jack Treherne could give his wife any rational explanation of his dismay, and just at first she seemed inclined to regard his tale with cold suspicion. But when he, abjectly humbled, begged the severe Mason to tell him the name of his guests, his wife knew that his shame and consternation were genuine.

The names were given to Margaret, sir. I was in the diningroom. She thought the lady and gentleman was Sir Thomas and Lady Trumpington till I told her they wasn't. . . . No, Sir, the cab was not off the stand. It drove round from Queen's Gate when I whistled.'

Thus the outraged Mason.

'Do you think they were Australians?' his wife.

Jack miserably asked

'Australians? Good heavens, no! They weren't Colonial. They were Cosmopolitan.'

There was little sleep that night for Mr. and Mrs. Jack Treherne.
VOL. XXVI.-NO. 151, N.S.

4

Next day each shipping office and every large hotel in London were visited. In despair Jack even went down to Tilbury and was looked on as a broken-hearted relative, undergoing an agonising parting, by the other people who returned on the tender from the P. and O. liner.

Detectives have, so far, been of no use. Advertisements have proved vain. Those two bank notes, which he has vainly tried to trace, sear Jack Treherne's conscience as if they were red hot.

'Susan,' appealed to in the agony columns of every British newspaper with a leg to stand upon, refuses to apply for something that is to her advantage.

Jack's friends-for the bitterness of his remorse has made him make his guilt public-have ceased to chaff him. They no longer inquire for Susan's health, nor mention the legal penalties for obtaining money on false pretences.

Anxiously and sympathetically they await with him some further development in the story of Susan.

JEAN LANG.

CRIMEAN PAPERS.

BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, BART.

ENVIABLY simple is the historian's task who brings not his narrative within a century of the time of writing. All the spadework has been done by other hands; let him but add diligence in reading to the natural gifts of an eye for colour, a sense of proportion, and command of a lucid pen, and his equipment is complete. Far different is the prospect before him who attempts to lay bare the springs of action in the nineteenth century. Already the materials are too mountainous to be mined successfully by any single pair of hands, and even while he stands gasping before the mass, fresh memoirs and correspondence pour hot and hot from the press, till he well-nigh despairs of ever reducing all these cross-lights to a common focus upon the true features of the original.

The two latest additions to this class of literature have appeared simultaneously, and, by a felicitous accident, dovetail at the most critical period of both the careers dealt with. Probably nine readers out of ten taking up either Mr. Martineau's Life of the Duke of Newcastle' or the more bulky volumes of 'Panmure Papers,' edited by Sir George Douglas and Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay, will turn first to the correspondence of 1854-5, when Panmure succeeded Newcastle at the War Office at the height of the first great European war since the curtain descended upon the field of Waterloo. At the height, said I? Nay, rather was it at the depth; for never was the prospect so gloomy for England as it was at the beginning of 1855. We were deeply committed to an enterprise which all military opinion concurred in pronouncing impracticable. It had dawned late upon the Government that, to use a vulgar phrase, they had bitten off a good deal more than they could chew.

There is revealed, besides, in this correspondence what may well give the reader pause, filling him with misgiving about the compatibility of effective operations in the field with a nervous Parliament and impatient public at home. It is well enough

known how closely Napoleon studied English newspapers during the Peninsular War and how much advantage he derived from their perusal. We are perfectly informed by the English,' wrote Berthier in Paris to Masséna at the front in 1811, 'much better than you are. The Emperor reads the London journals, and every day letters by [members of] the Opposition, of which some accuse Lord Wellington and discuss your operations in detail.' But communication was leaden-footed a hundred years ago. Had it been swifter, never would Wellington have been suffered to carry out the retreat upon the lines of Torres Vedras. Heartrending accounts would have appeared daily under panic headlines describing the horrors of devastation inflicted upon a friendly nation, the destruction of all food and property that could not be carried away, the sufferings and curses of peasantry driven like cattle from their farms. Yet it was upon the success of this retreat, and upon that only, that the whole six years of campaigning hinged. Had orders from home interfered with it, as assuredly they would have done had information from the front been incessant and instantaneous, the whole subsequent history of Europe must have run upon different lines. In the Boer War of 1900-1 Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener received a free hand from the Salisbury Cabinet; nevertheless in another respect their hands were the reverse of free. Hostilities were unduly prolonged because our generals dared not pay the price in blood which is sometimes exacted for victory, for there was always present to their minds the disabling apprehension of questions in Parliament, rousing the nation to a sense of the cost, before any value could be apparent in result.

Communication was not so immediate fifty years ago as it is now; nevertheless steam and electricity played an important part in 1854-5. Knowledge of events actually in progress at the seat of war was forced upon rulers and people at home, with the inevitable consequence of popular clamour and ministerial interference.

The fifth Duke of Newcastle, son of him who founded the Eton scholarship that bears his name,' sat as Earl of Lincoln and Tory member for South Nottinghamshire in the first reformed Parlia

'It is perhaps not generally known, nor is it noted in Mr. Martineau's narrative, that the dukedom has no connection with Newcastle-on-Tyne. It was inherited by Henry Pelham, ninth Earl of Lincoln, from his uncle Thomas Pelham-Holles, who in 1756 was created Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme.