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into the large parlour chamber, the stately best room. Hardly a word did we speak; but before he left I raised my eyes to his, and knew he really loved me. Ah, how happy that look made me. through the week I lived on it; and then, when next he came, he asked me to show him the high window I sat at, and I brought him here to see it, and we had a moment together, all of our own. And- -was it very immodest in me? -I let him kiss my neck-he said 'twas like a peach and sometimes I think that kiss burns there now, it was so sweet and

warm.

---

Through the summer he came, each week on market day, to see me, till I grew to love the sound of his horse's hoofs as he galloped up the avenue. But I was never strong like Susanna; and when the first cold of that winter came it chilled me and I suddenly sickened. 'O, mother,' I cried, and I so soon to be married! Am I to die, instead?' But she soothed me, and gave me herb-waters that she had made herself, and kept me still in my bed. But I grew worse, and I knew that I was sick to death; and when I told my mother she sent for the leech; and he said, 'Tis too true; she is dying.' And then I said,-'Mother 'tis near a week before dear Ned will come again-I cannot live so long! Send for him, dear mother, that I may say good bye!' My mother said she almost feared to ask my father to let her send; but she so pitied me that she went to him and asked him. She came back trembling and crying; my father was so angry! Never,' he said, 'never would be abet his own daughter in so unmaidenly a deed as sending for her lover. Never-far better die without thought of him than think of such an unwomanly act as that!' I trembled as I lay in my

bed, at the sound of his angry voice; I grew weaker and more sick with the sorrow and dis

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appointment. But that same evening as I lay still, and my mother sat beside me, I heard Ned's horse in the avenue. 'Mother,' I cried, he is coming.' 'I hear nothing, Anne,' Anne,' she answered-but I-oh, I heard him gallop to the door-I heard him come up the stairs-I saw him enter the room!-I started up, 'Ned,' I said, 'have you come to say good bye?'

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Anne,' said my mother, putting her arms around me, 'there is no one here.' 'Then indeed, I am dying, dear mother,' I said-and so it was!-so it was!-I never saw him! never saw him! never saw him!"

And the poor pale Anne wrung her delicate hands together till the Primrose felt her tears and her wrath rising together, at this sad old-world story.

"How could you bear it?" she exclaimed; "I would not! I would have risen from my bed and gone to him. How could you be kept like a naughty child? Why, what was there unmaidenly in sending for your lover? Perhaps it is worse to go to him, but I am not ashamed to do it. I have come over from America alone to nurse my lover, because he was ill. Why, it makes my blood boil to hear such a horrible story as yours!"

Anne had paused in the very act of wringing her hands, and now, still holding them clasped, leaned forward with startled blue eyes, in an attitude of intense eagerness.

"You did what?" she asked; "tell me again."

"I came over from America two months ago, to nurse Arthur Honeybell, who was sick with a fever, and his mother too delicate to attend on him. I am going to marry him this fall, and then I

suppose I shall own your pretty Honeybell die without seeing her old-fashioned name." "And you alone?"

say you came

"Yes, quite alone," responded the Philadelphia Primrose, with cheerful audacity. "Mamma always says she'll back me to travel round the world by myself. It was really great fun; and I'm so glad I came, for Arthur began to get better as soon as I was in the house."

"And he is going to marry you?" asked Anne, still in the same attitude, as if petrified. "He is going to marry you, and give you our old name after

that ?"

"After what?" inquired Miss Primrose, in some amazement.

"After following him-and alone from another country, he's going to marry you ?"

"Well, I guess he is," remarked Miss Primrose, eyeing Arthur's ancestress as if she had had about enough of that sort of catechism.

"And is our family to be so disgraced? Are the days you live in so degenerate-so loose in their morality? Oh, it is too shocking! What would my father have said?” And, with a faint shriek of horror, Anne put up her hands to her eyes as though to hide from her sight the dreadful young woman before her.

Primrose was about to reply with some impatience, when she was startled to see that the chair which the lovely Anne had occupied was empty. She rubbed her eyes and looked again.

"Been to sleep?" said a voice behind her-and on the instant Arthur's substantial form appeared, and he sat down on the identical chair so lately filled by a more fanciful shape.

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"Arthur! exclaimed the Primrose, "do tell me did Anne

lover because her father wouldn't send for him ?"

"What, Anne Honeybell whose portrait is hanging there?-my great-great-aunt? Yes, she did, and a burning shame it was. But fathers were tyrants in those days. I could tell you many such a story as that. But my poor aunt Anne's was certainly a sad one. They never even told Sir Edward when she was dead; and the next market-day he rode up to see her as usual. But the woman at the lodge came forward, and, as she opened the gates for him, said, 'Don't you know, Sir Edward, that poor Miss Anne is dead?' They say he never said a word, but looked at her as if to see she spoke the truth, and then turned his horse's head and rode away, swaying backwards and forwards in his saddle like a drunken man. He never came near this house again, and I'm sure I don't wonder."

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"I am afraid we American girls are terribly independent," marked Miss Primrose with an apologetic air not common with her. "I wonder what your greataunt Anne would have said to my rushing over here as I did, when I heard you were ill ? "

"I expect," said Arthur with a laugh, "that she would have said you were an immodest little baggage. But the opinions of a past century don't matter, fortunately for us; and in the present day, when you behave like a trump, as you did then, you will be called a plucky little angel. Thank

heaven that people don't let each other die in solitude out of modesty nowadays, and that there was an American girl with love enough in her to come all over here by herself and save my life!"

"I'm glad you look at it that way," said the Primrose with a little sigh of relief, "because since you've got so well I haven't dared to ask you what you thought of my impetuosity, and your aunt Anne

"May I ask," interrupted Arthur Honeybell, "what on earth has set your little brain running on my great-aunt Anne and her opinions about the conduct of young

women ?"

"Well, really, I don't know," said she, rubbing her eyes again, "but I believe I must have been dreaming."

"I am sure you have," said Arthur, "and a very funny subject for you to be dreaming about-oldworld notions of modesty-you, who are an apostle of the creed that every man should be a law to himself. And now, shall I tell you some more stories about these faded beauties with their waists under their arms; or shall we have the horses out, and go on to the moors ?"

"Oh, let us go out," cried the Primrose with some return of her wonted spirit ; "this place makes me SO sad dreamy."

and

She went gladly away, leaning on Arthur Honey bell's arm; but, as she left the corridor, she looked back, and a chill struck anew into her heart as she met the sad haunting eyes of the poor bygone beauty, looking out of her portrait upon the gallery where she passed so much of her subdued girl hood.

"Thank God!" cried the Primrose, as she paused an instant

on the threshold, looking back. "Thank God I was not born in those days, and that I live in a time when one may call one's soul one's own, and when one isn't a slave to other people's prejudices."

"Men

were

"I prefer the present day," remarked Arthur. drunken fools half the time then. In fact, three or four generations ago the English upper classes were a set of barbarians."

"But," said the Primrose with another remembrance of her dream, "doubtless they would be just as much disgusted with a great many things that we do now, as we are disgusted with things they did then."

"Certainly," said Arthur, " every age has its own prejudices. If my great-aunt Anne could see you and other young ladies of your type coolly promenading Europe and America, with your hands in your ulster pockets, your caps on the sides of your heads, smoking cigarettes, and placidly accepting the admiration and humble services of every fellow you meet, she would be, to say the least of it, astonished. In her days a beauty might be the toast of a county; now a beauty is nobody if she has not had London society at her feet and flashed in cool independent triumph through the various Courts of Europe. A century ago young beauties were violets; now, though they may be called lilies and Primroses, they appear to me to partake of the character of much more self-assertive flowers."

"Are you trying to tease me ?" asked the Primrose, looking at him very earnestly. She is like all other women in this respect, that there is one man in the world whose opinion she is absurdly sensitive about.

"Of course I am," he said, amused at her earnest look. "I like

teasing you, because you are so irrepressible, and however well you bear it at the beginning are certain to turn and rend me at last. But you look too dreamy to tease to-day.

Come, we will go out, and forget the miseries and sad love stories of those old fogeys of the past, in the enjoyment of the present and its independence.

THE QUALITY OF MERCY.

[A Paper read before the New Shakspere Society, Nov. 14, 1879.]

BY THE AUTHOR OF "HOME SIDE OF A SCIENTIFIC MIND."

[IN the discussion which followed the reading of this paper, it was treated as an "Attack on Portia.' But the criticism can scarcely be an attack upon this popular heroine, seeing that what is said of her is true of a very large proportion of persons in every class. If it appear severe on anything, it is not on Portia, but on a state of society in which a woman whose moral qualities are but of average order, and who is exceptional only in intelligence and grace, can find herself raised to the rank of an ideal of womanhood.

But, in reality, the writer had no thought of attacking anybody, even society at large; the sole object being to suggest a meaning for the grotesque old tale of the pound of flesh, which Shakspere, and perhaps more than one writer before him, connected with the story of the caskets.]

I have been asked to say a few words about the parallel between Shylock and Portia.

It will, of course, seem to many a matter of doubt whether Shakspere had any such parallel in his mind. But the point to which I have to call attention is that a certain correspondence does, at least in part, exist.

If the idea of such a comparison is a novel one, I can lay no claim to the credit of originating it. It was suggested to me by some pas

sages in the letters of the late James Hinton, which were to the effect that the sacrifice of human lives to self-righteous prejudices or to imaginary ideas of duty to one's family, may be essentially as cruel as sacrificing them to what are called evil passions or vicious pleasures. But whether this idea is essentially a modern one, or whether it had occurred to Shakspere's mind, is a question on which I do not wish to enter.

It is often said that commentators find lessons in old writers which would have greatly surprised the writers themselves. But this must necessarily be the case when we are commenting on the works of any author who is rather an artist than a didactic teacher.

The highest mission of a moralist is rather to show the inadequacy and imperfection of the ideal of rightness accepted by his age and country than to declaim against acknowledged vices and foibles. And the former object is often better accomplished by giving a purely artistic representation of that ideal than by any direct attempt at inculcating moral truths. What is the meaning of the word "inspiration" as applied to works of art, if the poet can never teach truths of which he is himself unconscious? If Shakspere can make us see a fact, we have, I think, a right to examine it, even if we are

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