youngest sister eventually went also to keep house for them. The other sister had married a man much older than herself, a person brought up to a farming life, and they lived with us, taking on themselves the entire management of the estate. Reading was my father's great delight; newspapers or periodicals were seldom seen in the house, novels never; but there was a vast store of theological books he had been collecting for many years, and to this store he was continually adding, so that a month seldom went by without bringing a fresh packet from England or Cape Town. He rarely stirred from the house, and could be found at all hours seated at the open window of his study, a volume spread out before him, and in his thin white fingers the pencil with which he was perpetually making his useless marginal notes. When spoken to, he would turn his dim eyes with that far-off look on the intruder, and mechanically repeat the words he had heard over and over again, apparently striving to catch their meaning without taking his thoughts off the subject that engaged them. I remember one morning the ploughman came in to say that the plough-and there was only onehad been carried by the bullocks against a tree and smashed in pieces. My brother-in-law being absent, we all went in to consult my father, the ploughman with us. My father seemed even more preoccupied than usual; he stared into the poor man's face with disconcerting earnestness while the story of the disaster was gone through again. When the man finished, he began:

"The plough has been smashed-the plough has been smashed. The Divine intelligence forms and knows all things. Granted. Does this then necessarily imply an exercise of the Divine will? Surely not! That is, I should say, perhaps not. For here steps in the difficulty. Can we hold the exercise of the Divine faculties to be involuntary? That would be to degrade our conception to the level of the heathen's, who hold destiny to be the supreme power. Are we not then driven to thisto fore-know is to preordain? But then-but then-the plough has been smashed against a tree!"

I stood listening open-mouthed to all this, but my sister, who happened to be in a merry mood, now burst out laughing. My father, recalled to himself, sharply rebuked her levity, and requested us to leave the

room.

He

His care for my education, in which he had never appeared to take a very lively interest, ceased altogether when I was about twelve. did not, however, cease giving me occasional advice. It was usual for him to say to me whenever I chanced to enter his room;-" By-the-bye, Latimer, I have put aside something here for you to read." Then he would give me a book, making a few remarks on its contents and the author's merits. Before long, forgetting all about the first book, he would give me a second one in the same way, then another, until there would be a dozen or twenty volumes collected in my room. These, after

glancing hastily over a few pages of each, I would carry back and rearrange on his shelves.

a season.

I did discover at last that not all the books in his library were of the same dry nature as those my father lent me to read. I discovered that there were also books capable of giving me the keenest delight. There were the histories and biographies-ecclesiastical histories and lives of men eminent for holiness and zeal in the advancement of religion. These books contained enough of human interest and passion to satisfy me for Tennyson, Bulwer, George Eliot, were names I had never heard, and the literature they represent was utterly unknown to me: when, therefore, it was my fortune to light on a work with more of earth and less of the cloudland of speculation-more about the incidents of a man's life and less about his theological opinions, it was to me like sweets to the savage boy accustomed to feed on flesh only, and acrid-tasting forest fruits. With the keenest pleasure I perused the lives of Fathers, Popes, Reformers; and, strange to say, the books I delighted most in reading were invariably discovered by me on lower shelves and in dusty, neglected corners of the library. I seldom spoke to my father about these works, for I had somehow got to believe that whatever pleased me most was, for some reason I could not comprehend, distasteful to him. I one day found in a volume of a many-tomed work, entitled "History of the Church of Christ," the greater part of the Confessions of St. Augustine. When I had finished reading this fragment, I ran full of exitement to ask my father to tell me something more about this noble saint, who was, without doubt, the holiest, wisest, greatest man the world had ever seen. He rebuked my extravagance, and coldly replied that Augustine had, no doubt, been a good man, holding truly that we are saved by faith and not by works: but he at the same time cautioned me against the danger of allowing myself to be carried away by too great an admiration for him, since, in his veneration for relics and also in other matters, he had shown a tendency to fall into those gross superstitions so abhorrent to our minds in the Romish Church of to-day. My father's words filled my mind with sorrow, and I could only lament in secret that my saintly hero had ever thought or said anything worthy of reprobation. This incident strongly affected my sensitive nature, making me exceedingly shy of betraying enthusiasm in my father's presence.

Just about the time he gave up instructing me he had, perhaps as a kind of compensation, presented me with a very pretty fowling-piece, ordered expressly for me from Cape Town. In making me this present he was not, I believe, quite disinterested, for he was extremely fond of game, caring little for any other kind of food at table, and I had often said that if I were only allowed to have a gun he should never want a bird for his dinner.

I found the greatest delight in my new pastime. Every morning, gun in hand, a few hard biscuits and a volume containing the biography of some

saintly personage in my pockets, I would go forth to spend the entire day in long rambles over the surrounding country. Occasionally my father appeared to wake up to the fact that my time was being sadly wasted, and these awakenings, always brief in duration, usually took place at the breakfast-table. "My son," he would say, "I can't quite make out what you are doing with yourself day after day; but it seems to me that if you go on spending your time in this idle, vagrant manner much longer you will be unfitted for anything in life. I really wish you would come into my study after breakfast to have an hour's serious conversation with me about your future. Probably your best plan would be to begin a systematic course of reading on some specific subject—the fulfilment of prophesy, for example, or the evidences of Christianity, or salvation by faith. We can, at any rate, select a dozen works giving an insight into one or other of these subjects, and then wait and see how the plan works."

A few minutes later, forgetting all about these lofty matters, he would perhaps remark, pushing his plate away: "Latimer, if you intend going out with that gun of yours to-day I hope you will not forget to bring in a quail or something for my supper. I really believe our mutton is getting tougher and skinnier every day. One would require the gastric juices of an ostrich to assimilate these pieces of fried deal, for I can compare them to nothing more succulent."

His wish for a quail always agreed so well with my own inclination that I never failed to obey it, and for some time nothing more would be said about my future and the course of reading that had been suggested.

Let it not be supposed, however, that I had degenerated into a mere sportsman incapable of taking pleasure in aught but the killing of wild animals. I never fired a shot that had not for its object the securing of something for the table; this end accomplished, I would think little more about sport for that day. To search for wild flowers, only to admire. them blooming ungathered in their wild beauty: to steal through the ancient gray-foliaged woods, listening to the murmuring wind in the farup leaves, or to the various notes of the feathered people, these were the pleasures I sought in my lonely wanderings and which never failed to fill my young heart with delight. When tired of rambling I would lie down on the dry grass in the shade and read my book, often till sleep overAt other times I would find myself a shady spot on the outskirts of the forrest-some eminence commanding a view of the wild broken country for many a league, and here I would dream my daydreams, and, though always shy and reticent in the presence of others, here I could imagine myself an actor on the stage of life, with no mean part to play before my fellow men. All these dreams of the future borrowed their colour from the religious histories and biographies I was incessantly reading. Applause, riches, the love of women, the soldier's renown, were less than nothing to me. The future I pictured for myself,

came me.

and that had an indescribable fascination for my mind, was a life of heroic effort and self-sacrifice. My years would be spent in converting heathen nations to Christ; in stirring the souls of men in vast cities with an eloquence like that of St. Chrysostom of old; in world-wide wanderings and perilous adventures by land and sea-shipwrecks, imprisonments, scourgings, hunger, thirst, fatigue-endured for the glory of God. And at last, perhaps, worn with age and unintermitted toil, I would withdraw to some peaceful solitude to spend my remaining years in writing some great book to keep alive the faith and cheer the souls of countless generations of Christians—a new immortal "City of God"-only without the blemishes that had been pointed out to me in the work of my beloved St. Augustine.

(To be continued.)

Old England and Old Russia:

INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF RUSSIAN LIFE AND A RUSSIAN CORONATION
THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

ON the 27th of February, in the year of grace 1557, England being

then once more happily restored to communion with the Church of Rome, there was a great stir in the City of London and its neighbouring parts; for on that day the first ambassador from " the high and mightie Evan Vasslivich, Emperor of all Russia, Great Duke of Volidemer, Moscovia and Novogrode, Emperour of Cassan and of Astrachan, &c.," after an unfortunate voyage that had lasted for nearly twelve months, made his state entry into the capital city of England. For nearly five hundred years all communications between the two countries had ceased. Lying as it were at the two extremities of the civilized world, each had been developing on its own lines uninfluenced by the other, from the days when Gytha, the daughter of our English Harold, had married the Russian Prince Vladimir. In the intervening centuries the two kingdoms had gradually been forgetting the very existence of each other, the only tie between them being that the German merchants of the Hanseatic League had houses both at Novgorod and London. It must have been this association that principally supplied our nobles and prelates with their ermines and sables, and it was mainly by its agents that the "budge doctors of the stoic fur" and other philosophies could strut in their petty hoods at our universities during the long years in which there was no direct communication between eastern and western Europe.

Let us now hurriedly glance at the circumstances which led to the opening of direct trade between the two.

During the whole of the Middle Ages the commerce with the East had been chiefly in the hands of the Venetians, until in 1497 the Portuguese discovered the path to India by the Cape of Good Hope. Five years before this Christopher Columbus had sighted the shores of the New World, to whose trade the Spaniards at once began to lay exclusive claim, no part of which they would forego. To the minds of both nations the new discoveries originally had but one value, viz., as opening out the road to those strange and golden regions of romanceCathay and the kingdom of Prester John. Whatever nation first set foot on these distant shores might claim the sole right of supplying Europe with the gifts of the East-silk, spice, incense, gold and precious stones. VOL. I.-No. 2.

M