a good girl. Often he would suggest, that, the kind things she said of her rival, and his mother should divide with her some of the admiration she expressed for her the good things with which he came laden from Luton - dainties which, he used to tell himself, stuck in his own throat, because of her before whom he longed to place the finest and freshest of them. He was most kind and brotherly; but there his attentions came to an end, for neither by word nor look could Annie ever reason herself into the belief that Philip meant anything towards her; and it required all Mrs. Lee's efforts to keep alive the fast-Nathaniel Horan, the popular preacher. dying-out hope that, notwithstanding he had broken with Margot, he had no intention of supplying her place with another.

On the strength, therefore, of this evidence, Dick Barry - now established as a steady workman, if not an entirely reformed character · made up his mind once more to try his fate, and speak to Margot on the subject which still lay nearest to his heart. But he was not allowed to proceed very far before Margot stopped him, bidding him say no more; as, if they were to remain friends, he had better remember that with her nothing was changed since the last time they had spoken on this subject.

fever and other complaints their ill-drained | Philip and Annie had been seen walking, and ill-ventilated dwellings brought upon and coming into chapel together. them by saying, "It served 'em right; 'twas a judgment on 'em. There was always something the matter with such folks." It was to these poor cottages, lying thick and close to the water's edge, that Margot often came as a ray of light. The inmates all knew that she was as poor as themselves; and when she did bring a little of the vegetable soup on which she and her grandfather principally lived, it was saved from the share which at most times was somewhat scanty for her own healthy appetite. Gifts, therefore, she could not bring; but she could bring her willing heart and strong hands to wash and dress the children, scrub out the room, and make many a neglected sufferer clean and comfortable. Was it any wonder, therefore, that wherever these met her she had welcome nods, outstretched hands, and familiar greetings, causing those who stood apart to think of, or sneeringly mention the proverb, “Birds of a feather flock together?"

During this past autumn, -a season when fever was always more rife among them. Margot had done more than ever she had done before. It seemed a sort of relief to work, none to sit still. Therefore, after toiling hard all day, she would take the little patched-up tub they called a boat, and row herself round to Cockle Cove, generally finding something upon which to bestow a portion of her restless energy. Unknown to herself, the shadow which had fallen on her life had greatly chastened the girl's naturally generous and impulsive character. She was tenderer than ever to her old grandfather, humouring him until he would cry out pettishly

"You won't argify with me anyways, Margot. I want to see ye flare up as ye used to do; but you're changed completely. 'Tis all along 'o Phil, I know that; and if you'd only let me seek him out, lovey, I'll warrant I'll make all square in a brace o' shakes."

"I only thought," Dick stammered out, "that, as Phil seems to have taken up with somebody else, in time, you know, Margot, you might.

But Margot shook her head.

"If Philip feels he can marry Annie Turle," she said, "I shall be the last to blame him. But as for me, until my heart changes, I shall be as I am, all my life." And when, after renewed promises of continued friendship, poor Dick very dejectedly took his leave, Margot hid her face in her hands, and tried, while the tears fell from her eyes like rain, to pray that Philip might be happy. Trouble had weighed rather heavily on Margot lately; for, in addition to her own heart-sorrow, her grandfather had been, from the time the colder weather set in, laid up with one of his attacks, and she looked forward therefore with dismay to the long winter which was before them. At Redneap November had been a month of continuous rain, auguring, according to the weather-wise, a dry Christmas. It wanted now barely a week to Christmas-day; and as Margot looked around her, she sighed, thinking it was very hard not to feel happy when everything seemed clothed with beauty and gladness.

The early afternoon sun of a winter day was shining with all its cheerful brightness, touching up and lingering about the old black cliffs, while little wavelets danced and rippled on the soft But to this she would not listen. "'Twas red sand, making a pleasant plashing grandfather led him on," she thought. sound that murmured soothingly to the "First his promise to poor mother, and girl's wounded spirit. Naturally her then grandfather all but asking him to thoughts turned to the happy days of her marry me. He knew not how to act, love. How thoughtful, how tender, had perhaps." Philip been to her!- never unkind, never From various circumstances, too, the unforgiving, but ever ready to make up report was very general that Philip was the quarrels, which were always of her keeping company with Annie Turle. Mrs. secking. When first she came to Redneap Lee hadn't denied it; old Turle had turned a lonely child without a friend save himit off by saying there was more unlikely self, ah! what had he not been to her birds than that flying; and, as a climax, then? Yes, until that last sad parting,

think I ought'er my beauty, when I know'd Phil Lee's father when his face was as smooth as yer own purty one is."

but say if you know when Philip will have returned, and if you cannot, say what is the best way for me to find out."

"Oh! as to finding out," replied Uncle Ben, "just you leave that to me; I've only to ax the old woman, which, as I don't know rightly myself, would be the shortest way."

This being the point Margot desired to gain, she readily agreed with him, getting a further promise that he would pay Mrs. Lee an early visit the next morning, when he would be sure not to let out to that sharp-sighted matron, by look or sign, that the inquiry did not proceed wholly from himself.

and once or twice when he was jealous of her, and feared that she cared for somebody else who had paid her attention, Philip had never breathed a harsh word to "Ah! Uncle Ben," exclaimed Margot, her. What could have made him so un- with a petulant shrug of her shoulders, just? And then she went over the inter-"never mind telling me about his father, view, recalling her own angry words and bitter speeches (oh! they had never seemed so bad before! how could she say such things!) until she thought it was no wonder he was provoked. No doubt, but had she said this all would have been different. True, it was wrong, very wrong of him to suspect her, but then had not Philip often said he couldn't help being jealous? it was because he loved her so dearly. She could see now that it was almost entirely the fault of her own wicked, proud temper - she should have spoken and acted differently to him, and he would soon have seen that all he was saying was false. Now she could have gone down on her knees before him and asked forgiveness, only this about Annie Turle? Was it true? - somehow she did not believe it; but suppose it should be so? And after a few minutes' further reverie she suddenly jumped up, with the determination that whatever might be the result, she would seek out Philip and have a reconciliation. If they could be nothing to one another, at least they need not be enemies; and as, in her eagerness, she ran along the sands to the object of her first inquiries, notwithstanding her arguments to the contrary, hope was strong within her that all would yet turn out well.

The person from whom Margot thought it most likely she should obtain her information, was an old man known as Uncle Ben, who, while pursuing his occupation as seller of the fish he himself caught, and those which the few fishermen around Redneap entrusted to him contrived to become acquainted with all that took place in the various houses he visited. Margot found him seated before an upturned boat, busily employed in patching it and putting it into order.

"Uncle Ben," she began without further introduction, "do you know if the Bluebell is expected here, and whether she's at Luton, or where she is?"

Uncle Ben paused in his work, stood as upright as a long life spent between low decks would permit him, pushed up his old cap, and meditatingly repeated —

"The Bluebell?"

"You know," added the girl, twisting the corner of her woollen apron into a hard ball, “we have not been quite friends of late, and I want to see Philip without his mother, or anybody else, knowing anything about it. Do you understand, Uncle Ben?" and she lifted up her sweet face all aglow with rosy confusion.

The old man looked at her for a minute or so, and then with a comical expression he said, meditatively

66

'Sweethearting's a rum game nowadays. There's you a-mopin' and frettin', - for I've seed ye when you've thought nobody was nigh, — and there's Phil Lee skulking about, as if he was ashore on the new act, tryin' to get a glimpse o' ye, and then when ye hove in sight scuttling off like a rabbit. I " but Margot had caught him by the armn.

"Uncle Ben," she cried; "how? tell me what you mean; where have you seen Philip?

Why, peepin' into the window, and behind Flatpole rock-not once, Lord love ye, but a dozen times. What, at it again! bless the maid, you're as leaky as my old boat. Why I niver did

Nor I either," laughed Margot in the midst of her tears; "for I am crying because I am so happy now. Oh, Uncle Ben! but you are a dear old man!"

PROFESSORS E. CURTIUS, Strack, and Adler, have arrived in Smyrna on an archaeological mission, having for its main object the investigation of the ruins of Sardis and its neighbourhood.

From The Contemporary Review. ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYTHOLOGY.

BY MAX MULLER.

modern philosophers cannot resist the at traction of these ancient problems. That stream of philosophic thought which, springing from Descartes (1596-1650), WHAT can be in our days the interest rolled on through the seventeenth and of mythology? What is it to us that eighteenth centuries in two beds — the Kronos was the son of Uranos and Gaia, idealistic, marked by the names of Maleand that he swallowed his children, Hes- branche (1638-1715), Spinoza (1632 – tia, Demeter, Hera, Pluton, and Poseidon, 1677), and Leibnitz (1618-1716); and as soon as they were born? What have the sensualistic, marked by the names of we to do with the stories of Rhea, the wife Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711 of Uranos, who, in order to save her -1776), and Condillac (1715-1780), till youngest son from being swallowed by his the two arms united again in Kant (1724 father, gave her husband a stone to swal--1804), and the full stream was carried low instead? And why should we be on by Schelling (1775-1854), and Hegel asked to admire the exploits of this (1770-1831),- this stream of modern youngest son, who when he had grown up, philosophic thought has ended where made his father drink a draught, and thus ancient philosophy began in a Philosohelped to deliver the stone and his five phy of Mythology, which, as you know, brothers and sisters from their paternal forms the most important part of Schelprison? What shall we think if we read lings's final system, of what he called himin the most admired of classic poets that self his Positive Philosophy, given to the these escaped prisoners became after- world after the death of that great thinker wards the great gods of Greece, gods be- and poet in the year 1851. lieved in by Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalized by Phidias? Why should we listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him, and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his limbs, threw them into a caldron, and thus restored Pelops to life, minus, however, his shoulder, which Demeter had eaten in a fit of absence, and which had therefore to be replaced by a shoulder made of ivory?

Can we imagine anything more silly, more savage, more senseless, anything more unworthy to engage our thoughts, even for a single moment? We may pity our children that, in order to know how to construe and understand the master-works of Homer and Virgil, they have to fill their memory with such idle tales; but we might justly suppose that men who have serious work to do in this world, would banish such subjects for ever from their thoughts.

I do not mean to say that Schelling and Aristotle looked upon mythology in the same light, or that they found in it exactly the same problems; yet there is this common feature in all who have thought or written on mythology, that they look upon it as something which, whatever it may mean, does certainly not mean what it seems to mean; as something that requires an explanation, whether it be a system of religion, or a phase in the development of the human mind, or an inevitable catastrophe in the life of language. According to some, mythology is history changed into fable; according to others, fable changed into history. Some discover in it the precepts of moral philosophy ennunciated in the poetical language of antiquity; others see in it a picture of the great forms and forces of nature, particularly the sun, the moon, and the stars, the changes of day and night, the succession of the seasons, the return of the years And yet, how strange, from the very all this reflected by the vivid imagination childhood of philosophy, from the first of ancient poets and sages. Epicharmos, faintly-whispered Why? to our own time for instance, the pupil of Pythagoras, deof matured thought and fearless inquiry,clared that the gods of Greece were not mythology has been the ever-recurrent what, from the poems of Homer, we might subject of anxious wonder and careful suppose them to be- personal beings, enstudy. The ancient philosophers, who dowed with superhuman powers, though could pass by the petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their quarries, without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more curious still, even

liable to many of the passions and frailties of human nature. He maintained that these gods were really the Wind, the Water, the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, and the Stars. Not long after his time another philosopher, Empedokles, holding that the whole of nature consisted of a mixture and separation of the four elements, declared

of seeing in the gods and heroes of Greece anything beyond what they appear to be in the songs of Homer, was a mere fancy and invention of the students of Comparative Mythology.

that Zeus was the element of Fire. Here forgetful of their own Plato and Aris the element of Air, Aidoneus or Pluton, totle, seem to imagine that the idea the element of Earth, and Nestis the ele'ment of Water. In fact, whatever the freethinkers of Greece discovered successively as the first principles of Being and Thought, whether the air of Anaximenes, or the fire of Herakleitos, or the Nous or There were, no doubt, Greeks, and emMind of Anaxagoras, was readily identified inent Greeks too, who took the legends of with Zeus and the other divine persons of their gods and heroes in their literal sense. Olympian mythology. Metrodoros, the But what do these say of Homer and contemporary of Anaxagoras, went even Hesiod? Xenophanes, the contemporary further. While Anaxagoras would have of Pythagoras, holds Homer and Hesiod been satisfied with looking upon Zeus as responsible for the popular superstitions but another name of his Nous, the highest of Greece. In this he agrees with Heintellect, the mover, the disposer, the gov-rodotus, when he declares that these two ernor of all things, Metrodoros resolved not poets made the theogony for the Greeks, only the persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, and gave to the gods their names, and asbut likewise those of human kings and he-signed to them their honours and their roes such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and arts, and described their appearances. Hektor into various combinations and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts, hidden under a thin veil of allegory.

--

Sokrates, as is well known, looked upon such attempts at explaining all fables allegorically as too arduous and unprofitable; yet he, too, as well as Plato, pointed frequently to what they called the hypónoia, the under-current, if I may say so, or the under-meaning of ancient mythology.

Aristotle speaks more explicitly:

But he then continues in a very different strain from the pious historian. "Imer," he says, "and Hesiod ascribed to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men. yea, they declared that the gods had committed nearly all unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud." "Men seem to have created their gods, and to have given to them their own mind, voice, and figure. The Ethiopians made their gods black and flat-nosed; the Thracians red-haired and blue-eyed; just as oxen or lions, if they could but draw, would draw their gods like oxen and lions." This was spoken about 500 B.C. Herakleitos, about 460 B.C., one of the boldest thinkers of ancient Greece, deinclared that Homer deserved to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged; and a story is told that Pythagoras (about 510 B.C.) saw the soul of Homer in Hades, hanging on a tree and surrounded by serpents, as a punishment for what he had said of the gods. And what can be stronger than the condemnation passed on Homer by Plato? I shall read an extract from the "Republic," from the excellent translation lately published by Professor Jowett :

"It has been handed down," he says, "by early and very ancient people, and left to those who came after, in the form of myths, that these (the first principles of the world) are the gods, and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The rest has been added mythically, order to persuade the many, and in order to be used in support of laws and other interests. Thus they say that the gods have a human form, and that they are like to some of the other living beings, and other things consequent on this, and similar to what has been said. If one separated ont of these fables, and took only that first point, viz., that they believed the first essences to be gods, one would think that it had been divinely Said, and that while every art and every philosophy was probably invented ever so many times and lost again, these opinions had, like fragments of them, been preserved until now. So far only is the opinion of our fathers, and that received from our first ancestors, clear to us."

I have quoted the opinions of these Greek philosophers, to which many more might have been added, partly in order to show how many of the most distinguished minds of ancient Greece agreed in demanding an interpretation, whether physical or metaphysical, of Greek mythology, partly in order to satisfy those classical scholars, who, forgetful of their own classics,