a man, who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero impatient for the redemption of mankind, and for the beginning of a reign when the kisses shall be those of peace and righteousness.

All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mordax was not found on his persuasion of superiority in his own motives, but on the compatibility of unfair, equivocal, and even cruel actions with a nature which, apart from special temptations, is kindly and generous; and also to enforce the need of checks, from a fellow-feeling with those whom our acts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will any one be so hardy as to maintain that an otherwise worthy man cannot be vain and arrogant? I think most of us have some interest in arguing the contrary. And it is of the nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become cruel and self-justifying. There are fierce beasts within; chain them, chain them, and let them learn to cower before the creature with wider reason. This is what one wishes for Mordax that his heart and brain should restrain the outleap of roar and talons.

As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he has not discovered is novel to him, one is surprised that quick intellect and shrewd observation do not early gather reasons for being ashamed of a mental trick which makes one among the comic parts of that various actor, Conceited Ignorance.

I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, respectable servant, whose spelling is so unvitiated by non-phonetic superfluities that he writes night as nit. One day, looking over his accounts, I said to him jocosely: "You are in the latest fashion with your spelling, Pummel; most people spell 'night' with a gh between the i and the t, but the greatest scholars now spell it as you do." "So I suppose, sir," says Pummel; "I've seen it with a gh, but I've noways give in to that myself." You would never catch Pummel in an interjection of surprise. I have sometimes laid traps for his astonishment; but he has escaped them all, either by a respectful

neutrality, as of one who would not appear to notice that his master had been taking too much wine, or else by that strong persuasion of his all-knowingness, which makes it simply impossible for him to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him that the world is spinning round and along like a top, and that he is spinning with it, he says, "Yes, I've heard a deal of that in my time, sir," and lifts the horizontal lines of his brow a little higher, balancing his head from side to side as if it were too painfully full. Whether I tell him that they cook puppies in China, that there are ducks with fur coats in Australia, or that in some parts of the world it is the pink of politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to a respectable stranger, Pummel replies, "So I suppose, sir," with an air of resignation to hearing my poor version of wellknown things, such as elders use in listening to lively boys lately presented with an anecdote-book. His utmost concession is that what you state is what he would have supplied if you had given him carte blanche instead of your needless instruction, and in this sense his favorite answer is, "I should say."

"Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at not getting my coffee, "if you were to carry your kettle and spirits of wine up a mountain of a morning, your water would boil there sooner." "I should say, sir." Or, "There are boiling springs in Iceland. Better go to Iceland." "That's what I've been thinking, sir."

I have taken to asking him hard questions, and, as I expected, he never admits his own inability to answer them, without representing it as common to the human race. "What is the cause of the tides, Pummel? "Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I was to give mine, it 'ud be different."

But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly imagining situations of surprise for others. His own consciousness is that of one so thoroughly soaked in knowledge that further absorption is impossible; but his neighbors appear to him to be in the state of thirsty sponges, which it is a

charity to besprinkle. His great interest in thinking of fereigners is that they must be surprised at what they see in England, and especially at the beef. He is often occupied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of the assembled animals "for he was not like us, sir, used from a b'y to Wombwell's shows." He is fond of discoursing to the lad who acts as shoeblack and general subaltern, and I have overheard him saying to that small upstart, with some severity, "Now don't you pretend to know, because the more you pretend the more I see your ignirance"-a lucidity on his part which has confirmed my impression that the thoroughly self-satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate the charm of humility in others.

Your diffident, self-suspecting mortal is not very angry that others should feel more comfortable about themselves, provided they are not otherwise offensive: he is rather like the chilly person, glad to sit next a warmer neighbor; or the timid, glad to have a courageous fellow-traveller. It cheers him to observe the store of small comforts that his fellowcreatures may find in their self-complacency, just as one is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco and snuff for which one has neither nose nor stomach one's self.

But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption which he sees to be ill-founded. The service he regards society as most in need of, is to put down the conceit which is so particularly rife around him that he is inclined to believe it the growing characteristic of the present age. In the schools of Magna Græcia, or in the sixth century of our era, or even under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom from that presumption by which his contemporaries are stirring his able gall. The way people will now flaunt notions which are not his, without appearing to mind that they are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. It might seem surprising to us that one strongly convinced of his own value should prefer to exalt an age in which he did not flourish, if it were not for the reflection that the present age is the only one in which anybody has appeared to undervalue him.

ΑΝ

A HALF-BREED.

N early, deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion, dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction. that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed, without being convinced that he was in error; who feels within himself unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved habits, and intimacies from which he has far receded, without conscious justification or unwavering sense of superior attrac tiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions-the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe confounding both.

Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwithstanding that he spends his growing wealth with liberality

and manifest enjoyment. To most observers he appears to be simply one of the fortunate and also sharp commercial men, who began with meaning to be rich, and have become what they meant to be a man never taken to be well-born, but surprisingly better informed than the well-born usually are, and distinguished among ordinary commercial magnates by a personal kindness which prompts him not only to help the suffering in a material way through his wealth, but also by direct ministration of his own; yet with all this, diffusing, as it were, the odor of a man delightedly conscious of his wealth, as an equivalent for the other social distinctions of rank and intellect, which he can thus admire without envying. Hardly one among those superficial observers can suspect that he aims or has ever aimed at being a writer: still less can they imagine that his mind is often moved by strong currents of regret, and of the most unworldly sympathies, from the memories of a youthful time when his chosen associates were men and women whose only distinction was a religious, a philanthropic, or an intellectual enthusiasm; when the lady, on whose words his attention most hung, was a writer of minor religious literature; when he was a visitor and exhorter of the poor in the alleys of a great provincial town, and when he attended the lectures given especially to young men by Mr. Apollos, the eloquent Congregational preacher, who had studied in Germany, and had liberal advanced views, then far beyond the ordinary teaching of his sect. At that time Mixtus thought himself a young man of socially reforming ideas, of religious principles and religious yearnings. It was within his prospects also to be rich, but he looked forward to a use of his riches chiefly for reforming and religious purposes. His opinions were of a strongly democratic stamp; except that even then, belonging to the class of employers, he was opposed to all demands in the employed that would restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most democratic in relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aris tocracy and landed interest, and he had also a religious sense of brotherhood with the poor. Altogether he was a sincerely