explain to him that great heaven-word, quietness, calm! His one idea is Motion! The picture in his mind for ever, Wheels! His children are so many more hands to work with! His World to Come is when iron machinery or age shall have disabled him from labour, and he must starve or exist on in a Union Workhouse!

Helen saw, felt, pondered, all these things. In Manchester she said 'Where is GOD?' A voice beside answered, ' HE abides where HE ever was— not in the thunder and the whirlwind and the fire, neither among the pomps of the proud, but within the stillness and the severe shadows of the Church. There are His benediction and His justice. This nation has turned its back upon His Church, therefore it is become the prey of confusion and wrong.'

They had not concluded their intended visits when fresh letters reached them from Ireland. But the broad black bordered envelope and the superscription in a strange hand-writing, raised the shadow of death before their eyes ere the seal was hastily broken. The brothers, so long parted, were to meet no more in this world. Colonel Riddesdale had suffered a sudden paralytic seizure, and a letter had been instantly dispatched to hasten the journey of his relatives; this, in travelling, had been missed, and now the news was that he was dead. The communication was made by the solicitor of the deceased, who stated that General Riddesdale was left joint executor with his niece, and that that lady was come to Dublin to proceed with the necessary legal forms as soon as her uncle should arrive. The next morning the General and Lady Helen took their passage from Liverpool to Dublin.

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CHAPTER VI.

The Roman Catholic.

"Toda le redonez de la tierra es un sepulcro: no hay cosa que sustente que con título de piedad no la esconda y entierre. Corren los rios, los arroyos, las fuentes, y las aguas, y ningunas retroceden para sus alegres nacimientos: acleranse con ansia para los vastos dominios de Tlulóca, ye cuanto mas se arriman á sus dilatadas márgenes, tanto mas van labrando las melancólicas urnas para sepultarse. Lo que fué ayer no es hoy, ni lo de hoy se afianza que será mañana.

"Aspiremos ál cielo, que allí todo es eterno y nada se corrompe."

"El horror del sepulcro es lisongera cuna para él, y las funestas sombras, brillantes luces para los astros."

XIMENE, the daughter of the deceased brother of General Riddesdale, sat silently gazing from an open window of her temporary home in one of the great thoroughfares of the city of Dublin. Her meditations were of her religion, and her country's nationhood. She was thinking of the passionate imprecations vented by the fevered heart of Ireland against those Saxon' footsteps, which there by thousands before her eyes, trod down the hallowed dust of the Land of Faith; and she was recalling how cruelly those hatreds were provoked. She thought of the people in their oppression, and their destitution, and their forced crime; vexed

with petty struggles, goaded to madness by the perpetual dawn and death of hope; infatuated in their passive long-suffering, and withered like a blasted corn-field, by their own blind, reckless wilfulness; full of the elements of fertility and splendour, all as the face of a dark water, for want of the creative command to be breathed upon the chaos -BE Light-BE Harmony. And she thought of her own bright Spain, the elder sister in sorrow; and because of both their piety the heart of the Roman Catholic marvelled much at their exceeding afflictions.

Ireland was then looking up to him who was to her ardent soul what Napoleon entitled Ney-the Brave des Braves-name of equal pride and comfort. She believed in his fortune, and trusted his genius, and her reverence for his endowments was boundless; and he, even he, now is gone down to the grave like a man-the lamp is shivered, and the flame is lost! Higher, yet higher must Ireland lift her eyes before they reach the hills from whence her help will come. But then, as we have said, he lived and shone, the star of a nation's idolatry,' and to-night he was to appear among them, and dense crowds began to gather together, and the heart of the young Irishwoman was busied with weighing his claims and his apparent power, while she reflected on the unparalleled disasters of the land. And then reverting from the weakness and the wantingness of political resources for the enormous need, her never-doubting belief looked back into the past, and forward to the future, at the trusted and one abiding ability for Ireland's restoration-the ruler and restorer, the keystone and cement, the shadow and the dew, to a hundred mighty nations. Instantaneously were passed in

involuntarily proud review the broad fields of the records of history, with their exhaustless fruit for triumph and satisfaction to the Roman Catholic ;— was it any wonder that the confidence of a zealous faith, not over-read in blue books or statistics, should turn to the hope of the resurrection of the national Church as an infallible leaf of the Tree of Life for unhappy Ireland?

Poor Ireland! surely she hates as Christian may not hate an enemy, the spoilers of her altar, and the violators of her soil; and perhaps till Ireland learns to hate less, she will be constrained to suffer still. Who knows but we have here the key to the mystery of her long afflictions?-Who knows but we have here a glimpse of the meaning from behind that awful veil, which seems to envelop the depression of a great and Christian country? There is a frequent legend in traditionary tales, nowhere more familiar than in Ireland, of beings exiled from the regions of Paradise, beneath

"The decree of awful ban, Stamped upon the love of man,"

whose expiation and reinstalment in the joys of their primeval home was to be permitted when, and not till when, they had learned to do good to them that should hate them, and work charity to them that should despitefully use them; their task being sealed under an enigma, which time must teach them to interpret, written in some mystic scroll, or enchanted fillet bound upon their brows. And long, long was it, often, before the high-beating heart of the sky-born one could grow calm enough to read its destiny, and to fulfil its task, and submit itself to be washed in the waters of repentance. There lies a deep moral beneath many such an idle

S

fable. Ireland, poor Ireland! perhaps might read in these, her own oft-told tales, lessons of wisdom. Hatred and restiveness are not the temper wherewith to win Heaven's blessings. The Church to which Ireland is devoted has found it so. When by the infirmities of administration she has been betrayed into giving her enormous power to acts of vengeance, she has failed and fallen; when she has scattered her breath in curses, it has returned home to her own bosom miasma and mortality. Was not the last and greatest session of Her authoritative senate-Sacrosancta Ecumenica et Generalis Synodus Tridentina Præsidentibus Legatis Apostolicis-almost opened and closed with cursing, apart from ecclesiastical comminations? and has she not since been visited with agony in every nerve? It is recorded that when Ambrose Pelargo, during the first interval of the Council of Trent, preached before a congregation of the fathers and divines assembled in that city, he took for his text the parable of the tares; and having traced through the successive verses the portraiture of the Protestant heretics, concluded with a vehement anathema and demand that they should immediately be rooted up from among the wheat. And it is also matter of history, that at the close of the last Conference, the Cardinal of Lorraine exclaimed, "Cursed be all heretics!" And the prelates joined in the cry, "Cursed-Cursed!" so that as they rose to depart, the building of assembly resounded with their imprecations. Alas! for that sublimer temper which won the first conquests of the cross! Such was not the advent nor the exit in His mission of the Church's Holy Lord. The tidings of His birth were a proclamation of good-will and peace to a troubled world, and His