She turned away upon this; and Stephen presently pursued his solitary ramble across the field.

On the following morning Sheba found him waiting for her by the milkhouse door. Having slept badly she had risen unusually early, and was surprised that he should be already afoot; no one else was about.

"I want a word with you, my girl," he said, and paused.

"What is it?" she asked quickly. "I thought you and me had words enough yesterday. I spoke out my mind plain for once.

It's to be me or her."

"See here, Sheba," said Stephen, "let's understand each other. I told you the truth about Miss Leslie and me, and I told you what I tell you again-I'd be glad if she was gone. I Went yesterday and asked her father to give up the house to me, and he said straight out he wouldn't do itnot for a few months anyhow. Now if they won't go willingly, I can't turn them out."

"You'd rather turn me out?" cried Sheba, with flashing eyes.

"No," he rejoined, "You know very well you're my promised wife, and you come first. But I have made up my mind to ask you to have patience. Mr. Leslie will leave as soon as he has finished some book he is writing. She, Miss Leslie, would go at once if I would let her. She came to me yesterday."

"Did she?" exclaimed Sheba.

"She did. She said she knew very well that she was the one I wanted to get rid of, and she'd take a situation." Sheba laughed.

"A situation-what 'ud she be fit for?"

"Just so." returned he. "There are some things a man can't do, Sheba, and one is to turn the girl he once loved out o' doors, particularly when she's helpless and ignorant of the ways of the world. Come, Sheba,

you're my promised wife-the wife I chose for myself-won't you trust me, my maid?"

The two pairs of dark eyes looked searchingly into each other, and

Sheba's face relaxed.

"You've never known me to go back on my word, have you?" he continued. "I'll be faithful to it, and to you. I'll always give you the best I have."

"The best ye have," she repeated slowly, "and what's that? Pity!"

She looked at him with a kind of agonized eagerness, as though searching for a contradiction, but Stephen did not speak, and her face fell.

"Well," she said, drawing in a long breath, "I'll try to content myself. I'd rather have the little you can give than another man's all. I'm like a beggar-thankful even for a crumb. I didn't ought to try your patience, same as I've a-been a-doing," she added humbly, "I'll not complain again. You did choose me-there's comfort in that thought."

They parted then, and Stephen went about his customary business.

Sheba remained very pensive, and. when her morning's work was concluded, stood for some time by the open door of the dairy, gazing downwards at the Little Farm. All at once she set out with her swinging, graceful gait down the path and across the lane to the Leslies' precincts. She had descried Kitty in the garden.

"I've summat to say to ye, miss," she began abruptly.

Kitty gazed at her half fearfully, half haughtily. Many emotions were warring in Sheba's heart, and the struggle was reflected in her face.

"Stephen did tell I what passed between you an' him yesterday," she said, "an' I thought I'd step across an' put in my word. I trust Stephen, Miss Leslie."

For a moment the girl's face was

beautiful; but it clouded over when Kitty replied earnestly:

"Indeed, you have every right to do SO. He is a most honorable man."

""Tis a pity you didn't value him better, then," she broke out. "You treated him like dirt, an' Stephen bain't the man to stand that. There's no need for you to be so condescendin' now. If ye was to ax en to forgive ye on your bended knees, he wouldn't look at you."

"Really," cried Kitty, absolutely taken aback by the suddenness of the onslaught. "I don't know how you dare say such things to me! Go away. I have no wish to speak to you any more."

"Nay, bide a bit," said Sheba, in an altered tone. "I didn't come here to insult ye. "Twas quite t'other way round, but it drives me mad to see how ye despise us-me an' Stephen."

"I don't," exclaimed Kitty, goaded into a denial.

"You do!" averred Sheba fiercely. "I see'd it in your eyes when ye come on me an' Stephen in the Lovers' Walk that day. 'Why should you think me likely to be surprised?' say you, meanin' that ye'd see'd me watchin' out for en time and again. I reckon ye thought I'd put myself in his road,

The Times.

an' made up to en maybe-but I didn't. "Twas him as picked me out. He did say so hisself this marnin'. 'You're my promised wife, Sheba,' he says, 'I chose you.'"

She broke off, breathless. In reality she was speaking as much to reassure herself as to confound Kitty. The latter stood silent and motionless, curiously stung by the words. After a moment she found her voice.

"I do not doubt it," she said, at length, "but I really should be obliged if you would go away now. All this has no interest for me."

Sheba retired a few paces, and then paused again, with a half puzzled expression.

"I

"I meant well," she muttered. come here meanin' well. I don't know why I've been sayin' all they things. I come here to ax ye to give up any notion o' lookin' for a situation, Miss Leslie. Arter what passed between me an' Stephen this marnin' I couldn't be jealous no more."

"Jealous!" ejaculated Kitty. She tried to laugh, but some sudden emotion seemed to catch her by the throat,

and, moreover, there was that in

Sheba's eyes which startled her a tortured look.

"I think I ought to go," she said.

That the mothers of great men have, in nine cases out of ten, been great women is so well-worn a truth that most of us are tired of finding it underlined. That the mothers of famous women have with strange frequency left them early orphans is less generally noticed. But the curiousminded in such matters may excusably feel some wonder why it has chanced that the fathers of so many celebrated

authoresses have been such singularly selfish and trying persons.

There is "that clever dog Burney," as Dr. Johnson called him; there is the claretty-faced Mr. Edgeworth, so exasperating to Byron; there is taciturn Mr. Ferrier, brought up after the fashion of Rousseau, and no very convincing example of its success. Then, too, there is the Reverend Patrick Brontë, with his comfortless habit of taking

his meals by himself; Dr. Mitford, a "detestable humbug" even in the kindly eyes of gentle William Harness; and, finally, Mr. Moulton-Barrett, the anti-matrimonial, of whom too much has been said already, and who may, perhaps, be forgiven for indirectly supplying literature with one of the sweetest-scented manuscripts it holds, the love-letters of Robert Browning and "Aurora Leigh."

At first sight it may appear unjust to put the pleasant, successful, genial Dr. Burney in the same category as the eminently uninteresting Ferrier and the egotistical Brontë. But he possesses their common and very mischief-making quality-a lack of perception that the marked ability of their daughters entitled them to more freedom and less interference. That these were alike most devoted and submissive should by no means be forgotten when their praises are sounded, detractors being much too ready to deny the clever woman all but her cleverness.

In Fanny Burney's early diaries, the prettiest record of a merry girlhood ever put on paper, Dr. Burney figures bravely as an ideal father. Selfmade in the best sense of the word, his personal charm won him friends worth making in all quarters, and when he came to London the smart world crowded his modest Poland Street drawing-room to hear the stars from the prosperous Italian Opera, unconscious of the quiet fifteen-year-old satirist taking its measure for posterity. But he was no "strass engel, haus teufel," and Fanny's sparkling letters to her dear "Daddy Crisp" bring him before us in a winning light. When the demure "Fannikin" awoke to find herself famous, with Johnson raving of his "little Burney," and Sir Joshua Reynolds so absorbed in Evelina that he had to be fed whilst reading it, who so proud as Dr. Burney? We may smile at the humility of her ded

ication, but to him it was doubtless a moving example of lofty poetry:

Oh author of my being! far more dear To me than light, than nourishment, than rest,

Hygeia's blessings, Rapture's burning

tear,

Or the life-blood that mantles in my breast.

Could my weak pow'rs thy num'rous virtues trace,

By filial love each fear should be repressed;

The blush of incapacity I'd chase, And stand Recorder of thy worth

confess'd.

But since my niggard stars that gift refuse...

This is probably quite enough for most of us; but, after all, the prudent young writer herself closes wisely: "Accept the tribute, and forget the lay."

How did Dr. Burney requite this reverent homage? How did he treat the girl who could amuse all England? Jane Austen's sweet Anne Elliott likened herself, as we know, to "the inimitable Miss Larolles," of Cecilia, and pays a glowing tribute to the writer who lived long enough to welcome Vivian Grey with fresh enthusiasm, and to receive Macaulay's splendid panegyric after her death. The ablest men, the most brilliant women, gave Frances Burney an ovation almost without parallel in literary history; yet, in the glad heyday of youth and success, her father's remorseless hand turned the key upon the door of her prison. That prison was the dullest of all Courts. Thackeray has painted an impressionist picture of its dreary routine in a few swift, memorable touches; the diary of the victim has done the rest.

What glorious result did Dr. Burney, dazzled to blindness by the glitter of a crown, anticipate in vain for himself or his obedient daughter? Fanny's "niggard stars" were indeed in the ascendant when she was condemned to

the

coarse tyranny of the ignorant Schwellenburg, who, when angry, "raged like a wild cat," in the place of the homage of Burke and Johnson; the mean salary of two hundred a year instead of the great sums eagerly subscribed for the novels; and, worse than all, the slight favors of the formal, frigid Queen, whose snuff-boxes and lap-dogs were her care, as a substitute for the love of her warm-hearted sisters. Gloomy is the contrast between that joyous home, echoing with noble music, and the mournful palace, roused one dreadful night to the wild laughter of a maniac on the throne.

What wonder health and spirits failed poor Fanny? What wonder that she soon began to petition eagerly for her order of release? But Dr. Burney was for a long time deaf to her timid entreaty. The possible loss of a daughter-for she was completely out of health-he could face with more equanimity than the possible loss of Royal favor. "What? what? what?" we may echo with "Farmer George" himself; yet so it was. His common sense suffered a total eclipse until it was almost too late. The jaded maid of honor who crept out to freedom after "all the Burkes" had "protested," after Boswell had stigmatized Dr. Burney's conduct as "outrageous," and Walpole and Windham had threatened to "set all the clubs on him," was not the happy-hearted girl who had "left the warm precincts of the cheerful day" so full of hope.

That history is the richer by her later diaries does not whitewash Dr. Burney. That she had her revenge by editing his own literary remains in the dismal later style which replaced the spontaneity and gay simplicity of Evelina was not more that he deserved, This extraordinary revolution in style, which ruined her work and made The Wanderer unreadable, is always as

cribed to her attempted imitation of Dr. Johnson; but may not her long period of association with those who at best talked broken English have im paired her command of her own language? Life with Schwellenburg was more a school for saints and patient Griseldas than for the making of a novelist. We are glad to think that, despite poverty, she found so much happiness with her courteous Emigré, and we like Monsieur D'Arblay-who refused to take back the title of General, conferred by a king, from the hand of Napoleon-better than the bustling, popular father, who ended his days peacefully as organist at Chelsea Hospital, and is buried in its little graveyard. That Fanny ever blamed him, or that he ever repented his waste of her best years, there is no record. He was lucky to the last, and so much respected as a musical authority that he was on one occasion paid a thousand pounds for a few short articles upon that subject.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth was born in Pierrepoint Street, Bath, in 1744, and lost no time in proving himself a chip of the old block. For, as his biographers quaintly put it, he came of a family of "men of talent marrying early and often." He began his own matrimonial ventures at eighteen, and long before he was of age had arrived at the conclusion "that the lamenting of a female we live with does not render life delightful." The "female" in question, the meek mother of the excellent Maria, might have retorted that the grandson of "Protestant Frank," raiser of a regiment for Dutch William, was quite unmindful of his duties toward her. But she was a depressed creature, dying when Maria was six, to leave her child to fall in love with the brilliant young stepmother poor Mr. Day, of Sandford and Merton fame, had hoped to make his bride. That he still continued a

slavishly admiring friendship for Mr. Edgeworth after that Don Juan had deprived him not only of Honora Sneyd, but of her sister, is, to say with the immortal Cyrus Bantam, M.C., "Re-markable!"

Mr. Edgeworth's custom of marrying heiresses made him prosperous, and it is undeniable that his abilities were well above the average. He came near to being the inventor of the telegraph and the velocipede, and exercised all sorts of educational theories upon his endless family. He was idolized by Maria, despite the drastic ordeal by hanging to which he vainly subjected the poor, under-sized child to make her grow, Mr. Day meanwhile dosing her with an abomination called "Bishop Berkeley's tar-water" to cure a weakness of the eyes! Mr. Edgeworth was a sort of Pope in his own adoring circle, and when he explained to Maria that it "was his business to cut and correct, hers to write on," she acceded with a respectful gratitude not a little touching.

If he had stopped at cutting and correcting, he might at least have done no harm; but, alas, the docile daughter, "submitted everything to her father, who frequently inserted passages." As Miss Edgeworth herself tells us that the dreadful young prig, Frank, was a fancy portrait of her father in his youth, we feel angrily that, if Mr. Edgeworth had but left Maria to do what she could do so well, without interference, her works might still have been lying on the shelves among the books we really read. Jane Austen feared that her Pride and Prejudice, that abiding and permanent joy, was "too light and bright and sparkling." She "thought it wanted some solemn padding," but prudently let well alone, as she had no evil counsellor at her elbow over-ready with the fatal suggestion of collaboration. Alas for Maria, her self-satisfied father

shows by the transparent egotism of his letters that, in his opinion, his reflections and moral dissertations were the best parts of her tales, and, if we compare the excellent syle of Helen, written after his death, with parts of Belinda, bearing painful traces of his ponderous hand, we can understand why Maria Edgeworth has not quite maintained her place.

The truth is that she was always overshadowed by the big gentleman Tommy Moore proclaimed to be an exasperating example of the worst class of bore, whilst Byron, who, to his credit, professed a decided liking for the quiet Maria, figuring so modestly as the lioness of a London season, was out of all patience with Mr. Edgeworth's detestable habit of interrupting her whenever she attempted to show her real powers of conversation.

Of his own literary style, a single specimen is sufficient, the condescending dedication to Patronage, which, with all its faults, scarcely deserved anything quite as discouraging: "To the Reader. My daughter again applies to me for my paternal imprimatur, and I hope I am not swayed by partiality when I give the sanction she requires. To excite the rising generation to depend upon their own exertions is surely a laudable endeavor. Would a modern reviewer ever get beyond that fatal foreword?

That Maria Edgeworth had a keen sense of humor, The Absentee and Castle Rackrent delightfully proclaim; yet what are we to think of her pathetic inability to perceive that her father was, as would then have been said, "exposing himself" hopelessly by his fatuity? His fascination does not peep out between the lines of his chronicle. Yet all his wives and all his children were devoted to him, obeying his lightest wish as if it had been a royal command; and when Maria, her eyes blinded by her tears,