Kate's face was scarlet. 'But I thought-I understood,' she stammered, that Mr. Clode was to be rector here?'

'Not at all,' said Mr. Bonamy, with some asperity. The whole thing was settled before ten o'clock this morning. Mary told me at the door that Lindo had been here since, so I supposed he had told you something about it.'

'He did not tell me a word of it!' Kate answered impulsively, the generous trick her lover had played her breaking in upon her mind in all its fulness. 'Not a word of it! But papa'—with a pause and then a rush of words-' he asked me to be his wife, and I-I told him I would.'

For a moment Mr. Bonamy stared at his daughter as if he thought she had lost her wits. Probably since his boyhood he had never been so much astonished. 'I was talking of Mr. Lindo,'

he said at length, speaking with laborious clearness. referring to your cousin, I fancy.'

You are

'No,' Kate said, striving with her happy confusion. ‘I mean Mr. Lindo, papa.'

Indeed! indeed!' Mr. Bonamy answered after another pause, speaking still more slowly, and gazing at her as if he had never seen her before, nor anything at all like her. 'You have a good deal surprised me. And I am not easily surprised, I think. Not easily, I think.'

'But you are not angry with me, papa tearfully.

?' she murmured rather

For a moment he still stared at her in silence, unable to overcome his astonishment. Then by a great effort he recovered himself. Oh, no,' he said, with a smack of his old causticity, 'I do not see why I should be angry with you, Kate. Indeed, I may say I foretold this. I always said that young man would introduce great changes, and he has done it. He has fulfilled my words to the letter, my dear!"

CHAPTER XXVI.

LOOSE ENDS.

DR. GREGG was one of the first persons in the town to hear of the late rector's engagement. His reception of the news was characteristic. 'I don't believe it!' he shrieked. 'I don't believe it! It is all rubbish! What has he got to marry upon, I should like to know?'

His informant ventured to mention the living of Pocklington.

'I don't believe it!' the little doctor shrieked. 'If he had got that he would see her far enough before he would marry her. Do you think I am such a fool as to believe that?'

'But you see, Bonamy, the earl's agency will be rather a lift in the world for him. And he has money.'

'I don't believe it!' shrieked Gregg again.

But, alas! he did. He knew that these things were true, and when he next met Bonamy he smiled a wry smile, and tried to swallow his teeth, and grovelled, still with the native snarl curling his lips at intervals. The doctor, indeed, had to suffer a good deal of unhappiness in these days. Clode, about whom he had boasted largely, was conspicuous by his absence. Lord Dynmore's carriage might be seen any morning in front of the Bonamy offices. And rumour said that the earl had taken a strange fancy to the young clergyman whom he had so belaboured. Things seemed to Gregg and to some other people in Claversham to be horribly out of joint at this time.

Among others, poor Mrs. Hammond found her brain somewhat disordered. To the curate's unaccountable withdrawal, as to the translation of the late rector to Pocklington, she could easily reconcile herself. But to Mr. Lindo's engagement to the lawyer's daughter, and to the surprising intimacy between the earl and Mr. Bonamy, she could not so readily make up her mind. Why, it was reported that the earl had walked into town and taken tea at Mr. Bonamy's house! Still, facts are stubborn things; it is ill work kicking against them, nor was it long before Mrs. Hammond was heard to say that the lawyer's conduct in supporting Mr. Lindo in his trouble had produced a very favourable impression on her mind, and prepared her to look upon him in a new light.

And Laura? Laura, during these changes, showed herself particularly bright and sparkling. She was not of a nature to feel even defeat very deeply, or to philosophise much over past mistakes. Her mother saw no change in her-nay, she marvelled, recalling her daughter's intimacy with Mr. Clode and the obstinacy she had exhibited in siding with him, that Laura could so completely put him out of her mind and thoughts. But the least sensitive feel sometimes. The most thoughtless have their moments of care. Even the cat, with its love of home and comfort, will sometimes wander on a wet night. And there are times when Laura, doubting the future and weary of the present, wishes

she had had the courage to do as her heart bade her, and make the plunge, careless what the world, and her rivals, might say of her marriage to a curate. For Clode's rugged face and masculine will dominate her still. Though a year has elapsed, and she has not heard of him, nor probably will hear of him now, she thinks of him with regret and soreness. She had not much to give, but to her sorrow she knows now that she gave it to him, and that in that struggle for supremacy both were losers.

The good wine last. Kate broke the news to Jack herself, and found it no news. 'Yes, I have just seen Lindo,' he answered quietly, taking her hand, and looking her in the face with dry eyes. 'May he make you very happy, Kate, and—well, I can wish you nothing better than that.' Then Kate broke down and cried bitterly. When she recovered herself Jack was gone.

If you were to describe that scene to Jack Smith's friends in the Temple they would jeer at you. They would cover you with ridicule and gibes. There is no one so keen, so sharp, so matterof-fact, so certain to succeed as he, they say. They have only one fault to find with him, that he works too hard; that he bids fair to become one of those legal machines which may be seen any evening taking in fuel at solitary club tables, and returning afterwards to dusty chambers, with the regularity of clockwork. But there is one thing even in his present life which his Temple friends do not know, and which gives me hope of him. Week by week there comes to him a letter from the country from a longlimbed girl in short frocks, whose hero be is. Time, which, like Procrustes' bed, brings frocks and legs to the same length at last, heals wounds also. When a day not far distant now shall show him Daintry in the bloom of budding womanhood, is it to be thought that Jack will resist her? I think not. But, be that as it may, with no better savour than that of his loyalty, the silent loyalty of an English friend, could the chronicle of a Bayardmuch less the tale of a country town-come to an end.

THE END.

599

THE MISTLETOE BOUGH.

No plant on earth has ever aroused so many kinds of interest on all possible grounds as the mystic mistletoe. Take it how you will, that strange shrub is a wonder. From every point of view it teems with curiosity. Its parasitic mode of growth, its paradoxical greenness among the bare boughs of winter, its pale and ghostly berries, its sticky fruit, filled full with viscid birdlime, have all aroused profound and respectful attention from the very earliest ages. Then its religious importance in so many countries and ages, its connection with Christmas and the midwinter Saturnalia, its social survival to our own time as the Yuletide symbol, and its modern relation to the pleasing anachronism of indiscriminate kissing, all invest it alike with an additional factitious importance. Yet, strange to say, the full story of the mistletoe has never yet been written at any adequate length. It has been left for the nineteenth century and the present humble scribe to attempt for the first time in the world's history an exhaustive account of the plant and its cult,-the mistletoe itself and the superstitions based upon it.

6

The origin of the mistletoe, like that of Mr. Jeames de la Pluche, is to a certain extent wrop in mystery.' Evolutionists as yet can tell us but little as to its probable line of development from earlier ancestors. It belongs, indeed, to a small family of parasitical plants, all of them as gentlemanly in their habits as the Tite-Barnacles themselves, being absolutely dependent upon other trees for a part at least of their livelihood, and showing very little affinity to any other order. It is conjectured, to be sureI believe with justice-that this isolated group of parasitic shrubs may be honeysuckles gone wrong-may be descended in the last resort from some aberrant member of what botanists playfully know as the caprifoliaceous order: and this is all the more probable because climbing and twining plants are particularly liable to degenerate in the long run into confirmed parasitism. But if so, the resemblance to the supposed primitive honeysuckle ancestor, as in the case of so many other distinguished pedigrees, is now almost obliterated. The flower retains hardly a trace of honeysuckle peculiarities: the opposite leaves and the smooth round berry, capped by the remnant of a calyx, alone suggest the

possibility of a remote cousinship with woodbine, laurustinus, and guelder-rose. And this is just as it should be, for the mistletoe is nothing if not vague and mysterious. It trades upon the occult, the abstruse, the recondite. A plant whose relationships were all as clear as mud would lack that mystic element of the dim and the incomprehensible which Mr. Herbert Spencer considers essential and fundamental to the very idea of religion.

The modern mistletoe, as we know it to-day, in its present highly evolved and degenerate state as a confirmed parasite, is no longer an enigma. It is a woody shrub, with yellowish-green leaves, which specially affects the branches of apple-trees, pears, and poplars. People who get their ideas vaguely and at secondhand from books, have a general notion, indeed, that the mistletoe's favourite haunt is the British oak: but this, I need hardly, say is a complete mistake: as I shall show hereafter, it was the very rarity of the mistletoe on oaks that gave one, when found there, its peculiar sanctity in the eyes of primitive peoples. In the purely wild condition, mistletoe grows mostly on poplars alone; in civilized and cultivated soils it extends its depredations, whereever it gets a chance, to apple orchards and pear-trees.

And this is the manner of the generation of mistletoes. The young seedlings sprout on a branch of their involuntary host, where the seed has been carried by birds in a way which I shall hereafter more fully describe, at its proper point in the life-history of the species. Instead of rooting themselves, however, like mere groundling plants, by small fibrous rootlets, they fasten by a sort of sucker-like process to the tissues of the tree on which they feed; and, penetrating its bark to the living layer just beneath, suck up elaborated sap from the veins of their victim. Thus they live at the expense of the poplar whose food they appropriate; and when many of them together infest a single tree, as one may often see in the long road-side avenues of central France, they succeed in largely strangling and choking the foliage of their unhappy host. Nevertheless, the mistletoe is not quite a parasite of the deepest dye, like our common English dodder or the felonious broomrape, which are both of them leafless, and derive their entire nutriment from the vessels of the plants on which they prey. Mistletoe still retains some relics of self-respect: it has only reached the first stage of parasitism. It keeps to this day green leaves of its own, containing the active vegetable digestive principle, chlorophyll, which manufactures starch for it under the influence of sunlight. It takes from its host elaborated