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depicting in marvellous manner "the Brownriggs illtreating Mary Clifford," is pretty sure to catch the eye of the passer by the shop windows. The original, and now more than a century old, story of the Brownriggs is horrible enough, but it is mild as compared with its adaptation in "The Fiend of Fetter Lane," and is there, moreover, built about with a framework of romance that makes it very cheap indeed for a penny. In the prologue alone we have a chapter headed "The Traveller! The Fratricide!! A Demon!!! Revenge!!!!" and, not to mention other attractions, there is a moving description of a storm, which "now shrieked like fiends in revelry, the forked lightning revealing the mysterious pedestrian quickly passing on, muttering strange words which were carried away by the whistling winds." Possibly when the blessings of education are further extended the taste of the hundred thousand readers of "The Complete Romancer" will become elevated, and they will be able to share with their social betters the joys of the sensation novel of the season. In the meantime, we can only deplore their depraved tastes, and thank Heaven we are not as they.

AN awful responsibility rests upon London as the guardian of the records and mementoes which will in future ages form the material of the history of great nations. I mean the great nations whose infant pranks and infant struggles we are watching in these days. For although I am no croaker as to the decline and fall of Britain, and do not think that, barring the results of possible convulsions of nature, this country is likely ever to become an abandoned ruin, I cannot doubt that there are many lands in the two hemispheres of no significance now which will be great nations or the centres of powerful empires in their turn. And many of them must come to England for the first chapters of their history. A stone in Westminster Abbey has just been laid over the coffin of one who should be a demi-god in the early annals of a score of great kingdoms which shall flourish in Central Africa in the course of the third thousand years of the Christian era. As the pious pilgrims of several generations betook themselves to the stone steps of the shrine where A'Becket was buried, so for hundreds and perhaps for thousands of years shall the black poets, historians, statesmen, and antiquarians of future negro civilisation make pilgrimages to Westminster and nurse great thoughts at the tomb of David Livingstone. The Queen of England at Windsor welcoming home Sir Garnet Wolseley and the troops from Coomassie; the British Houses of Parliament thanking the victorious soldier; the peerage of Lord Napier of Magdala; the

education in England of the little black son of the redoubtable King Theodore of Abyssinia-these are scenes and events the records and descriptions whereof in the Anglo-Saxon of the nineteenth century will make beautiful tradition for some of the predominant African nationalities of the twentieth, the twenty-first, or say the twenty-fifth centuries. What will the proud statesmen and orators of the great Parliament of Fiji, in those days, say of the caution and hesitation of the Britons of these early times touching the cession to the Queen's dominions of those islands of the South Seas towards which now civilisation is so rapidly drifting?

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1874.

OLYMPIA.

BY R. E. FRANCILLON, AUTHOR OF "EARL'S DENE," "PEARL AND EMERALD," "ZELDA'S FORTUNE," &c.

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HE Fates, who had been so cruel to Mrs. Westwood last night, were amply propitious to her in the morning. When Lord Wendale was announced, she and the three

girls were all at home, and Olympia out of the way. The visit was a trifle too early for the state of the drawing-room, but that was of little consequence compared with the fortunate absence of Olympia, who seemed growing dangerous as well as disagreeable. So the lady of The Laurels came down with her very best smile.

She greeted the Earl with a happy mingling of deference and cordiality; his eccentric shadow, Forsyth, with a somewhat less happy blending of cordiality with dignity. He puzzled her. She thought she understood about young men, and here was one

Vol. XII., N.S. 1874.

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who appeared wedded to the companionship of a man with whom youth had nothing in common. It was worse than puzzling, for it was difficult to settle the exact degree of courtesy she ought to extend towards Forsyth-he might be merely a hanger-on, but then it is often as politic to conciliate hangers-on as their masters. Doubtful whether to give him one finger or five, she compromised the matter by offering him three.

Of course, the host of last night and his friend could not find themselves near The Laurels without calling to ask how Mrs. Westwood and her daughters found themselves after the ball. Meanwhile the three sisters appeared to answer for themselves, and did so with an elegant bashfulness that amply satisfied their mother. Lord Wendale looked beyond them as they entered, as if expecting a fourth young lady, but as nobody else appeared, graciously allowed himself to be led into a tame and one-sided discussion upon the merits of the village choir, for the benefit of Marian. Presently, however, Forsyth turned to Mrs. Westwood.

"But where is my old friend of Lyke Wood?" he asked. "I hope she is not the only one who brought away a headache from Beckfield?"

Lord Wendale gave him a look of thanks.

"Oh, Olympia?" said Mrs. Westwood, carelessly, but with an addition to her instinctive distrust of the Earl's Mephistopheles-inwaiting. "She's very well. I hope your lordship means to make a long stay at Beckfield?”

"I? Ah, I suppose you mean I'm but a bad neighbour, and I'm afraid it's true. We must know one another better in future, even it I don't stay long, and I never know where I may be in three days." Mrs. Westwood coloured with pride. "I'm sure your lordship is the best neighbour in the world."

"On the contrary, I am the very worst. I even hear that you have never seen what I am prouder of than anything else in the world-of course, I mean my pictures. It is monstrous to think of when you live so near, and when Miss Westwood seems so interested in pictures, too. One thing I called for was to ask you and my friend the Captain to come over one day before I go"

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"Oh, that she is!" exclaimed Mrs. Westwood, catching at his offer almost before it was made. 'Aren't you, Marian? She used to do beautiful things herself-heads and flowers. It is too kind of your lordship! She has been so longing to see the pictures at Beckfield for years and years, but of course as your lordship was away we couldn't presume. That is Marian's portfolio that

Mr. Mr.-is turning over now. I think if your lordship looked at some of them you would be surprised. I used to be considered accomplished myself when I was a girl, but my things were never fit to hold a candle to Marian's. If your lordship would kindly name a day"

Forsyth, having given his friend the chance of bringing Olympia's name into the conversation, had turned to Marian's portfolio, not because the contents particularly interested him, but because it was the excuse for silence that lay nearest to his hand. He was listening idly to the manner in which Mrs. Westwood had contrived to trump Lord Wendale's card by playing Marian to his Olympia, when he turned over another page of the portfolio.

Suddenly Mrs. Westwood's sharp voice died away. He had turned back another page than that of a portfolio, and yet the two leaves were so closely bound together that they formed but one. His eyes fell upon the half-finished sketch of a face-of a woman's face, for what else should call back living light into a man's dull eyes? The four walls of Mrs. Westwood's drawing-room opened, but did not show a prospect of Gressford St. Mary beyond them. He, Forsyth the painter, found himself riding along a rough road, with his arm-chair transformed into a horse that carried double weight-himself and the impatience that sat behind him and spurred him on. He was following a woman's face, and it was the face that looked upon him from the sheet of drawing-paper in the portfolio of Marian Westwood. Before Mrs. Westwood could finish her sentence, he had turned back every leaf in the portfolio of twenty years.

No wonder that the young Lord Calmont of twenty years ago, last heard of when he galloped away from the quinta of Don Pedro Sanchez, had been lost for ever to his family and friends. He had entered his Fool's Paradise through the jaws of Death, who seldom gives back his own. That first day's hot gallop grew out into weeks and months, of which every hour was a new barrier between himself and home. Even if he had had the power he had not the heart to write and explain, "I am racing all over a whole continent in search of a girl whom I have lost on my wedding-day." They must be strangely constituted who, in the midst of a life and death chase, can take pen, ink, and paper, and set down alarming and unprefaced explanations that are long over-due. The end must come first, and then the story that led to it.

Indeed, to send to England his unfinished story would be absurd. In all likelihood before it had crossed the Atlantic his search would be over and he would have another tale to tell. He could not fail to

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