never knew. She listened intently, but she could not make out a word. What was it? What was it? Whatever it was, to have said it was an infinite satisfaction to him. He dropped back upon his pillows with an air of content indescribable, and silent pleasure. He had done everything, he had said everything. And in this mood slept again, and woke no more.

Mr. Sandford's previsions were all justified. The house was sold to advantage, at what the agent called a fancy price, because it had been his house-with its best furniture undisturbed. Everything was miserable enough indeed, but there was no humiliation in the breaking up of the establishment, which was evidently too costly for the widow. She got her pension at once, and a satisfactory one, and retired with her younger children to a small house which was more suited to her circumstances. And Lord Okeham, touched by the fact that Sandford's death had taken place under the same roof, in a room next to his own (though that, to be sure, in an age of competition and personal merit was nothing), found somehow, as a Cabinet Minister no doubt can if he will, a post for Harry, in which he got on just as well as other young men, and settled down into a very good servant of the State. And Jack, being thus suddenly sobered and called back to himself, and eager to get rid of the intolerable thought that he, too, had weighed upon his father's mind, and made his latter days more sad, took to his profession with zeal, and got on, as no doubt any determined man does when he adopts one line and holds by it. The others settled down with their mother in a humbler way of living, yet did not lose their friends, as it is common to say people do. Perhaps they were not asked any longer to the occasional 'smart' parties to which the pretty daughters and well-bred sons of Sandford the famous painter, who could dispense tickets for Academy soirées and private views, were invited, more or less on sufferance. These failed them, their names falling out of the invitation books; but what did that matter, seeing they never had been but outsiders, flattered by the cards of a countess, but never really penetrating beyond the threshold?

Mrs. Sandford believed that she could not live when her husband was thus taken from her. The remembrance of that brief but dreadful time when she had abandoned him, when the children and their amusements had stolen her heart away, was

heavy upon her, and though she steeled herself to carry out all his wishes, and to do everything for them that could be done, yet she did it all with a sense that the time was short, and that when her duty was thus accomplished she would follow him. This softened everything to her in the most wonderful way. She felt herself to be acting as his deputy through all these changes, glad that he should be saved the trouble, and that humiliation and confession of downfall which was not now involved in any alteration of life she could make, and fully confident that when all was completed she would receive her dismissal and join him where he was. But she was a very natural woman, with all the springs of life in her unimpaired. And by-and-by, with much surprise, with a pang of disappointment, and yet a rising of her heart to the new inevitable solitary life which was so different, which was not solitary at all, but full of the stir and hum of living, yet all silent in the most intimate and closest circle, Mrs. Sandford recognised that she was not to die. It was a strange thing, yet one which happens often: for we neither live nor die according to our own will and previsions—save sometimes in such a case as that of our painter, to whom, as to his beloved, God accorded sleep.

And more—the coming true of everything that he had believed. After doing his best for his own, and for all who depended upon him in his life, he did better still, as he had foreseen, by dying. Daniells sold the three pictures at prices higher than he had dreamed of, for a Sandford was now a thing with a settled value, it being sure that no new flood of them would ever come into the market. And all went well. Perhaps with some of us, too, that dying which it is a terror to look forward to, seeing that it means the destruction of a home, may prove, like the painter's, a better thing than living even for those who love us best. But it is not to everyone that it is given to die at the right moment, as Mr. Sandford had the happiness to do.

OF DATES.

THE word date is exceedingly ambiguous. It is not what the logicians prettily describe as a univocal term. On the contrary, it is most distinctly and decidedly equivocal. Its equivocation has given rise, indeed, to one of the most marvellous tours de force in the way of a sustained and elaborate pun ever perpetrated in the English or any other language. Everybody remembers in the Heathen Chinee how, when Bill Nye and Truthful James go to examine Ah Sin's bland and childlike person, they discover winning cards of various values carefully concealed about that guileless Mongolian's sleeves and bosom. And we found on his nails, which were taper,' continues the innocent Caucasian narrator, what is frequent on tapers-that's wax.' Now, there is a famous Cambridge Senate-House parody of the Heathen Chinee, which describes the guile and wile of a naughty undergraduate who endeavours to get through his little-go examination on the same general principles as those which actuated poor benighted Ah Sin in his method of playing the game of poker. After describing how the undergraduate has tips of various kinds written upon his cuffs, his finger-nails, his sleeves, and his penholder, the university poet goes on to remark, in strict accordance with the ring of the lines parodied,

And we found on his palms, which were hollow,
What is frequent on palms-that is dates.

Even as an isolated and original pun, that would be very neat and telling; but when we consider further how admirably the double play upon words is imitated, and the lilt of Bret Harte's verse is preserved in the imitation, the performance rises to absolute high-water mark of the parodying faculty. The man who could dance in such fetters as those would have been not unequal to the task of translating Aristophanes.

The dates wherewith we have here to deal, then, to be quite precise, are not the dates inscribed on the palms of the self-convicted candidate for academical honours, duly registered in Haydn's Dictionary; they are the dates that grow on those other palms which flourish among the allegories on the banks of the

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Nile. It is always surprising to me how many articles we all use familiarly in our everyday life, about whose origin and real nature we know nothing or next to nothing. A city man one day was discoursing volubly to me about the recent remarkable fall in the price of fenugreek. And pray,' said I, 'what is fenugreek, and what do they use it for?' Upon my soul,' said the bold merchant, with a start of surprise, I haven't really the faintest notion; but I know it's something you sell by the ton.' (Lest I should seem too unjustifiably to arouse the curiosity of the invariably candid and courteous reader without stepping out of my way a moment to satisfy it, I may add parenthetically that fenugreek, as I found on further inquiry, is a sort of pulse, not unlike a very large clover; that it grows in India, Egypt, and the East; that the seeds yield a bitter and disagreeable oil; that they form an important ingredient in all curry-powders; that they are used to flavour a well-known food for cattle; and that 47. 108. a ton is the current quotation at the present moment for prime Egyptian. And having thus disburdened my soul of its accumulated store of knowledge anent this mysterious fenugreek, I will return once more from my sudden digression to the dates themselves from which I started.)

When we see Best Tafilats duly arranged like herrings in a box in the grocers' windows, we accept at once the fact that they are dates, and usually ask no more about them. But since the date forms the staff of life for large masses of our fellow-creatures, many of whom are now also all but our fellow-subjects, some little consideration of their origin and nature befits the imperial and imperious true-born Briton. For it is one of the peculiarities of our very varied and expanded empire, in these latter days, that in order to govern and administer it properly, our legislators and voters ought to know absolutely everything. They should be versed in monsoons, and rice crops, and metaphysics for India; in sugar-cane, and bananas, and bandanas for Jamaica; in lumber, and ermine, and fall wheat for Canada; in diamonds, and Zulus, and theology for the Cape; in Chinese, and Buddhism, and pigeon-English for Hong-Kong; and in coolies, vacuum-pans, and irrigation for Demerara. They must acquire a permanent squint by keeping one eye firmly fixed on a scientific frontier in Afghanistan, and the other steadily pointed to a Hudson's Bay outlet for the wheat of Manitoba. They must never forget the disaffection of Hyderabad, or go to sleep without VOL. X.-NO. 59, N.S.

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having ascertained beforehand the feelings of the Namaquas, the Maories, and the Blackfoot Indians. Why, the House of Lords alone, in its capacity of final court of appeal, must decide on cases in old French law from Lower Canada, in the Code Napoléon from Mauritius, in Dutch law from the Cape of Good Hope, in Hindoo law from India generally, in Mohammedan law from Bengal and Oudh, in Sikh law from parts of the Punjab, in Singhalese law from Ceylon, in local law from Ontario and Victoria, in Malay law from the Straits Settlements, and, for aught I know to the contrary, in cannibal law from the Fiji Islands and the King Country of New Zealand. 'Enough,' said Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, to the sage who discoursed to him on the poet's education; 'you have convinced me that no mortal can ever by any possibility become a poet.' How, then, can any mortal ever become, I do not say Prime Minister of England, but even a silent voting member of the imperial Parliament?

Nevertheless, since-let us say-eminent aldermen rush in where angels fear to tread, it is decidedly desirable that every unit in the great central governing oligarchy of our composite empire should at least know something about the fruit which forms the staple product of a country that has already cost us some odd millions, and is likely to cost us before we have done with it as many more. In the name of the Prophet, figs. Or if not figs, then dates at any rate.

The date-palm seems the most paradoxical of trees. It invariably insists upon impossible or at least impracticable combinations of circumstances. It requires a hot dry climate, and yet its roots must have access to abundant moisture. It flourishes best in rainless countries, and yet it can only live by means of natural or artificial irrigation. It will ripen its fruit in Portugal and Andalusia; and yet it refuses to come to perfection in the basking hot summers of Anatolia and Sicily. The fact is, the date-palm really belongs by origin to the desert belt, but even in the desert it grows only among the stray oases where a spring or stream allows a little group of its tall stems to raise their head of feathery branches high into the dry and scorching air. I need not dwell upon this idyllic Eastern picture of the native haunt of the date-palm, for everybody has it stamped indelibly on his memory from the familiar woodcuts of the Sunday-school books that amused or distressed his happy childhood. We know it well, that oasis in the desert: in the foreground stands the conventional