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sufficient fires kept by people who watch every lump of coal they burn with anxiety, because they do not know where they will find money for

more.

"What were you doing, Francis, before you got ill?" she said. "You never told me."

"I never shall tell you."

"You came back wet through every day."

"I was out in the rain."

"As tired as if men had hunted you." "I am not young. I get tired." Mrs. Byrne had sighed.

"If the child had married Conrad," she began, and then Helga made some sound to warn her mother that she was within hearing.

That afternoon she took a step she had contemplated for weeks. She went to a registry office she knew of in Kingston and asked for work.

"What sort of work?" asked the woman who kept it, looking at Helga doubtfully. It was not an office for governesses, she pointed out, but only for servants.

Helga said she knew that.

"I have not the training necessary for a governess," she said, for she derived her ideas of the teaching profession from her mother, and Mrs. Byrne had not been brought up to think that to teach came by nature.

"You don't look like a servant," said the woman.

"I understand housework thoroughly," said Helga, "and I was reading an article the other day about ladies finding employment of this kind more easily than teaching."

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they're no help. Give me girls that know their work, and I'll find you places for them, good places. But these betwixts and betweens- ,,

As she talked she listlessly turned over the pages of a ledger, and sometimes stopped her talk to murmur names and details that Helga felt were meant to be impressive and discouraging.

"Lady Jones, butler, two housemaids, under-one wanted, must be tall-tall, that won't do. Mrs. Morison Popple, Marlborough House, seven servants, all leaving on twenty-fourth. Rev. Spratt, that's the Wesleyan Minister. Wants a general, must be a Wesleyan." She looked up from the ledger. "What references?" she asked. "None," said Helga, feeling her want of value terribly. "I've never been out before."

"I suppose you call yourself lady?"

a

"I never call myself anything," said Helga, who was getting impatient. "I want a place as parlormaid."

She was making the discovery so many of us have made that the women who keep small registry offices for servants are kin to the men who keep house agencies, and that they conduct their business in the same peculiar and offensive way. When ladies came to this woman for servants they were made to understand that servants were as precious as rubies, and that only the scourings of the market would be tempted by the pay and privileges they had the impertinence to offer. When servants wanted work they were looked at with suspicion, cross-examined with insolence, and told that work

was scarce.

"Parlormaid!" cried the woman now. "A parlormaid is expected to wait and carve, and understand glass and silver. Lady or no lady, once you go into business you got to be business-like. No one'll care how you speak if you mas

sacree a duck at the side-table, which brings me to it. Mrs. Stair-here she is-Mrs. Stair, Brendon House-she's gone in for ladies lately, and a pretty time she's had with them, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, I tell her straight. She wants a parlormaid. You can go and see her if you like, not that she'll take you, I don't think for a moment, without references."

"Have you no other places?" said Helga, who did not in the least want to apply at Brendon House and serve Marcella Stair.

"None that'll do for you," said the woman, rudely; and Helga was so persuaded that without references and without experience any opening she could see must be rushed and taken, that she went there and then to call on Mrs. Stair.

A supercilious person, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, thought Helga, opened the door.

"Mrs. Stair is at home on Thursdays," she said haughtily.

"I have come to try for a place as parlormaid," said Helga, nervously, and wondering if she ought to have gone to the back door.

"Oh, indeed," said the young woman, and left her standing in the hall.

"Clive has been in this hall," thought Helga, as she waited.

"This way, please," said the young woman, coming back again, and showed her the drawing-room door.

Helga shut it behind her and went forward. A fretful-looking woman of middle age sat by a big fire. She did not ask Helga to sit down or bid her good evening.

"I hope you've wiped your shoes," she said. "Who sent you?"

Helga presented the form given her at the registry office, but Mrs. Stair hardly looked at it.

"She sends me such useless people," she said. "Some one applied this morning who was fifty, if she was a day,

and had dyed her hair. She didn't look respectable. You look respectable. I'm very particular; just as particular with ladies as I should be with any one else. I allow no followers."

Helga said nothing. She did not know what to say. Every moment she expected Marcella Stair to come into the room and recognize her.

"How long were you in your last place?" asked Mrs. Stair.

"I have learnt to do housework at home," said Helga. "I have never been out before."

"Then you probably know nothing about it."

"I really do," said Helga.

"But where am I to get a reference? I can't take you without one."

"I used to know Mrs. Warwick," said Helga. "Herr Hille lived with us; we live close by."

"What's your name?" "Helga Byrne."

"Byrne-Byrne isn't your mother the woman who hangs out her washing in her back garden?"

"We do," said Helga.

"I can't see you properly-come nearer. So you want to be a parlormaid. But you'll have everything to learn-and beginners are so troublesome and destructive. You can't expect much wages at first-if any."

"Twelve pounds!" said Helga, firmly, for the woman at the registry office had told her not to go for less.

"Ten," said Mrs. Stair, with a far greater firmness. "That's double what I ought to give. Think what you'll cost to keep, and there's your washing; ten, no beer; every other Sunday after tea; no week evenings. And you must come to-morrow or not at all. My present parlor maid is here for another week and will put you in the way of things. Have you got caps and aprons and a black dress, and cotton dresses for the morning?"

"I have a black dress and some cot.

ton ones. I'm not sure that the cotton ones are suitable."

"I'll tell you if they are not," said Mrs. Stair. "I suppose you can get the other things this evening."

"I suppose so," said Helga, slowly. She had no money and had never in her life asked for credit. In fact, it was not till she was staring at servants' caps and aprons in a draper's window that it occurred to her as possible to

buy things without paying for them over the counter. It was a little shop where she was known, and when, with a beating heart and downcast eyes, she asked whether she could have the things and pay for them later, they served her willingly and without showing great surprise. It did not enter their heads that she was buying them to wear herself.

(To be continued.)

RUSKIN.

The official Life of Ruskin is a book which we have eagerly awaited, and hope, in our anticipation of it, has mingled perhaps with some anxiety. The task with which Mr. Cook was confronted was of uncommon difficulty; but his performance is marked by a tact and judgment which give distinction to his work. He had to write a life which had been written many times before, once, in part at least, incomparably well; and as he went along he had to place in their true relations and perspective a host of plans and enterprises of which we are apt to remember now chiefly the fact that they were unfulfilled. He had to steer clear of Scylla, in the shape of the insatiable devotee; and Charybdis, in the shape of the overpowering personality of his hero. In spite of these perils and many others, and although his narrative is necessarily as broken and many-faceted as the life it records, he has achieved a tone of deferent, and kindly humorous, impartiality; his book is not a manifesto, and though it is of necessity a compilation, it is more; it has a pleasing unity of its own.

The great figure which Mr. Cook so fully and so discerningly presents to us has seemed to have been surrounded in recent years with an obscuring mist.

Ruskin was of mountainous proportions; but from his lofty top clouds issued, and not such clouds as he loved, but such as he regarded with peculiar hatred, clouds of smoke. To-day this smoke, once launched forth in voluminous defiance to tower before an awestruck world, hangs as it were about his lower slopes, chokes and depresses the aspiring climber, and effaces the wide prospects and religious solitudes of the upper region. The mountain was reared by its internal fires of which these exhalations were a byproduct. But there are some people who mistake them even now for the mountain itself, or breathe them in with half-unconscious approbation, like hardened Londoners in the yellow December days; while others, looking back upon a time when they were guilty of this confusion of simple-mindedness, commit the less pardonable error of the complex-minded, and, instead of thinking that the smoke is the mountain, think that the mountain is smoke. Cook's discriminating pages should do a great deal to blow the fumes away; they should go far towards reconciling this independent age of ours with the splendid personality by which our fathers were subdued.

Mr.

Ruskin was a "teacher," accepted as

such and ever ready to flaunt the insignia of his office in the public eye. The teacher is a Victorian animal, an extinct species, and it is palpable to our emancipated minds that his insignia were mere apron-strings. Perhaps, for all that, it argues a lack of real independence on our part to be offended, as we so often are, at an outworn fashion, which must have become harmless, one would suppose, from the very fact of being worn out, and in which there surely lurks for those who will perceive it a kind of old-world charm. Ruskin had a "message" for our fathers, and undoubtedly he has a message still for us. His weight is, when we regard one impact of it, thrown resolutely in the face of the conquering tendencies of the age; but he anticipated most of the problems of the day and offered the solutions we are still but slowly reaching at a time when they seemed stark madness. Events are justifying him strangely. The laissez-faire economics, which he challenged alone in the streaming thoroughfares in 1860, are retiring everywhere to the back-streets, the slums and alleys of the mind. His insight unquestionably had a prophetical vein. Yet he is not a writer whom we can readily trust, and our distrust, taking the style as an indication of the man, attaches itself sometimes to his character. To those who care to grow familiar with him, he remains, it is true, one of the most lovable of the great men, few in number, whose life and personality shine through the veil of the written word and claim a personal response; and yet it is often of his unattractive features that his readers today are most aware. The fact is that they mistake the accidents for the essence, and finding Ruskin in early life pious, pompous, and rhetorical; in late life dogmatic, discontented, and scatter-brained, are led to suspect that the fund of passion in his nature was, after

all, a shallow one. The violences and exaggerations of his style are obviously a symptom of some kind of weakness. There is a tendency to attribute them to weakness of a kind which people profess nowadays to disregard, but to which, nevertheless, they are extremely sensitive, to moral weakness in short-to the absence in him of the power to enter into the common arena of life and to measure, control, direct his strength in response to the forces that prevail there and test the character of men. One may admit that Ruskin's character was not tested in this way, and he suffered accordingly; he never, as Jowett said, "rubbed his mind against others." But it was opportunity, not power, that was lacking; and perhaps his innocence of the marketplace and of its pre-occupations did something to preserve that intensity of purity in his thinking which was the secret of the lasting vitality of his perceptions.

Among the smaller annoyances with which Ruskin strews the steep path of the mountain pilgrim, one of the most tiresome is his perpetual iteration of the word "entirely." He engraved it upon his father's tombstone, calling him "an entirely honest merchant," and it puts some of the airiest of his billets-doux quite out of countenance, like a bishop at a ball. I fancy that the element of affectation in this trick escaped him because the word gave natural expression to what was, after all, the central force of his mind. He was himself whole-hearted to the last fibre of his nature. The characteristic process of his thought was a clear, irrevocable parting of truth from error and uncertainty, the "drawing out of the line of the Almighty that man and beast may exist." The process is beset with difficulty and danger, and yet it is the ultimate process of thought, as, in their different realms, the artist and the mathematician, the scientist

and the philosopher, unite to testify. By reasoning we sift, we arrange, we systematize our intuitions, and learn how to define and apply them; but there will be little to sift or to systematize, or to apply, unless, at the council meeting of the mind, intuition continues to preside. And it is the mark

of intuition that it is entire. This creative, vitalizing vision was the first of Ruskin's gifts. His mind was never clogged by its own past or fogged by lost memories of half-assimilated ideas. He was intent for what was before and around him; and around us all, if we can but open our eyes to it, is truth.

He

Wide-eyed to truth, Ruskin was, as it were, wide-mouthed for the instant proclamation of his vision of it. was endowed with eloquence from early childhood. Now the forms of expression have an intoxication of their own. Long before the mind has come to close quarters with the world, it may be charmed, in impressionable and impulsive natures, by vague premonitions of experience and by the sense of its own budding power. What is vague in the object seems to conspire with what is copious in the subject and the result is magniloquence, a form of utterance sometimes impressive and seldom intended to be more. The young Ruskin was not free from headiness of this kind; he loved to hear the music of his own voice because it was his own; and the rhetorical ornamentation of his work, flagrant in his first writings, became an ingrained habit with him before he had detected its absurdity, and affected his style harmfully to the very end; he was never, I mean, secure against occasional inroads of the alliterative and sing-song phrases which he had come to detest. But the true source of his eloquence was elsewhere; it was not in its essence an impressive, it was a communicative eloquence. Blake, from whom I have already quoted (and who

that is familiar with Ruskin's ideas can fail to be struck by the curious anticipation of some of the most fundamental of them by Blake?) explains how for the man of feeling the reactions of sympathy are as immediate and unconscious as the watering of the eye when a particle of sand flies into it. Tears are not rhetorical, and Ruskin was so. And yet one has but to extend this idea of Blake's to find that it reveals the secret of Ruskin's fountain of words. Before he was ten years old he was writing "Songs of Innocence" to please his father's ear, and to the end of his life "there was never," as Professor Norton says, "a soul that responded with more sensitiveness, or more instant sympathy to the appeals of nature or of man. It was like an æolian harp, its strings quivering musically in serene days under the touch of the soft air, but as the clouds gathered and the winds arose, vibrating in the blast with a tension that might break the sounding-board itself." The artificiality of his writing often suggests a man wrapped up in self-spun webs of fine theory and untried aspiration; he was, really, nothing of the kind. These artifices were accidents of his solitary upbringing and of the false tastes of the period in which he lived. There was something in them of his mother's methodical serenity; he arranged his sentences as she did her dinner-table, punctual alliteration being as necessary for the one as the proper distribution of forks and spoons was for the other. It is not surprising, then, that his balanced periods leave us cold; he was cold when he wrote them; they were decorative exercises in which he took

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