The carriages stopped, the love-making broke off, and the venerable Mrs. Pentecost, recovering the use of her senses at a moment's notice, fixed her eyes sternly on Allan the instant she woke.

vehicle, directed Allan's attention, in a shrill tenor voice, and with an excellent choice of language, to objects of interest on the road. The only way to quiet him was to answer, which Allan invariably did by shouting back, "Yes, beautiful;" upon which young Pedgift disap- "I see in your face, Mr. Armadale," said the peared again in the recesses of the leading car-old lady, sharply, "that you think I have been riage, and took up the Romans and the Infants where he had left them last.

The scene through which the picnic party was now passing merited far more attention than it received either from Allan or Allan's friends.

asleep."

The consciousness of guilt acts differently on the two sexes. In nine cases out of ten it is a much more manageable consciousness with a woman than with a man. All the confusion,

on this occasion, was on the man's side. While Allan reddened and looked embarrassed, the quick-witted Miss Milroy instantly embraced the old lady with a burst of innocent laughter.

66

"Ile is quite incapable, dear Mrs. Pentecost," said the little hypocrite, "of any thing so ridiculous as thinking you have been asleep!"

"All I wish Mr. Armadale to know," pursued the old lady, still suspicious of Allan, “is, that my head being giddy, I am obliged to close my eyes in a carriage. Closing the eyes, Mr. Armadale, is one thing, and going to sleep is another. Where is my son?"

The Reverend Samuel appeared silently at the carriage door with his green spectacles and his sickly smile in perfect working order, and assisted his mother to get out. "Did you enjoy the drive, Sammy?" asked the old lady. "Beautiful scenery, my dear, wasn't it?"

An hour's steady driving from the major's cottage had taken young Armadale and his guests beyond the limits of Midwinter's solitary walk, and was now bringing them nearer and nearer to one of the strangest and loveliest aspects of Nature which the inland landscape, not of Norfolk only, but of all England, can show. Little by little, the face of the country began to change as the carriage approached the remote and lonely district of the Broads. The wheatfields and turnip-fields became perceptibly fewer; and the fat green grazing-grounds on either side grew wider and wider in their smooth and sweeping range. Heaps of dry rushes and reeds, laid up for the basket-maker and the thatcher, began to appear at the road-side. The old gabled cottages of the early part of the drive dwindled and disappeared, and huts with mud walls rose in their place. With the ancient church-towers and the wind and water mills, which had hitherto been the only lofty objects seen over the low marshy flat, there now rose all round the horizon, gliding slow and distant behind fringes of pollard willows, the sails of invisible boats moving on invisible waters. All the strange and startling anomalies presented by an inland agricultural district, isolated from other districts by its intricate surrounding network of pools and streams, holding its communications and carrying its produce by water instead of by land-began to present themselves in closer and closer succession. Nets appeared on cottage palings; little flat-bottomed boats lay strangely at rest among the flowers in cot-pocket. tage gardens; farmers' men passed to and fro clad in composite costume of the coast and the field-in sailors' hats and fishermen's boots, and plowmen's smocks—and even yet the low-lying labyrinth of waters, unbosomed in its mystery of solitude, was a hidden labyrinth still. minute more, and the carriages took a sudden turn from the hard high-road into a little weedy lane.

A

Young Pedgift, on whom all the arrangements for exploring the Broads devolved, bustled about, giving his orders to the boatmen. Major Milroy, placid and patient, sat apart on an overturned punt, and privately looked at his watch. Was it past noon already? More than an hour past. For the first time, for many a long year, the famous clock at home had struck in an empty work-shop. Time had lifted his wonderful scythe, and the corporal and his men had relieved guard, with no master's eye to watch their performances, with no master's hand to encourage them to do their best. The major sighed as he put his watch back in his

"I'm afraid I'm too old for this sort of thing," thought the good man, looking about him dreamily. "I don't find I enjoy it as much as I thought I should. When are we going on the water, I wonder? where's Neelie?"

Neelie-more properly Miss Milroy-was behind one of the carriages with the promoter of the picnic. They were immersed in the interThe wheels ran noiseless on the damp esting subject of their own Christian names, and and spongy ground. A lonely outlying cottage Allan was as near a point-blank proposal of appeared, with its litter of nets and boats. A marriage as it is well possible for a thoughtless few yards farther on, and the last morsel of young gentleman of two-and-twenty to be. firm earth suddenly ended in a tiny creek and quay. One turn more to the end of the quay and there, spreading its great sheet of water, far and bright and smooth, on the right hand and the left-there, as pure in its spotless blue, as still in its heavenly peacefulness, as the summer sky above it, was the first of the Norfolk Broads.

"Tell me the truth," said Miss Milroy, with her eyes modestly riveted on the ground, "when you first knew what my name was you didn't like it, did you?"

"I like every thing that belongs to you," rejoined Allan, vigorously. "I think Eleanor is a beautiful name; and yet, I don't know why,

I think the major made an improvement when At the same moment, from the other side of the he changed it to Neelie."

carriage, the lurid spectacles of the Reverend "I can tell you why, Mr. Armadale," said the Samuel showed themselves officiously on the major's daughter, with great gravity. "There search, and the voice of the Reverend Samuel's are some unfortunate people in this world whose mother (who had, with neat dexterity, put the names are-how can I express it?-whose names two ideas of the presence of water and a sudden are, Misfits. Mine is a Misfit. I don't blame movement among the company together) inmy parents, for of course it was impossible to quired distractedly if any body was drowned? know when I was a baby how I should grow up. Sentiment flies and Love shudders at all demonBut as things are, I and my name don't fit each strations of the noisy kind. Allan said, "Damn other. When you hear a young lady called it!" and rejoined young Pedgift. Miss Milroy Eleanor, you think of a tall, beautiful, interest-sighed, and took refuge with her father. ing creature directly-the very opposite of me! With my personal appearance Eleanor is ridiculous-and Neelie, as you yourself remarked, is just the thing. No! no! don't say any more -I'm tired of the subject; I've got another name in my head, if we must speak of names, which is much better worth talking about than mine."

"I've done it, Mr. Armadale!" cried young Pedgift, greeting his patron gayly. "We can all go on the water together; I've got the biggest boat on the Broads. The little skiffs," he added, in a lower tone, as he led the way to the quay steps, "besides being ticklish and easily upset, won't hold more than two, with the boatman; and the major told me he should feel it his duty to go with his daughter, if we all separated in different boats. I thought that would hardly do, Sir," pursued Pedgift Junior, with a respectfully sly emphasis on this word. “And, besides, if we had put the old lady into a skiff with her weight (sixteen stone if she's a pound), we might have her upside down in the water half her time, which would have occasioned delay, and thrown what you call a damp on the pro

She stole a glance at Allan which said plainly enough, "The name is yours." Allan advanced a step nearer to her, and lowered his voice (without the slightest necessity) to a mysterious whisper. Miss Milroy instantly resumed her investigation of the ground. She looked at it with such extraordinary interest that a geologist might have suspected her of scientific flirtation with the superficial strata. "What name are you thinking of?" asked ceedings. Here's the boat, Mr. Armadale. What Allan.

Miss Milroy addressed her answer, in the form of a remark, to the superficial strata-and let them do what they liked with it, in their capacity of conductors of sound. "If I had been a man," she said, "I should so like to have been called Allan!"

She felt his eyes on her as she spoke, and, turning her head aside, became absorbed in the graining of the panel at the back of the carriage. "How beautiful it is!" she exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of interest in the vast subject of varnish. "I wonder how they do it!"

do you think of it ?”

The boat added one more to the strangely anomalous objects which appeared at the Broads. It was nothing less than a stout old life-boat, passing its last declining years on the smooth fresh water, after the stormy days of its youthtime on the wild, salt sea. A comfortable little cabin for the use of fowlers in the winter season had been built amidships, and a mast and sail adapted for the inland navigation had been fitted forward. There was room enough and to spare for the guests, the dinner, and the three men in charge. Allan clapped his faithful lieutenant approvingly on the shoulder; and even Mrs. Pentecost, when the whole party were comfortably established on board, took a compara

Man persists, and woman yields. Allan declined to shift the ground from love-making to coach-making. Miss Milroy dropped the sub-tively cheerful view of the prospects of the picject.

"Call me by my name, if you like it," he whispered, perseveringly. "Call me 'Allan,' for once-just to try."

She hesitated with a heightened color and a charming smile, and shook her head. "I couldn't just yet," she answered, softly.

"May I call you Neelie? Is it too soon?" She looked at him again, with a sudden disturbance about the bosom of her dress, and a sudden flash of tenderness in her dark gray

eyes.

per.

nic. "If any thing happens," said the old lady, addressing the company generally, "there's one comfort for all of us. My son can swim."

The boat floated out from the creek into the placid waters of the Broad, and the full beauty of the scene opened on the view.

On the northward and westward, as the boat reached the middle of the lake, the shore lay clear and low in the sunshine, fringed darkly at certain points by rows of dwarf trees, and dotted here and there, in the opener spaces, with windmills and reed-thatched cottages of puddled mud.

"You know best!" she said faintly, in a whis- Southward, the great sheet of water narrowed

The inevitable answer was on the tip of AlJan's tongue. At the very instant, however, when he opened his lips, the abhorrent high tenor of Pedgift Junior, shouting for "Mr. Armadale," rang cheerfully through the quiet air.

gradually to a little group of close-nestling islands which closed the prospect, while to the east a long, gently undulating line of reeds followed the windings of the Broad, and shut out all view of the watery wastes beyond. So clear and so light was the summer air that the one

Established in perfect comfort in the boat-In ten minutes more the boat was brought to a the major and his daughter on one side, the curate and his mother on the other, and young Pedgift between the two-the water party floated smoothly toward the little nest of islands at the end of the Broad. Miss Milroy was in raptures; Allan was delighted; and the major for once forgot his clock. Every one felt pleasurably, in their different ways, the quiet and beauty of the scene; Mrs. Pentecost, in her way, feeling it like a clairvoyant-with closed eyes.

"Look behind you, Mr. Armadale," whispered young Pedgift. "I think the parson's beginning to enjoy himself." An unwonted briskness-portentous apparent-ity gathers together to pour out the gastric juice! ly of coming speech-did certainly at that moment enliven the curate's manner. He jerked his head from side to side like a bird; he stopped and cleared his throat, and clasped his hands; he sighed, and looked at the company. Getting into spirits seemed, in the case of this excellent person, to be alarmingly like getting into the pulpit.

this with your tender secrets, your loves and hatreds, your hopes and fears. His heart is uncorrected by his stomach, and the social virtues are not in him.

The last mellow hours of the day had just met the first cool breezes of the long summer evening before the dishes were all laid waste, and the bottles as empty as bottles should be. This point in the proceedings attained, the picnic party looked lazily at Pedgift Junior to know what was to be done next. That inexhaustible functionary was equal as ever to all the calls on him. He had a new amusement ready before the quickest of the company could so much as ask him what that amusement was to be.

"Fond of music on the water, Miss Milroy?" he asked, in his airiest and pleasantest manner. Miss Milroy adored music, both on the water and the land-always excepting the one when she was practicing the art herself on the piano at home.

way of variety? Shall I wind up with "The Mistletoe Bough" and "Poor Mary Anne?"

Having wound up with those two cheerful melodies (sitting cross-legged on the roof of the cabin), young Pedgift respectfully requested the rest of the company to follow his vocal example in turn; offering, in every case, to play "a running accompaniment" impromptu, if the singer would only be so obliging as to favor him with the key-note.

"Go on, somebody," cried Mrs. Pentecost, eagerly. "I tell you again, I dote on music. We haven't had half enough yet, have we, Sammy ?"

The Reverend Samuel made no reply. The unhappy man had reasons of his own-not exactly in his bosom, but a little lower-for remaining silent in the midst of the general hilarity and the general applause. Alas for humanity! Even maternal love is alloyed with mortal fallibility. Owing much already to his excellent mother, the Reverend Samuel was now additionally indebted to her for a smart indigestion.

"We'll get out of the reeds first," said young Pedgift. He gave his orders to the boatmen, dived briskly into the little cabin, and reappear- Nobody, however, noticed as yet the signs and ed with a concertina in his hand. "Neat, Miss tokens of internal revolution in the curate's face. Milroy, isn't it?" he observed, pointing to his Every body was occupied in entreating every initials, inlaid on the instrument in mother-of-body else to sing. Miss Milroy appealed to the pearl. My name's Augustus, like my father's. founder of the feast: "Do sing something, Mr. Some of my friends knock off the 'A,' and call | Armadale," she said, "I should so like to hear me Gustus Junior.' A small joke goes a long way among friends, doesn't it, Mr. Armadale? I sing a little, to my own accompaniment, ladies and gentlemen; and, if quite agreeable, I shall be proud and happy to do my best."

Stop!" cried Mrs. Pentecost; "I dote on music."

you!"

"If you once begin, Sir," added the cheerful Pedgift, "you'll find it get uncommonly easy as you go on. Music is a science which requires to be taken by the throat at starting."

"With all my heart," said Allan, in his goodhumored way. "I know lots of tunes, but the worst of it is, the words escape me. I wonder if I can remember one of Moore's Melodies? My poor mother used to be proud of teaching me Moore's Melodies when I was a boy."

"Whose melodies?" asked Mrs. Pentecost. "Moore's? Aha! I know Tom Moore by heart."

"Perhaps, in that case, you will be good enough to help me, ma'am, if my memory breaks down," rejoined Allan. "I'll take the easiest melody in the whole collection, if you'll allow me. Every body knows it-Eveleen's Bower.""

With this formidable announcement the old lady opened a prodigious leather bag, from which she never parted night or day, and took out an ear-trumpet of the old-fashioned kind-something between a key bugle and a French horn. "I don't care to use the thing generally," explained Mrs. Pentecost, "because I'm afraid of it's making me deafer than ever. But I can't and won't miss the music. I dote on music. If you'll hold the end of it, Sammy, I'll stick it in my ear. Neelie, my dear, tell him to begin." Young Pedgift was troubled with no nervous hesitation he began at once-not with songs of the light and modern kind, and as might have been expected from an amateur of his age and character-but with declamation and patriotic bursts of poetry, set to the bold and blatant music which the people of England loved dearly at the earlier part of the present century, and which, whenever they can get it, they love dearly still. "The Death of Marmion," "The Bat-ishes and groans; a jig corrected by a dirge, tle of the Baltic," "The Bay of Biscay," "Nelson," under various vocal aspects, as exhibited by the late Braham-these were the songs in which the warm concertina and student tenor Mrs. Pentecost elevated her trumpet, and Alof Gustus Junior exulted together. "Tell me lan elevated his voice. "Oh, weep for the when you're tired, ladies and gentlemen," said hour when to Eveleen's Bower-"" He stopped; the minstrel solicitor. "There's no conceit the accompaniment stopped; the audience waitabout me. Will you have a little sentiment by "It's a most extraordinary thing," said VOL. XXXI.-No. 182.-O

"I'm familiar, in a general sort of way, with the National Melodies of England, Scotland, and Ireland,'" said Pedgift Junior. "I'll accompany you, Sir, with the greatest pleasure. This is the sort of thing, I think." He burst into a complicated musical improvisation, wonderful to hear a mixture of instrumental flour

and a dirge enlivened by a jig. "That's the sort of thing," said young Pedgift, with his smile of supreme confidence. "Fire away, Sir!"

ed.

Allan; "I thought I had the next line on the silenced at last. tip of my tongue, and it seems to have escaped me. I'll begin again, if you have no objection. In two sec'Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bow-onds the art of medicine occupied the place left vacant in the attention of the company by the

"The lord of the valley with false vows art of music. came," said Mrs. Pentecost.

"Thank you, ma'am," said Allan. "Now I shall get on smoothly. Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bower, the lord of the valley with false vows came. The moon was shining bright' -"

"No!" said Mrs. Pentecost. "I beg your pardon, ma'am," said Allan. matter with him! Want of power here, major"The moon was shining bright'—"

"The moon wasn't doing any thing of the soda to correct him; sal volatile to hold him up. kind," said Mrs. Pentecost.

"Your mother's copy was wrong," retorted Mrs. Pentecost. "Didn't I tell you just now Nobody appearing to be in a fit frame of mind that I knew Tom Moore by heart?" for singing a hymn, the all-accomplished PedPedgift Junior's peace-making concertina still gift drew upon his stores of local knowledge, flourished and groaned, sotto voce.

"Well, what did the moon do ?" asked Allan, boat was immediately changed under his direcin despair.