Bruna cried out sharply. "Then I am the cause of it all! You made that wretch your enemy by protecting me. The false Bevil never forgave the real one. I have destroyed you, Jack. It was I—I—who sharpened Crossley's knife!"

"Hush!" said the surgeon. "He has fainted." After this manner Jack o' the Light returned to Crag Head, and the woman who loved him. Morning was in the sky when Roger crept to the door of the room where Love and Death were contending for mastery, and begged to speak to his young lady.

"I've news for you, Miss Bruna," he whispered. "Last night the Fogport authorities were notified, and that raskill Crossley found he wasn't a-going to git safe out of the town. So he hid near the station, and made a rush to board a train when it was moving by. And he slipped and went under the wheels, miss, and was took up in bits-a very good thing, too, for that's the end of him, and saves further trouble."

Sydney Lithgow and his wife came in haste to share Bruna's vigils by the wounded man. In his delirium Jack o' the Light raved of weary roving, not in the old South American haunts, but through the vast solitudes of Australian sheep farms of privation, hunger, thirst, heartsickness; and then of an urgent recall, found by accident in a Melbourne paper, and signed with Sydney Lithgow's name.

"The notice said that all would be forgiven," he muttered, "so I threw up everything, and took passage on the first home-bound ship."

Sydney Lithgow looked at Bruna.

"I advertised for Jack in foreign journals," he whispered; "among others, a Melbourne paper. Poor boy !"

After that the sufferer was struggling with Crossley for his life-he was standing in the Fogport church, holding Bruna's hand, and pleading for pardon-he was wandering, lost in the Australian scrub. His cry of despair rent the hearts of

his watchers:

"Oh, God! the sky is brass-the lakes are dried up. There is no water for the sheep-no escape anywhere, no hope! Bruna-oh, my love, my love!"

Skilled and tireless hands ministered to him constantly. Unfailing care and tenderest love

surrounded him. He was young and sound, and he made a gallant fight for life. How could he die, with Bruna's hands holding him back from death, and Bruna's pale lips murmuring over him heartbreaking prayers? Sorrow does not always vanquish love, and there are smiles in the world as well as tears.

year

Christmas Eve came to the North Shore that with ice and snow and arctic cold. On that merry night a fire of pine knots cracked in the wainscoted parlor of Crag Head, and into the light and warmth of it a couch was drawn, and heaped with splendid furs. On this bed of luxury lay Jack o' the Light, wasted and pale, but convalescent, and with a deep content-an unspeakable happiness-illumining his handsome young face.

"Bruna," he said, teasingly, to the girl, who sat by his side, holding his thin hand in both her own, "you would not let me die when Jim Crossley did his best to finish me, so now you have me on your hands for life."

"Oh, Jack," she implored, "don't jest on that subject!" "My darling,

"Sorrows remembered sweeten present joy!'

You know that, in the future, you will have me at a great disadvantage. When I become unruly there is one way by which you may always bring me promptly to terms and make me your abject penitent. Shall I name it ?-call me Bevil!" Bruna colored and shook her head. "Never! I scorn such a method.

Moreover,

A WIDE and far-extended landscape, lit up here and there by sunny gleams, resembles a retrospect of life. The mind passes over it with contentment, insensibly pleased with an occasional bright spot, dwelling on no one memory as prominent, but soothed with the peaceful effect of the whole. It is otherwise with the objects which present themselves in the foreground to the lover of rustic scenery. Some are at once repugnant to the artistic sense. No one can find beauty in a newly built brick cottage or a muddy pond where cattle have trodden down the marsh plants by its rim, which would else have set it in a verdant flowery circlet. Neither of these objects possesses any associations with human needs or human joys and sorrows. On the other hand, let an ancient churchyard, an old half-timbered farmeven a milestone whose time-worn figures are almost obliterated by moss-suddenly meet a wayfarer, and they at once appeal powerfully to his attention. They do more, they keenly touch his heart. Sympathy with human life is the key to the beauty of the country. The poets who can invest rural objects with human interest are thus for ordinary men the best interpreters of nature. Painters, by virtue of their insight and the subtle genius which connects their pictures with man's emotions, appeal more strongly to the reflective and educated mind. Compare the effect, for instance, which a picture like Millet's "L'Angélus" has upon a well-read philosophic disposition and the few elements of beauty which it contains for the general stream of gazers. Ruins, deserted halls, dismantled castles, and the like, do not speak so powerfully to the emotions because they are old-although this is what attracts the mere painter or photographer to them-but because they have been inseparably connected with men who have long since worked and fought in life's battles, laid themselves down to rest in them, and risen again with the morrow, resolute and perseverving unto the end. Such sights appeal at once to the brotherhood of the whole human race. They are a moral lesson-a hope, an aspiration.

Among the multitude of objects which, in an old and settled country like Great Britain, at once catch the eye and take the heart captive with these sentiments, mills, whether they work by wind or by water, are prominent. They possess every element which can give delight to the

-As You Like It, ii. 4.

contemplative mind-the beauty which comes of a long course of usefulness, associations of many kinds-picturesqueness, swiftness of motion, giant power, diversity combined with monotony. Their might and velocity strongly impress the beholder. No object is so pleasing when viewed from a study window as a windmill on a windmill on a distant eminence cheerfully spinning round against the sky. It is a perpetual Mentor. No encouragement is there to wait for inspiration, or to delay because the worker does not feel in the fitting mood-the mill shames such an excuse. According to the old motto, cut over its low door, "Wind Blowes, Miln Goes." Every breeze is the same to it, it turns round and faces them all. So, too, with the water mill. It runs whether the stream be low or flooded, pellucid or red with the rains of winter. "All is grist that comes to the mill" in the way of water as well as grain. There are windmills indeed erected to perform different duties to the homely task of grinding meal, which is the end of the ordinary mill. Some are seen from afar in the Fens connected with modern machinery for drainage; and some, with peculiarly swift and fussy mill sails, in brick fields and such like places, revolve day and night with a rapidity which is both tiresome and unpleasing. These never commend themselves to the lover of the country. the country. They remind him of the endless labors of Sisyphus and the Danaides, or of Tityus suffering eternal torments under the earth:

"Nec fibris requies datur ulla renatis."

The water mill is older than the windmill; but prehistoric corn-such wheat, for instance, as Pytheas, the first traveler from civilization to Great Britain, saw the natives of Kent drying in large sheds on account of the absence of sunwas ground in handmills, as is still done in the East. Querns, as these mills are called, are frequently found in the cyclopean underground dwellings of Scotland. Their simplest form consists of two thin circular stones, the upper of which is pierced in the centre and revolves on a wooden or metal pin inserted in the lower one. The grinder dropped the grain into the central hole with one hand, while the other caused the upper stone to revolve by means of a stick inserted in a small hole near the edge. The labori

HISTORIC MILL ON THE BATTLEFIELD OF CRECY.

ousness of this operation is well illustrated by a story told of Columba. He was studying under St. Finnian, and every night on which it fell to his lot to grind the corn with the quern he performed his task so quickly that his companions enviously

Wilson

asserted he had the assistance of an angel in turning the stone. thinks that at this time (the early part of the sixth century) the quern was the only mill in use. Large water mills were introduced in the thirteenth century into Scotland, and legal means had to be employed to render their use compulsory. The quern is said to have lingered in the remoter districts of that country until the close of the last century, notwithstanding Alexander III.'s prohibition, in 1284, that "Na man sall presume to grind quheit, maishlock or rye with hands mylne, except he be compelled be storm, or be lack of mills, quilk sould grind the samen.'

Water mills are among the oldest features of the country, and they have been little improved since their intro

IN RURAL SUSSEX.

duction, save that the old millstones, which were of millstone grit, are now made of composition; and it has been found out that, of all woods, hawthorn is the most useful for timber requisite in the machinery. Few country objects are more picturesque than the laboring wheel with its dropping streams, and the ferns and mosses which so frequently flourish by it. There are certain to be several paintings of such mills in every exhibition. At the Conquest a mill was a great source of profit to the lord of a manor. All his dependents were obliged to use

it. Consequently, “One mill" is a frequent entry in Doomsday Book, and the miller a well-known character in song and ballad: witness the Miller of the Dee, and "Little John and Midge, the Miller's Son"; and who can forget Chaucer's mill at Trumpington, "not fer fro Canterbrigge," and the miller?—

"As any peacock he was proude and gay,

Pipen he coude, and fishe, and nettes bete, And turnen cappes, and wrastlen wel and shete." Multitudes of mills in Lincolnshire match the late Laureate's happy sketch:

-"Let us wander forth

To yon old mill across the wolds;
For look, the sunset south and north
Winds all the vale in rosy folds,
And fires your narrow casement glass,
Touching the sullen pool below;
On the chalk hill the bearded grass
Is dry and dewless."

Everyone must have noticed the difference between water and wind mills from a moral and æsthetic point of view. The former is smothered in verdure, grave, monotonous, always doing its duty, and yet with a perpetual restful look as of Sunday about it, and a pleasing accessory to the most beautiful river scenery. A windmill, on the contrary, seeks the most elevated and gusty position in the countryside, and is always whirring away with an obtrusive air of virtue, which puts a man quietly going about his own business, let alone a lazy man, into a resentful mood at once. The water wheel, as it slowly revolves, every now and then almost stopping with a groan, types the highest achievement of Celtic ingenuity, and shows the slowness of its thought; the active windmill, never able to fly round fast enough to please its energy, manifestly came from the doggedly industrious levels of Holland.

There is but one type of the water mill, with its wheel, its ivy-covered house, and the geese which haunt the dam. The windmill, on the contrary, presents two distinct forms, neither of which pretends to such an antiquity as belongs to many water mills. These were frequently an appanage of some well-known religious house, as was the mill at Abbey Dore in the Golden Valley (which still does its work), of the Cistercian house of that name. Windmills are either of painfully new brick and of an imposing height and great sweep of sails, or they are of wood, twisted and warped with sun and shower, with tattered sails and broken arms, leaning to one side, gray and generally decrepit. The former are doubtless Letter, commercially, as grinding corn more thoroughly and with greater expedition; but the lat

ter are dearer to the artist. A subtle play of lights and shadows glances over an old wooden mill which the spick-and-span brick tower can never boast. The finest picture of a mill in which all its pathetic associations with man-man's life and harvest are faithfully represented was painted by Millet, the French peasant, and he who contemplates it will find out what latent poetry an ordinary village mill may contain.

The miller himself, both in real life and literature, possesses a twofold character. He is either a rogue, like Chaucer's miller, Simkin,

"A thefe he was forsooth of corn and mele, And that a slie and usant for to stele "; or a good-natured, easy-going man, such as Tennyson has portrayed:

His double chin, his portly size,
And who that knew him could forget
The busy wrinkles round his eyes?
The slow wise smile that, round about
His dusty forehead, dryly curled,
Seemed half within and half without,

And full of dealings with the world."

Among tradesinen of a philosophic character, such as cobblers and fishing-rod makers, millers hold a high place. They are always democratic in their views, as being wont to grind all that comes into dust, and to see all their neighbors compelled to resort to them for the staff of life. Their pigs, too, are always fat, and thereby hang dark tales. The gossip of the countryside is well known to them, and fitly enough their tongue "clappeth as a mill." Doubtless there is some alloy in their cup of prosperous happiness. Virgil alludes to the weevil, which is not unknown in modern flour at times. Sometimes, again, the water mill is blocked by ice, and not a breath of air blows to turn the windmill's sails. Millers' wives, too, are often shrews, why, is not very apparent, and they live in daily fear of their children being drowned in the dam or killed by the rushing sails. Foreign exportations also convulse the corn market, so that a miller's life is not uniformly to be coveted. A peck of troubles invariably accrues from the numbers who wish to fish in his milldam and pit. Naturally he likes to catch his own eels, nor has he much objection to allow a few to throw the fly on his water. But strangers will trespass, tread down his meadow and break his hedges, and then his temper is apt to be short.

Unluckily he fares ill in proverbial literature. "An honest miller hath a golden thumb." The Scotch, with their pawky humor, are never tired of girding at him: "It's gude to be merry and