likes he can try the place. Evenin', Mrs. Mills, ma'am.' He nodded, and turned to go.

'But 'e's not convertid,' cried Mrs. Mills.

'Oh, 'e's not convertid?' said old Kent, pausing reflectively. 'No,' said Mrs. Mills.

Oh,' said old Kent. He turned it slowly over in his mind for a moment or two, looking about him.

'Well,' he said, ruminatively, that there young Lacey, ain't he giv' up law-breakin' and took to work, an' learned 'is manners an' cleaned 'isself, and kep' 'isself sober?'

'I don't 'ave no one in my 'ouse who don't do that much,' said Mrs. Mills, with a sudden severity born of the memory of the sternness she had had to exert to make John Lacey see the necessity of doing that much.

'Well,' said old Kent. He remained a moment in meditation. 'Well,' he resumed, 'that there young Lacey. You tell 'im that my third keeper's leavin' come September, an' if 'e likes, I'll try 'im in the place. There ain't no one knows the woods like young Lacey, as I knows to my corst. Set a thief to catch a thief. Evenin'.' He turned to go, paused, meditated, and spoke over his shoulder.

' What 'ud you call it, if it ain't convertid?' he said, closed the door behind him, and was gone.

Mrs. Mills turned towards the hearth, and Mrs. Bray met her, hurrying across it. Her hands were out, the tears were streaming down her cheeks, and her smiles were making them as radiant as rainbows make showers. She caught Mrs. Mills by the arm. Oh, Mrs. Mills, ma'am, oh, Mrs. Mills, my dear,' she cried, then there ain't no need to go up to the Vicar arter all.'

'Why ain't there no need to go up to the Vicar arter all?' said Mrs. Mills, gazing at her in bewilderment.

Because John Lacey's convertid,' cried little Mrs. Bray.
Convertid?' said Mrs. Mills, with a gasp.

'I don't know what you'd call it if it ain't convertid,' said Mrs. Bray, laughing and crying at once. And there's nothin' to go up to tell the Vicar about.'

EVELYNE E. RYND.

SIXTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS.

NEARING JORDAN.

BY SIR HENRY LUCY.

CHAPTER XXII.

A GROUP OF PEERS.

VISCOUNT MORLEY-EARL WEMYSS-LORD GRANVILLE-LORD DUFFERIN-LORD DERBY-LORD SHERBROOKE.

LORD MORLEY lived long enough in the House of Commons to discredit some widely accepted Parliamentary aphorisms. One is that the gateway of Parliamentary success is closed against a man unless he takes his seat whilst yet young. Another points to high reputation acquired out of doors as a bar to renown, whilst a third fixes upon literary men as the least likely to achieve high position. All these things are true. Lord Morley's variation of the triple rule affords evidence of his indomitable courage and dogged perseverance.

He was in his forty-sixth year when he entered Parliament-a splendid age, the very prime of life for an intellectual man. But it is a little late to begin the process of assimilation with the House of Commons. It will be found, without exception prominent enough to be called to mind, that all men who have made the highest mark in the Parliamentary record have entered the House in their young manhood. Pitt, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, are names that suggest themselves in illustration of this law-four men whose characters are wholly dissimilar, who reached the highest position by lines of personal conduct and public policy widely diverse, but who possessed in common the inestimable advantage of entering the House at a stage of comparative youth.

For some sessions it seemed as if this disadvantage would, in Mr. Morley's case, prove insurmountable. Upon a man of his temperament and nature it pressed with exceptional weight. Superadded was his literary training and the high reputation he had won outside the precincts of Westminster. For a time it seemed as if the world was destined to witness the re-enactment of the tragedy of the Parliamentary failure of John Stuart Mill.

The House was crowded on every bench to hear the maiden speech of the biographer of Burke and Cobden, the philosopher who had written On Compromise,' the man who had thrown fresh. light on the working of the minds of Voltaire and Rousseau. It was, moreover, a friendly audience, generously eager to welcome a new acquisition to its intellectual forces. That the speech was full of weighty matter, carefully prepared, goes without saying. This was, perhaps, the secret of its failure. It was an essay on the question of the hour, and would have been well enough if the course usually found convenient in communicating essays to an audience had been permissible, and the new member had been allowed to read straight through his MS. That was out of order, and Mr. Morley, with parched tongue and blanched face, painfully stumbled through an imperfect recital.

In due time he came to rank as one of the ablest debaters in the House of Commons. The position was acquired by slow and laborious process. He always had it in him, but for several sessions could not get it out. To some men the delivery of a speech in the House of Commons or elsewhere is an incident in an idle hour, a mere recreation-though that view of it may not be taken by the audience. To Lord Morley it is a serious business, carrying with it an amount of responsibility not to be lightly or unnecessarily undertaken. In the Lords as in the Commons he is conscientiously concerned not only for the matter of the speech, but for the selection and proper sequence of every word that composes it. To his almost ascetic literary taste the looser style of expression which passes with a public audience is shocking.

After he had been some sessions in the House, occasionally taking part in debate, listened to, but, as a speaker, not loved, he happened to find himself on a platform at Leeds faced by a crowded audience. It was at the time when Liberals were beginning to recover from the knockdown blow of the General Election of 1886. A by-election had been won here and there, and there was already talk of the flowing tide. The Conference Hall at Leeds was full of enthusiasm. Its electricity touched Mr. Morley. He had come prepared with the customary carefully thought-out lecture, with heads and catch-notes written out. Something said early in the speech drew from the highly strung audience a rousing cheer. Following up the line thus opened, he spoke on without reference to his notes, delighting the audience and probably astonishing himself with the ease and success of the daring experiment. It was as if a man

floating in the water, by accident deprived of his life-belt, discovered that he could swim very well without it.

In addition to rare intellectual gifts, chastened and strengthened by high culture, Lord Morley has the endowment, priceless to an English statesman, of a reputation for absolute disinterestedness. People may differ from him on matters of opinion. Political friends or foes are all one in their belief in his absolute honesty of purpose. Not even for the advantage of his party-and for party purposes even good men will dare to do shady things-will he stray by the breadth of a peppercorn from what he holds to be the right course.

People not admitted to the intimacy of his friendship regard him as an austere man, whose talent, if he bestow it on you, it were well to wrap in a napkin in readiness for the day of reckoning. His manner is certainly not flamboyant. But its occasional aloofness, of which complaint is made, is simply the reticence of a highly born sensitive nature, quickly shocked by anything coarse or mean. This sometimes obscures but never hampers the impulse of the keenest and most generous human sympathies.

Earl Wemyss was a prominent figure in the House of Lords these thirty-one years. His upright, lithe figure, his mobile countenance, his free gestures, showed almost up to the last little variation from his aggressive manner during a long term in the Commons. Seventy-seven years ago Frank Charteris was a gentleman commoner at Christ Church. The boy being father to the man, he habitually 'cheeked' the Dean, as in the last decade of the century he defied the Premier. He patronised young LevesonGower, brother of Earl Granville, devising a scheme whereby he was able at dinner-time surreptitiously to pass to his junior (by one year) remnants of the richer dishes provided for the Gentlemen.' He excited the curiosity of the great Lady Holland, who commanded Leveson-Gower to take him to Holland House. When the two lads were leaving, Lady Holland whispered in her older friend's ear, Never mind, my dear Frederick, good looks are not everything in this world.' A nice kind thing to say to a boy. Leveson-Gower treasured it up in an otherwise tranquil breast.

He might have been consoled with the assurance that when Frank Charteris, blossomed into Lord Elcho, reached the House of Commons he was accustomed to find his frequent intervention

in debate impartially howled down. Thirty-four years ago, it being a period at which a new fashion of finding water was in vogue, it was said of him, 'When on his legs he is an Abyssinian well in respect of fluency; only it is the House that is bored.' Heavily humorous, weakly witty, audaciously illogical, he was accustomed to carry personal references nearer the verge of positive rudeness than did Bernal Osborne in his prime. During his last years in the Commons, his favourite place before he was ousted by the Fourth Party was the corner seat below the gangway to the left of the Speaker. He had a trick of rolling up a copy of the Orders of the Day in the form of a bâton, with the waving of which he enforced the wordy nothingness of his speech.

Transplanted to the Upper House, the Earl of Wemyss did not carry more weight in debate than did Lord Elcho in the Commons. But he was a welcome innovation on its immobility. The late Lord Coleridge described his sensations when making his maiden speech in the Lords as akin to those of a man addressing the tombstones in a churchyard on a moonlit midnight. Lord Wemyss on his legs was free from solemnities of that kind. With characteristic shrewdness he found his platform on the Cross Benches, whence he could command a view, sometimes the attention, of members on both sides. Amongst other attractions to one brought up in the Scottish Kirk the structure of the Cross Benches had something in common with a roomy pulpit. Standing by the second bench, Lord Wemyss might, as the spirit moved him, walk a pace to the right or left, anon leaning on the rail of the front bench and shake a warning forefinger at the congregation. Per contra, there was, twenty years ago, the drawback that the corner of the front Cross Bench was the accustomed seat of an illustrious personage. One night, whilst his late Majesty was still Prince of Wales, Lord Wemyss, wrought to the highest pitch of excitement by his own eloquence, brought a gesticulatory fist in rough contact with the crown of the Royal hat.

For some time after he passed the age of fourscore years Lord Wemyss displayed unflagging energy in Parliamentary debate. He had more than one field-night all to himself. His method of approaching debate was properly commensurate in its deliberativeness with the importance of the occasion. He placed on the Paper notice of a motion for an early day.' When the constitutional lethargy of noble lords might be supposed to be stirred by curiosity, a day was fixed. But it did not necessarily follow that the event