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She stepped to the piano and closed it; | she would not play any more that night. It might disturb her father and aunt.

She would go out into the pavilion, a small summer-house in the garden, on raised ground that commanded a seaview; in it she could sit, get cool, and perhaps sleepy. It was of no use her going to bed now; she was far too excited to sleep. Had she spoken her own opinions in her controversy with the rector? She had no opinions. Her moral sense, her views of life, were inchoate. She had merely repeated what she had heard fall from her father, opinions which her mind received without consenting to them or rejecting them. She had measured arms with the rector out of perversity, because she knew that her father wished her to gain the old parson's good opinion, and because she owed her father a grudge for having wasted her property. That she was cutting off her own nose to spite herself, she was aware, but indifferent to the consequences. That she would meet with angry rebuke, and sneers worse to bear than rebuke, from her father, she also knew, and did not care. She was in that condition of soul which is most dangerous in a young person, a spiritual condition analogous to that of one who in a dark room has lost all his bearings, does not know where door or window or table or wardrobe is; who beats about with the hands, moves this way, then that, and at last goes forward desperately, knowing that a blow or a fall must ensue, and give the proper bearings of the room. Josephine's mind was in confusion; she hardly could distinguish between right and wrong, and she was perfectly incapable of judging what was her proper course.

She did not care about her fortune that was squandered, because she had made no scheme, built up no hopes on the future when she would be her own mistress. She had one passion - for music, and at one time she thought of going on the stage; so she would escape from home; but she doubted whether she had the perseverance to pass through the drudgery of apprenticeship for the opera; and it was to the opera she turned, with her musical ear and splendid voice.

There had been long simmering in her heart indignation against her father, and impatience with Aunt Judith; and now this boiled over. The baseness of her father had never seemed to her so odious as since she had made the acquaintance of Richard Cable, nor the supineness of her aunt less inexcusable. Her rebellious

temper impelled her to no positive line of action; it made her disposed to quarrel with every one who came in her way, and oppose everything that was suggested to her. In nervous disorders, the patient is irritable, and almost insufferable to his nurses; and Josephine was spiritually ill; her moral tissue was in a state of angry excitation. We are her nurses sitting round her, reading her mind, with our fingers on her pulse, counting its furious throbbing. We must be patient with her, and not angry because she seems to us unreasonable. The moral sickness must be borne with as tenderly as the sickness that is physical. Have we not ourselves had our periods of ethical giddiness, when everything swam round us, and the ground gave way under our feet? When we put out our hands grasping in vacuum, we caught at things that could not stay us up.

Or, to vary the simile somewhat, may we not consider our span of life as a tightrope on which we have to dance our hour? We can do it with the balance-pole in our hands that we are supplied with a balance-pole of one sort or another — moral principle or social etiquette. How we pirouette, and leap and fall and rebound, and trip and spin on tiptoe, with a smiling face. We have our pole. And what pranks we play with that same pole! Now we bear it horizontally, and then all the lookers-on know we are safe. Anon we balance it on our noses, and folding our arms across the breast, caper a hornpipe; thereat every breath is held, for all expect our fall. Anon we toss the pole from hand to hand, and sway in our dancing precariously; a gasp from the spectators; we have cast our pole from us high into the air. We are lost! No; a somersault is turned on the rope, and the hands grasp the falling pole in time to steady us again. So we go along our rope to the end; and whether we carry our pole off it at the extremity depends on what the balancingpole has been.

Some acrobats are sent along the rope without any pole at all, to balance themselves as best they may with outstretched arms; and under some, nets are spread which may receive them if they fall; but to others, are only the hard stones of the pavement and sharp flints. When these go down, they never go aloft to dance again; they cause a talk for a day, and are then forgotten. The broken creatures lie all about us; they can be counted by scores. We thank God we are not as they; we have our balancing-poles and our receiving-nets, and have not our spasms

of supreme agony, when our feet totter, | balancing-pole whatever, certainly no our heads whirl, and we know we are lost. moral principle. She walked through the Not we. We have social etiquette, which garden, softly singing the mermaid's song, can never fail us, which will always restore bearing the colored light, a pretty object, our equilibrium, always remain in our had there been any one there to see her. hands and keep us upright; always, that The garden gate could be opened by the is, till we reach the end of our cord, and hand from the inside, but only by a latchthen we throw it away forever. key from without. When she came to it, As Josephine sat in the summer-house, she put the box of crackers under her she was quite in the dark. The house chin, and held it thus whilst her disenwas of board, painted, with a conical roof, gaged hand drew back the latch. Then no window, only a side door. Through in a moment she stepped through, and this door she looked on the quivering with a merry laugh, stood lamp in hand silver belt of the sea. A cloud obscured before Cable; and the door closed behind the moon, but not the rays that fell on the her unregarded. She raised the lamp and sea, which gained in brilliancy by the ob- let the rosy light fall over her face and scuration of the moon. She knew that hair and bare neck and shoulders. the tide was full. The hour was midnight, and when the tide was at noon day or night, then were the highest tides at Hanford. She could hear the lap of the water on the sea-wall outside the garden palings

a cool pleasant murmur, that soothed her. Without thinking of what she was doing, moved by the sight of the glittering water and the sound of the tide, she began to sing the mermaid's air in " Oberon." As she sang, she thought she heard a sweet whistle repeating the air; she stopped, and the whistle continued it. She flushed in the dark. Richard Cable | was without, on the sea-wall, in the moonlight, watching the tide, by the garden gate. She sang another verse and stopped, and again the whistle echoed the strain.

Then she started up. "What can have brought him here? He has been thinking about me! I have some crackers for his children. I put the box aside in the conservatory." She did not stop to consider what she was about; she ran to the house, stepped into the little glass veranda and took the box. Then she also stooped and carefully raised the ruby-globed lamp, and went out into the garden with the box of gilt crackers in one hand, and the ruby lamp in the other. She took the lamp partly that she might show Richard the pretty crackers by its light, as the moon was hidden; partly, also, out of a sense of vanity, because she wished him to see her in her rose silk evening dress, and artificial light was necessary to bring out its color. Another, a third reason, also influenced her, as unacknowledged as her vanity; an instinctive sense of imprudence in going out of the garden gate at midnight to speak to a man, and a fancy that the bearing of a light would modify the impru

dence.

Josephine, for her trip along the rope of life, had been given by her father no

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The boatman took off his cap and stood as one dumbfounded, holding his cap to his breast with both hands, looking at her. "Are you not surprised to see me, Mr. Cable?"

"Very miss. I thought I saw a fairy, or a vision."

"And I," she said, smiling, "I was surprised too. I sang, and heard an echo. I came out to see whence the echo came, and found you. How come you here at this time of night?"

"Well, miss," answered Cable deferentially, "I am up so much of nights when aboard the lightship, looking after my lamp; and now that I am ashore, I can't always sleep; and this being a beautiful night, and the tide flowing full, I thought I'd walk on the wall. But, miss, excuse me; you ought not to be here."

"Oh, I have only come to give you this box of gilt crackers; it will amuse the children. Each contains a trifle, a brooch, or a ring, or an anchor. How they will laugh over them!"

"Yes," said Cable; "but I had rather you had not brought them now."

"I give you them. Take them. I must go back."

"Yes, miss, at once."

She put her hand to the garden door. It was fast. "O Mr. Cable!" she exclaimed, as her heart stood still.

"Hush!" He put his finger to his lip. Both heard voices close at hand, on the sea-wall. The wall made a bend at the garden paling, so that those approaching from one direction were invisible. On the other side it extended straight forward for a mile.

The moon burst forth in a flood of light. Instinctively, Cable and Josephine looked along the wall. No escape was possible in that direction. Seawar 1 also was no escape; the tide was in and washed the

Josephine blew out the light, and then was aware that it was useless for her to do this; she could not be hid. She stood in her evening dress, in the glare of full moon, against the painted, boarded wall, and Cable beside her, exposed to the sight of any one turning the corner, without possibility of escape, without a place where she could hide.

base of the dike. The sailor put his foot | Ovens," was undertaken by us for the puragainst the door, it was too strong to be pose of archæological research, pure and burst open. simple. Archæologists are accused of being slightly oblivious to passing events in the great absorption of their subject; and, perhaps, that was why it never occurred to us that, whilst war was pending between Greece and Turkey, and whilst the steamers which protect the coasts of Asia Minor had been removed for fear that the Greek population should steal them, the Oven Islands, with their wealth in harborage and distance from government control, were not the safest place for Dr. Dryasdust and his wife to pitch their

Scarce a moment was afforded her to determine what to do, when round the angle came the rector and his son, arm in

arm.

66

My dear Algernon,” said Parson Sellwood, "you need not be afraid; she is right at heart. It is human nature to be perverse."

Then, all at once, the two gentlemen saw those before them.

"My dear Josephine!" exclaimed the rector. "Good gracious! what is the meaning of this?

Josephine looked down, and her voice faltered as she said: "I came with crackers for the children, and the gate closed -and- and I asked Mr. Cable to take the crackers home to his little ones."

"The gate fast?" asked the rector. "Locked out on the wall at midnight. O Josephine!"

In a moment, the captain threw his overcoat that he had on his arm upon the spikes that incrusted the top of the palings, and laying both his hands on the coat, lifted himself over, and in another minute had opened the door.

"We are inconsiderate," said Captain Sellwood; "we must not keep Miss Cornellis standing here making explanations." "No," said the rector, "inventing explanations." He clicked his tongue in his mouth. "What a pity it is you have lost your mother! To a young girl, nothing can replace a mother; no, not the best of aunts. Shut the gate. Come on, Algy." He said nothing to Cable; but as he relinked his arm in that of his son, after a few paces in silence, he muttered: "No; it won't do. I am sorry. There is good in the girl; but - it won't do, Algernon. Look elsewhere."

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From Longman's Magazine. THE OVEN ISLANDS.

A VISIT to certain islets in the Egean Sea, which rejoice in the name of "the

tent.

There are four Oven Islands lying close together, and I believe they owe their name to certain ancient rock-cut tombs which to the inhabitants look like ovens ; only one of them is inhabited, and on this there is only one village, called Kroussæ, which consists of forty houses. The inhabitants, in fact, are all members of one family, over whom the common ancestor, Captain All Holy (Panagiotes), a retired sponge-fisher, rules supreme. It was a great pleasure to us to be plunged into a society so truly patriarchal as this was; to witness the respect paid to the eighty years which weighed but lightly on All Holy's shoulders; to hear how every voice was hushed when he spoke; how at the feast his was the first song, and how his advice was law in the councils held in the village church. He told us that he had been born in the Oven Islands, and that in his youthful days only four houses existed on the island. He delighted in recounting stirring incidents of the revolution, during which time the Ovens were the hotbed of piracy. He had had many sons and daughters born to him at Kroussæ, who in their turn had so increased the population that the number of houses had of necessity been multiplied by ten.

Husbands and wives had been imported from the adjoining island of Nikaria, where every one knows Captain All Holy, of the Ovens, and is proud to claim relationship with him by those strange ties of kindred which puzzle the uninitiated in the Greek social system; such as "fellow father-in-law," "fellow godfather," and the like. Captain All Holy's family had originally emigrated from Patmos, a highly respectable island, which revels in traditions of St. John; consequently the importations from Nikaria are looked down upon. For no island in these seas has a worse reputation; its inhabitants are nomad charcoal-burners, and so wedded to

their primitive line of life that when on one occasion a Nikariote who had made some money at Smyrna returned home, bringing with him, amongst other comforts, a four-post bed, his compatriots were so scandalized by its appearance that they dragged it into the village square and reduced it to charcoal. Evil report also says that most of those hideous deformities which beg from you on the bridges at Constantinople are manufactured by heartless parents on Nikaria; so the descendants of All Holy have probably just cause for looking down upon their consorts who hail from there.

The male descendants of Panagiotes are either shepherds or sponge-fishers, whilst the females are remarkable only for their extreme simplicity and servile obedience to their husbands. They deal largely in magic and spells, and they hoard amongst themselves superstitions which have long ceased to exist elsewhere.

Those who witnessed our arrival one stormy wet evening in April received us with great effusion; it was raining in such torrents that it was out of the question to live in our tent; it was even impossible to proceed to the village. So we took refuge for the night in a tiny coffee-shop which Captain All Holy keeps down by the shore. Fifteen souls in all were collected in this apartment, not to mention dogs, cats, and hens; and as the night came on the storm so increased in fury that none of our comforts could be brought from our boat. We dined off a tin of lobster, and then resigned ourselves to be stared at, for the space of two hours, as those only can stare whose staring appetite has never been assauged by exhibitions and wonders from all quarters of the globe; it was a simple, childlike stare which meant no rudeness, but genuine delight. They left us at last in possession of the room. I lay on my ulster and on boards; my wife reposed in her hammock; and to our manservant Matthew we generously handed over the sole and separate use of All Holy's bed and its entomological treasures. Evils in the night are doubly hard to bear, and I never remember a dawn more acceptable than that which shone on Kroussæ towards the close of last April, with a brilliant sun to dry us and the prospect of a cleaner home.

Up in the village we secured a largish room, out of which we turned every movable thing. We hired a woman to clean it, whose only dustpan was her own petticoat, and her only brush was nearly bald.

After some hours' work it was raised to the rank of an exceedingly dirty English room; but we had our own beds and bedding and our own canteen, and thus we settled down in our Oven Island home. We had four windows without any glass in them, a door opening on to an outside staircase, and Matthew slept and cooked in a dirty hole below us. Our landlady, Mrs. Peace, was one of All Holy's eldest daughters. She had had fourteen children, she told us, in her day; seven of them were still living at Kroussæ, married, and with houses of their own, and three had "gone to Hades." She was a bustling, stirring woman, between fifty and sixty, whose great pride was having once been to Patmos and having said her prayers in the cave of the Apocalypse. She thought herself very lucky to have secured us as tenants, and was a constant visitor.

The next day was that dedicated to St. George, a holiday of course, so no workmen were to be found who would accompany us to the proposed site of our explorations. I was exceedingly glad to see the so-called Kúpa fires which, on the vigil of St. George, were lit at Kroussæ; it was a weird sight to see the women and children dancing around them and singing, "Get out, ye fleas! get out, ye bugs! get out, ye mighty rats! It is a superstition, connected, I suppose, with St. George's mythical victory over the dragon, that he has likewise power to destroy the smaller tormentors of the human race. I was told that a similar performance is gone through on St. George's other day in November; and, as circumstances turned out, I was not sorry for the opportunity of remaining for the feast-day in the village.

St. George's Church, with its bell hung to a tree outside, looked very gay; it had been newly whitewashed for the occasion; its floor was strewed with myrtle and sweet-smelling herbs, and its picture of St. George was dressed up in a new piece of chintz for the occasion. As the service proceeded I looked at this picture, which represents St. George on a winged horse piercing the dragon, whilst the princess and the flocks stood trembling by; and as I looked I thought how kindred are the legends of Christendom to those of heathen days when read here on their native soil. Who is St. George but Perseus? Is not the horse Pegasus? The princess is Andromeda, and your story is almost complete. Perseus for merry England would sound odd enough to our ears, and still odder would it be to tell the aristocracy of

England that they had been married in a | Karabas, a Samiote of evil reputation, who temple of Perseus not far from Hanover Square.

had murdered a man in Syra only a few weeks before, was their captain, and his crew of twenty-two men were selected from amongst the greatest ruffians of the neighboring islands. They were all armed to the teeth, and, concluded she, "they have even got torpedoes on board to prevent any one from venturing alongside." Their object this time in visiting the Ovens was to capture the English archæ

The amusements for the evening were simple but characteristic; the men assembled together in a shady garden, cut up a lamb into tiny pieces, and boiled the bits in a caldron which cast a savory odor far and wide. When they had eaten enough, and drunk and sung songs to their hearts' content, they joined the ladies, who had hitherto only dared to peep occasionally atologists, and of this object they made no the lords of creation over the garden wall; and then dancing began the strange singing dances of Nikaria, in which men and women revolve in a long, wavy circle, singing as they move part-songs more monotonous than beautiful, and our earlier slumbers were disturbed by the sound of bagpipe and lyre and the discordant yells of inebriation.

We went to our work next morning, taking with us our tent, our provisions, and ten workmen; we were rowed in a boat some dozen miles to the site of our proposed excavations -a hillock by the sea, on which had formerly stood a marble temple. That we slept peacefully in our tent when the workmen left us all alone for the night, that we rejoiced in the cleanliness and solitude which surrounded us, we owed to our ignorance rather than to our courage. I fancy that if we had known of the arrival of a certain two-masted caïque in the harbor of Kroussæ that evening, and of its object, we should not have slept so well, and we should not have enjoyed our evening stroll amongst the rocks and brushwood. Luckily for us our researches were not crowned with success; the spot was not a promising one; so we decided to return to the village on the following morning. As we entered the harbor the new arrival at once arrested our attention. "She is quite a fine boat,' we said to each other. "We must try to secure her for our return voyage," I innocently remarked to our boatmen; but they shook their heads mysteriously; there was evidently something wrong about her, for she had no flag and her color of dark chocolate did not look prepossessing.

There was much confusion and secret talking when we got on shore. All Holy's coffee-shop was full, and so was his son's up in the village, and amongst the company we soon recognized the strangers, ill-conditioned, European-dressed men. Mrs. Peace was the first to tell us all about them. It was a well-known pirate boat which often paid the Oven Islands a visit.

secret when conversing in the café.

Our position we at once recognized as highly critical; we hardly dared to think of the night we had spent in solitude in our tent; and our only chance of safety now lay in support from the Oven Islanders. By great good-luck, Mrs. Peace's son-in-law had a small store close to our house, and, moreover, he had some money by him; consequently the presence of pirates disturbed him almost as much as it did us; and to this fact I firmly believe we owed the allegiance of the islanders.

Towards evening we held a council of war in the church, at which were present Captain All Holy, two of his sons, the demarch, who had married the captain's third daughter, the two Turkish soldiers, who feebly represented their government on the Ovens, my servant Matthew, and myself. The Greeks were loud in their protestations of good faith; the Turks merely looked on in a cynical fashion and said nothing whilst we examined their guns and pronounced them valuable only as firewood. Besides these we found that there were twelve other guns on the island, all of them more formidable in appearance than reality.

It was agreed that a little army of Oven Islanders, under the generalship of our servant, who, to our comfort, we knew was an excellent shot, should be formed for our protection. Every available weapon was to be produced, and our house was to be barricaded and surrounded by our faithful followers. Captain All Holy concluded the proceedings by stating, "Nothing more can be done to-night; to-morrow the demarch shall demand of Captain Karabas his papers, and state that a steamer is daily expected from Chios in pursuit of pirates." Greeks are always ready with a lie, and the old man's stratagem met with universal applause.

When I reached home I found my wife and Mrs. Peace hard at work with the barricades; large stones were being car ried up to our room with which to block up the windows; the door, which was de

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