favourite. He mixed familiarly with the
peasantry, strolled into their cottages, sat by their
firesides, joined in their amusements, and was
beloved by all, old and young. It was a
singular contrast, this hatred of the father, this
love for the child.

Hoskins had been very rigorous in the
collection of rents for the absentee proprietors
whose lands had been entrusted to his care, and
he had evicted many defaulting tenants. At
that time, if not now, eviction meant, for the
Irish peasant, mendicancy and starvation; he
had not then, even the workhouse to turn to.
Threatening letters innumerable were sent to
the stern agent, but he flung them into the fire
with a laugh.

On a beautiful afternoon in summer, Major
Hoskins was standing at the open window of
his dining-room, with his wife and son. Some
men, dressed in the ordinary garb of the
peasantry, were seen coming up the gravelled
carriage-way which led to the house. The boy,
who had been in the habit of mixing so
familiarly with the humbler population of the
surrounding district, jumped out, and ran
across the lawn to meet them. Imagine
the horror and agony of either parent, when,
as the boy hurried up to the approaching
peasants, several guns were suddenly levelled at
him, and their murderous contents discharged
into his body! The father rushed down, and
found his child lying dead on the lawn. Men
wondered why, when the father was so abhorred,
his life was not sought, in place of the life of the
child who was so beloved. How could any of
the peasantry have murdered that bright noble
boy whom they had professed to love so much?
It turned out afterwards that the murderers
were strangers in the locality. They belonged
to one of the secret organisations common at
the time; and these men—doubtless chosen
by lot—had come from a neighbouring county
to execute vengeance for the alleged wrongs of
those over whom Hoskins exercised so stern
and rigorous a sway. They could have easily
slain the father; they deemed it a more deadly
punishment to murder before his eyes the child
in whom all the love of his stern heart was
centred.

BUTTONS.

WHAT is the inherent quality in buttons that
they should be everywhere symbolic of conditions
and degrees? What hidden mystery lies
in those round plates of metal that all nations
should agree to accept them as emblems of a
man's real worth and standing, from the great
Pajan-aram, dancing till the gunpowder runs
out at the heels of his boots, to the little foot-page
playing at pitch and toss with the baker's
boy round the corner? Buttons rule the
world; buttons are the timekeepers of the
human omnibus, and set the stakes for which
the great human family game and fight. Who
has a soul above buttons? Who? A Cincinnatus,
born as of rare chance, once in a thousand
years or so; little groups of pious martyrs
giving up life and buttons both to the edge of
the axe or the fire of the stake; a few unseen,
unknown philosophers—mute Miltons and
inglorious Hampdens smoking their pipes in
village alehouses, and content to let all the
buttons in the universe go undesired and
unattained; one or two lowly women—only one
or two—serving love and duty too fully to have
leisure left for ambition; just a sprinkling,
sparse and wide, in all the broad field of human
nature, where every one else is down upon his
knees grubbing for buttons and button-shanks
as eagerly as the old alchemists grubbed for the
philosopher's stone. Yes, buttons rule the
world, and, save the few exceptions mentioned,
all men and women bow down to buttons and
worship them, and greatly desire them.

Does anybody remember Prince Esterhazy,

All jewils, from jasey to his di'mund boots?

I am afraid to say now, though I knew
the figures pretty accurately once, the worth
of the diamond buttons of that royal prince
—but they represented not only a weight of
gold, but a weight of influence, a position
of social leadership, a power of obtaining
all such good things as he might desire, a
modernised version of Aladdin's lamp, that
placed him very high up in the scale of social
demigods. Esterhazy's diamonds may be taken
as the type of the power of wealth and position;
buttons carried out to their ideal and perfected
ultimate. Then there are the mandarin's glass
buttons, as mighty in their way as the diamonds
of the Austrian prince and as symbolic. How
many heads have fallen at the nod of a stained
glass button! how many tears have been shed
at the dimming of its lustre, the flaws in its
casting, or the scratches on its surface! How
many men, Chinese men at least, have toiled
and moiled, and mopped and mowed, for the
beatified translation from white to red, and
from red to blue! while the yellow button—
the imperial yellow—the yellow which makes a
man brother to the sun, and uncle to the moon—
who could be found to disregard that? The
Chinaman whose soul could soar above the
worship of a glass button coloured with chrome
might be caught and exhibited as a natural
curiosity—a Cincinnatus or a Garibaldi with
oblique eyes and a slanting brow.

Our button worship at home is of a more
moderate character; and yet, are the buttons on
the first-lieutenant's coat no matters of reverence
and kowtowing to sleek-chinned little Jack just
struggling into his middy's shell? And what
are the captain's to the lieutenant, and the
admiral's to the captain, nay, even sleek-chinned
little Jack's himself to the brave boys left at
school and destined to duller trades? So with
the army; the young cornet aspires after the
buttons of the rank above him, but holds his
own chin high over the sergeant and the corporal
below; while through all the grades there is a
universal straining after the buttons above,
unequalled in any profession whatever. Perhaps