of the small people, are bundles of faded
marriage finery, where all that was once white has
now turned a pale cream yellow, and where
dust and smoke have cast long pencil lines
of dingy grey. The wedding-bells are silent
now – there may have been a passing bell since
their last peal rang out its "molten golden
notes" – the wedding-feast is cold, and the
wedding-dress is old and faded. Yet,
perhaps, the hearts that bounded then in joy
together, beat still in the full unison of love
and trust, and the lives that gave themselves in
mutual troth have never failed their vows or
wished the words unspoken. In the wreck and
ruin of so much that lies about us, it is precious
as sleep to the weary to believe in the quiet
continuance of love and the happy issue of faith !

It is not pleasant to see a veteran soldier's
coat hanging up for sale in a miserable rag-
store. It has an ungrateful look, as if both
coat and wearer had gone to the dogs since
their last day of usefulness to the country,
and no one cared to inquire how, or why, or if
any of the pain could be averted. We ought
to take better care of the old defenders of our
hearths and homes than that, and not let the
country's livery and the badge of sacrifice and
valour come to open grief, swinging like a
scarecrow among the graves of the dead.

Close to the old scarlet coat dangle a pair
of pink silk stockings, of ample size and perfect
manufacture – fit for the legs of the grandest
lord in the peerage. To which, indeed, they
have belonged; for they are silk stockings that
have once been gartered with that courted bit of
blue, but are now to be sold to Snooks for money.
Other things are to be sold to Snooks for money
in this early afternoon of the nineteenth century:
things which once were to be had only by the
sharp logic of the sword, or through the pure
descent of blood.

Look at that heap of linen rags; perhaps the
most noticeable things of all in the collection.
Those rags were once the snowy wrapper
of a queen; but, passing down by the slow
stages of successive uses, they came at last to
be mere rags – rags pure and simple – good for
dressing the poor man's sores in hospitals. And
now, having fulfilled all the purposes possible in
their present form, they are to go into the paper
mill, there to become the medium of the best
thoughts and the noblest instruction of our
time. It is pleasant to think of that transformation;
and how, from stately beauty to homely
use and pitiful charity, they mount up again into
even a higher world than their pristine highest,
and become the bearers of good words and the
carriers of good thoughts to a thousand souls
seeking eagerly for the light which shall know
no night. But, indeed, everything has its
uses. Even the miserable rags and tatters
of the lowest outcast have their appointed
way for the benefit of the world. Was there
not once a Lord of Flies? Jupiter coming
down from Olympus, where, as Zeus on the
thunderbolt, he had been Sovereign of Gods and
Men, to make himself the immediate patron of
the fly? The meaning of the myth may have
been – one meaning generally serving the purpose
of explanation quite as well as another – that
even the vilest and most noxious thing that lives,
has a special usefulness in the divine economy,
and a special place appointed in the divine
ordering ; like the outcast's rags and tatters, which
come to final and nobler uses to the world at large.

Another noticeable feature in the old-clothes
shop is the ingenious way in which old things
are furbished up to pass for new, and the clever
manipulation by which flaws are hidden,
deficiencies supplied, the worst parts put out of sight
altogether, and the only slightly soiled made to
look unsullied by dexterous juxtaposition. All
life is only a marshalling of comparisons; and good
is not to be found in absolutes, look where you
will. These shabby garments, furbished up to look
like new, serve the purpose of novelty to the
buyer; as old opinions, and gouty thoughts, and
worn-out systems, and philosophies dying of
atrophy and fatigue, polished up with plate
leather, and steeped in benzine-collas, and cut
and carved into new shapes and modes, pass for
quite original with the unknowing, not quick at
the hall-mark or clever in the generation of the
loom.

UNDER THE ROSE.

A LOVELY May evening. Twilight melting
into moonlight – and it wanted only a week
to the wedding. Jack Wyvill believed himself
the luckiest man alive, and his Minnie the
prettiest little darling in Christendom. He assured
himself of these pleasing truths a score of
times as he marched away towards Skelton
Place, smoking his after-dinner cigar, with his
honest hands thrust deep into his pockets, and
his honest heart free from every shadow of care.
He had come down from town, by the six o'clock
train, a day earlier than Minnie had been bidden
to expect him; and now he was off for a chat
with the squire about the business that had
carried him to London, and a glimpse of her before
sleeping.

He had a two miles' walk before him, but
the way by the fields was pleasant, and his
thoughts were excellent company. He anticipated
Minnie's exclamations of surprised delight,
her face of joy at his return, and insensibly
quickened his steps, flinging away the end of
his cigar as he came within sight of the gate
into the plantation that bordered the park. It
was quite dusk in the wood; but he could have
followed the narrow path under the fir-trees
blindfold; he had known it ever since he was a
lad, and for several months past he had
traversed it almost daily. The evening air was
heavy with the scent of the wild hyacinths,
which grew here in lavish profusion, and Jack
snuffed it up with a grateful sense of pleasure,
feeling quite pastoral in his happiness, until
suddenly his nostrils were delicately assailed by
another perfume much less sylvan but much more
familiar – the perfume, in short, of a capital cigar.