'Yes, he had a fever, and it is supposed he
was delirious, for he blew out his brains;
there is a report that he had been playing
high, and lost a great deal of money. What's
the matter, dear? Oh, Charles, I shouldn't
have told you! I was not aware that you knew
him!'

'Fetch my father here, and, Mother, you
come back with him!' said Charles, speaking
with a strange sternness of tone, and wildly
motioning her out of the room.

When the parents came, he bade them sit
down beside him; and then, with a degree of
remorse and anguish that no words could
portray, he told them all; whilst they, with
blanched cheeks and fainting hearts, listened
to the dire confession.

'And here I am,' he exclaimed, as he ended,
'a cowardly scoundrel that has not dared to
die! Oh, Herbert! happy, happy, Herbert!
Would I were with you!'

At that moment the door opened, and a
beautiful, bright, smiling, joyous face peeped
in. It was Emily Lovell, the beloved daughter,
the adored sister, arrived from London in
compliance with a letter received a few days
previously from Herbert, wherein he had told
her that by the time she received it, he would
be a captain. She had come to introduce him
to her parents as her affianced husband. She
feared no refusal; well she knew how rejoiced
they would be to see her the wife of so kind
and honourable a man. But they were ignorant
of all this, and in the fulness of their agony,
the cup of woe ran over and she drank of the
draught! They told her all before she had
been five minutes in the room. How else
could they account for their tears, their
confusion, their bewilderment, their despair!

Before Herbert's funeral took place, Emily
Lovell was lying betwixt life and death in a
brain fever. Under the influence of a feeling
easily to be comprehended, thirsting for a
self-imposed torture, that by its very poignancy
should relieve the dead weight of wretchedness
that lay upon his breast, Charles crept
from his bed, and slipping on a loose coat that
hung in his room, he stole across the garden
to the tower, whence, through the arrow-slit,
he witnessed the burial of his sister's lover,
whom he had hastened to the grave.

Here terminates our sad story. We left
T—on the following morning, and it was two
or three years before any further intelligence
of the Lovell family reached us. All we
then heard was, that Charles had gone, a
self-condemned exile, to Australia; and that
Emily had insisted on accompanying him
thither.

DREAM WITHIN DREAM; OR, EVIL
MINIMISED.

WHAT evil would be, could it be, the Blest
Are sometimes fain to know. They sink to rest,
Dream, for one moment's space, of care and strife,
Wake, stare, and smile; and this is Human Life.

THE SCHOOLMASTER AT HOME AND
ABROAD.

THE lamentable deficiency of the commonest
rudiments of education, which still exists
among the humbler classes of this nation, is
never so darkly apparent as when we
compare their condition with that of people of
similar rank in other countries. When we do
so, we find that England stands the lowest in
the scale of what truly must be looked upon as
Civilisation; for she provides fewer means for
promoting it than any of her neighbours. With
us, education is a commodity to be trafficked
in: abroad, it is a duty. Here, schoolmasters
are perfectly irresponsible except to their
paymasters: in other countries, teachers are
appointed by the state, and a rigid supervision
is maintained over the trainers of youth, both
as regards competency and moral conduct.
In England, whoever is too poor to buy the
article education, can get none of it for
himself or his offspring: in other parts of Europe,
either the government (as in Germany), or
public opinion (as in America), enforces it
upon the youthful population.

What are the consequences? One is revealed
by a comparison between the proportion
of scholars in elementary schools to the
entire population of other countries, and that
in our own. Taking the whole of northern
Europe—including Scotland—and France and
Belgium (where education is at a low ebb), we
find that to every 2¼ of the population, there
is one child acquiring the rudiments of
knowledge; while in England there is only one
such pupil to every fourteen inhabitants.

It has been calculated that there are in
England and Wales 6,000,000 persons who can
neither read nor write—that is to say, about
one-third of the population, including of
course infants; but, of all the children
between five and fourteen, more than one
half attend no place of instruction. These
statements—compiled by Mr. Kay, from official
and other authentic sources, for his work
on the Social Condition and Education of the
Poor in England and Europe, would be hard
to believe, if we had not to encounter in our
every-day life degrees of illiteracy which
would be startling, if we were not thoroughly
used to it. Wherever we turn, ignorance,
not always allied to poverty, stares us in
the face. If we look in the Gazette, at the
list of partnerships dissolved, not a month
passes but some unhappy man, rolling
perhaps in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance,
is put to the experimentum crucis of 'his
mark.' The number of petty jurors—in
rural districts especially—who can only sign
with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual
to see parish documents of great local
importance defaced with the same humiliating
symbol by persons whose office shows them
to be not only 'men of mark,' but men of
substance. We have printed already specimens
of the partial ignorance which passes