the plot of a tale. The event which happens to our neighbour is of more importance to us than we are inclined to make it.

Mr. Randall, whose position both with regard to Brandon and the events of the Crimea, has occupied no unimportant portion of this tale, after the death of his son and the last terrible battle of Inkermann, had determined to leave the Crimea, and return to his native land, impelled by a desire if possible to ascertain where the unfortunate being who had shared his early follies and his early sins might be. The tale of the dying boy had awakened in the husband and the father's bosom a feeling to which he had almost been a stranger, and which the iron hand of the world had rather tended to lock up in his own breast than to permit to break from a heart which genuinely longed to give it vent. Mr. Randall, as the readers already have seen, was a man of strong impulse and sensitiveness of feeling. Those two properties had been the cause of many of the faults of his life, and since these faults had been committed, had been the cause of some errors in his judgment, and morbidity in his sensations. It is true that the great fall in life such as that which had marked Mr. Randall's career, is a natural precursor to a course of peculiar self-devotion. It is also true that the best refuge for many from the recurrence of such a fall would be the life of severe discipline, if it were not for one of self-imposed rule of asceticism and seclusion from the world. Nevertheless, while that may be the case, and while such a rule may apply to many in the history of life, there are

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on the other hand a large number who are inclined to apply it to themselves with a perverted judgment. The very characteristic which leads a man to faults of this kind is one which would also dictate to him an exclusive and remarkable line of penitence and refor mation. There may be as much self-seeking in the peculiarity and eccentricity of the line of reform as there was in the act of committed sin. It is in many cases more painful, more healthy, and more the duty of a fallen man to recover his position alike before God and his neighbour, by remaining in those very scenes which have been the witness of his infirmity, and in the presence of those persons whose eye may often kindle the blush of shame. It is by restoring character in the very walks where that character has been lost, and by uttering words "that may minister grace to the hearers" in the very ears which have been polluted by the blasphemy of a day gone by, that a man shows the reality of his penitence and reaches that healthy situation of restoration to GOD which is real in proportion as it is painful.

True, in other days the monastery often offered alike to the royal and the low born penitent a refuge and an opportunity of repentance; and the cloister in its secluded shelter often echoed to the monotonous tread of the foot which had once passed rapidly and gaily through the mazes of the dance; the lip too has grown dry under the severities and austerities of monastic life which once touched the cup of the revel and the purple blood of the grape. But such acts of penitence were perhaps suited peculiarly to the age that gave them

birth, and the very nature of the committed crimes made the monastery almost the only opportunity of deep and real penitence for the fallen of past days. I do not mean that such a refuge is not for some cases earnestly to be desired now, nor would I be for one moment understood to desire that that painful vacuum should continue unfilled in the system of our own Church, which offers no authoritative refuge for the lapsed child of GOD. Nevertheless, what has just been said is true of numberless cases, and amongst them of Mr. Randall. He would probably have sought more correctly, and reached more healthily the end for which God destined him, in striving to accommodate himself to the sudden.. ness of the alterations of his life in the very haunts in which he had fallen, and in there performing those duties to his neighbour which he had so neglected.

Impressed by feelings such as these, which very likely the death of his child, and the words that fell from his lips in connection with his mother roused, Mr. Randall immediately after the battle of Inkermann signified his intention to Loraine of leaving the Crimea and seeking a home again in his native land. He was not one who was inclined to unbosom his mind to those with whom he even was most intimate, and he was one who frequently failed to recognize to himself the conclusions to which he came. There is a reserve which is held towards the communion of our own spirit; there is a fear, and a salutary one, which a man has even of himself; there is a respect which we may have for our own judgment and our own conscience, which compels us to live in awe of them, as if they were

separate beings to our will. Mr. Randall was one who felt this.

The vessel in which he returned home landed at Cork, a neighbourhood which he was peculiarly anxious for reasons that our reader will already anticipate, to explore.

On the evening after his reaching the Cove, Mr. Randall was sitting in the coffee room of an inn, in which he had found a temporary abode before going further into the country. It was there that he gathered from the conversation of some of the guests that were present intimations which induced him at once to repair to the neighbourhood of those far-famed Lakes of Killarney, which his child had mentioned to him as the scene in which he had spent the concluding months of his life before joining the army. Accordingly the next day, Mr. Randall taking with him the few things he had brought from the Crimea, started for the Lakes in question with the prayer that his mission might be blessed, and that he might succeed in finding the object of his search.

It was towards the afternoon of the day on which he had left Cork that he came in sight of the lovely scenery of those Lakes which approach more nearly to those of Northern Italy than any other sheets of water in Britain; and whose exquisite outline of mountain and hill fringed with the national emerald of their country resemble more than any other hills in Britain the soft ranges which gird Maggiore and Como. The scene was lovely, for though he had left striking grandeur in the scene of war, he came back to his native

land with those feelings with which every traveller returns to it. We are astonished amid the stupendous sublimity of the eternal snow of the Alps. We stand charmed with the fairy-like beauty of the continental city, with the sunny atmosphere of Paris, of Frankfort, or of Florence, and with the deep glow of the sunset and the mountain at Naples. We stand astonished with the azure blue of the leaping Rhone, as it plunges from the Lake of Geneva to its grave in the Arve; and we are astonished in such scenes that there is anything in England that can charm or delight us; yet when we return there is a strange power in the sloping hill, the copse, and the pond in the green lane, the sward by the side of it, the falling chestnut, the geese that strut across the common, and the thatched cottage with its clustering roses creeping round the eaves of the window; the cottage garden enamelled with the pink, wallflower, and the honeysuckle, and the child that stands beneath the wicket gate which is more beautiful than all. There are scenes of this land that as we return to them make us say there is nothing like England; whether it be from simply the force of association connected with our own bygone days, or whether it be from some similarity between the character of the inhabitants of a nation and its physical scenery, it may be hard to determine.

These feelings came over the mind of our traveller. The coach on which he had got after leaving the railroad drove up to one of those dirty and uncomfortable inns in the town of Killarney. Retirement being his immediate object, and if possible, for a time, conceal