I deserve it; but I wasn't a designing scoundrel, and somehow I don't feel like a villain. If you knew all you would make allowances for me; and if you knew the infernal grief I've suffered, I think you would be a little sorry for me, and perhaps not turn your back on me. I can't be surprised if you do, or blame you for it, of course; but it is a dismal thing, with all this trouble on a fellow's mind, to have no friend -not a soul in the world. And I have taken such a liking to you, old fellow; do you think you really must desert me altogether?"

There was a tear in the poor fellow's eye, a pathos in his usually stolid voice, and a simplicity about the recital of his sorrow and remorse that touched me, and might have softened an austerer moralist; and who was I to refuse this artless sinner my sympathy and my friendliest offices?

"Turn my back on you, old fellow!" I oried, "I will not; I am

sure you would never designedly do anything cruel, or unmanly, or unlike a gentleman. I won't turn my back on you-depend upon

that. I can see you must have behaved with terrible weakness; but we're all weak miserable sinners, and I won't preach, for the chances are I would have done the same or worse myself."

"Thank you, Donald; you wouldn't, I know, but you're a good fellow for saying so."

"Will you tell me about this this deplorable marriage?"

"Of course I will--a half confession is no confession; you would not understand anything if I didn't, besides. Let us get off and picket the ponies, and sit down under this big tree. It's awfully hot, and I think I can speak better when I'm sitting still."

We accordingly dismounted and disposed ourselves, he to tell and I to listen to Burridge's story.

THERE are few things which give SO clear an idea of the multiplicity and diversity of life as the glimpses which history affords us of the different occupations carried on at the same moment by men belonging to the same age and educated under the same circumstances. No doubt the contrast continues through all periods, and becomes but greater as civilisation progresses; but yet the circumstances of life in the backwoods or in the bush, wherever our boys may have gone to carry on the conflict with external nature, are so softened by perpetual tidings of them, and by all the aids that science and knowledge can give, that it strikes the imagination less than in those days when the highest sophistications of artificial society at home were going on side by side with the most appalling struggles of primitive man amid the untamed winds

and seas. In the eighteenth contury science had not penetrated everywhere, inquisitive yet beneficent, with the lamp which is never so blessed as when it lights up those blank wastes of land and water through which the wanderer of old had to grope his darkling way. And nothing can be more startling and abrupt, for instance, than the contrast between such an impersonation of his period as Horace Walpole and the man whose brief story we are about to tell. About the first we know almost everything that can be known- his "long lean" form stands in the very front of the stage, bepowdered, belaced, bescented, not unkind or unattractive in its way, a thing of velvet and embroidery and fine arts and good taste, with his hands full of pleasant dainty occupations, in which every dilettante (and we use the word with no scornful meaning) must feel a certain tenderness

of sympathy. Yet to think that while he was writing his letters and collecting his anecdotes about kings and princes and ministers of state, and Patapan, his white dog-while he was unpacking his curiosities and hanging his pictures and building pasteboard Gothic at Strawberry, Anson, for his part, was going round Cape Horn! And that the two men might have shaken hands at some antiquated street-corner, not many months before, and bidden each other a cheerful good-bye, with no particular sense of the difference between them! What a strange chaos would this world seem to any spectator, could we but come to knowledge of such, who had the power to watch its simultaneous scenes at a glance from some starry tower of observation or low-placed bastion of heaven.

Few men have come to such note as he did in his generation of whom there is so little to tell as of Anson, apart from the work which was his hour of revelation. About his origin and the preliminaries of his. career we know not much more than we do about those of his ship

where she was built or what became of her, matters of little importance in comparison with what she, and what he, did in their moment of splendid service and action before the world. One small book, the scene of which is laid, not in the haunts of civilised men, but on the high seas and uninhabited islands of the Pacific, contains all our sailor's history, though it embraces only some three or four years of his life. Eleven big volumes are not enough for Horace, out of whose various editions, commentators, and critics, a whole library might be made. But we will not attempt to carry on the comparison. Anson was a sea-captain, evidently

known to his superiors as a man worthy of trust, but not otherwise remarkable, when he was chosen to head the squadron which made him famous. He was "of a family at that time new and obscure,' says Lord Mahon, “ nor had he the advantage of distinguished talents. After his expedition it used to be said of him that he had been round the world but never in it; he was dull and unready on land, slow in business and sparing of speech." A silent unexpansive man, thinking much and saying little, able to keep his own counsel, maturing slowly in his mind plans which no urgent need of sympathy in his nature tempted him to reveal prematurely: with a silent sense in him-disclosed not by words but by accidental indications of fact-of the beauty and splendour of nature, such as belonged to few men in his time and with a steady force of resolution and modest undemonstrative valour which no difficulties could appal. Such is the aspect in which he appears to us dimly to do his work; not him but his work being the notable, ever-memorable thing. It is on the standing-ground of this achievement alone that Anson has any right to a place in the chronicles of his country. But to be beyond all rivalry in a nation like England, identified with naval adventure and the supremacy of the seas, the sailor of the age, is no small distinction. During the same period there is no English general whom we can identify as its soldier. Marlborough was over; Wellington was not begun. A crowd of incapable second or third rate commanders were doing what they could-as they have done more or less in all ages-to neutralise the steadfast valour of British soldiers. They gained us a defeat at Fontenoy, glorious, it is true, but no thanks to them; they made the army contemptible in Scotland; they did what they could to reduce its prestige everywhere. But in this unheroic age one man did vindicate

VOL. CIV.-NO. DOXXXVIII.

for the sister profession its old laurels, and leave a tradition upon which the great seamen of another generation could be formed. He stands between Drake and Nelson, uniting in his sober person something of the romance of individual adventure impersonated in the former, with something of the legitimate warfare and national importance of the other. On him fell the splendid mantle of the adventurers of Elizabeth's time, though his unobtrusive figure bears little resemblance to theirs. While all the other public officers of England were wasting the public money upon unsuccessful expeditions and untrustworthy allies, Anson alone spoiled the enemy. The Spanish galleon, golden romance of merchandise, once familiar to the British imagination, rose again under his sober touch into a wealthy reality before the country's astonished eyes. The South Seas had but recently shaken the whole fabric of society in this island, and made the very kingdom totter. It was a sordid tragedy when played in Change Alley; but it took to itself a noble human investiture when carried out in a second exciting chapter amid the fairy islands and awful rocks of the Southern Seas.

For, in fact, Anson's expedition was but the dénouement and climax of the strange national whirlwind which had rapt England out of its senses, and all but destroyed its credit and mercantile standing in the world twenty years before. The South Sea Company, as has been already described. in these sketches, had gained at this terrible price the privilege of sending one ship a-year to the supposed golden coasts of South America. Trade, which then as always was apt to have confused ideas of truth and honour, did what it could to exploiter to the best of its crafty powers this grudging concession; and as the best means of doing so, sent its one ship, attended by a little fleet of smaller vessels, the

2 Y