"No, wait a little longer-let us have thirty minutes more of complete happiness."

"Isn't it beginning to be time for us to be miserable?" asked Margery, when three quarters of an hour had passed—" there is father's letter."

"My dear sister," wrote Squire Nettlefold, "a friend of mine who has recently been in your neighbourhood, tells me what fills me with concern-namely, that you allow my Margery to be continually in the company of one Bromley, lieutenant in a marching regiment. No daughter of mine shall give her hand to a soldier, and, God willing, my Margery shall be rescued from the danger to which your thoughtlessness has exposed her. This will reach you on Wednesday. I command you as you value my affection, at once to arrange to despatch her home to me on the following morning by the early coach. If you can accompany her, I shall relish your visit, if not, send some trustworthy female servant as far as Darlington, where I myself will meet her. Should you have no woman servant whom you can send, my girl's journey must not on that account be delayed; better trust to the care of the guard for the distance between Marton Hall and Darlington, than run the risk of her pledging her word to wed a soldier. Sister, I wonder at you! How could you let your brother's child be exposed to falling in love with a man who, now that the Corsican miscreant has broken loose again, and is carrying all before him, cannot call his life his own? All our reserves will have to go abroad, and who knows if that will arrest his progress. Being affianced to a soldier, in these days, means going to bed in anxiety and rising up to sorrow, and I had rather see my only daughter Margery's name in the mortalick register than let her condemn herself to such suffering. This monster has cost the lives of tens of thousands, and will cost more. Send my girl back by the first coach after you receive this, or I will never call you sister again. So help me God, I never will.

"JAMES NETTLEFOLD."

"Your father thinks as I do-I ought to have left you free." "I was not free. I should have been a thousand times more miserable if you had said nothing. Don't wish it undone; besides our troops will conquer."

He shook his head. "They will not conquer, Margery. The Prussians have been annihilated at Ligny and we have been

beaten at Quatre Bras. Wellington has retreated to a place called Waterloo. That's the news that came this morning."

"Defeated!" Margery gazed at Bromley in despair; he too would be a victim to this monster's ambition. "No army has a chance against him," she said faintly; "his very name wins battles! If Wellington and Blucher are defeated there is no hope!" He made no reply; he too saw no hope.

"Whatever happens I will love none but you," she said.

When the Highflyer pulled up at the " King's Head," Darlington, Margery's father, a thin, anxious-looking, iron-grey man, was there. When he saw that his daughter had a young man with her instead of a staid maid-servant, he strode indignantly to the coach. "What's this?" he cried. "Where is the escort your aunt was to provide?

"This is Lieutenant Bromley, father," said Margery. "Come inside, he wants to speak to you.'

"Speak to me! What the is he doing here? What right have you, sir, to be there with my daughter?"

"Sir," said Bromley, "I love your daughter. I want you to let us consider ourselves engaged to each other."

"Engaged to each other, with a great European war going on and you a soldier! You want her to pledge herself to misery! We have had enough of that since General Bonaparte put himself at the head of everything. I have nothing to say to you, sir-be so kind as to get out at once. You must have played my sister some rascally trick, or you would have not have been here. I shall never forgive her. Most women are fools, but she's the biggest I know!"

"Don't blame Madam Gould, sir. I engaged every seat in the coach all the way from Kirkley. My love for your daughter must be my excuse.'

"The devil you did!" cried Squire Nettlefold with some admiration. "Well, having done what you ought to be ashamed of, will you please to get out."

"Sir, it is scarcely English to refuse a man a hearing."

"If I hear you, it shall be outside; I will travel outside for one stage. Say good-bye to my daughter; you will not speak to her again."

Then being a kind man in the main, though desperately in earnest now, he turned round to watch the smoking horses going into the inn-yard while the lovers clutched each other's hands in one despairing farewell. Two ladies then got into the coach beside Margery, and Bromley climbed up on to the roof with the Squire.

1

"And now, young man," said he, "speak; but I warn you beforehand that nothing you can say will have any effect on me. You had much better dismiss all thought of my daughter from your mind."

"Impossible, sir! Soldiers do marry, why shouldn't I?"

"Not my daughter! I will not let a fine girl like that fret her life away every time a battle is expected. You have heard the bad news, I presume; and what's a lieutenant in a marching regiment? My girl is highly personable and full of the most amiable virtues, and what's more, she's a twenty thousand pounder-now I don't suppose you have a penny to look to beyond your pay. Every one knows that soldiers run after

fortunes."

"I care nothing for money, I have enough of my own. My father died when I was in the Peninsula, and left me two thousand a year."

"Then why on earth didn't you send in your papers at once? You might have been killed; it is a very sad thing when a man of property is killed. You have been wounded, I hear."

"Yes, at the Bridge of Sauroren; that is why I am in England."

"Well, wasn't that a warning to you? Two thousand pounds is a tidy sum, but so long as you are in the army, it won't change me. Sell out, and I may entertain your proposal."

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Absolutely impossible! You must have heard of our defeat at Quatre Bras--how could I sell out? I am under orders to join my regiment, and on my way now."

"Then in heaven's name let us have an end of this! Leave my girl alone, and a week after you have gone she will dance and sing, and soon find some young fellow who will make her just as happy as you would.”

Bromley might perhaps have found something to say in reply to this if the coachman had not suddenly looked round and cried, "There's news just in front of us, and good news!"

Even during their exciting conversation Bromley and the Squire had been vaguely aware of the sound of a trumpet in the distance, but the coachman's ear was practised.

"It's the mail," he said; "it's bringing news of a victory. We are due to meet her at Croft Bridge, and we shall.”

All eyes were strained to examine the road in front-even Bromley's, though he could not forget that the man by his side had the jewel of his heart in keep and denied it to him. Soon they perceived clouds of rolling dust marking the track of some swiftly moving body. It was the coach tearing along, and pre

VOL. CVIII.

F

sently they could see the sun flashing on the coachman's royal livery. Louder blared the trumpet, and now volleys of faint cheers were heard as the mail flew by flinging down as it went the glad news of victory. Not to the silent hedgerows, not to the dumb cottages-every field was emptied of its labourers, every hamlet of its folk; all ran to the high road to wave hats and handkerchiefs, shout their loud hurrahs, and hear the glorious tidings, and scarcely had they heard them before their own church bells rang out their contribution to the din.

The mail coach was very near now, and all could see the sun flashing on the laurels in the coachman's broad hat! Guard, passengers, coach and horses, all were bedecked with laurels, and oak leaves, and gay ribbons, and every one on the coach was cheering wildly. Every one on the Highflyer cheered too. "Waterloo for ever!" cried those on the mail as it flew by. "Boney is done for now!" Some one on the mail threw a white missile at Bromley, and some time afterwards when he came to himself, he found that it was the Gazette with the glorious news of Waterloo.

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"The war is over," said the Squire after a pause given up to emotion. Bromley looked at him with eyes full of hope. There was a sound of ostler's pails clinking against hard paving stones. They are going to stop for a minute to water the horses," said the Squire, "I wonder whether poor little Margery understood the meaning of all that noise and clamour. Would you like to go and explain it to her?"

MARGARET HUNT.

Cambridge, the Everything.

NoT for a moment to leave the reader at a loss in presence of an ambiguous title, let us hasten to copy out a passage from that cornucopia of small talk, the correspondence of Horace Walpole. He is writing in 1755 to Richard Bentley, son of the famous Master of Trinity, about his neighbours at Twickenham. "We shall," says he, "be as celebrated as Baiæ or Tivoli; and, if we have not such sonorous names as they boast, we have very famous people: Clive and Pritchard, actresses; Scott and Hudson, painters; my Lady Suffolk, famous in her time; Mr. H[ickey], the impudent lawyer, that Tom Hervey wrote against; Whitehead, the poet-and" (the italics are ours) " Cambridge, the every thing." Most of these names need no explanation. Catherine Clive and Hannah Pritchard have long since been offered up to the dramatic biographer; Lady Suffolk-perhaps more easily recognised as the "Mrs. Howard" of Pope and Gay-is part of the history of George II.; Hudson and Scott are still remembered-one as the master of Reynolds, the other as the English Canaletto; while Hickey and Paul Whitehead respectively have been preserved for posterity, with more or less distinction, in the "Retaliation" of Goldsmith and the "Conference" of Churchill. It is only the last of Walpole's list-and strangely enough the very one upon whom his complimentary pen confers universality of merit-who requires the assistance of the commentator. And yet, as the friend of Chesterfield and Johnson, as the author of a once commended mock-heroic poem, as a valued contributor to Dodsley's society paper, as a wit and man of the world who had enjoyed the fullest opportunities for studying what the Fine Lady in "Lethe" calls the "Quincetence and Emptity" of things, Richard Owen Cambridge certainly seems to merit something more than the formal footnote of the forgotten. We purpose, therefore, to repair this injustice by offering to his neglected shade the inane munus of a short paper.