asks nothing more than to succor her from his own very moderate store—a fellow singer who met and loved her in the days when she was free, and in these, her days of ignominy, loves her honorably and hopelessly still, and devotes himself to any service in her and her children's behalf that she will permit; a poor, little, unknown, unsung Bayard, whose earthly happiness may be added to those sadder wrecks of lives ruined by the theorizings of Lady —— and her co-vagrants."

What do you think of all this, Susie? Would you exchange love in the bush for love among these "leaders of thought" in London? How, after these wicked, cynic, dreary histories and encounters, I nestle into my home and am so humbly grateful for its every little self-abnegation, every straitness of bond, no less than for the unspeakable riches it holds—that of being loved and beloving to one's heart's highest-heaped and deepest-down-pressed measure.

Love from Ronayne and self to my dearest woman. All kindest regards to the head of the house, and tender wishes that the new home in that topsy-turvy region of the world may be as happy and, some day, as noisy as that whence this journeys to you from

Lil.

18 Stanfield Gardens,
March 12, 1876.

And do I never, in these days, see anything of my coöperative friends? Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to Düsseldorf. Mrs. Stainton came to us a good deal early in the winter, but a month ago she was ordered off to Bournemouth for an obstinate cough, and the long letters I get from her are fuller of personal and spiritual matters than of references to her late co-associates. For she's done at last what we had all been looking for—gone over to Rome—and one hears from her now nothing but the Church: the Church's wisdom and peace, allusions to the saints, speculations upon states of prayer, enthusiasm for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and fervent wishes that all puzzled wayfarers may find what she has found—absolute conviction and rest—though she owns that the new religion is fuller, far, of struggles and crosses than the old. "What does our father, the Dean, say?" I asked lately. "That this 'is at least a respectable vagary,'" she wrote back, "'which one could hardly say for most of my dreams and experiments!' Fancy papa's feeling himself authorized to speak of the spiritual life of anything above a crayfish!—a dear old country gentleman who is too entirely well satisfied with this world and his lot in it ever to think of heaven except in an official way, and whose strongest vocations are matrimony, and the writing mildly learned antiquarian papers for the West of England Archæological Society.

"But you like stories. Here is papa's latest: One of his High Church confreres had been diligently expounding to a navvy the doctrine of the Trinity, and was boasting to papa of the intelligence of his neophyte. Papa, who holds very old-fashioned, inhumanitarian ideas as to the good or possibility of education for the masses, was scornfully incredulous as to the navvy's getting even an idea of the mystery upon which his friend had been instructing him. 'Will you go with me to see him, and convince yourself?' asked the clergyman. 'Delighted,' said papa, and off they set to find the navvy. After a little talk papa said to the man, 'This gentleman here tells me he has been talking to you about the Holy Trinity. Can you give me the names of the Three Persons?' 'Why, sir,' answered the navvy, 'there's God the Father and God the Son, but, to tell the truth, sir, I disremember the name of the other gentleman entirely!' Now I maintain that papa's in the wrong about the navvy, and that the ritualist clergyman had no reason to be so utterly disconcerted, as papa declares he was, at this naïve answer. Am I wicked, I wonder, to be repeating these stories? But you know I don't mean the least irreverence, and I can't help seeing they're droll! Somebody has said nobody is so irreverent as religious people, but I always reckoned that a sour-tempered saying, judging after the sense and not after the spirit. We have some distant Quaker connections where I visit sometimes, and in that household if one mentions our Lord in familiar conversation, as if He had a connection with the humble little events of the daily life, there is always a shocked hush, as if possibly it might not be unsacrilegious to speak of our Creator save on meeting days, and with formal removal of all lay business and speech. I am sure they never heard of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds. What would they have said to it?

"You hope that Mr. Feldwick's experience will not be mine, and intimate that if the Church fails me, nothing remains for me but the unbelief of our friends in the coöperative house. Yes, I've long felt that between Rome and rationalism there's no logical ground on which to rest. But I have no fears.

"Mr. Feldwick told me once that having, while a Catholic, read somewhere that St. Philip of Neri was so distressed at ecstasies that befell him in public that he tried the reading, before saying mass, of books on other than spiritual subjects, to divert the usual current of his thoughts and love, he, Mr. Feldwick, conceived this to be an authorization for him to read romances, speculative books, what not, by way of preparing himself to receive Holy Communion—after which history I never wondered that he had wandered out of the Father's House after the husks of spiritism. But it is very difficult to conceive him responsible. If reading qualified for heaven, how high up would he not be! But he seems rather born to accumulate all manner of heterogeneous information, and to echo the last 'Times' leader, the last clever paper in the 'Contemporary' or 'Fortnightly,' than to live a man's life of independent impression, expression, and will. I always hope that invincible ignorance and invincible prejudice may cover so much!"

Anna Hedges and the porcelain widow being gone from London, I should see little of the remaining confederates were it not for "little Malaise." His mother, I am sure, has given me up as a possible disciple. I have never been able to get beyond one suffrage meeting; I couldn't somehow sign my name to a petition that women be eligible pupils for the study of law, and I horrified her greatly by enthusiastic support of a proposition that garroters, wife-beaters, and committers of ruffianly assaults upon women and children be publicly punished with the cat. "So inhumane!" she said. "Such an education of the brutal instincts in the spectators! Surely I did not think what such a sight would be for the young, how much more it would inculcate in them revenge than the gentler virtues. And society was responsible for these criminals. They were what her neglect and their conditions had made them. They should not be punished for what was a misfortune rather than a fault. Our business was to train, develop these people instead of behaving to them as they did to their unfortunate victims." I admitted a trembling hope that something might be done for the humanizing of the next generation of our lowest-down people, but persisted that fear and shame seemed to me the likeliest means to stop the sickening record of cowardly savagery that week after week comes to us from all over England—the crimes of adults past all restraints save forcible ones. One week I kept a list, gathered from two provincial papers and the "Telegraph." Besides a dozen or so of the ordinary cases where a man beats and kicks his wife, and policemen and no onlookers interfere because she's the man's wife, one costermonger had flung his wife under a loaded van; one navvy had gouged out one of his wife's eyes, and threatened, in the police court, "to do for