sary." The garrison were notified that supplies were ready by means of a signal fire which was lighted in the dead of night on a hill adjoining the castle, "when a party was sent to the spot who returned loaded with the bounty of their friends." The final siege began on the 3d of June, 1646, and lasted until the 19th of August. The letter in which the garrison was summoned to surrender is thus worded: "His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, having now finished his work over this kingdom, except this castle, has been pleased to spare his forces for this work." The gallant old marquis (eighty-five years old) in reply said that he "made choice (if it soe pleased God) to dye nobly rather than to live with infamy." A number of notes passed between Sir Thomas Fairfax and the marquis, all of which are interesting, and characteristic of the dauntless old man, who held out until the castle walls began to crumble, the provender for the horses had failed, and the last barrel of powder was consumed. A capitulation was at length effected on honorable terms, and the garrison marched out to the sound of music. Besides the soldiers, the marquis's own family and servants, there were "a commissary, four colonels, eighty-two captains, sixteen lieutenants, six cornets, four ensigns, four quartermasters, and fifty-two esquires and gentlemen.' Sir Thomas Fairfax, who was an honorable man, and who, as the close of his life proves, had little relish for the work in hand, kept faithfully to the terms of capitulation; but on his removal to another command the castle was sacked, and the citadel blown up, by order of Cromwell. The marquis, on his arrival in London, was, in direct defiance of the treaty, committed to the custody of Black Rod. He died four months after the fall of Raglan, and was buried in Beaufort Chapel, Windsor. MARIE L. THOMPSON. S NEAR, YET FAR. O near! and yet, I think, as far apart As heaven from hell, high noon from darkest night, I dream of you, and then from dreams I start That snatched from dreams impossible delight, How shall I comfort, then, my lonesome years, Blown to and fro, as is a vagrant leaf, And well I know how idle are the tears That burn my aching eyes, yet mock my grief. LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. THE THE PERFECT TREASURE. HE playful warnings Mr. Ketchum had received had no effect upon his relations with Miss Vane, unless, indeed, they served to accelerate the pace of his wooing, for such it now was. But for this attraction, he would long since have exhausted the sights of a provincial town and bolted the historic scenes of the neighborhood at a gulp, as it were, and then rushed off to do the same thing elsewhere with the same fretful haste and joyless expenditure of energy. And, in spite of his infatuation, Mr. Ketchum felt that he was wasting precious time, of which he should not be able to give any satisfactory account to his recording enemy Sam Bates, who was always standing in the background of his mind, asking him what he had seen "abrard." His ideal had been to "do" England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and the Holy Land "inside of three months." This was the time he had allowed himself for that hurried race over many thousand miles of foreign territory-with its insane jumble of hotels, railway-carriages, cathedrals, picture galleries, scenery, peoples, and tongues-which once in a lifetime the American “business-man" allows himself, usually when already threatened with softening of the brain and most in need of repose. Whether moved by this consideration or not, Mr. Ketchum certainly conducted his sentimental campaign with vigor and discretion. He tipped the little slavey so magnificently that when she saw him coming she flew to the door as though she had been shot out of a mortar, and on opening it gave him a series of courtesies and quite flattened herself against the wall. She thought him, as she confided to Mabel, "the 'andsomest and most liberal gentleman as ever was, and took a burning interest in the progress of the affair, as indeed all the women in the house did. She would knock at the Vanes' door and say, "The American gentleman is down below again, mem: is he to be allowed up?" Or, "The gentleman said as 'ow you wasn't to be disturbed on no account, and this package was to be give particular into Miss Vane's h'own 'ands, w'ich I 'ope you'll overlook the thumbmark, seein' I was a-doin' the grates." She wore a chronic air of repressed excitement all the while, and quite neglected the penny-dreadful romances on which she was wont to feed her youthful imagination, for a more fascinating reality. Mr. Ketchum came to know Mrs Butts by sight, and always had a pleasant word and smile for her. One day he met the old lady on the first floor, and, hearing that she had lost her favorite cat, sent her a beautiful Maltese mouser, almost all tail, to fill the aching void. He astounded Mrs. Vane by the number, the variety, and the generosity of his benefactions in all directions, and poured a Pactolian stream of flowers, books, and music, the only things he could offer, upon Mabel's head. Hearing of a crippled lad in whom they were interested, he sent him ten pounds, and, being asked by a clergyman to subscribe to a "Home for Disabled Seamen," of which he was chairman, amazed that gentleman by giving him a check for a hundred. His reputation for liberality grew apace. Cabmen fought for him, beggars followed him, florists sent him specimen bouquets, tradesmen inundated him with cards, and begging-letter-writers exhausted all their arts upon without, however, making a penny out of this shrewd creature, who knew better than most men how to make, save, and spend money. But, if he had an eye for and hatred of shams, he had a heart easily moved by real distress, and, unhappily, there is only too much of him, that in England, so that he was always giving, if not to the daughters of the horse-leech, to consumptive widows and reduced gentlefolks, orphan children and old women. It was no part of a scheme for conquering Miss Vane's heart, of course; but if it had been he could not have better succeeded in winning her confidence. To these two lonely women, accustomed to the rigid economies and colorless vistas of a tiny fixed income in which there was room for neither hope nor despair, which curbed every generous impulse and tamed every wild desire, Mr. Ketchum was a constant source of wonder. He brought with him a breath of his native prairies, and his large ideas, hopes, views of life and its possibilities, the breadth of his horizon, the force of his energy, impressed them more and more. He seemed the splendid flower of conditions undreamt of in their world,-a world in which every ounce of tea was carefully weighed and the caddy watched with a vigilance that was never to sleep from the cradle to the grave, in which a gnawing anxiety as to how much was being cut off the leg of mutton downstairs was one of the gravest interests of an immortal soul, the cleaning of soiled gloves and remodelling of old dresses religious rites. It amused him beyond measure, when admitted on a sufficiently intimate footing to know of such things, to find that he had been agonizing Mrs. Vane by his reckless way of picking up the poker and vigorously uprooting the fire. She had feebly remonstrated in a playful way once, telling him that one could not punch a friend's fire until one had known him seven years," and he had said, "Well, I suppose two can do it if one can't, and Miss Mabel can help me if she likes." He never realized the enormity of his offence until he discovered that, though ostensibly a Christian English woman, Mrs. Vane was really at heart a fire-worshipper. She had a grate half full of clay balls that retained the heat and effected an untold saving in her "coals." The sacred fire was built up and renewed at stated hours by the slavey in lieu of a vestal, and then became to all intents and purposes an altar which no one was ever allowed to desecrate by a touch. "Why don't you have a fire?" he would ask, in entire good faith, on coming in on bitterly cold days and finding the ladies in a chilly room, decorously engaged on some bit of needle-work before a handful of coals built into a pyramid in the centre of the grate. "We have got one! There was a beautiful blaze not five minutes ago. Mabel, dear, you might lift that lump a little on the right, and stir it very gently, if Mr. Ketchum feels cold." Such as it was, Mr. Ketchum sat by it a good deal, warmed, let us hope, by a more sacred flame. He got two severe colds, it is true, that resulted in quinsy and a swelled face, by sitting in that cheerless lodging-house; but they did not cool the ardor of his suit, which a refrigerator would have been powerless to affect, and Mabel was not sorry when he was well enough to resume his visits. Curious affairs they must have been, those interminable talks between people who differed in a thousand things and agreed perhaps in a dozen. It was a duet, chiefly, between Job and Mrs. Vane, punctuated by Mabel's bright smiles and blushes and neat platitudes, for she was a gentle, good little girl, obedient to a fault, accustomed to see life over her mother's shoulders, and it would have seemed to her quite shockingly bold to have taken a leading part in any conversation. It seemed the most unlikely thing in the world that these two should ever have cared for each other, yet somehow the great Leveller smoothed the way to a perfect understanding and affection between them, she seeing and valuing the fine qualities, the real refinement and goodness, that lay hidden under what had struck her as roughness and eccentricity, and he recognizing under the conventional crust of a formal manner a sweetness and unselfishness and womanliness that seemed to him little short of adorable. Matters were at this interesting and satisfactory stage when Mrs. Vane be came suspicious and put a sudden stop to their further progress. Hearing that Mr. Ketchum visited and sent bouquets to other young ladies of his acquaintance, as indeed he did, being of a gallant and amiable turn of mind, she took it into her foolish old head to think of him, and, what is more, speak of him, as "a desperate flirt." Mabel was impressively warned not to believe a word that he said. She was kept up-stairs when he called. She was made to return, with polite, frigid little notes, as loans, the books he had given her. If they met on the Promenade, Mrs. Vane was always there too, and gave Mabel's arm a warning squeeze, which said that she was to bow and cross the street. The poor child was not even allowed to walk in the square opposite Portarlington Gardens, for fear of meeting the ogre who was crunching all the young women's bones in the place. Mr. Ketchum was completely mystified by this fine display of feminine tactics, and confided his woe to Kate at great length. Not only was life valueless and existence unendurable, but, among other things, a picnic that he had long planned was completely spoiled, since Mabel would not come to it. "Are you sure she won't?" said Kate the comforter. "I don't know about that. Let me ask her." To this he joyfully assented, and, for some reason, she was not only cordially received, though she went as his ambassadress, but Mrs. Vane accepted the invitation for herself and her daughter. Hearing this, Mr. Ketchum threw himself with more than his usual energy into the preparations for the occasion. He ordered the luncheon from London, and, when the caterer murmured something about its being an expensive proceeding, exclaimed, pay the piper. And look here: I don't want a teaspoonful of ice-cream in a butter-plate, either! And send plenty of those fellows of yours in swallowtails, to run the thing as smooth as greased lightning. Do you understand?" Just such instructions had never been left at that shop; but there was no misunderstanding the general tenor of them, and in spirit they could not have been better carried out, as was shown when the day came. "These people have been polite to you, Kate, and I don't want you to be under any obligations to them. Ask them all," he had said. She replied that, in her husband's absence, she had not entertained to any great extent, but that she had given a number of small affairs and did not feel herself weighed down by her social obligations. "Well, never mind! ask them anyway. We'll take the town and paint it red!" said he, as he went off whistling Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines." A large party assembled on the day chosen, a fine, mild day, full of suggestions of spring, and as well adapted for the expedition as though it had been ordered on purpose. A long string of carriages went rattling out of the town into the lovely country beyond, past Cranham Wood to Witcomb, where it had been agreed that the remains of a Roman villa should be visited. Arrived at the spot, the party came to a halt, and, after endless chatter and delay, dismounted and formed into a straggling procession, which struck into a footpath that led through a farm-yard full of comfortable-looking animals, hay-ricks, and poultry into a succession of fields, and brought up at two small stone thatched huts near the border of the wood. Entering the largest of these in detachments, all the ladies fell into the regulation fit of rapture over what remained of the remains, and gazed with enthusiasm at certain spots in the tessellated mosaic pavement which, with the aid of a vivid imagination and the eye of faith, could be made out to have been intended for fishes. Most of the guests felt but a languid interest in this piscatorial display; but Mr. Ketchum got out a foot-rule and went to poking and peeping and measuring with much. zeal and intelligence. He discovered that the lintels of the door-way leading into the next room were of massive stone and more than six feet high; that the floor of the room rested on pillars three feet high, and each about one foot square, set sufficiently far apart to permit combustibles to be thrust in between them and the whole room heated. He tipped the guide and got two bits of the tesseræ and dug up a bit of the cement. "Hang it! I must find out how those old scalawags did this! They beat the world at it!" said he, as he tied the relics up in a corner of his handkerchief. He stared for ten minutes at the hypocaust under the flooring, calculated the amount of wood and coal it would take to "run" it, and declined to leave, though Kate assured him the others were getting restless, until he had satisfied himself as to what became of the ashes, and wondered what people in Tecumseh would say if he bought it and transported it bodily there. The interest he exhibited in this antiquarian research surprised his relatives, who could not understand the attraction it had for his practical mind. At last he consented to move, and, taking carriages, they drove rapidly to Birdlip and up to the door of "The Black Horse" Inn, where everything wore an extremely festive air and a small army of servants was drawn up to meet them. Entered from the street, the house was in no way remarkable, but it must have been artfully contrived to heighten the effect produced on the mind when, walking straight through a long, narrow, dark passage, they came out suddenly upon a lovely garden laid out on the very verge of a cliff which sloped almost perpendicularly several hundred feet to the valley of the Severn and commanded one of the most extended, varied, and beautiful views in all England. The Americans were especially enraptured by it, and, long after the other ladies had gone in to lay aside their wraps, Jenny and Kate and Lucy and Mrs. Fletcher stood in a group on the terrace, picking out and admiring in detail the white Roman road stretching straight across the valley, the Severn winding through it, the towns of Gloucester and Worcester with their spires and cathedrals dotting it, the abbey tower of Tewkesbury rising out of the woods in its centre, the beautiful Malvern and Shropshire hills that encircled it, and a thousand features besides of this most charming landscape. By this time the party had assembled in a closed pavilion, which, thanks to the upholsterer and the florist, had been completely transformed. The dull gray light of an English winter's day had been shut out; it was brilliantly lit, and the long, bare, dismal room was gay with bunting and mirrors and flowers, and at the upper end an orchestra was playing delightfully. Mr. Ketchum had kept his preparations a secret even from his relatives, and, like his other guests, they found this feature of the entertainment a most agreeable surprise. On their complimenting him upon it, he said that he was "determined it shouldn't be a onehorse, Jim Crow blow-out, if he had anything to do with it." Mrs. Vane stood transfixed when she arrived at the door, near which her host was standing. "Look here! Why don't you leave your gums outside?" said he, glancing down at her feet. "What? What did you say?" she exclaimed. You have forgotten How can I? or "Your gums. to take them off." "Take off my gums! What on earth do you mean? why should I, if I could? I beg pardon, but I really can't have understood you," said she, putting on her glasses and peering at him in her near-sighted way, completely mystified. "Why, your shoes I am talking about. Don't you see?" said he, pointing at them as he spoke. "Oh!" she exclaimed,-a full, longdrawn English "Oh!" with volumes in it," you mean my galoches." And then she sat down and laughed more heartily |