had always conceived a romantic admiration of the gipsy tribe, and had often imagined that their wandering life must be of all lives the most charming; and now to find some of their race far from the greensward and the wild woods they belong to, and in a hospital in the dreary streets of overgrown bustling London, struck me as a burlesque. How could a gipsy child even draw her breath in a room however spacious it might be and was? But lo and behold! when I reached the cot there lay the little gipsy merrily laughing and showing her teeth, evidently as much at her ease as if she had been dancing round the elfin rings in the bright free country air, whilst over her hung father, mother, and I fancy uncle or cousin, the mother with a pleasing dark face and very bright eyes, the two men with strongly-marked features and intelligent faces. Some sprain, I think, had brought the little girl to the hospital, and the good nursing there and attendance would doubtless send her out as blithe as a lark, with many a strange and pretty tale to tell to the children of her tribe. I chatted with them all for some time, and some stray observation from one of the party elicited the information that they belonged to the converted gipsies. I should like the cot and the little party to have been photographed, but so it is in my memory. A darling little girl sat up hugging a dolly in a cot near by, but no coaxing, no entreaties could persuade her to tell her name; she pointed to her foot, which looked like a little piece of rosy coral, when we asked what was the matter, and a bandage emphasized her finger. "Curly-pated little woman, may you soon be able to run races with that very foot."

Another child struck me by a look of patient submission. She was the eldest in the room, fourteen, I think, she was in a cot at the head of the room, with no visitors belonging to her. To our question, "Has your mother been to see you?" the answer came with rather an unsteady voice, "Please ma'am, I only came in yesterday. Mother will come next week." Home sickness was not conquered yet.

The lady-superintendent told me that the hardest parting she had almost ever witnessed had been with the parents of a child of canal-boat people. It seemed as if they could not make up their minds to leave their child behind them whilst they went upon a long journey.

Any amongst my readers who may have read "The Channings," by Mrs. H. Wood, will perhaps remember that Charlie Channing, when he fell into the river, was picked up and taken the greatest care of by canal people, and that he conceived a

great affection for the motherly woman; as I watched one of their boats slowly go down the canal in the Regent's Park a day or two after I had been to the hospital, I wondered to myself whether the man and woman on it were the identical parents of the little patient in the hospital. I can quite fancy that the somewhat dreamy, solitary life they lead, with the advantage of moving through lovely scenery, and hearing the river voice singing sweet music to them, does make the river folk more attached to what forms their domestic life, and, for aught I know, this little child, who for her health's sake they felt they must give up for a time, may have been their only one; if so, think of the silence in the boat as the twilight creeps on, and the shadows fall, and the little one's laugh is not heard.

But I am getting dreamy as I always do whether I am on the river, by the river, or writing of the river, and all this time I want to tell you of three more little patients before I bid the hospital good-bye-one a wee child, all eyes, sitting disconsolately up in her cot with a large plate of bread and butter on her lap but not touching it. Such a forlorn mite it was, and nothing we said seemed to make any difference, till a nurse came up, and then the little face broke into a smile, and the bread and butter was at last begun. To my great astonishment a little row of baby cots swung in the middle of the room, and in one actually lay a tiny tiny baby of five days old hugging its bottle, and looking quite at home.

"What is it in for?" I asked in amaze.

"Two operations," was the sad answer. "But what is it?" I persisted.

"Foot and something wrong with the spine."

In my heart I must confess I almost hoped that

"God would take it from the mother's arms,

From present pain and future unknown harms;

"

but I stifled the wish, for how was I to know what great future God may design for that helpless little one.

A pretty young German woman, with a child in her arms and another clinging to her skirts, smiled as we came up to the cot, by which she was standing, where her eldest child lay; she scarcely looked more than a child herself, but was much amused when we expressed astonishment at her little party.

"I have been married years," she said, with an air of pride; then with a little sigh she turned to the sick child saying, "She is beginning to forget our language." This was the last cot I stopped at, before saying good-bye to this interesting hospital.

IN ST. JOHN'S.

BY R. W. KENYON.

UNDER long, memorial windows,
Set by many a glancing ray
With the tinting of the rainbow
Where the soft-hued sunbeams play,
Here we kneel in mystic union,

With but Him in every thought,

Filled with awe, await the blessing

Of the change His blood hath wrought.

Solemnly from out the choir-loft

Rolls the cadence sweet and clear, "Now dismiss us, Holy Father,

Free our souls from every fear;

Let Thy blessing rest upon us,
As we pray, vouchsafe to hear."
And our hearts re-echo gladly,
"Jesus, Saviour, tarry near."

Day is fading, deepens twilight,
And the vesper hymn is done,
Yet, for us, the evening closing
Is the dawn but just begun ;
For there softly falls upon us

That which nevermore shall cease;

That which science cannot gainsay

"Tis His Holy Spirit's peace.

SAMUEL JOHNSON AMONG THE PROPHETS.

BY F. HARRISON.

Of all the portraits left to us in the long gallery of English history there is probably not one with which we are so familiar as the portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Among our sovereigns are many whom we number with the friends of our childhood, as Canute, Alfred, Henry V., Elizabeth, George III. ; and among the monarchs in the realm of literature we have more than a bowing acquaintance with Chaucer, Surrey, Shakespeare, Herbert, Pepys, Addison, Goldsmith, Byron, Scott, &c. But not one of these great men is so thoroughly a friend as Samuel Johnson.

Doubtless much of our intimacy with the mind which dominated the world of thought and letters a hundred years since, is due to the labours of the smallest intellect which, at that time had a place in the wide literary circle; Johnson sat as a king above his contemporaries, and Boswell was well content to sit at the footstool of his master and treasure up the grains of wisdom that fell from the lips of the ungainly monarch. And when we speak of wisdom we are constrained to allow that foolish as Boswell constantly was, by his own showing, yet he displayed consummate good sense in his admiration of Johnson and in his method of preserving such noble records of a noble heart and mind.

We see Johnson, as described by Peter Pindar, in a plain suit of brown, a grey bushy wig, very shabby in an age when extreme foppery was the fashion in men's dress. Goldsmith might wear a suit of peach-blossom, and owe his rent, but Johnson, in clothes worn, or even worn out, would hurry off with the "Vicar of Wakefield" in his hand and bargain with a publisher as to the sale of the MS., in order to set his spendthrift friend free from his embarrassments; employing for the service of Goldy such haste and diligence as Goldy would not employ for himself.

On Johnson's goodness as a man and greatness as an author there is no need to dilate. In political feeling we know that he was intensely conservative. He was even a confessed Jacobite

until George III. granted him a pension in acknowledgment of his services to literature; then he said that he could not take the king's money and yet dispute his authority; and doubtless by this time (1760) Johnson felt that he and all reasonable Englishmen must acquiesce in the established order of things. But the bias of his mind was indubitably conservative.

And if thus conservative in politics he was no less so in Church matters. The word Ritualism and its congeners Tractarianism and Puseyism, were utterly unknown in the last century; the thing had not then appeared, consequently its names or nicknames had not been invented. There was, it is true, a HighChurch party, but it was more political than religious, and can only be regarded as a distant relative of the High Church party of the present day. Dr. Johnson was a thorough and devoted Churchman of a school older than his era, which saw the rise of Voltaireanism and the culmination of scepticism. No one in his own day, or in our present day, could accuse him of being carried away by a love of novelty; and it would be well if those persons who are now easily influenced by the charm of something new, or by a popular cry, would consider Johnson's remarks on many of the vexed Church questions of this concluding quarter of the nineteenth century. Johnson never spoke without due consideration; if he replied at once to a question it was because he had long before thought over the matter, and had now only to pronounce his judicial opinion. As a cat sits for hours watching the hole which is the mouse's hall-door, and then with one sudden spring secures her prey the moment he appears, so Samuel Johnson, after long years of deliberation on some matter, social, moral, or religious, would pounce with a sudden swoop on the point brought before him, and utter his dictum with certainty and precision.

It may be that not all our readers will accord to Johnson a blind confidence, or accept without argument his opinions on important subjects; but it will be at least interesting to see what he thought on various points that are making more stir among us than among our grandfathers, and to observe how he anticipated difficulties that should not come to the front until a hundred years after he had spoken of them.

It must be confessed that the Church of England had fallen very low in the eighteenth century; there are names, it is true, which stand out in history with a lustre that illuminates the closed and grimy Church of our great-grandfathers; but the