possible to come out to such a heavenly silence, and to all those celestial lights. The Aurora Borealis was playing about the sky, flinging waving rosy tints here and there among the stars, and as he stood gazing, a great shadowy white arm and hand seemed to flit across the heavens, dropping something upon him. What was it? the fairy gift for which those blue eyes had asked him, those eyes which were like the stars? Harry was only roused from his star-gazing by the vigilant butler, attended by a footman with a lantern, who made a survey of the house every night, to see that all the windows and doors were shut, and that no vagrants were about the premises. “Beg your pardon, Sir,” said that functionary, “but there’s a many tramps about, and we’re obliged to be careful.” Harry threw away his cigar, and went indoors; but he did not attempt to return to the society of his family. Solitude had rather bored him than otherwise up to this moment; but somehow he liked it that night. Next morning was as bright and sunshiny as the night had been clear, and Lady Mary was again bound for the village, with Phil and his sister. “Come with us, Harry; it will do you good to see what is going on,” she said. Harry had no expectation of getting any good, but he had nothing to do, and it seemed possible that he might see or hear of the beautiful stranger, so he graciously accompanied the little party in their walk. Lady Mary was in high spirits. She had brought all her schemes to completion, and on this day her course of lectures was to begin. Nothing could surpass her own conscientiousness in the matter. No girl graduate, or boy graduate either, for that matter, was ever more determined to work out every exercise and receive every word of teaching from the instructors she had chosen. I do not think that Lady Mary felt herself badly equipped in general for the work of life; indeed, I suppose she must have felt, as most clever persons do, a capability of doing many things better than other people, and of understanding any subject that was placed before her, with a rapidity and clearness which had been too often remarked upon to be unknown to herself. She must have been aware too, I suppose, that the education upon which she harped so much, had not done everything for its male possessors which she expected it to do for the women whose deficiencies she so much lamented. I suppose she must have known this, though she never betrayed her consciousness of it; but by whatever means it came about, it is certain that Lady Mary was a great deal more eager for instruction, and more honestly determined to take the good of it, than any one of the girls at Harbour Green for whose benefit she worked with such enthusiasm, and who acquiesced in her efforts, some of them for fun, some of them with a half fictitious reflection of her enthusiasm, and all, or almost all, because Lady Mary was the fashion in her neighbourhood, and it was the