thoroughly the Scots understood the business of war according to their own method of conducting it—how well they knew the motions of the enemy while keeping their own unrevealed. Douglas offered to let the admiral see and count the enemy, and then decide on his course. Accordingly, he was taken to the top of a hill, whence, to his amazement, he could see the whole English force as if it were reviewed before him. He estimated that he saw there six thousand men-at-arms, and sixty thousand archers, and concurred in the hopelessness of meeting such a force in the field.

The admiral and his followers seem now to have thought that the war must come to an end, that there was nothing for it but surrender. This was a conclusion, however, entirely unknown in Scottish warfare, and still further, to his amazement, the admiral was made to understand that, while the great English army was left to do its worst in Scotland, his countrymen might have an opportunity of joining the Scots in an invasion of England. Accordingly, they swept Cumberland and Westmoreland in the old fashion. They were unmolested, for the country had been drained of men for the English army; and we are told that "the French said among themselves, they have burned in the bishoprics of Durham and Carlisle, more than the value of all the towns in Scotland."

They returned to find desolation in Scotland. The great English army had marched to the Forth, finding little that they could destroy, save the religious houses. They made the incursion memorable by the destruction of the rich abbey of Melrose. Then came the established fate of such invading armies-starvation. It was early in the year, when the grain was but growing, while the Scots had driven their cattle, and carried their ripe grain and other effects to the shelter of the nearest hills; and the fleet which was to have provisioned the English army, failed it as usual. Thus each army went back to its own country.

The surprises which were to greet the French in this

strange land were not yet over. No sooner was the English host fairly across the border, than the desert became animated. The people crept down from the hills with their cattle and effects, and these received a contribution from the plunder of England. The Scots took the devastating of their land with marvellous indifference; and they needed but a few beams of wood to restore their burnt cottages, and make themselves as comfortable as, in these unsettled times, they ever were.

GEORGE ELIOT (MARIAN EVANS).

GEORGE ELIOT is the nom-de-plume of a lady novelist, said to be the daughter of a clergyman, born about the year A.D. 1820. Her first work, Scenes from Clerical Life, appeared in "Blackwood's Magazine;" and its publishers have since issued Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Romola, Middlemarch, etc., from the same facile pen. She is also the author of The Spanish Gipsy, a poem of great beauty and power.

DOLLY WINTHROP.

MRS. WINTHROP was in all respects a woman of scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning, which it was a constant problem with her to remove. Yet she had not the vixenish temper which is supposed to be a necessary condition of such habits; she was a very mild, patient woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life, and pasture her mind on them. She was the first person thought of in Raveloe, when there was illness or death in a family, when leeches were to be applied, or there was a sudden disappointment in a monthly nurse.

She was a comfortable woman, good looking, fresh complexioned, having her lips always tightly screwed, as if she felt herself in a sick chamber, with the doctor or

the clergyman present. But she was never whimpering; no one had seen her shed tears; she was simply grave, and inclined to shake her head and sigh, almost imperceptibly, like a funeral mourner who is not a relative. It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with a wife like Dolly; but she took her husband's conviviality and jokes as patiently as everything else, considering that " men would be so," and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

This good wholesome woman could hardly fail to have her mind strongly drawn towards Silas Marner, now that he appeared in the light of a sufferer; and one Sunday afternoon she took her little boy Aaron with her, and went to call on Silas, carrying in her hand some small lard-cakes, flat, paste-like articles, much esteemed in Raveloe; and on arriving at the stone pits they heard the sound of the loom.

"I had a baking yesterday, Master Marner, and the lard-cakes turned out better nor common; and I'd ha' asked you to accept some, if you'd thought well. I don't eat such things myself, for a bit of bread's what I like from one year's end to the other; but men's stomachs are made so comical, they want a change-they do, I know, God help them."

"There's letters pricked on them," continued Dolly. "I can't read them myself; but they have a good meaning, for they are the same as is on the pulpit cloth at church. I prick them on all the loaves and all the cakes, though sometimes they won't hold, because of the rising; for if there is any good to be got, we have need of it in this world; and I hope they'll bring good to you, Master Marner, for it's wi' that will I brought them, and you see the letters have held better than common."

"Ah! if there's good anywhere," repeated Dolly, "we've need of it. But you didn't hear the church bells this morning, Master Marner. I doubt you didn't know it was Sunday. Living alone here, you lose your count,

and when your loom makes a noise, you can't hear the bells, more partic'lar now the frost kills the sound."

"Yes, I did; I heard them," said Silas, to whom Sunday bells were a mere accident of the day, and no part of its sacredness.

"Dear heart," said Dolly, pausing before she spoke again. "But what a pity it is you should work of a Sunday and not clean yourself, even if you didn't go to church; for if you had a roasting bit, it might be you couldn't leave it, being a lone man. But there's the bakehus, if you would spend a tuppence on the oven now and again, not every week in course, you might carry your bit of dinner there, for its nothing but right to have a bit o' summat hot of a Sunday, and not to make it as you can't know your dinner from Saturday. But now upo' Christmas-day, this blessed Christmas as is coming, if you take your dinner to the bakehus, and go to church, and see the holly and the yew, and hear the anthem, and then take the sacramen, you'd be a deal the better, and you'd know which end stood and you on, you could put

your trust in Them as knows better nor we do, seeing you'd done what it lies in us all to do."

"Its never too late to turn over a new leaf; and if you've never had no church, there's no telling the good it will do you. I feel so set up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been and heard the prayers and the singing to the praise and glory of God, as Mr. Macey gives out, and Mr. Crackenthorp saying good words; and if trouble comes, I feel as if I can put up with it, for I've looked for help in the right quarter, and give myself up to Them as we must all giv up to at the last; and if we've done our part, it isn't to be believed as Them that are above us will be worse nor we are, and come short o' Theirn."

Poor Dolly's expression of her simple Ravelloe theology fell unmeaningly on Silas' ears; for there was no word in it that could rouse a memory of what he had known as religion, and his comprehension was baffled by the pluralpronoun, which was no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding a presumptuous familiarity.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, born A.D. 1818, author of History of England, from the fall of Wolsey to the destruction of the Spanish Armada, Short Studies on great Subjects, and of numerous critical and historical essays.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCOTCH.

WHOEVER has attended but a little to the phenomena of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight which he can hope to attain into a character and disposition. Every one is a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences, trained by the same teachers, and lived from childhood to age in constant and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly by impalpable and mysterious barriers.

And if from those whom we daily meet, whose features are before our eyes, and whose minds we can probe with questions, we are nevertheless thus separated, how are the difficulties of the understanding increased when we are looking back from another age, with no better assistance than books, upon men who played their parts upon the earth under outward circumstances, with other beliefs, other habits, other modes of thought, other principles of judgment! We see beings like ourselves, and yet different from ourselves. Here they are acting upon motives which we comprehend; there, though we try as we will, no feeling will answer in unison. The same actions which at one time are an evidence of inhumanity may arise in another out of mercy and benevolence. Laws which, in the simpler stages of society, are rational and useful, become mischievous when the problem which they were meant to solve has been complicated by new elements. And as the old man forgets his childhood-as the grown man and the youth rarely comprehend each other—as the Englishman and the Frenchman, with the same reasoning