head aches, my eyes ache. my back aches, so does my breast, and I am sure my heart aches and what can Duty ask more?" Duty, however, in Scott's judgment did ask more, and was ever urging him to unparalleled exertions. In two years he earned for his creditors by the labors of his pen very nearly £40,000. "Woodstock" produced £8,000, and the "Life of Napoleon" in nine volumes, the most laborious work he ever undertook, brought in £18,000. It was," says Lockhart, "the work of one twelvemonth, done in the midst of pain, sorrow, and ruin." This was the man who could write, "When did I ever like labor of any kind ?"

66

And now in addition to other labors Sir Walter began to write his "Tales of a Grandfather," one of the most charming books that came even from his magical pen. These historical tales, the delight of children and also of their elders, were received with more enthusiasm than any one of his books since "Ivanhoe. He himself thought the work well done, and wrote in his Journal that he "would as soon compose histories for boys and girls which may be useful, as fictions for children of a larger growth." It was seldom that he thought well of his own writings. On this score it is stated that he was not only inaccessible to compliments but even insensible to the truth. He disliked to hear his books praised or talked about, but learning upon one occasion that Dr. Chalmers had expressed his admiration of his works, he said, "To have produced any effect upon the mind of such a man as Dr. Chalmers is indeed something to be proud of. Dr. Chalmers is a man of the truest genius. I will thank you to repeat all you can recollect on the subject.

TheTales of a Grandfather" Scott appears to have retained in his own hands. "If I work," he writes, "to the amount of £10,000 a year for the creditors, I think I may gain a few hundreds for my own family at by-hours." In the spring of 1828 he took his daughter Anne to London, for he was longing to see his boys and Lockhart and Sophia and the darling grandson to whom he had dedicated the "Tales." The poor child had given many a pang to Scott, for his life seemed to hang upon a thread, and there are few things more pathetic in the Journal than the references to this engaging boy who

died a few months before his grandfather.

Something may be said about this London journey, which was not, sixty years since, the cheap and easy matter it is nowadays. The travellers slept the first night at Carlisle, " a sad place," Scott writes, in my domestic remembrances, since here I married my poor Charlotte. She is gone and I am following faster perhaps than I wot of. It is something to have lived and loved; and our poor children are so hopeful and affectionate that it chastens the sadness attending the thoughts of our separation." After visiting among other places Warwick, Leamington, and Stratford-on-Avon, Scott and his daughter reached London in six days, and "had a joyful meeting, I promise you.' "I looked into my cash," he writes, "and found £53 had diminished on the journey down to about £3. In former days a journey to London cost about £30 or thirty guineas. It may now cost onefourth more. But I own I like to pay postilions and waiters rather more liberally than perhaps is right. I hate grumbling and sour faces.

Had Mrs. Lockhart read the Journal, she would probably have objected to her father's comments on her youngest infant.

My name-son, a bright and blue-eyed rogue, with flaxen hair, screams and laughs like an April morning and the baby is that species of dough which is called a fine baby. I care not for children till they care a little for me."

During Scott's visit Mrs. Lockhart had to take her " poor little Johnnie" to Brighton, and Anne Scott accompanied her sister. This saddened the London sojourn, and ultimately he was left alone with his younger son Charles, then a clerk in the Foreign Office. "And this is the promised meeting of my household !" is Sir Walter's melancholy comment. However, he remained in London for some time, going everywhere, and seeing all the great personages of the day, from poets to princes.

Now he breakfasts with Rogers, now dines with the Duke of Wellington, and now "with Mr. Peel-a great Cabinet affair, and too dignified to be very amusing.'

Then be is entertained at that home of literary lions, Holland House, or sits to Haydon for his portrait, or breakfasts at Somerset House on tea and coffee and

bread-and-butter, "which is poor work ;" and Scott thinks that a slice of ham, some broiled fish, or a mutton chop "would have been becoming so learned a body" as the Royal Society. Every day brought its invitation, and Scott records how, on one of these busy days, he dined, by command, with the Duchess of Kent.

I was presented to the little Princess Victoria-I hope they will change her name-the heir-apparent to the crown as things now stand. The little lady is educated with much care, and watched so closely by the Duchess and the principal governess that no busy maid has a moment to whisper, "You are heir of England." I suspect if we could dissect the little head, we should find that some pigeon or other bird of the air had carried the matter. Then Sir Walter went to Brighton in a coach which performed the distance in six hours, and was happy to find himself "at Sophia's quiet table, and am only sorry that I must quit her so soon.

Father and daughter returned to London together, and the gay metropolis-it was then the height of the season-gave him once more the welcome he deserved. It contained at that time a nest of singing birds," including, in addition to the Wizard of the North, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey, Rogers, and Moore. On leaving London Scott sums up under nine headings the advantages of the trip. It is characteristic of the writer that of these, six are services rendered to other people. Even in his worst straits we find him thinking and laboring for others. "There would be little gain," he says, ' in doing a kind act if you did not suffer pain or inconvenience upon the score.'

66

The reader will already have observed that one of Scott's first thoughts at the news of his cominercial failure was for his poor people," and it is pleasant to know that in this fall of his fortunes his servants declined to leave so good a master. Lockhart relates that the butler, instead of being the easy chief of a large establishment, was willing to do half the work of the house at probably half his former wages, and that old Peter, his coachman of five and twenty years' standing, became ploughman in ordinary," and so on with all that remained of the ancient train, and all seemed happier." One old laborer on the estate when he heard of Scott's misfortunes" went to bed and said he would not rise again, and kept his word."

Writing in Edinburgh Sir Walter says,

"I shall be glad to be at Abbotsford to get rid of this town, where I have not in the proper and social sense of the word a single friend whose company pleases me. In the country I have always Tom Purdie." Tom's first introduction to the Sheriff was as a prisoner charged with poaching. Scott detected the good qualities of the man and made him his shepherd. Then he was promoted and became his master's forester and constant companion in the woods of Abbotsford. Always at hand when Scott wanted an arm to lean on, he would also find his way into the splendid library in his ploughman's garb and see that the books were in good order. He used to talk of his master's works as 66 our books," and said the reading of them was the greatest comfort to him, " for whenever he was off his sleep, which sometimes happened, he had only to take one of the novels, and before he read two pages it was sure to set him asleep." Tom died suddenly in the days when the comfort of his help was most needed, and Scott wrote, "There is a heart cold that loved me well, and I am sure thought of my interest more than of his own. I have seldom been so much shocked."

"I am

The tremendous strain upon brain and heart were fast telling upon Sir Walter, and the Journal makes many a sad disclosure of physical and mental suffering. He complains of violent rheumatic headaches, and that the joints of his knees are so stiff and painful in rising and sitting down that he can hardly help screaming. very ill to-day," he writes, "with a rheumatic headache and a still more vile hypochondriacal affection which fills my head with pain, my heart with sadness, and my eyes with tears. It is a most hang-dog cast of feeling, but it may be chased away by study or by exercise. The last I have always found most successful, but the first is most convenient. I wrought, therefore, and endured all this forenoon.' The lameness which he suffered and laughed at in youth gave him intense pain at times, buc there were graver evils to be borne, and in February 1830 he had a fit which for a short time deprived him of the power of speech. Later on in the same year he records that he sank stupefied on the floor. One bad symptom after another is noted in the Journal, and still Sir Walter toiled on with an iron will that no

never,

physical suffering could subdue. "I will " he had written, "relax my labor in these affairs either for fear of pain or love of life. I will die a free man, jf hard working will do it."

His latest tale, "Count Robert of Paris," showed the failure of his wonder ful imagination, and Scott was keenly conscious of the loss.

I have suffered terribly, that is the truth,

rather in body than in mind, and I often wish I could lie down and sleep without waking. But I will fight it out if I can. It would argue too great an attachment of consequence to my literary labors to sink under. Did I know how to begin, I would begin this very day, although I knew I should sink at the end. After all, this is but fear and faintness of heart, though

of another kind from that which trembles at a loaded pistol. My bodily strength is terribly gone; perhaps my mental too.

In the family circle, we are told, Scott seldom spoke of his illness, and always hopefully, but in the Journal he writes of himself as "perhaps setting like a day that has been admired as a fine one: the light of it sets down amid mists and

storms.

At length it was resolved to try the effect of a southern climate, and the Government placed a vessel at his disposal. Before leaving Abbotsford Sir Walter was visited by his great brother poet, Wordsworth, and the memory of that parting is beautifully recalled in "Yarrow Revisited." The fine sonnet written at the same time, On the departure of Sir Walter Scott for Naples," is probably familiar to our readers, but the final lines may be quoted: "Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners! for the might

Of the whole world's good wishes with him

goes;

Blessings and prayers, in nobler retinue Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,

death at Weimar of the poet Goethe, whom he had hoped to visit on the return journey, made him eager to go home.

He had left London on September 23, 1831, and after another apoplectic fit, reached Abbotsford in a hopeless condition in July 1832. He had been in a state of complete unconsciousness, but as he approached his home he began to look about him, and when his eye caught the towers of Abbotsford it was with difficulty he could be kept in the carriage. The next morning he awoke with perfect consciousness, and was wheeled about the garden and through his rooms in a chair. have seen much," he said, "but nothing like my ain house-give me one turn

more.

"I

On the following day he begged Lockhart to read to him; when asked from which book, he said, 66 Need you ask? there is but one." He listened to the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospe! ; and when it was finished he said, "Well, this is a great comfort; I have followed you distinctly, and I feel as if I were yet to be myself again." On the morning of the day he died Sir Walter is said to have asked the nurse to read a Psalm. "She proceeded to do so, when he gently interposed, saying, 'No, no, the Scotch Psalms.' After reading to him a little while he expressed a wish to be moved nearer the window, through which he looked long and earnestly up and down the valley and toward the sky, and then on the woman's face, saying, 'I'll know it all before night.'"

"About half-past one P м., on September 21," writes his biographer and sonin-law, "Sir Walter breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day-so warm that every window was wide open-and so perfectly still, that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes."-Leisure Hour.

EVERY country has some customs and traits of character which belong essentially to itself, and nowhere, I think, does this exist more than in Turkey. Of course as the Mussulman turns for every law, social as well as religious, to the Koran, which to him is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, he cannot but differ essentially from other nations; and the silence kept by Christians about us has always seemed surprising to me, for nowhere could be found better tools for any author in search of novelty.

The different traits, habits, and customs existing in a harem; the strange superstition, the childlike faith, the barbarous credulity of the black; the deep religious sentiment, the intriguing habit, and the sad spectacle of a noble character perverted by want of education, which the Circassian usually exhibits; the haughty superiority, innate selfishness, and proud scepticism of the Turkish girl, would, it seems to me, become the pen of the greatest author living. But, however that may be, none have written about us, and we are as little known with thousands of Europeans visit ing us daily as we were when no Christian could pass the sacred threshold of a harem. We are now little by little changing, and the reforms operating in the harem are slowly but surely mining our social position. The Turkish girl of the period has been for a long time looking with deep disaffection on customs which leave her powerless and make her, so to speak, an alien in her father's house. Till very lately. however, she was in a too great minority to act; in nearly every great harem there are at the most three Turkish girls to perhaps a hundred Circassians, among whom are frequently included the ladies of the house, and in fact the moth ers of those Turkish girls, their father's mother and their grandfather's mother, were all Circassians also. Such being the case, the Turkish girl ought to count herself as more than half Circassian, but against this she has a very comfortable theory (taken from no less a person than the prophet himself), which, in a country where woman is counted as a slave, explains that children belong essentially to

their father and can only count their descent from him; so, armed with this, she will look on the Circassians with a hardly disguised contempt, rather amusing to witness, as in reality the Circassians are the mistresses of the harem, where they reign supreme. In sober truth we count for very little in our homes, where we are, however, treated with more respect than any other of its inmates; but though our father's wives themselves will rise when we enter a room, will give us the pre-eminence everywhere and will never name us without adding the title hanem (lady), we know well that we have less influence in our father's house than the lowest slave.

A European lady would be surprised if this was stated to her, as no Christian has understood the real social position of a Circassian in a harem. To a European lady a slave is a servant, a creature who works, and who from the fact of being bought is to be pitied, but who ranks even lower in her estimation than her cook or her chambermaid. I would not for worlds state this to a Circassian slave, because by the fact of being a Mohammedan a slave holds herself superior to any Christian lady in existence, and will look down on her with as much contempt as the other would show toward her servant. A slave will work, but she will never consider. herself abased by it; to her the period during which she works being considered as a sort of probation which must inevitably end one day in her marriage. An English lady once asked me if she should shake hands with a slave. I told her it would be a mere act of courtesy which depended on her own wishes, but I did not tell her that if she had not done it the slave would have been seriously offended. A slave coming into a room, in an old-fashioned harem, will mix in the conversation held there without any surprise being testified, nor will any be felt. This girl may become a lady any day, and in treating her as one beforehand we take off very much of the awkwardness which would else ensue. To this rapid change of position to which all Circassians are liable, and which fill our harems with Circassian ladies as well as slaves, may be