labour—nothing to love or to protect. Let me have your little girl; I shall be a better father to her than your husband can be.’
“At first I thought that I could never, never consent to such a thing; but little by little he won me over, in a grave, persuasive way, that convinced me in spite of myself, and I couldn’t afford to engage a nurse to go out to Calcutta with me, and I’d advertised for an ayah who wanted to return, and who would go with me for the consideration of her passage-money, but there had been no answers to my advertisements; so at last I consented to write to Fred to ask him if he would agree to our parting with the pet. Fred wrote me the shortest of letters by return of post; ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the child would be an awful nuisance on shipboard, and it will be much better for her to stop in England.’ I sent his letter to the lawyer, and the next day he brought a nurse, a respectable elderly person, and fetched away my precious darling.
“You see, Miss Villars, neither Fred nor I had realised the idea that we were parting with her for ever; we only thought of the convenience of getting her a happy home in England for nothing, while we went to be broiled to death’s door out in India. But, ah, when years and years passed by, and the two babies who were born in India died, I began to grieve dreadfully about my lost pet; and if I hadn’t been what some people call frivolous, and if Fred and I hadn’t suited each other so exactly, and been somehow or other always happy together in all our troubles, I think I should have broken my heart. But I try to be resigned,” concluded Mrs. Lennard, with a profound sigh, “and I hear of my pet once in six months or so, though I never hear from her, and indeed I doubt if she knows she’s got such a thing as a Mama in the universe—and I have her portrait, poor darling, and she’s very like what I was twenty years ago.”
“I know she is,” Eleanor answered gravely.
“You know she is! You know her, then?”
“Yes, dear Mrs. Lennard. Very strange things happen in this world, and not the least strange is the circumstance which has brought you and me together. I know your daughter intimately. Her name is Laura, is it not?”
“Yes, Laura Mason Lennard, after Fred’s rich aunt, Laura Mason.”
“And your maiden name was Margaret Ravenshaw.”
“Good gracious me, yes!” cried Mrs. Lennard. “Why you seem to know everything about me.”
“I know this much,—the man you jilted was Gilbert Monckton, of Tolldale Priory.”
“Of course! Tolldale was poor Papa’s place till he sold it to Mr. Monckton. Oh, Miss Villars, if you know him, how you must despise me.”
“I only wonder that you could—”
Eleanor stopped abruptly: the termination of her speech would not have been very complimentary to the good-tempered Major. Mrs. Lennard understood that sudden pause.
“I know what you were going to say, Miss Villars. You were going to say you wondered how I could prefer Fred to Gilbert Monckton; and I’m not a bit offended. I know as well as you do that Mr. Monckton is very, very, very superior to Frederick in intellect, and dignity, and elegance, and all manner of things. But then, you see,” added Mrs. Lennard, with a pleading smile, “Fred suited me.”
VOLUNTEERS OF THE PAST.
At a time when “Volunteering” has become a national characteristic, and grand rifle tournaments at Aldershot, and prize-giving at the Crystal Palace, are affording matter for every newspaper, and interest for every household, it may not be uninteresting to look back upon the Volunteers of former days, and see what they were like.
It is a singular fact that the nation, designated by the first Napoleon as a “nation of shopkeepers,” should have been, less than three centuries before, renowned as a military people. Froude tells us in the preface to his edition of the “Pilgrim,” that, in Henry the Eighth’s reign, the English “were a nation of soldiers—fierce, intractable, and turbulent to a proverb;” an armed people also; twenty thousand well-drilled men being at the disposal of the corporation of London! Henry could call every one of his male subjects into the field, if he would, and find them efficient men-at-arms.
In his reign one of those panics (if they are rightly thus designated) about invasion took place. The notes at the end of the “Pilgrim” contain an interesting and curious account of it given by the French envoy Marillac himself. He says in a letter to the Constable, “the king, my lord, is in marvellous distrust as well of the king our master” (Francis I.) “as of the Emperor. He is confident that they intend to declare war against him; and he is therefore taking measures with the utmost haste for the defence of the realm . . . . . . In Canterbury and other towns upon the road, I found every English subject in arms who was capable of serving. Boys of seventeen and eighteen have been called out without exemption of place or person . . . . . In short, my lord, they have made such progress that an invading force will not find them unprovided.”
There is much significance in the whole letter from which these passages are taken; not once in it does M. Marillac hint that the king’s apprehensions were groundless!
A review of this armed people took place in the following month. The Ambassador informs the Constable in a following letter: “Fifteen thousand men, all clad in white from head to foot—ten thousand fully accoutred—showed that the English lion was awake and prepared for defence.”
The demonstration defeated all adverse plans (if such had been formed) of the “Foreigner,” and the armed multitude subsided again.
A similar force has always been ready for defence whenever the “cloud, as big as a man’s hand,” has loomed across the sea.
A recollection of the last misgiving and dread which called forth England’s Volunteers has been