It was over presently and the party came forth from the station, Lord and

"Is the Lord Lieutenant comin' to see Colonel Plunkett and the Bishop or me, I'd like to know?"

"Touched, poor chap, touched!" commented the Fusileer to a comrade, standing shoulder to shoulder.

Carriages drove up, and their inmates passed through the red line, whereat the carpenter fumed. But, fume as he might, the soldiers were relentless and kept him back in the crowd of ordinary, unofficial sightseers.

"I'll make ye suffer for this. I'll have ye sint to Injy-or to hell," roared the carpenter.

The soldiers smiled, and some in the crowd laughed, increasing the old man's fury.

"A nice thing, to keep me from seein' the gintleman that comes all the way from Dublin to see me!"

"It's hard, we know," chuckled the Fusileer, "but orders is orders, comrade.”

His voice was drowned in a roar from far down the tracks, where people were clustered on gates and fences. Then above the roar broke the shrill whistle of the train as it sped townward, around a clump of trees, a few hundred yards from the station. Above the trees a pale plume of steam fluttered and vanished airily. Once more the whistle sounded; the throb of the engine, the panting piston and rattling wheels became audible, in deafening crescendo.

An officer emerged from the station, where part of the Fusileers were drawn up on the platform. He shouted an order in short staccato, and with a clatter of steel and leather the soldiers came to the salute. The Viceroy had arrived and at that moment, within the whitewashed walls that ran the full length of the platform, was listening to the Bishop reading the address of welcome.

file of red-coats over a crimson carpet to Colonel Plunkett's carriage. As they seated themselves in the vehicle, amid thunders of applause, a little fairy of a girl in golden hair, rosebud blushes and immaculate muslin, broke from the crowd, slipped through the soldiers, and, tip-toeing beside the carriage, handed a bouquet to the Vicereine. The beautiful Countess smiled and, smiling, instantly, won her way to the hearts of the people. Then, leaning forth, she took the flowers and kissed the child.

It is such instances-trifles light as air-that make loyal subjects of a sensitive, warm-hearted, romantic race, if their British masters would but understand. The Irish people, like the lion of the fable, can be led in bonds of roses, whereas coercion lashes them into uncontrollable fury.

But another was now trying to approach the carriage-poor Tom Swift, his parchment of a face eagerly alight with anticipation, his wispy locks streaming to his shoulders, his faded green coat more faded and rusty than ever, in contrast with the vivid scarlet of the Fusileers.

"Back, there, back!" cried a soldier, smiting him in the stomach with the butt. of his rifle.

"Yer honor! yer honor! don't you know me? Won't you spake to me?" he called despairingly to the Viceroy.

Colonel Plunkett beckoned to Kelly, the strutting sub-inspector of police, and told him to have Swift under surveillance during the Viceroy's stay. Whereupon a pair of burly constables laid violent hands on the carpenter and dragged him, resisting, to the police-barracks.

"Who is he?" queried the Viceroy. "Only a poor simpleton, but perfectly harmless," assured the Colonel.

Then, under arches of evergreen and banners bearing mottos of welcome,

amid crowds of shouting countrymen, past groups of smiling women, invoking blessings on the beautiful Countess, the Viceroy and his lady, accompanied by the Bishop and Colonel Plunkett, drove to the Colonel's palatial home on the outskirts of the town. There they remained for a week, the avenue and all approaches to the house being guarded by Fusileers.

The Viceroy made diligent inquiry into the conditions of the people, the relations of landlord to tenant, their agricultural prospects, their housing, their annual emigration to England. He visited them in their little holdings in bog and on mountainside. He entered their smoky cabins, chatted with them in the fields and by the roadside, drew forth their confidence and won their hearts.

The Vicereine made herself an indissoluble empire in the homes of the countryside, going from house to house, chatting with the women, caressing the children, relieving want, lightening sorrow, banishing sickness by her smile and winning many a fervent "God bless yer beautiful face!" from hearts responsive as flowers to the dew of kindness.

But day by day the carpenter haunted the neighborhood of Edmundstown, seeking audience with the Lord Lieutenant, only to be repulsed by the hated redcoats. Approach the house by whatever way he would there was the scarlet tunic and towering bearskin of the guard; while, discreetly aloof but ever keeping him in sight, in and out of town, lurked the shadowy constables. Every morning he sought the grand gates of Plunkett's palace; all day long he kept his hopeless vigil there, and every night he returned in despair to his squalid loft in the Back Lane, not to sleep, but to toss wildly in disordered dreams of man's inhumanity to man.

Then, his mission being fulfilled, the Viceroy slipped quietly from Edmunds

town to another part of the county, and that very night the fortune he had so long sought, came to Tom Swift.

The Master was reading quietly in his study, when from the hotel next door came a messenger seeking audience for a guest of the hotel-an old friend and former pupil, but one long since mourned as dead.

"Who can he be, I wonder?" soliloquized the Master, half-aloud.

"I dunno, sir," quoth John the Boots, "he's a tall, dark man with a bushy beard an' looks like a furriner. He's too brown in the skin to be Irish."

"Tell him I will see him," said the Master, and John withdrew.

It was a burly figure, well-dressed in Irish tweeds, a face of bronze framed in a reddish-brown beard, that filled the doorway of the Master's study. The blue eyes of the man kindled at sight of the venerable scholar, advancing, book in hand, to greet him. He took the slender wax-like hand, blue-veined and fragile, held it a moment in giant grip, then raised it to his lips and kissed it.

"My old Master! My 'fidus Achates!" he murmured. Then his voice choked and tears suffused his eyes, trickling thence into the abundant beard.

"I must confess, old pupil of mine, that you take me at a disadvantage," muttered the Master, touched by the man's emotion.

"Yes, I suppose I do," said the man, after a while. "I have long since passed from the memory of men unless-unless," he faltered, "it be true that the evil that men do lives after them."

He was silent again, struggling with his emotion.

"I have done evil," he began, "but I also have done some good, thanks to the lessons and example of my old preceptor. Listen, Mr. O'Keefe! You must have read some fifteen years ago of that famous murder in Surrey, where a Lon

don broker was killed in his suburban mansion-"

"I remember it well," sighed the Master.

"And you recall the murderer ?" "Alas, too well I do."

"Well, I am the murderer!"

A shadow, as of death, passed over the Master's face; he sank back in his chair, his breath coming in gasps, his eyes fixed on those of his visitor.

"Not-not-Joseph Swift?" he mur

mured.

"Joseph Swift. The very man, but thanks be to God, no murderer. Do not be afraid, my old friend. I come to you with a clear conscience, an unsullied name and honor untarnished."

And now he was holding the old man in his arms, and the. old man was dissolved in tears.

"For this God be praised-God and His Blessed Mother! Out of evil He bringeth forth good," sobbed the Master. "But you must come at once to your father-"

"Ah! he's alive then? Of him I would make an inquiry. But first you must hear my story. 'Tis a brief one and easy in the telling. I fell, as you know, into evil ways in my youth. But of that-well, I have atoned and suffered. May man, as I hope God will, draw a veil over that blotted page in my life! For a long time I consorted with bad companions in London, sharing their ill-gotten gains, but never, oh, never! staining my hands with blood. Then came the murder in Surrey-done by two of my comrades while I lay asleep at Wandsworth. I was known as their associate; suspicion led the police to our home. They found arms there. The murderers had safely covered their tracks and escaped to France with their booty. I was arrested, tried at The Old Bailey and, because of my bad record sentenced to death at Newgate on what, I must confess, looked like

very damning evidence. Still it was but circumstantial, and I was innocent. On the eve of execution, the Home Secretary, having gone over the evidence carefully with my counsel, the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life in New South Wales. I went there fifteen years ago, but two years later, one of the murderers having been killed in a burglary in Paris and the other mortally wounded, the latter confessed to the Surrey murder, exonerating me by name. The Prefect of Police of Paris laid the case before the Home Secretary. My case was gone into anew, my innocence acknowledged, and I was liberated, a free man with a clear name. To make amends the Government gave me some money, with which I started sheepranching in Australia with an Irish partner. We prospered, thank God! I sold my interest to Mc Dermot and am now fairly fixed in worldly goods. That is all, and here I am to make amends, if possible, to the father who, I thank God, is yet alive to share in my prosperity, but whom, I fear-nay, I know-my misconduct must have wounded terribly. That is all. And now shake hands again 'tis a clean hand I offer you."

The Master's face was aglow as though with reflected light, and the joy in his eyes was good to see.

"Glory be to God for this! This is worth a million petitions and a million. treasures. This is fortune indeed, real, true and tangible." The allusion was lost on Joseph Swift. "Will you see your father? 'Twill be a pleasure for him. But no, not now. He'd never recognize you in that beard, and he'd never believe you were Joseph. Can't you remove it? There's a barber in the hotel."

"A good suggestion," agreed Joseph. "In the meantime I will bring your father to the hotel. Twill be better than calling on him. He's very suspicious of strangers. In fact, he's grown quite eccentric of late," explained the diplomatic

domine, euphemistically veiling the piteous truth. "Don't be surprised if you discover any new peculiarities or idiosyncrasies in your father. Time works. change. You remember poor Horace'Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis ?'"

Thus cautiously did the Master prepare the son for the shock of reunion with a demented father. But he had hopes that the outcome of that reunion would be beneficial for the father. 'Twas just possible-he had read of such cases in psychological treatises-that the joy of sudden recognition might counteract as a blessed antidote the poison of that awful sorrow that had clouded the poor brain all these years. And, as he went his way to the Back Lane, the words of Hamlet came to his lips as a prayer. "O Lord of mercies!" he moaned, his face uplifted to the stars,

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow? Raze out the written troubles of the brain?" "

More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. The prayers of the just avail, and God heard the Master's prayer.

Tom Swift was easily persuaded to go to the hotel with the Master. The Master he had always revered. In him he had always found a friend, guileless, undesigning, disinterested, sympathetic. Mr. O'Keefe would not come to him with any fell purpose, or try to lure him into any danger. However he might be wary of the casual visitor to his little shop-for he had grown cunningly wary of humanity at large-from this good man he had nothing to fear. So lucidly, instinctively as it were, reasoned. the disordered mind; and innocently, with the trust of a little child, he left the shop and followed to the hotel.

The barber had wrought a wondrous transformation in the son Stripped of the beard, his features were still the

features of youth, bronzed, it is true, by a life under the open Australian sky, matured, strong with the strength of manhood, more firm, more emphatic, more full of purpose, but yet the lineaments of the boy who had sat at the Master's feet in Saint Nathy's.

"I will go first," said the Master to the carpenter. "You wait here in the parlor until I see that the stranger is ready to receive us."

Entering his room in answer to the in amazement at the door. cheery "Come in!" the Master paused

"The old Joseph," he called delightedly; "my old boy, grown a man!" "Is he here?" asked the son. "He's in the parlor."

"Then, in God's name bring him up." The son's heart was beating tumultuously with anticipated joy, as his mind ranged backward over the years of boyhood-to the Back Lane, the little shop, the devoted carpenter at his bench, the loving father solicitously tender of the lad who, each morning, trotted away to school with his strapful of books.

There was a knock at the door. The son turned and faced it.

A bent old man, in a faded green coat, his face yellow as a parchment, stood there uncertainly. Suddenly a change. came over his face. The light of recognition flashed in his eyes. The darkness

fell from his mind. A sunburst of sudden glory flooded his brain, and fifteen years of oblivion dropped away.

"My God! My God!" he cried aloud in the greatness of his joy. "Joseph! my Joseph!"

In a moment father and son were locked in each other's arms.

The Master hastily withdrew to the parlor. As he stood at a window, the lights of the street without a golden blur through the mists of emotion, he recalled the words of Susannah: "Out of evil He bringeth good. 'Twas ever so; it will always be so!"

I

F art reflects life-and it certainly does if art be an interpreter of the highest thought and ideas of a people in their happiest moods and moments, then can the genius of the English people be truly studied in the English National Gallery

of London.

It has always seemed strange to me that a land so rich in poets, scholars and inventors as is England should practically have had no school of painting before the middle of the eighteenth century.

While the artistic genius of the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries glorified the canvas in well nigh every country of the Continent now beyond the Alps, now beyond the Pyrenees, now between the Elbe and Rhine, now in the Netherlands, where Teutonic strength and Celtic grace gave power and splendor to the artistic conceptions of a Rubens and a Van Dyke-England remained during those centuries the sole country in Europe in which it was impossible to naturalize the art of painting. Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough are the real founders of the English school of painting-that is, nearly all of the painting in England before the middle of the eighteenth century is exoticit has nothing of the atmosphere or color of English life and thought.

At the commencement of the sixteenth century a number of pupils of great painters in Italy went to England, but neither Henry VIII of England nor

Francis I of France could induce Raphael to leave Italy for England or France.

In 1526 Hans Holbein, one of the greatest of German painters, furnished with a letter to Sir Thomas More, at London, from Erasmus-who, like Holbein, was at this time living at Basle, in Switzerland-visited England and spent in all twenty-eight years there. Amongst the portraits which Holbein painted during the first two years of his residence in England was one of Blessed Thomas More. To his early period of residence. in England belongs the famous portrait group known as "The Ambassadors," which is in the English National Gallery.

It is not precisely known at what date Holbein was received into the permanent service of Henry VIII. It was in 1537 that he painted the large composition for the Privy Chamber of the Palace of Whitehall, in which, in figures of large size, were represented Henry VIII standing to the right and Queen Jane Seymour to the left of a sort of pedestal; and on a slightly higher level, behind, the figures of the King's parents, Henry VII an Elizabeth of York. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Holbein was kept very busy in the service of his royal master painting the portraits of prospective brides, and it is supposed that it was his flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves that helped to plunge the King into his fourth inauspicious marriage.

During his twenty-eight years' residence in England Holbein left many paintings in the royal palaces, in the castles of the aristocracy, at Windsor Castle, at Hampton Court, in the homes of the Dukes of Northumberland, Man