ostentation and scarcely dramatic excuse about
"seeing to the haddock," limped away. Did
the young girl, intelligent also, see this sign?
But she made no protest.

"I have come," said Mr. Tillotson, going over
to her hastily, " to say that I cannot stay this
evening——" Her face fell. " But I have
something to say to you, if you will allow me,
and will hear me now."

She hung down her head, but could say
nothing.

"I have been thinking," he went on, " over
and over again, of your conduct on that night.
It is only now I am beginning to see its full
force. I must have been ungrateful, and——"

"No, no, no!" she said, softly; " indeed, no.
You have thanked me more than enough
already."

"Thanks are not what I am going to offer,"
he said. "I am going to ask you to let me lay
myself under a still heavier obligation; strange
thanks, you will say. But my life has hitherto
been a raw blank day of coldness and misery. I
have been living in a sort of delusion. I have
thought that all men were cold, and heartless,
and hateful; that women were, at the least,
indifferent—and, forgive me—selfish; and that
the world was all barrenness. Now I have found
that there is some warmth. I have seen kindness
and unselfishness, and believe that there
is yet more to be discovered, if I look for it.
Will you help me? I have little to offer. Not
a warm heart, I fear; but certainly a grateful
one. Not what is called love, but what may
become love. I want to live. Will you help me?"

This was his proposition. She was very
natural and romantic, as has been described;
confusion, surprise, delight, went rushing to her
cheeks. She could not speak for some moments,
then said, perhaps in an unmaidenly way, " Oh,
how good, how noble. I could sink down at
your feet."

"I will do what I can," he went on; " and
you will make a generous allowance. I am
accustomed to the old hard and cold ways."

"Oh, it is not that," she said, starting back;
"but this is all kindness and gratitude—what
they call gratitude—ah! I am sure it is."

"No, no," he said; " I want to live again—
to be human. And will you not help me?"

"With my whole life and soul," she said, fervently,
and giving him her hand. Suddenly
she added, " But you will go back. You will
think of this again, and go back. To-morrow
—in a week, or two weeks."

"Never," he said; " you don't know me yet,
I see. Not if the world were to change."

"Would you give me," she said, timorously
and hanging down her head, " your word—I
don't say your honour. But, oh! it would be
such a support."

"You shall have both," he said; " my word
and my honour. I solemnly swear to carry out
what I have proposed to you now."

He went away soon after, and met the captain
on the stairs. The captain looked at him
wistfully, and without speaking — too delicate
to put a question when there was such uncertainly.
But Mr. Tillotson took his hand and
half whispered, " It is done! I must try and
be happy, for I have a great chance of happiness."

MISERY-MONGERS.

"POOR fellow," said A. to B., looking after
C. with mingled regard and regret. " He will
never be happy himself, nor make any other
human being happy."

It was most true. Poor C. was a very worthy
man: an honest, kindly, and well-intentioned
man; well-to-do in business; in his domestic
relations rather fortunate than otherwise;
blessed with good health, good looks, and rather
more than the average of brains. Altogether an
enviable person—externally. Yet his friend,
apparently much less lucky than himself, regarded
him with the profoundest pity. "No, C. will
never be happy. Nothing in this world would
ever make him happy." And nothing ever did.

C. is no uncommon character. He was a
misery-monger: one of those moral cuttle-fishes
who carry about with them, and produce out of
their own organism, the black liquid in which
they swim. If they could only swim in it alone!
Is it any good to show them their own likeness—
these poor creatures, who, without any real woe,
contrive to make themselves and everybody about
them thoroughly miserable. Can we shake them
out of their folly by a word of common sense?
Probably not; your confirmed misery-monger is
the most hopeless being in creation: but there
are incipient stages of the complaint, which,
taken in time, are curable. To such, it may not
be unadvisable to present these incurables as a
wholesome " shocking example."

Misery-mongers (the word is not to be
found in Johnson, yet it suits) are those who
do not really suffer affliction, but make a trade
of it — and often a very thriving business too.
They are scattered among every class, but
especially they belong to the " genus irritabile" — the
second or third-rate order of people who live by
their brains. Not the first order — for the highest
form of intellect is rarely miserable. True
genius of the completest kind is not only a
mental but a moral quality. Itself creates the
atmosphere it lives in: a higher and rarer air
than that of common earth.

      Calm pleasures there abide; — majestic pains.

To a really great man, the petty vanities, shallow
angers, and morbid crotchets of smaller natures
are unknown. Above all, genius gives to its
possessor a larger, clearer vision; eyes that look
outwards, not inwards. That enormous Ego — the
source of so many puny woes to lesser minds—
rarely grows rampant in a man who is great
enough to know his own littleness. Consequently,
he is saved at once from a hundred vexations
which dog the heels of a mental Chang — a
seven-foot giant of genius—who is always
measuring himself with Tom, Dick, and Harry, and
requiring, or fancying he requires, larger