False Steps and Wrong Roads.

DID any child ever learn to walk without falling? It is of little good to tie it up in leading-strings, or even to fence it round in the wheeled go-cart, where one would think it could not fail, and had nothing to do but stand upright on its own two feet, and go where the laws of mechanical progression appointed. Nature is inexorable, and insists on a certain number of mistakes and false starts, before she allows any thing to be completed, even under the go-cart system. But what matters it if the creature falls again and again, so long as it does not break its neck, or put its legs out of joint? From that helpless mass of gelatinous flesh, all quivering and tottering and uncertain and dismayed, are evolved, by due training, such results as Léotard and Deerfoot; and does it signify now, if, in the days of their gelatinosity, they had fat ancles, and bones no better than gristle, and stumbled and fell like weaker creatures, who have come up bandy-legged? The stumbling was part of the training, and the falls helped to the better understanding of their own anatomy; and as they did not end bandy, or with humps between their shoulders, experience was, after all, no stepmother to them, but rather an honest tutor with a thick pad of wadding at the end of his ferule. It would be well for us if there were no harder slips in life than those of the embryo pedestrian falling on his nose over a doorstep six inches high, or the acrobat pounding his future salt out of sprained thighs and shoulders; but the false steps of adult life are worse than these, and of slightly graver results; also, unfortunately, of far more frequent occurrence. Who goes straight and clear without them? Who can say that he never turned his ancle over a stone, or slipped in the mud, or lost his balance altogether on the ice, and so came sprawling helplessly, with no footing left him any where? None of us; none! Not the wisest or coldest or surest or most guarded; not the one most carefully tethered in the go-cart of home and conventionality; not the most exasperatingly prudent, or the most irritatingly unimpulsive. We have all, some time or other, made our own especial false steps; but, I grant you, we have not all made them in public; for the more cautious among us go into corners and slip and slide there, at the back of the rest of the world, and so get a reputation for sure-footedness, and the credit of having learnt to walk without stumbling.

Ah, and there are worse false steps than these too! These are the mere slips of inattention, or awkwardnesses of inexperience; but there are some of our own wilful making, when we despise the warnings of our guides, and will go to dangerous edges, and look down curiously into the abyss below, crying out that we are safe, and cannot we take care of ourselves? And then our foothold of rotten branch or slippery rock breaks away from under us, and we go rolling down the steep whence there is no return at all; or only one with bruised limbs and aching bones, and a weary climb

in pain and sorrow and humiliation back to the heights again. Blessed the man who can climb back to them, through any amount of suffering! Sometimes the fall is too great and the abyss too deep; and then we either lie in the ravine and rot and die, and the vultures come and pick our bones, or we make ourselves a home there with the worms and the waterrats, and live in darkness and degradation for the rest of our natural term. Samson made such a false step as this when, with Delilah's white arms coiled round him, he put his head in her lap, and became the prey of the Philistines for the love of a fair-faced traitress loving only herself. And the same false step is made again, and again, and again, in life,— wherever a man gives up his manhood to a love born only of beauty and pleasure, and sacrifices to his Delilah the strength which God gave him for happiness and virtue and home. And how often! Turn which way we will, we can all point to youth destroyed or manhood undermined, to fortune, fame, and friends, all forfeited for the sake of some cunning loveliness, some siren of the modern flood,-who lives by dragging men down to ruin in her deep waters, and who casts back only the mangled remains of those on whose hearts she has fed and fattened in her caves below. Scarcely a family which does not number some among its members ruined body and soul by such an unworthy love, and which cannot point out to you the series of false steps that led them gradually from the breezy uplands to the pestilential swamps, or flung them at once headlong into destruction down the precipice. From Samson's time to ours the road of human-going has been marked thick with these fatal footsteps; and the time has not come yet when they will decrease.

And yet thicker still, and oftener,-threading the man's larger stride with their weaker tread,-fall the small footprints of women. Traced in blood sometimes, blurred with tears, and often leading through dirt and mire and all impurities, these small slipping footsteps, branching off to destruction, or sometimes only making a dangerous swerve aside, tell a pitiable tale of human love and sorrow, and the weakness of the passionate flesh. Oh, that terrible wholeness of woman's love! that abandonment of self, that sacrifice of good, that denial of GOD, which it so often includes in its crimson lines! that utter recklessness of all things, save the acceptance of its passion by the man beloved! What a tremendous account of his stewardship will he have to render up who, accepting the sacred trust of a woman's heart and life, has led his charge down those treacherous steeps beyond whose pleasant places lies the valley of desolation, and the shadow of death! But how many! ah, how many! Where one man's feet have slipped and strayed through love, count woman's by the hundred; where one noble manhood has been warped because of Delilah's kisses, reckon for the deserted Hagars and the ruined Tamars as many women as there are men who can abandon after love, and despise after conquest. For whatever a man may be, however criminal, and even however mean and base, he will always find some woman to love him,-always be the idol of some living shrine where GOD and the saints will be placed

below him. A mystery of feminine life; one of the deepest and saddest and most perilous of all the deep mysteries there.

And many a false step has been made in marriage as well as in love. It was a false step when Sophia, proud, ambitious, and worldly, let herself be stayed at the artist's cottage-door, persuaded that she could play Ruth among the corn, with a penniless painter for her Boaz. It was a false step when Eugenia, brought up in France, whose notions of country simplicity were taken from the Bois de Boulogne, and whose deepest religious exercise was to listen to a florid sermon at the Madeleine-it was a false step in her when she bound herself for life to a handsome, enthusiastic, north-country missionary, who would have accounted it a sacrifice of principle if he had laboured in any field more cultivated or accessible than the wilds of Central Africa or the Polynesian Islands. And it was a false step in the missionary himself when he allowed his zeal to blind his judgment, and chose Eugenia and her private fortunewhich would come in so well as working capital for his dusky converts— to that poor little, patient, energetic school-governess of his, who had no more substantial dowry than her faith and love, and who would have gone to the ends of the earth with him, if she might have aided in his work and have ministered to his life. For the love of him, and the spread of Calvinism, she would have braved even a scalping-knife above her head, or have contemplated her future end as a meal for hungry men with fortitude and courage. He saw it all when it was too late; when he was standing alone on the deck of the emigrant ship, poorer than when he married, while his wife drove down the Boulevards to her old home in the Champs Elysées, and the poor little governess was wringing her hands on the shore, praying wildly for his safety, and for her own forgiveness for loving him too well. Once he had stood on a pinnacle, whence he might have stepped down to either side. He made a false step, came down on the wrong side, and set his foot on the happiness of three lives for ever.

It was a false step when my young friend, the author of a work on human nature in six volumes,-to be had half-price uncut,-married a woman he did not love, and a fortnight older than his mother, because she liked the same books that he did, and held the same doctrinal views concerning original sin; and he thought a marriage of brains a higher kind of thing than one of only heart and feeling, and what a soul striving to grow greater than the body should prefer. He found out his mistake, like the missionary and so many more, when too late, and when it was of no use for truth and feeling to lift up their heads and cry aloud in the wilderness of his life. He had accepted as his portion a field of straw, neither rich with corn nor beautiful with flowers; and of what good to make now his moan that the tender grass-lands were green and luscious, and the leafy woods full of song and scent, while his withered halm had no flowers and no shade, and was fit for neither food nor beauty? He should not have held false principles, and then he would not have believed

that bog-moss was solid ground, or that youth and age could ever gowell in hand together.

Sometimes we are not blameworthy, even for the most disastrous of false steps. Not having eyes for the future, and owning no spell that can charm success, we must just walk on blindfold, trusting to chance or kindly fortune to lead us safely past the mud-heaps and stony places that we know are in our way. It was a false step, but one taken in the dark and quite on just calculations, when my friend elected for his patron that one of two rival firms bidding for his services which seemed to promise best for friendliness and filthy lucre combined. But my friend's moral arithmetic was wrongly squared, and wouldn't prove; and when it came to the test of time he found that he had set his foot on a mere shifting quicksand, and that the sooner he retrieved his steps the better. But he could not get back to the vantage ground of the alternative. The rival firm had closed its sluice, or rather turned the stream another way; and my poor friend had only the consolation of knowing that there is no art by which a man can tell a quicksand by simply looking at it, and that he must run the risk of being half swallowed up alive before being quite convinced that he may not build a city on its foundations. He had another consolation besides; perhaps the other firm was just as bad, and it was only a choice of quicksands at the best. Another friend of mine made a terribly bad step when he refused that small consulship in America, and told his lordship the Foreign Secretary that he would wait for something better. His lordship the Foreign Secretary did not approve of graduated acceptances, so turned his back upon my friend, and left him to ruminate on the problem when that something better would turn up. It has kept itself carefully hidden to the present day, and I see no chance of its being unearthed, at least during the present dispensation.

If my friend made a false step in declining, his brother made one just as disastrous in accepting. He was told that the affair was hollow at the heart and rotten at the base; he was told that it had not six months' life in it nor an ounce of gold at its back, and that he would either never be paid for his work at all, or if paid would be found troublesome and dismissed. My friend's brother was a man of square feet, and when he planted them of his own will any where, it was rather difficult to dislodge them. He had made up his mind to wear the crest of the company, and he did. But before half the prophetic weeks were accomplished, the forecastings of his various Cassandras came true; the affair, hollow at the heart and rotten at the base, and with only an empty purse dangling as its ensign from the flagstaff, came down with a crash among the weeds, and fell upon the square feet planted so confidently below, and lamed and crippled them for life. My friend's brother never got over the losses which the crest of the company sealed upon his schedule, and to this hour goes about limping and threadbare, because he would stand in dangerous places, and would believe that weeds were worts.

Many false steps occur in the taking of houses. Indeed I do not

think that a house was ever built since the days of the Tower of Babel which had not half a dozen ruts and holes and tripping-places about it, where a man could hardly fail to make false steps. The taking of servants is another matter of difficult walking, where spongy bits and stony bits alternate in almost unrelieved succession. Those who do not sink to their knees in the spongy bits break their shins over the stones; and those fortunate few who do neither may thank a tender-handed fate, or their guardian angel, or take comfort in the doctrine of chances, according to their standing in the school of faith, for it is not a question wherein sagacity, foresight, or any thing more subtle than fate or hazard has a word to say. Perhaps if one takes a ticket-of-leave burglar for one's body servant, one might then have occasion to meditate on the genesis of destruction from false steps; but in general the hiring and future results of houses and servants are chances, and matters of blindfold walking on uncertain ground. So is the buying of horses; about which, however, I know nothing practically, beyond the one occasion when I bought a thorough-bred filly, which could do every thing but talk, said my dealer, quiet to ride and drive, and sound in wind and limb, and which flung my wife, kicked the dog-cart to pieces, jibbed when she went up hill and shied when she went down, was eight years old last May, and had almost every disease which the stable can produce. I acknowledged my false step in time, and sold my ancient filly to the knacker's for just the same number of shillings as I had given pounds; but I sold her before she had been the death of any of us, which I thought was getting out of the scrape handsomely.

It was a false step when Mr. Easy, who wanted the bishop's patronage for his eldest son, went up and spoke to him with the same rollicking, hail-fellow manner that he would have used to a corn-factor on 'Change. The bishop was a stiff, pompous, aristocratic old gentleman, with strong notions repecting Church privileges and episcopal supremacy; and Mr. Easy's opening salutation settled the question at once. A High-Church prelate, who believes in himself as a diluted St. Peter, is not likely to be propitiated by the familiarity of a country gentleman in top-boots, who asks him for a piece of preferment in the same tone and manner as he would have asked his neighbour, Mr. Freeman, for the loan of a dog-fox or the grace of a day's shooting: and Mr. Easy's son had to be satisfied with his curate's salary of a hundred per annum for another half-dozen years at least; till the pompous bishop, in fact, was translated to a richer see, and his successor took, on principle, the exactly opposite course in all things connected with the diocese. Rudeness to one's superiors is just as wandering walking as over-familiarity; and I have seen a great many false steps taken by men a little touched on the subject of independence and manly bearing, who could not learn the difference between civility and servility, but maintained they were both the same, and would not be taught the fit spelling of either. There are men who never get on in life, but, after a perpetual fight and ineffectual struggle with stronger forces,