him die? It was not his fault; nobody could blame him. And what right had he to risk his life a second time for Harry Frankland? All that a murderer, all that a martyr could feel rushed through Colin's mind in that instant of horrible indecision. Then somebody Then somebody said, "Frankland, Frankland! where is Frankland?" That voice was the touch of fate. With a strange shout, of which he was unconscious, Colin plunged into the black invisible stream. By this time the others of the party saw with unspeakable relief lights approaching, and heard through the darkness voices of men coming to their assistance. They were close by one of the locks of the canal; and it was the keeper of it, not unused to such accidents, who came hurrying to give what help was possible. His lantern and some torches which the anxious young men managed to light threw a wild illumination over the muddy, motionless stream, in which two

of their number, lately as gay and lighthearted as any, were now struggling for their life. The same light flared horribly over the two motionless figures, which, after an interval which seemed like years to the bystanders, were at length brought out of the blackness; one of them still retaining strength and consciousness to drag the other with him up the stony margin before his senses failed. They lay silent both, with pallid faces, upon the hard path; one as like death as the other, with a kind of stony, ghostly resemblance in their white insensibility, except that there was blood on the lips of one, who must have struck, the lockman said, upon some part of the lock. They were carried into the cottage, and hurried messengers sent to the nearest doctor and to Wodensbourne. Meanwhile the two lay together, pallid and motionless, nobody knowing which was living and which dead.

To be continued.

THE cathedral of Christ Church in Dublin is probably nearly the ugliest specimen of Gothic architecture in existence. The impressions, gorgeous or sublime, which I have enjoyed under the arches of Cologne or Winchester,

"Of loveliest Milan, or the Sepulchre, So dark and solemn, where the Christ was laid," were utterly wanting in this mouldering old pile-huge, shapeless, and desolate. Part of the building claims to be coeval with the Danish sea-kings of Dublin, but of architectural beauty or merit of any kind there is entire dearth. Sordid whitewash, damp-stained and dustbegrimed, covers the walls; and blank, dank, dark, and cold spreads the forlorn and useless nave, where the shattered statue of Strongbow lies on his altartomb-a desolate conqueror, forgotten and alone.

researches of a genealogical kind guided my steps a few years ago. It was my desire to discover whether a certain Archbishop of Dublin, dead a century since, had been buried in the Cathedral, and, in such case, what record of the event could be discovered.

The well-disposed sacristan aided me to the best of his abilities to examine all the monuments through the building

-monuments whose paucity made the task a tiring one-and then announced to me he could help me no more. There was but one chance remaining. The prelate might have been deposited in the state-vault under the chancel without any tomb or tablet having been erected to his memory above-ground. His coffin might, possibly, be discovered; but then, of course, I could not (so thought the sacristan) undertake the disagreeable task of descend

various coffin-plates to find the one I desired. It did not seem so clear to me that this was impossible. The search was one I was anxious. to accomplish satisfactorily; and it needed, apparently, only a little strain upon the nerves to do so. I asked the man whether he would accompany me to the vault; and, as he consented, after a little hesitation, we were soon in the crypts of the cathedral, prepared with candles for our gloomy task.

If the upper part of the building was desolate, these crypts beneath it were a thousand times more so. The low arches rising out of the earthen floor extended in all directions in long dark vaults, down which our lights, of course, penetrated but a little way, leaving the gloom beyond unexplored. Above there had been the roar of the streets and the glare of the summer sun. Here the darkness and stillness were so absolute that the sacristan's little son, who had followed us thus far, exclaimed, in a suppressed voice of

awe :

"How silent it is here!"

"Ay, my boy," said his father, "this is the place of silence. Those we are going to visit are the silent indeed."

The child looked wistfully at the man, and stole back to the sunshine, and we passed on without him to a low door in an archway, which the sacristan opened with ponderous keysa mockery, as it seemed to me, of the peaceful prisoners within.

Of the size of that chamber of death I cannot speak. It did not seem very large, and the stone roof bent down low overhead; but it was full, quite full. All round the walls double and treble tiers of coffins were piled up to the height of several feet lengthways, crossways, upright; and in the centre space stood several large coffins, on tressels, evidently of more recent date than the rest. One of those nearest the outer door was of handsome crimson velvet, and in the darkness I had rested against it to regain a little of the composure which the first sight of the vault

"That is the coffin of poor Archbishop L-," said the sacristan.

I started, for the good old man had once been near me in life, when, as a child, I had been at sea on a stormy night, and had stolen up on deck above. He had made me sit beside him and share his warm cloak, and I had afterwards learned to connect his name with that kindly shelter given to an unknown child. Now he was beside me again— poor old man-but had no warmth to offer more.

The single candle borne by my guide glimmered feebly in the thick air of the vault, and it was some time before we could estimate where there was any probability of finding a coffin of the age of the one we sought. There were some, as I have said, quite recent, and others evidently of great age. The oaken lids had been broken or were removed, and within lay something, vaguely defined, one did not dare to look at too closely. Others, again, might have belonged to the last century; and among these the sacristan commenced his search. I confess I did not watch his search with any great interest. The object which had brought me there, and many other things besides, seemed too small to be regarded in that place, where the one only great event of human existence was commemorated. The sight of the Idead was at all times to me the source of an awe which amounted to physical pain, like a stone-cold hand laid on the heart; and in going down into the vault I had not been sorry to accept the occasion for overcoming such feelings. even they were forgotten when actually there. There was no disgust-no terror -only the one clear idea brought out into the foreground of thought till it filled the whole horizon-" DEATH!"

But

The man laboured on while I stood pondering. Coffin after coffin he had looked over-examining the names upon the plates. They had all belonged to men of rank, usually such as held some temporary high office and had died in the city away from their ancestral mausoleums. One was surmounted by a ducal coronet, another by that of an

"His Grace the Lord Primate !" "The Right Honourable the Lord Chief Justice !" and so on, and so on. On some of the plates were coats-of-arms well known to me; on others names which had been familiar from childhood, whose portraits had hung round the walls of my home. Those pompous titles, deciphered now with a farthing candle in their dim vaults-those dustengrained armorial bearings-those miserable tarnished coronets and mitres-no language can tell how pitiful they seemed. If

At length the sacristan paused. the coffin we sought was anywhere, it was buried under a pile of others, which could not have been moved without dreadful disclosures. We had been nearly an hour in the vault, and I begged him to desist from further search and come away. Before doing so, however, he looked round for a few moments, and approached a coffin whose lid was broken off, and within which some poor remnants of mortality lay visible under the yellow winding-sheet and the dust the dust accumulated over it. Out of this the man lifted carefully a singular object. It was a large Heart of solid silver, and within it, when shaken, might be heard a faint sound, proving, doubtless, that it enclosed another which once had beaten in a human breast.

"This was brought over from France," said the sacristan, "long years ago, by a French nobleman. They say it was at the time of the French Revolution. He kept it with him till he died, and then he ordered it to be buried with him in his coffin. No one knows anything more of it, or remembers the name of the nobleman; but each sacristan receives it when he undertakes his office here, and transmits it safely to his successor. See! it is a beautiful mass of rough silver, not tarnished in the least!"

No; it was not tarnished! Those

were all soiled and rusted; but the SILVER HEART, the fitting casket and type of human love, was unhurt by the mouldering decay of the sepulchre. I should vainly strive to describe the happy revulsion of feeling which the sight of that heart caused in me. I had been reading the lesson of the paltriness and misery of mortal pride. and ambition in those pompous titles graven on the rotting coffin-lids in the vault, till it seemed as if the whole summary of our history was "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust".

"A life of nothings-nothing worth,
From that first nothing ere our birth,
To that last nothing under earth.”

But here was a lesson of another kind-LOVE. The love of which that heart was the memorial was not of the things which rust and perish in the grave. Honour and power all ended in that vault of death; their owners brought them just so far, and then left them on their coffin-lids. But Love had not ended when the faithful friend who had cherished its memorial through exile and bereavement was laid low in that sepulchral chamber, with his longhoarded treasure by his side. There was a Beyond for Love, though not for Pride. Life here below was not all transitory and vain, with hopes and passions ending in the disgrace and ruin of the grave-a chain of "yesterdays"

...

66 Which have but lighted kings
The way to dusty death..."

There was somewhat therein which might survive and endure for ever; somewhat beside the divine aspirations of religion; somewhat purely human and yet susceptible of immortality; somewhat which would not be laid by like the coronets and crests and mitres in the grave.

I took the Silver Heart reverently from the sacristan, and as I held it in my hands I thought: "Perchance that love which once made the little handful of dust herein to kindle and throb is at this very hour a living love in heaven, filling with the joy of the immortals two glorified souls in the

MANY centuries ago, Königsberg began to grow up around a fort, which was one of the outposts of Christianity against a form of Paganism that had long dragged on its existence amid the dense woods that line the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. When the struggle was ended, the town expanded into a trading-port, and in the sixteenth century a careful ruler placed in it a university for the civilizing of the rude population scattered over the surrounding country. The new university seems to have done its work soberly enough, but probably quite as well as could have been expected, time and place considered, and it served at least, by its very presence, to remind busy townsfolk of something higher than buying and selling. But in the eighteenth century, it left off witnessing mutely of better things, and suddenly became a real power in the town and district. Not that the trade had begun to fall off, for down at the river the bustle was greater than before, but it was noticed that the citizens spoke often now about the university and the professors. Besides, strangers (other than sea-captains) came in numbers every year from remote parts of Germany and from different countries, some bent on study, others curious to see on what an unlikely spot the muses were cultivated with such success and fame. Now, it so happened that among the professors, the townspeople had most to say of their own Kant, and it was the same Kant that strangers were most anxious to see.

Kant was a true son of Königsberg. He said often that his grandfather had come from Scotland, and for a long time wrote his name Cant in orthodox Scotch fashion, but he himself saw the light first in the capital of Ost-Preussen.

warehouses and beside the ships, and then was sent by his thrifty parents to the university. They wished that their son should enter the Church, and he did indeed apply himself to theology; but at last he yielded to his own very decided preference for science and philosophy. When the student-days were ended, he had to leave his loved Königsberg, to become a house-tutor in the country; but he never went beyond his native province, and often resided during the winter in the old familiar place, when the noble families of the province came up to town. This mode of life lasted a few years, he studying busily all the while; until, at the age thirty, he came back finally to the old spot, and began his professorial career. During the remaining fifty years of his life, he may be said never to have lost sight of the church-steeples of Königsberg.

of

He devoted himself steadily to his academical duties, observed very narrowly everything that came within his horizon, thought harder than any man alive, and wrote, for the most part, dry books. That was his life-the life, one would suppose, of a man with narrow sympathies, and indifferent to anything but a distorted ideal world of his own. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Kant was too poor to travel, and knew other countries only from books, and newspapers, and hearsay; but he knew them very thoroughly. Philosopher as he was, he would converse more readily with an English skipper, who could tell him of distant lands, than with the heaviest of the heavy metaphysicians who sought his presence. Books of travels were always welcome to him, and much more welcome than other men's speculations when he had once become conscious of having outstripped