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ALICE LAUDER.
103

out of either the moorland or the sea, towards this forsaken house of prayer.

Although the day had been hot and oppressive down in the village, there was a crisp coolness and autumnal fragrance in the air that blew from azure mountain-gulfs and precipices, and Alice stopped her horse and drank it in with a sensation of relief and gratitude. The sky was covered with furrows of grey cloud, through which the long sunbeams glistened in diagonal lines, or threaded the cloud -folds like the web of a spider. She got off her horse and turned him loose in the little churchyard to enjoy the church grass, and going a few steps out into the plain, flung herself down on the bracken, and rested her head on a grey, mossy boulder, that seemed to offer the nearest approach to a pillow.

There are moments in all our lives when the world we live in, and from which we take our dye, “subdued to that we work in,” seems to slip away into obscurity, and we turn to Nature with an eager desire for her help and consolation. At such times our mother-earth reminds us that we are bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, and our inmost being acknowledges the tie. The nutty fragrance of the furze, the haunting cry of the sea-gull, the sob of the

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