The next day's wedding was rather a dull affair. Somehow, the romance of the thing was gone. Ghost indeed! The impudence of parvenus in assuming a ghost when there are already many really old families with no ghost at all, or at best the mere memory and shadow of a ghost. And the honeymoon would have been altogether a time of rebuke, but that Jack put his foot down and would hear no more nonsense about the ghost.

In the Apple Orchard.

IN the green orchard sitting,
Of care and strife unwitting,

Where, through the branches flitting,
The broken sunbeams fall,
Where, russet-red and yellow,
The fruit shows ripe and mellow ;--
Oh, time that had no fellow!
Oh, sweet time to recall !

No thought was then of sorrow,
No dread of the to-morrow,
No seeking but to borrow

Full bliss of the to-day;

As pure as the first mother,
With no more doubts to smother,
We sang to one another,

In joyful childish play.
Alas, that such pure gladness
Should ever yield to sadness,
To passion's short-lived madness
Or parting's stress and storm!
That both for lads and lasses
Life's bloom as swiftly passes
As shadows o'er the grasses
When autumn days were warm!

Yet youth is but the showing
Of promise, like the blowing,"
With earnest of fruit's growing,
Of blossoms red and white;
Sun-tried, by breezes shaken,
The germ must wax and waken,
Before by man is taken

Therefrom a full delight.

Cheer up! though heart-strings tighten
At memories that brighten

The bygone days, and lighten

With hope thy mist of fears!
Nor careless nor forgetful,
Yet peaceful though regretful;
What boots repining fretful

At flight of childish years?

B. MONTGOMERIE RANKING,

30

Bickers the Blower.

A CONFESSION.

My name is Bickers-Humphrey Bickers, of Whangdale Scar. I am the organ-blower at St. Simon's of Whangdale; I have been blower, man and boy, for sixty-three years come next Christmas day. I am still blowing. I shall blow on till ' pegged out.'

I have seen a good many peggings-out in my time—we always call it pegging out' at Whangdale Scar-and I suppose my time will come as well as other chaps', though I am hale and hearty for all my eight-and-seventy years. A good age, but not old age, mind you. My father lived till eighty-four and then pegged out suddenlike. Some people say he pegged out of his own accord, being tired of life and preferring to drop himself down the old shaft at Blackgap pit, rather than live on with only half a kidney-but it was a pure accident combined with rum. My father was very fond of rum, and it brought him to an untimely end, which has been a warning to me to keep to gin as a clearer spirit and less heady.' I have never touched anything but gin since-and not too much of that, except now and then upon Saturday nights, or when Mrs. Bickers has been going it. And Mrs. Bickers being of an irritable disposition, owing to having lost the use of her limbs for the last ten years or so, and being also of a jealous turn of mind that thinks I give the preference to female society at the vicarage to hersMrs. Jodson's society I may say, and this is absolutely laughable -is very often going it.

'I know it's all settled between you and Mrs. Jodson,' she says bitterly, but plaintively, and I shan't keep you very long now, Humphrey. But don't hurry me.'

All this is folly, everybody knows excepting Mrs. Bickers. If Providence removed Mrs. Bickers this very afternoon, I don't suppose I should think of marrying again. Mrs. Jodson is sixtyfour and past the bloom of youth. She is cook at the vicarage. She was cook, too, in the time of the Reverend Sextus Tyke-vicar of St. Simon's, Whangdale Scar-and she has saved two hundred pounds. But this is an episode, as people call it-and has not much to do with the story which I have to tell. And a story which I feel I can't help telling either-which I shouldn't peg out easy if I died with the whole lumping weight of it upon my chest. A story which you may believe or not, just as you like it's no manner of

my business and very little matter to me if you don't. You can do exactly as you please about it. Here it is.

The Reverend Sextus Tyke was vicar of my church a good many years. I mind him, a youngish man when he first came, a little wisp of a man, wiry and washed out, an old-fashioned kind of fellow, as perky as a peacock, as absent-minded as an owl, and with about as much blood in him as in a full-sized frog. I can't say I took to him at first—I am not quite certain that I ever took to him, and I know he never took to me. I think he was always a bit conceited, too, and I can't bear conceited people. He has shaken hands with me three times in my life-once on the day of the funeral of my son Tom, once when I was getting over the fever,and very cold and fishy shakes they were, which I am not likely to forget. The third time will bring me pretty close to the end of what I've got to say, and will be found in its right place. I like things in their proper order. I have always been regular and proper, which accounts for the great respect they have for me in Whangdale Scar, and in Taxby, the market town beyond it.

There had been a heap of parsons before Mr. Sextus Tyke; they had come in and out of St. Simon's as if it was a show, nobody caring for it very much, and getting shut of it as soon as possible. Certainly it was not a lively church-though as old and big and grand a place as any in the county. We have never lighted up with gas yet, gas not having got to Whangdale Scar, and not being likely to get there, I'm thinking, with a population of three hundred and seventy-three, not reckoning myself. We burn candles, and a sight of candles too--the church being large enough to hold eighteen hundred people easy, and it being supposed—at least, the guidebook says so, and says anything, for that matter-that there was a large population in Whangdale Scar once upon a time, and a monastery, and all that. I can't say as I believe a word of it.

When Mr. Tyke was close on fifty years of age, and was getting more absent-minded, but more generally-interfering than ordinary, he took it into his head to marry Mary Purkis-the daughter of Purkis the solicitor at Taxby. She was thirty years younger than he if she was a day. Everybody said at Whangdale Scar that it would not turn out a happy match-that it couldn't turn out a happy match, Mary Purkis being a dashing kind of girl, the youngest of seven female Purkises, all dashers, fond of flower-shows and county balls, and tearing about the country on horseback, and going up and down the hills with long sticks in their hands and billycock hats on their heads, a regular free-and-easy family that followed the hounds in the hunting season, and talked like men.

People do marry contrariwise at times, and just the very people

you wouldn't expect they would marry. I married contrariwise myself. I often wonder now what I saw in Mrs. Bickers. She was not intellectual, she was not amiable, she had not a habit of ingratiating herself with her own species or with mine, and she had a temper of her own. In every respect she was as opposite to me

as you can possibly imagine.

Well, Mr. Tyke married Mary Purkis and brought her to the vicarage to live, and they laughed in Taxby at the match and said it would not do at any price, and they pitied poor old Tyke from the bottoms of their hearts. I don't think there was any occasion to pity him—and he had a deal of money with her, though it was strictly settled on herself-and it was wonderful how she took to the humdrum little vicarage amongst the hills, and the big old church with never less than fifty broken windows in it, glaze your life out as you might, and the population of the place not up to the three hundred and seventy-three when she first came amongst us. She was very pretty when she came, and very full of fun, always laughing and showing every tooth in her head, and rare white teeth she had. I must say I liked Mrs. Tyke. I haven't liked many people in my time, but I got to like her a good deal. Not all at once, but by degrees as it might be and as she got to understand me, and to see I was not exactly like the rest of the Whangdale Scar lot, but was a bit above my station.

'I wonder, Bickers, you did not go to London when you were a young man,' she said once to me; 'you might have got on well in the world with your general knowledge.'

I had been mentioning one or two little matters connected with the church which I thought might be altered with advantage.

'Yes, ma'am—that's true enough, mayhap. But I never cared to turn my back on Whangdale Scar.'

'Well, that was very kind of you, Humphrey,' she said, smiling. 'And we should have missed your blowing very much.'

'I blow with expression-though I say it myself-I think, Mrs. Tyke, I blow with expression.'

'I would not have anyone else blow for me except you, Bickers. I couldn't trust them.'

You are very good to say so.'

'And if you can spare me an hour now

"To be sure, ma'am--to be sure.'

Then away we would go to the organ-loft-though this was not in my regular business, or what I was paid for, and though I might have made up my mind beforehand to do a little gardening that day—and Mrs. Tyke would play away for hours. Not that Mrs. Tyke had anything to do with the organ at the Sunday services, or

at any services, but it was always necessary for Mrs. Tyke to be prepared for what might happen to the regular man engaged. Something was always happening to the organists at St. Simon's church; they were a fickle, flighty, birds-of-passage lot, coming and going like swallows, worse than the vicars before Sextus Tyke's time, never satisfied, never settled down, a puffed-up, arrogant, don't-you-interfere-with-me sort of gang, wrangling with the vicar about the musical services and the voluntaries, and always at such deadly hatred with the choir, that why murder has not happened more than once at Whangdale Scar has been a perfect wonder to me. And even the good-tempered organists-one or two have turned up and stopped about a fortnight-were not to be relied upon, and young Mrs. Tyke was always prepared at a moment's notice to fill the place of any absent player. I can't say that she ever completely mastered the instrument, or that the hymns did not wobble a good deal, but she was fond of the organ, and I helped her all I could. What I did, I did with my heart in it,never once in all my life did I let the wind out and leave the organist in the lurch, male or female, or whoever it might be presiding at the instrument.

Well, organists went and came pretty regularly, nobody stopping long, and Mrs. Tyke kept up her practice and was pretty well prepared, and I kept blowing calmly. Mrs. Tyke by degrees became the mother of three pretty children, two girls and a boy, and the boy that tiresome! and when she was about eight-and-twenty years of age or so you would have thought she wasn't two months older than when she first married old Tyke, so young and pretty did she keep. And her husband, the vicar, whom we all called 'old Tyke,' was looking remarkably aged; never did a man's hair get so quickly grey, and turn from grey to white, as his did, and as for the lines about his thin face, I should poor he had a thousand of them. And he grew uncommonly absent too, and as for listening to a single word whilst you were talking to him, or whilst I might be talking to him on business even, it was not in him to attend to you. They were a happy couple, at least we all thought so, and I don't think we could be far out in our calculations, they living right amongst us all, and Mrs. Jodson and myself having often a talk together at tea-time about them both.

say

'You'll take a cup of tea before you go,' Mrs. Tyke would always say, when I was bringing round the keys of the church, you'll find Mrs. Jodson downstairs.'

And it was this taking tea with Mrs. Jodson, and Gravett the parlour-maid too, and Susan Chapman, general help, it is only fair to state, which wounded Mrs. Bickers' feelings, and made her

D