his lodging at the bar, and went out into the street. He felt sick at the thought of joining them; he had had a surfeit of wickedness.

But he was too near his former haunts; and the officers of justice must be after him. He turned from one narrow street into another, and wandered on till he came where the bowsprit of a vessel projected over a wall across a narrow lane, and he knew by this that he must be near the Thames. The sun was going down, and the friendly darkness was at hand. But he could not rest. He knew nothing of the other side, and it seemed to him therefore that he would be safer there. He would take a boat and be put across. A passage between two houses led towards the river. Probably there were stairs at the end. He turned into the passage. Half a dozen bills were up on the walls. He stopped to look. They all described bodies found in the river. He turned away, and started at the sight of a policeman regarding him from a door three or four yards off. It was a police station. He had all but put his head into the lion's mouth. He had just presence of mind enough to prevent him from running, but not enough to keep his legs steady under him. His very calves seemed to feel the eyes of the policeman burning upon them, and shrink away with a sense of unprotected misery. He passed several stairs before he ventured to look round. Then finding no reason to suppose he was watched, he turned down the next opening, found a boat, and telling the waterman to put him across to Rotherhithe, of which district he just knew the name, sat down in the stern.

The man rowed up the river. The sun was going down behind the dome of St. Paul's, which looked like the round shoulder of a little hill; and all the brown masts and spars of the vessels shone like a forest of gold-barked trees in winter. The dark river caught the light, and threw it shimmering up on the great black hulls, which shone again in the water below; and the Thames, with all its dirt and all its dead, looked radiant. But Thomas felt nothing of its beauty. If Nature had ever had a right of way in his heart, she was now shut out. What was it to him, despised in his own eyes, that the sun shone? He looked up at the sky only to wish for the night. What was it to him that the world was for a moment gay, even into the heart of London? Its smile could not reach his heart: it needs an atmosphere as well as a sun to make light. The sun was in the heavens, yea, the central sun of truth shone upon the universe; but there was no atmosphere of truth in Thomas's world to be lighted up by it; or if there was, it was so filled with smoke and vapour that for the time the sun could not make it smile. As they passed under a towering hull, he envied a monkey that went scrambling out of one of the portholes and in at another. And yet the scene around was as strange as it was beautiful. The wide river, the many vessels, the multitudinous wilderness of grey houses on every side, all disorder to the eye, yet blended by the air and the

light and the thin fog into a marvellous whole; the occasional vista of bridge-arches; the line of London Bridge lying parallel with the lines of green and grey and gold in the sky-its people, its horses, its carriages creeping like insects athwart the sunset-one of the arches cut across near the top by the line of a new railway-bridge, and the segment filled with a moving train; all this light and life to the eye, while, save for the splash of the oars, and the general hum like an aroma of sound that filled the air, all was still to the ear-none of it reached the heart of outcast Thomas.

Soon, as if by magic, the scene changed. The boatman had been rowing up the river, keeping in the quiet water as the tide hurried out. Now he was crossing towards Cherry Garden Stairs. As they drew near the Surrey-side, all at once Thomas found himself in the midst of a multitude of boats, flitting about like waterflies on the surface of a quiet pool. What they were about he could not see. Now they would gather in dense masses, in every imaginable position to each other, the air filled with shouting, objurgation, expostulation, and good-humoured chaff, varied with abuse. Again they would part asunder and vanish over the wide space. Guns were firing, flags were flying, Thames liveries gleaming here and there. The boats were full of men, women, and children; some in holiday garments, most of them dark with the darkness of an English mob. It was an aquatic crowd-a people exclusively living on and by the river-assembled to see a rowing-match between two of their own class for a boat, probably given by the publicans of the neighbourhood-who would reap ten times the advantage. But although there were thousands assembled, the uproar troubled such a small proportion of the river's surface, that one might have rowed up and down in the middle space between Rotherhithe and Wapping for hours and known nothing about it.

But Thomas did not see the race, not because he was in haste to get ashore, but because something happened. His waterman, anxious to see the sport, lingered in the crowd lining the whole of that side of the river. In a boat a little way further up was a large family party, and in it a woman who was more taken up with a baby in her arms than with all that was going on around her. In consequence of her absorption in the merry child which was springing with all the newly discovered delight of feet and legs, she was so dreadfully startled when the bows of another boat struck the gunwale just at her back, that she sprung half up from her seat, and the baby, jerking itself forward, dropped from her arms into the river. Thomas was gazing listlessly at the water when he saw the child sweep past him a foot or so below the surface. His next remembered consciousness was in the water. He was a fair swimmer, though no rider. He caught the child, and let himself drift with the tide, till he came upon the cable of a vessel that lay a hundred yards below. Boats came rushing about him; in a moment the child was taken from him and handed across half a dozen of them

to its mother; and in another moment he too was in a boat. When he came to himself a gin-faced, elderly woman, in a small threadbare tartan shawl, was wiping his face with a pocket-handkerchief, and murmuring some feminine words over him, while a coarselooking, dough-faced man was holding a broken cup with some spirit in it to his mouth.

"Go ashore with the gentleman, Jim," said the woman. "There's the Indiar Arms. That's a respectable place. You must go to bed, my dear, till you gets your clo'es dried."

"I haven't paid my man," said Tom, feebly. He was now shivering with cold; for after the night and day he had spent, he was in no condition to resist the effects of the water.

"Oh, we'll pay him. Here, Fluke," cried two or three they seemed all to know each other.

"Come along, sir," cried twenty shrill voices over his head. He looked up and saw that they were alongside of a great barge which was crowded with little dirty creatures, row above row. "Come this way-solid barges, sir, all the way. Ketch hold of the gen❜lm'n's hand, Sammy. There. Now, Bill."

They hauled and lifted Thomas on to the barge, then conducted him along the side and across to the next yawning wooden gulf, and so over about seven barges to a plank, which led from the last on to a ladder ascending to the first floor, of a public-house, the second floor of which, supported upon piles, projected over high water. There his conductors, two ragged little mudlarks, left him. Through an empty kind of bar-room, he went into the bar, which communicated with the street. Here first he found that he had been followed by the same man who had given him the gin. He now passed before him to the counter, and said to the woman who was pumping a pot of beer :

"This gen'leman, Mrs. Cook, 's been and just took a child out o' the water, ma'am. He 'ain't got a change in his wescut-pocket, so if you'll do what ye can for 'im, there's many on us 'll be obliged to ye, ma'am."

"Lor'! whose child was it, Jim?"

"I don't know as you know her, ma'am. The man's name's Potts. He keeps a public down about Lime'us, someveres."

Thomas stood shivering-glad, however, that the man should represent his case for him.

"The gentleman had better go to bed till we get his clo'es dried for him," said the landlady. "I think that's the best we can do for him."

"Take a drop o' summat, sir," said the man, turning to Thomas. "They keeps good licker here. Put a name upon it, sir."

"Well, I'll have a small glass of pale brandy," said Thomas, "-neat if you please. And what'll you have yourself? I'm much obliged to you for introducing me here, for I must look rather a queer customer."

"It's what you have, not what I'll have, sir, if you'll excuse me," returned the man.

I beg your pardon," said Thomas, who had just received his brandy. He drank it, and proceeded to put his hand in his pocket -no easy matter in the state of his garments.

"I'm a goin' to pay for this," interposed the man, in a determined tone, and Thomas was hardly in a condition to dispute it.

In

At the same moment the landlady, who had left the bar after she had helped Thomas, returned, saying, Will you walk this way, sir?" Thomas followed, and found himself in a neat enough little room, where he was only too glad to undress and go to bed. As he pulled off his coat, it occurred to him to see that his money was safe. He had put it, mostly in sovereigns, into a pocket-book of elaborate construction, which he generally carried in the breastpocket of what the tailors call a lounging-coat. It was gone. His first conclusion was, that the man had taken it. He rushed back into the bar, but he was not there. It must be confessed that, in the midst of his despair, a fresh pang at the loss of his money shot through Thomas's soul. But he soon came to the conclusion that the man had not taken it. It was far more likely that, as he went overboard, the book slipped from his pocket into the water. this loss an immediate reward of almost his first act of self-forgetfulness, had followed. The best thing that can happen to a man, sometimes, is to lose his money; and while people are compassionate over the loss, God may regard it as the first step of the stair by which the man shall rise above it and many things besides with which not only his feet, but his hands and his head are defiled. Then first he began to feel that he had no ground under his feetthe one necessity before such a man could find a true foundation. Until he lost it, he did not know how much, even in his misery, the paltry hundred pounds had been to him. Now it was gone, things looked black indeed. He emptied his pockets of two or three sovereigns and some silver, put his clothes out at the door, and got into bed. There he fell a-thinking. Instead of telling what he thought, however, I will now turn to what my reader may be, and I have been, thinking about his act of rescue.

What made him, who has been shown all but incapable of originating a single action, thus at the one right moment do the one right thing? Here arises another question: Does a man always originate his own actions? Is it not possible, to say the least of it, that, just to give him a taste of what well-doing means, some moment, when selfishness is sick and faint, may be chosen by the Power in whom we live and move and have our being, to inspire the man with a true impulse? We must think what an unspeakable comfort it must have been to Thomas, in these moments of hopeless degradation of which he felt all the bitterness, suddenly to find around him, as the result of a noble deed into which he had

been unaccountably driven, a sympathetic, yes, admiring public. No matter that they were not of his class, nor yet that Thomas was not the man to do the human brotherhood justice; he could not help feeling the present power of humanity, the healing medicine of approbation, in the faces of the common people who had witnessed and applauded his deed. I say medicine of approbation; for what would have been to him in ordinary, a poison, was now a medicine. There was no fear of his thinking himself too much of a hero at present.

It may be objected that the deed originated only in a carelessness of life resulting from self-contempt. I answer that no doubt that had its share in making the deed possible, because it removed for the time all that was adverse to such a deed; but self-despite, however real and well-grounded, cannot inspirit to true and noble action. I think it was the divine, the real self, aroused at the moment by the breath of that wind which bloweth where it listeth, that sprung thus into life and deed, shadowing, I say shadowing only, that wonderful saying of our Lord that he that loseth his life shall find it. It had come-been given to him-that a touch of light might streak the dark cloud of his fate, that he might not despise himself utterly, and act as unredeemable-kill himself or plunge into wickedness to drown his conscience. It was absolutely necessary that he should be brought to want; but here was just one little opening-not out of want, but into the light of a higher region altogether, the region of well-being-by which a glimmer of the strength of light could enter the chaos of his being. Any good deed partakes of the life whence it comes, and is a good to him who has done it. And this act might be a beginning.

Poor weak Thomas, when he got his head down on the pillow, began to cry. He pitied himself for the helplessness to which he was now reduced, and a new phase of despair filled his soul. He felt without thinking it, that his ill-gotten gain had, like all the devil's money, turned to rubbish in his hands. What he was to do he could not tell. He was tolerably safe, however, for the night, and, worn and weary, soon fell into a sleep which not even a dream disturbed.

When he woke all was dark, and he welcomed the darkness as a friend. It soothed and comforted him a little. If it were only always dark! If he could find some cave to creep into where he might revel in-feed upon the friendly gloom! If he could get amongst the snowy people of the north, blessed with half-a-year of gentle sunlessness! Thomas had plenty of fancy. He leaned on his elbow and looked out. His clothes had been placed by him while he slept. He rose and put them on, opened the door of his room, saw light somewhere, approached it softly, and found himself in a small room, like a large oriel window. The day had changed from gold to silver; the wide expanse of the great river