never lacking when required. Bravo issued a decree empowering mayors and governors of towns, upon their own responsibility, to exile for forty days all men whom they held to be dangerous, and, carrying out the same theory, he himself seized the leading military chiefs, and amongst them Marshal Serrano. The country rose to a man against such senseless tyranny; General Prim hastened back from London to direct the popular movement, and Admiral Tapete and the navy joined the people. Isabella, with Marfori, her latest favourite, was staying at St. Sebastian when the news of the revolt reached her. Thinking it was only another Pronunciamiento, she tried to pacify the people by dismissing Bravo and appointing Don Conchas in his place. Conchas' first despatch ought to have opened her eyes to the danger; he advised her to return to Madrid at once, warning her at the same time, however, that if she appeared with Marfori at her side, he would not answer for the consequences. Divided between the desire of returning to Madrid and the dislike of leaving Marfori, she lingered at St. Sebastian in a state bordering on distraction, appealing to everyone-always excepting her husband-whom she met for advice. "If I could wear breeches," she cried again and again, "I would return to my capital at once." In this she was wrong, for, if she had only known it, womanhood, as the present Queen-Regent has shown, is the surest weapon in Spain. The Spaniards are a long-suffering race, and, even at the eleventh hour, if she had trusted herself entirely to them and shown that, for their sake, she was willing to leave both favourite and confessor, they might have given her one last chance. But whilst she was hesitating her hour of grace passed, for Serrano defeated at Alcolea what few troops had remained faithful to her, and then she knew she must leave Spain. Flushed with weeping, her dress all in disorder, no gloves on her hands, and a little straw toque with a flaming red feather on her head, she crossed the French frontier, September 30, 1868. There was no anger and no regret, but perhaps just a touch of scorn, in the faces of the people of St. Sebastian as they watched the departure of their Queen. She evidently preferred to rely upon foreign aid "Napoleonic aid," they said, with a sneer-for the recovery of her crown rather than upon her own subjects. Tanto peor para ella. JAN WINN. ARCADIAN EXTREMES. OF F all the varieties of human life that of the agricolist, or husbandman, is the most ancient, even as it is the most honourable and independent. Emerson expressed the general conclusion on the subject when he said, "The farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land." It is one of the happiest of avocations; an almost universally desired pursuit. As the Author of The Seasons declared, In ancient times, the sacred plough employed There are many striking instances of this; for although, as we are told, "the disposition of Ulysses inclined him to war, rather than to the more lucrative, but more secure, method of life, by agriculture and husbandry, "yet there were those who, like Cyrus of Persia, obtained great pleasure from working on the land; and others who, like the Roman Cincinnatus, when freed from the toils and perplexities of war and rulership, have gone back to the fields with a great joy in their hearts, have disdained the gifts of power, have "seized the plough, and greatly independent lived." every Now, although agriculture is one of the oldest of human arts, so old indeed that it dates long before the dawn of history, it has not in any appreciable degree lost its hold upon human affection, and it never will lose that hold so long as the hearts of men are ready to respond to what Sir Walter Scott called nature's genial glow. But the life of the farmer is not altogether an existence of unalloyed arcadian sweetness. It is not all poetry. Even as white will have its black," according to the ballad of "Sir Carline," and as “every sweet will have its sour," so the pursuit of the agricolist has its acetous and prosaic side. He can live greatly independent, as compared with many others of the human family, but none are so immediately dependent as he is upon forces over which he has little or no control. He is the bond-slave, or, to put it mildly, he is the subject of the weather, and sometimes he can only signify his freedom by an independent grumble. Not that he works blindly. As a matter of fact, he strives for definite results in a most specific way, and, consequently, he prizes the results of his labour in a higher degree than most others do. With the farmer, work and the result of it largely coincide. And yet he is influenced more nearly and more acutely than others to give an instance-by the condition of the weather, say by a spell of drought, or by an excess of rain; and he is influenced at once, for a timely rainfall may raise fiftyfold the value of his harvest, or a storm of untimely hail may cut off the possibility of any harvest at all. In the month of May of this passing year of 1889 a clear exem plification of the poetry and prose of the farmer's life was afforded in the shire of Worcester. For three-fourths of the month the promise of May was all that heart of agricolist could wish, but all at once the spell was broken, the poetry was turned to prose, even to prose of the most serious kind. On the afternoon of the 24th of the month a hailstorm of unprecedented violence, so far as the experience of the present generation goes, occurred in the Worcestershire part of the basin of the river Severn. The thunder could hardly be heard for the noise of the hail. Some of the stones appeared to the observers to be as large as walnuts, and as they were rushing along in a slanting direction, the vegetation was literally cut into shreds. In one short hour the promise of the season was completely broken to many a hard-working farmer. As an eye-witness prosaically said, "More ruthless effects of a storm could not be imagined than met the eye in the districts where it was at its worst." Well may the farmer study the thermometer and the sky! Well may he strive to read the indications at evening's close or at morning's dawn! A still more striking instance of extremes in Arcadian life occurred on the second day of the following June in the Lancashire district. There was a charming morning, a beautiful noon, and a calm evening; and yet between whiles there were terrible storms. It was, to parody Dryden's couplet, A day so various that it seem'd to be, The lightning was intense, the thunder was deafening, and the rain came down in torrents. The most remarkable feature in the variety was the exceptional fall of hailstones. Indeed, in many cases they were pieces of ice of large size, which, on reaching the hard parts of the ground, broke with a noise like the report of a pistol. It was quite a fusilade while it lasted. Scores of stones two and three inches in circumference, and nearly as large as hen's eggs, were picked up within a few yards. The farmer, taking broad views of his life, knows that, as one has said, Wise is Nature's plan, Who, in her realm, as in the soul of man, Alternates storm with calm, and the loud noon With dewy evening's soft and sacred lull. He cannot shut his eyes to the damage, for it is obtrusively near, and it touches him persistently, so he may be pardoned if he sometimes. gets a little anxious as he thinks of the harvest days. There is, however, a good deal of poetry in the life of the farmer. Certainly the opportunity is there. Isaac D'Israeli in one of his papers declares that “an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team;" but he is far too absolute, for there is much to appeal to the emotion of the farmer. How striking are the processes going on about him! The grass, so very humble among the productions, growing along the roadside and over the meadows and upon the hills, clothing the landscape, refreshing with its greenness, fragrant as it falls before the scythe, and afterwards how delicious when it is borne homewards to be the food for the humble creatures that serve us! Who at such a time is not ready to cry out, with Nick Bottom the weaver, "Methinks, I have a great desire to a bottle of hay good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow"? But it is more than interesting. As Earl Russell affirmed, "The heart of the farmer insensibly expands, from his minute acquaintance with multifarious objects, all in themselves original; whilst that degree of retirement in which he is placed from the bustling haunts of mankind keeps alive in his breast his natural affections, unblunted by an extensive and perpetual intercourse with man in a more enlarged, and therefore in a more corrupt, state of society. His habits become his principles, and he is ready to risk his life to maintain them." This is the oppor tunity, if it is not always realized. Co-operation with the forces of nature is the work of the farmer, and the very thought of it is harmonising. Those Divine forces, so powerful and so infinite, are everywhere, and work everywhere. upon the material of the world. What is the earth the farmer turns with the plough and rouses with the harrow? It is the storehouse of life. He commits the precious grain to it, and, as Goethe wrote, "Smoothly and lightly the golden seed by the furrow is covered." Nowhere else but in the dark, dull ground would it grow, but there it meets with the conditions of life. The farmer cannot create the harvest. The seed is as dead as granite to all unaided demands. So he works in unison, in confident co-operation, and he waits in faith for the result. By the way of experience he has learnt the lesson the Dorsetshire poet expressed: "Ay, 'work and wait 's' the wisest way, for 'work and wait' will win the day." He buries his seed in the soil, and he sleeps at night, and he goes to work in other fields by day. The very procedure is rhythmical. Soon the tender green appears upon the naked earth, and then the shoot, the stalk, the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, and then "it stands in all the splendours of its garments green and yellow." The farmer shares in the production of an awe-inspiring epic. Divinest influences move within the soil, responsively the seed he has planted opens, there comes forth life, beauty, loveliness, and the result is as useful as it is charming. Such is the poetry of agricultural life. Of course the farmer, like everybody else, will lay stress on the darker and prosaic extreme of his occupation, and it is well that he should not altogether forget it; but the aggregate amount of his anxiety will depend upon the character of the motives whereby he lives. Well for him is it if he can truly say I never met a grief half-way, In thinking every day a blight was nigh. And better than all for him is it if he is content with doing the nearest duty, and is willing to leave the result in higher Hands than his own. It will conduce largely to the harmony of his mind and heart if he can bring himself to be satisfied with the striking of averages. Between the two extremes the bulk of good will always lie. It cannot but be expected that there will be moments in his yearly round when he will cry out with Queen Margaret, "Who can be patient in such extremes?" In the harmoniously poetic extreme he will rejoice; in the worst extreme, the prosaic and inharmonious one, he will sorrow; but if he is really wise he will "lump them a' thegither," knowing that he cannot avoid them, and in the worst extremes he will be resolute. Then the extremes will meet and justify each other, for they teach him that in nature and human nature alike they conduce to the general good. Let the Arcadian have confidence in his work. He was of the first of men and he will be of the last. When the civilised savage comes to view the ruins of our cities he will find the farmer hard at work in the fields of Arcady. His occupation will never be gone, for he cannot be dispensed with. The ground is the great storehouse |