ence. Then followed the report--whispered through the party assembled
to do honour to the future bride and bridegroom--that "Bill" was
missing. Then came the agonising suspense and the eight hours' search
throughout the long summer evening.

Late that night the father found the fair young form of his boy in a
thick and tangled copse,--there it lay under the silent stars, the face
upturned in its last appeal to heaven; and close by lay the deadly
twelve-bore which had been the cause of all the misery and grief
that followed.

"Solemn before us
Veiled the dark portal--
Goal of all mortal.
Stars silent rest o'er us;
Graves under us silent."

He had evidently pursued game or vermin of some sort into the dense
undergrowth of the wood, and in his haste had slipped and fallen over
his gun, for the shot had just grazed his heart

Who that knew him will ever forget Bill Llewelyn, prince of good
fellows, "truest of men in everything"? In all relations of life, as in
the hunting field, he went as straight as a die.

The accidental discharge of a gun shortly after he came of age, and
within a few weeks of his wedding day, has made the England of to-day
the poorer by one of her most promising sons. Infinite charity! Infinite
courage! Infinite truth! Infinite humility! Who could do justice in
prose to those rare and godlike qualities? No: miserable, weak, and
ineffectual though my gift of poesy may be, yet I will not let those
qualities pass away from the minds of all, save the few that knew him
well, without following in the footsteps (though at an immeasurable
distance) of the divine author of "Lycidas," by endeavouring to render
to his cherished memory "the meed of some melodious tear." For as time
goes on, and the future unfolds to our view things we would have given
worlds to have known long before, when the events that influenced our
past actions and shaped our future destinies are seen through the dim
vista of the shadowy, half-forgotten past, we must all learn the hard
lesson which experience alone can teach, exclaiming with the "Preacher"
the old, old words, "I returned, and saw under the sun that the race is
not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.... but time and chance
happeneth to them all"

LINES IN MEMORY OF

WILLIAM DILLWYN LLEWELYN.

It may be chance,--I hold it truth,--
That of the friends I loved on earth
The ones who died in early youth