ed gainer by his physical sufferings--I have not wholly
failed--then I say, with the ingenious Author who devoted twenty years
to a work "On the Note of the Nightingale,"--"I have not lived in
vain!"

A STORY WITHOUT A NAME.[24]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE,

BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.

_Continued from Page 44._

CHAPTER VI.

Reader, can you go back for twenty years? You do it every day. You say,
"Twenty years ago I was a boy--twenty years ago I was a youth--twenty
years ago I played at peg-top and at marbles--twenty years ago I
wooed--was loved--I sinned--I suffered!" What is there in twenty years
that should keep us from going back over them? You go on so fast, so
smoothly, so easily on the forward course--why not in retrogression? But
let me tell you: it makes a very great difference whether Hope or Memory
drives the coach.

But let us see what we can do. Twenty years before the period at which
the last chapter broke off, Philip Hastings, now a father of a girl of
fifteen, was a lad standing by the side of his brother's grave. Twenty
years ago Sir John Hastings was the living lord of these fine lands and
broad estates. Twenty years ago he passed, from the mouth of the vault
in which he had laid the clay of the first-born, into the open splendor
of the day, and felt sorrow's desolation in the sunshine. Twenty years
ago, he had been confronted on the church-yard path by a tall old woman,
and challenged with words high and stern, to do her right in regard to a
paltry rood or two of land. Twenty years ago he had given her a harsh,
cold answer, and treated her menaces with impatient scorn.

Do you remember her, reader? Well, if you do, that brings us to the
point I sought to reach in the dull flat expanse of the far past; and we
can stand and look around us for awhile.

That old woman was not one easily to forget or lightly to yield her
resentments. There was something perdurable in them as well as in her
gaunt, sinewy frame. As she stood there menacing him, she wanted but
three years of seventy. She had battled too with many a storm--wind and
weather, suffering and persecution, sorrow and privation, had beat upon
her hard--very hard. They had but served to stiffen and wither and
harden, however. Her corporeal frame, shattered as it seemed, was
destined to outlive many of the young and fair spirit-tabernacles around
it--to pass over, by long years, the ordinary allotted space of human
l