warmest sympathies; and we believe that to give it cordial national support, and to give it a fresh impulse by means of governmental grants, will ultimately prove a most saving investment of money on the part of the country. We fear no invasion. The very fact of this corps de reserve, the very military demonstration that we have made, will cause our only possible invader to think twice before he acts once. Under such circumstances, it will not be necessary for us to maintain so enormous a standing army as we are compelled now to keep up. When it is remembered that every soldier costs this country no less than 1007. a year, 200,000l. paid over annually by the Chancellor of the Exchequer into the hands of the commanders of Volunteer corps is but a comparative trifle yet it may be raised from a trifle into an actual gain; for if, by the attitude which the Volunteers take, they ward off the enemy from our coasts, a reduction of 10,000 or 15,000 men from our regular forces might easily be accomplished, without the reduction being materially felt. In this single fact alone, which would be a saving of 800,000. or 1,000,000l. a year to the nation, is a strong argument why our citizen legions should be efficiently supported out of the public treasury. We have the testimony of officials, of military men high in places, as to the service which they might render in case of an emergency; we have this proud consolation, that round our hearths are clustered a brave fraternal band, which does not fight for pay, and would therefore fight more enthusiastically and heartily. In every respect, then, socially, morally, politically, and financially, we add our recommendation to the recommendation of the Royal Commission, and trust that no niggard spirit will be manifested when this question of a Volunteer grant comes to be discussed in the Commons' House of Parliament.

TEMPLE BAR.

JANUARY 1863.

John Marchmont's Legacy.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," &c. &c.

CHAPTER IV.

GOING AWAY.

EDWARD ARUNDEL went from Montague Square straight into

the household of the private tutor of whom he had spoken, there to complete his education, and to be prepared for the onerous duties of a military life. From the household of this private tutor he went at once into a cavalry regiment, after sundry examinations; which were not nearly so stringent in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty, as they have since become. Indeed, I think the unfortunate young cadets who are educated upon the high-pressure system, and who are expected to give a synopsis of Portuguese political intrigue during the eighteenth century, a scientific account of the currents of the Red Sea, and a critical disquisition upon the comedies of Aristophanes as compared with those of Pedro Calderon de la Barca, not forgetting to glance at the effect of different ages and nationalities upon the respective minds of the two playwrights, within a given period of, say, half an hour, would have envied Mr. Arundel for the easy manner in which he obtained his commission in a distinguished cavalry regiment. Mr. Edward Arundel therefore inaugurated the commencement of the year 1810 by plunging very deeply into the books of a crack military-tailor in New Burlington Street, and by a visit to Dangerfield Park; where he went to make his adieux before sailing for India, whither his regiment had just been ordered.

I do not doubt that Mrs. Arundel was very sorrowful at this sudden parting with her yellow-haired younger son. The boy and his mother walked together in the wintry sunset under the leafless beeches at Dangerfield, and talked of the dreary voyage that lay before the lad; the

arid plains and cruel jungles far away; perils by sea and perils by land; but across them all, Fame waving her white arms, beckoning to the young soldier, and crying, "Come, conqueror that shall be! come, through trial and danger, through fever and famine,-come to your rest upon my blood-stained lap!" Surely this boy, being only just eighteen years of age, may be forgiven if he is a little romantic, a little over eager and impressionable, a little too confident that the next thing to going out to India as a sea-sick subaltern in a great transport-ship is coming home with the reputation of a Clive. Perhaps he may be forgiven, too, if, in his fresh enthusiasm, he sometimes forgot the shabby friend whom he had helped little better than a twelvemonth before, and the earnest hazel eyes that had shone upon him in the pitiful Oakley-Street chamber. I do not say that he was utterly unmindful of his old teacher of mathematics. It was not in his nature to forget any one who had need of his services; for this boy, so eager to be a soldier, was of the chivalrous temperament, and would have gone out to die for his mistress, or his friend, if need had been. He had received two or three grateful letters from John Marchmont, in each of which the lawyer's clerk spoke pleasantly of his new life, and hopefully of his health, which had improved considerably, he said, since his resignation of the tragic banner and the pantomimic mask. Neither had Edward quite forgotten his promise of enlisting Mrs. Arundel's sympathies in aid of the motherless little girl. In one of these wintry walks beneath the black branches at Dangerfield, the lad had told the sorrowful story of his well-born tutor's poverty and humiliation.

"Only think, mother!" he cried at the end of the little history. "I saw the poor fellow carrying a great calico flag, and marching about at the heel of a procession, to be laughed at by the costermongers in the gallery; and I know that he is descended from a capital Lincolnshire family, and will come in for no end of money if he only lives long enough. But if he should die, mother, and leave his little girl destitute, you'll look after her, won't you?"

I don't know whether Mrs. Arundel quite entered into her son's ideas upon the subject of adopting Mary Marchmont, or whether she had any definite notion of bringing the little girl home to Dangerfield for the natural term of her life, in the event of the child being left an orphan. But she was a kind and charitable lady, and she scarcely cared to damp her boy's spirits by holding forth upon the doubtful wisdom of his adopting, or promising to adopt, any stray orphans who might cross his pathway.

"I hope the little girl may not lose her father, Edward," she said gently. "Besides, dear, you say that Mr. Marchmont tells you he has humble friends, who would take the child if any thing happened to him. He does not wish us to adopt the little girl; he only asks us to interest ourselves in her fate."

"And you will do that, mother darling?" cried the boy. "You will take an interest in her, won't you? You couldn't help doing so, if you

were to see her. She's not like a child, you know,-not a bit like Letitia. She's as grave and quiet as you are, mother, or graver, I think; and she looks quite a lady, in spite of her poor, shabby pinafore and frock." "Does she wear shabby frocks?" said the mother. "I could help her in that matter, at all events, Ned. I might send her a great trunk-full of Letitia's things. She outgrows them long before they are shabby."

The boy coloured, and shook his head.

"It's very kind of you to think of it, mother dear; but I don't think that would quite answer," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because, you see, John Marchmont is a gentleman; and, you know, though he's so dreadfully poor now, he is heir to Marchmont Towers. And though he didn't mind doing any thing in the world to earn a few shillings a week, he mightn't like to take cast-off clothes." So nothing more was to be said or done upon the subject.

Edward Arundel wrote his humble friend a pleasant letter, in which he told John that he had enlisted his mother's sympathy in Mary's cause, and in which he spoke in very glowing terms of the Indian expedition that lay before him.

"I wish I could come to say good-by to you and Miss Mary before I go," he wrote; "but that's impossible. I go straight from here to Southampton by coach at the end of this month, and the Auckland sails on the 2d of February. Tell Miss Mary I shall bring her home all kinds of pretty presents from Affghanistan,-ivory fans, and Cashmere shawls, and Chinese puzzles, and embroidered slippers with turned-up toes, and diamonds, and attar of roses, and suchlike; and remember that I pect you to write to me, and to give me the earliest news of your coming into the Lincolnshire property."

ex

John Marchmont received this letter in the middle of January. He gave a despondent sigh as he refolded the boyish epistle, after reading it to his little girl.

"We haven't so many friends, Polly," he said, "that we should be indifferent to the loss of this one."

Mary Marchmont's cheek grew paler at her father's sorrowful speech. That imaginative temperament, which was, as I have said, almost morbid in its intensity, presented every object to the little girl in a light in which things are looked at by very few children. Only these few words, and her fancy roamed far away to that cruel land whose perils her father had described to her. Only these few words, and she was away in the rocky Bolan Pass, under hurricanes of drifting snow; she saw the hungry soldiers fighting with savage dogs for the possession of foul carrion. She had heard all the perils and difficulties which had befallen the Army of the Indus in the year '39, and the womanly heart sank under those cruel

memories.

"He will go to India and be killed, papa dear," she said. “Oh, why, why do they let him go? His mother can't love him, can she? She would never let him go, if she did."

John Marchmont was obliged to explain to his daughter that motherly love must not go so far as to deprive a nation of its defenders; and that the richest jewels which Cornelia can give to her country are those ruby lifedrops which flow from the hearts of her bravest and brightest sons. Mary was a poor political economist; she could not reason upon the necessity of chastising Persian insolence, or checking Russian encroachments upon the far-away shores of the Indus. Was Edward Arundel's bright head, with its aureola of yellow hair, to be cloven asunder by an Affghan renegade's sabre, because the young Shah of Persia had been contumacious?

Mary Marchmont wept silently that day over a three-volume novel, while her father was away serving writs upon wretched insolvents, in his capacity of out-door clerk to Messrs. Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson.

The young lady no longer spent her quiet days in the two-pair back. Mr. Marchmont and his daughter had remained faithful to Oakley Street and the proprietress of the ladies' wardrobe, who was a good, motherly creature; but they had descended to the grandeur of the first floor, whose gorgeous decorations Mary had glanced at furtively in the days gone by, when the splendid chambers were occupied by an elderly and reprobate commission-agent, who seemed utterly indifferent to the delights of a convex mirror supported by a gilded but crippled eagle, whose dignity was somewhat impaired by the loss of a wing; but which bijou appeared, to Mary, to be a fitting adornment for the young Queen's palace in St. James's Park.

But neither the eagle nor the third volume of a thrilling romance could comfort Mary upon this bleak January day. She shut her book, and stood by the window, looking out into the dreary street, that seemed so blotted and dim under the falling snow.

"It snowed in the Pass of Bolan," she thought; "and the treacherous Indians harassed the brave soldiers, and killed their camels. What will become of him in that dreadful country? Shall we ever see him again?"

Yes, Mary, to your sorrow. Indian scimitars will let him go scatheless; famine and fever will pass him by; but the hand which points to that far-away day on which you and he are to meet, will never fail or falter in its purpose until that day comes.

We have no need to dwell upon the preparations which were made for the young soldier's departure from home, nor on the tender farewells between the mother and her son.

Mr. Arundel was a country gentleman pur et simple; a hearty, broad-shouldered squire, who had no thought above his farm and his dogkennel, or the hunting of the red deer, with which his neighbourhood abounded. He sent his younger son to India as coolly as he had sent the