greatest. Joyce arrived first. What he
saw was a large pool of water where ice
had been; floating on it a small round
velvet cap trimmed with fur. He looked
hastily round. She was not there—then
he knew what had occurred.

At that instant his arm was seized by
Mr. Biscoe, who whispered, "Wait man!
They're fetching the rope!" "Stand
back!" he cried, "it'd be too late! Let
me go!" and the next instant he was
diving beneath the floating fragments of
ice.

"It was as near as a toucher," Mr.
Boyd said, and he was right. When they
pulled him in, Joyce's arm, which had been
wound round Lady Caroline, had nearly
given way, and the hand with which he
had clung to the ice-edge was bruised and
bleeding. Just as they were lifted on
shore he thought he saw her lips move. He
bent his head, and heard one word—
"Walter!" Then he fainted.

A QUESTION OF ANCESTRY.

THE French assure us that "rien n'est sacré
pour un sapeur." But neither the sapper, nor
the French, have any monopoly of irreverence
and incredulity in our day. People question
everything, past and present. The wisdom
and veracity of our ancestors are laughed to
scorn, and historians and annalists of all degrees
of note and authority are put into the witness-
box, and rigidly cross-examined. Niebuhr with
Rome, and Cornewall Lewis with Greece,
remind one of bulls in a china shop, butting
and smashing with might and main among the
brittle but beautiful wares of antiquity. There
was no Romulus and no Remus, and
consequently those interesting babes were never
suckled by a wolf. Virgil and the Roman poets
are yet mercifully left us; they were but
moderns after all, but Homer, in racing phrase,
"is nowhere." His existence is denied, and
if that by any chance be granted, his authorship
of the Iliad is impugned by the literary sappers,
who disintegrate the immortal work into a series
of separate ballads, written or composed by
various "eminent hands," whose names no one
knows or can possibly discover. We are not
even allowed to imagine that Macbeth killed
Duncan as Shakespeare tells us, but we are
informed and commanded to believe, that these
two rivals for the crown of Scotland fought
out their quarrel fairly in the battle-field; that
Duncan was slain in single combat, and that
Macbeth was no murderer at all. We are
also told by the sappers that Richard the
Third had not a hunchback, but was a very
handsome man, with only a slight and studious
stoop in his shoulders; that, moreover, he
was a very good king, beloved by the people,
and only hated by the nobility, who employed
and paid partial historians to blacken his
character and misinterpret the events of his
reign. We hear also that Henry the Eighth
was a soft, kind-hearted gentleman, the victim
of designing women, whom he loved but too
well, and too foolishly; that his daughter Mary
no more deserved to be called "bloody," than
his daughter Elizabeth; with various other
contradictions of our pre-instilled knowledge or
beliefs, sufficient to justify the wary old Sir
Robert Walpole in proclaiming all history to be,
as in plain Saxon English he called it, "a lie."
Saxon! did I say? Yes, I did, but who and
what are the Saxons? A very determined
sapper, one Thomas Nicholas, Master of Arts
and Doctor of Philosophy, following in the
wake of other incredulous philosophers, denies
that the English are Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons,
and proclaims us to be a nation, in which
the Celtic or Keltic blood is more largely
predominant than any other, and this more
especially in the midland counties, where
Shakespeare was born. Here is a sapper
with a vengeance! The facts and arguments
on which this ethnological iconoclast bases
his astounding statement, are to be found
in a volume recently published, entitled, "The
Pedigree of the English People investigated;
an Argument Historical and Scientific on
English Ethnology, showing the Progress of
Race-amalgamation in Britain from the Earliest
Times, with especial Reference to the incorporation
of the Celtic Aborigines." Dr. Nicholas,
like other sappers, has a good deal to say
for himself, and merits respectful attention
both for the array and marshalment of his facts,
and for the arguments which he builds upon
them. Let us hear, and then judge his
exposition, that we may either continue to call
ourselves Anglo-Saxons, as we have been in the
habit of doing for more than a thousand years,
or Celto-Saxons, if that be the truer and more
accurate definition.

Every one knows now-a-days that the
Ancient Britons or Celts of this island were not
xactly savages, as it was once the fashion
to consider them; inasmuch as they were
cunning artificers in gold, iron, and brass, kept
cattle, built houses, and cultivated the soil.
Diodorus Siculus says, "that the Britons used
chariots, as the ancient Greek heroes are
reported to have done in the Trojan war; that
they were simple in their manners, and far
removed from the crimes and wickedness of the
men of the present day; that the island was
thickly inhabited; and that the people of Cornwall
were particularly fond of strangers, and
civilised in their manners." Caesar himself, who
never penetrated very far into the interior, is
forced to admit, evidently much against his
inclination, that the Britons of Kent "were not
barbarians; that the land was well peopled, and
full of houses built after the manner of the
Gauls; that the people used brass and gold
money, and employed iron rings of a certain
weight in barter." He also confessed that the
heavy armed legions of Rome were no match