out Her Majesty's fleet. In putting out to sea,
or in coming to land when the weather is rough,
all the peril is upon the broken sea, and life
depends on a distinct understanding of the
dangers to be battled with, and the right way of
overcoming them. In spite of all knowledge
and skill, the Aldborough life-boat was upset
last December in a very high surf, when on its
way to a vessel in distress, and three of its crew
of fifteen men were drowned. But it is a remarkable
fact, that until that day during all the
six-and-thirty years of the existence of the Life-
boat Institution, while more than eleven thousand
lives had been saved from shipwreck, of
the men who went out in life-boats to their
rescue, not one had been lost.

I could say more, but Ethel is awake, and,
wandering in fever, talks with the child drowned
in the storm that scared away her little rest of
health.

OPENING A BARROW.

WHEN a friendly letter came to me one bright
day last spring, from Oldbuck, a country squire
down in Ramshire, that great sheep-breeding
country, begging me to come and assist at the
opening of one of the great Ramshire tumuli,
I lost no time in at once packing up my
portmanteau and setting off by the S. W. R. to visit
my old antiquarian friend, my chum at Eton,
and my comrade in the hunting-field.

There is a charm in opening anything, whether
it be a parcel from the country, or a box of
books. I like the first analytic cut at a Stilton,
the first ride over a new line of country, the
first dip of the line in a new stream. There is
a hope and expectancy about it, coupled with a
mystery in the unsounded depths of the untried,
which I suppose produces the pleasure.

But here the mystery sets one's antiquarian
imagination on the burn and on the boil. We
might find a skeleton in armour, one of Death's
sentinels, with spear and sword laid ready
beside its fleshless hands. We might, for all I
knew, dig up Caractacus himself, or Boadicea's
first cousin, or some silent Briton who had seen
Cæsar, and drawn a bow at the legionaries. We
might see through the fresh dark earth a great
gold torques, one of those collars of twisted
bullion that the ancient British kings wore, or
one of those tiaras of gold plate that the arch-
Druids donned on great mistletoe-cutting festivals,
when the men with the white and blue robes
and the golden sickles rehearsed Norma on the
most tremendous scale, in the oak forest, or
round the sacred circles of grey stones.

A dog-cart bore me from the station, to the
pretty Ramshire cottage, where my antiquarian
bachelor friend hoards his flint-axes, elk-horns,
torques, old coins, and bronze spear-heads. It
was a drive under a mile or two of black-
boughed elms, where the stars seemed to hang
like fruit, or like the little tapers that twinkle
in a Christmas-tree—a door opening into a glowing
room—a supper—some seething grog—and
a plunge into an ocean of best bed.

When I awoke next morning, I thought at
first I was in a cathedral, and was staring
through a great crimson stained window; but it
proved only to be the sunlight shining through
the red curtains. They were not angels as I
had dreamed, in the choir, but thrushes and
blackbirds singing in the laurels outside, boasting
of their blue eggs and their thriving families.
When I wrenched myself from bed and looked
out at the sky, the colour of a forget-me-not, and
saw the sun blazing on the glossy laurel-leaves,
and the swallows studying entomology like so
many transmigrated Kirbys and Spences and
Rev. Mr. Whites of Selborne, I felt quite
ashamed of myself in not being up to watch
the pyrotechnics of a Ramshire sunrise—the
only thing which Oldbuck acknowledges to be
as good as it was in the thirteenth century.

I was busy down stairs watching a monster of
a speckled thrush pulling a worm out of the
lawn, which he did with a give and take, pull-
baker pull-devil principle, like a sailor-boy at
a rope a little too heavy for him, when the
breakfast gong went off and Oldbuck appeared
instantly, like Zadkiel at the same summons, in
high spirits—with Colt Hoare's Wiltshire under
his arm. It lay on the side-table beside the
frilled ham, and was occasionally referred to
during our meal by my enthusiastic friend.

Breakfast done, the dogs loosed in case of a
rabbit, off we set to Peterwood: a fir plantation
about a mile away on the downs, where the resting-
place of the ancient Briton we were going to
wake up, lay. The keepers were to meet us on
the upland, with pickaxes, spades, and other
resurrectionary apparatus. Oldbuck was great on
the pugnacious illogical Celt, on the boat-headed
Pict, on the long-headed Scot, on the Belgæ
and the Allobrogæ, and the Cangi, on the slow
struggle that the Romans had for Ramshire,
winning it, red-inch by inch, and dyking back the
blue-painted deer-slayers with trenched camp and
palisade and mound.

It was a day of soft burning blue, with now
and then a triumphal arch of rainbow for Queen
April to pass under, weeping like a bride in
mingled joy and pleasure. The roadside banks
were starred with cowslips, weighed down by
tax-collecting bees, and under the tasseled hazels
the royal purple of the violets formed a carpet.
As for the white clouds, their edges were so
round and sharp cut, that, had they been so
much white paper cut out and stuck against the
sky, they could not have looked harder edged;
but they changed shape so often, and folded,
and lifted, and scattered so much like snow
turned into vapour, that they relieved the
inquisitive and unsatisfied mind.

Now, we reached the grizzled down, speckled
with furze, churlishly blossoming yellow amidst
its thorns, and, striking up an old Roman road
called the Ox Drove, we made straight for a
white board, with its legend warning trespassers
who could not read, just on the skirts of the
fir plantation, where the barrow was. A long
line of tumuli, the labours of that modern
barrow maker, the mole, pointed our way. A