As she passed out of the then dark church
the sexton—an old, lame man—was coming
in with a lantern to put away the books and
lock it up; a task neglected till then for his
Christmas dinner. He drew back aghast as
Hildred gently bade him good-night, and
looked with awe after the tall figure that
soon disappeared in the darkness. He hurried
over his duties and hobbled back to his fire-side;
where, no doubt, he told a grim ghost-story;
of having seen, and been spoken to
by, the long-deceased lady of a long-deceased
squire, in the church-porch, after dark, to
very credulous listeners.

Erle and Millie had been anxiously expecting
her for a long time—Millie had even
urged Erle to go and seek her—but he,
saying that most likely she had only gone for
one of her mad rambles, excused himself from
doing so. And, as they waited and the night
fell, Erle Lyneward had made a short humiliating
confession of his weakness and sinfulness.
And Millie? She pitied him, smiled
upon him and forgave him, quite content
with his assurance that now he loved her only.
Erle did not tell Millie who had been the object
of his fierce love, and she did not ask;
he had spoken too bitterly and harshly of
Hildred. Neither ever alluded to that subject
again; neither ever knew of Hildred's devotion.

Mr. Lyneward's manner that evening when
he first met Hildred was full of troubled consciousness;
but she set him at ease. She stayed
with them all the time, because it was the
evening of Christmas day, and because her
heart was at once softened and strengthened.
She was loving to Millie, and so friendly to
Erle that Millie's sweet face brightened into
pure unalloyed gladness.

The marriage took place a few days after.
To the last, Hildred was full of motherly
affectionateness to motherless Millie. She
made Erle Lyneward feel that she accepted
him as a brother; forgiving him his sin
against her sister, and asking forgiveness herself
only for the harsh way in which she had
rejected and upbraided him then.

It was a very hard time, but Hildred got
through it. She filled Millie's cup of joy as
full as she could—made her sacrifice as complete
as she was able, for she made it cheerfully,
and suffered its cost patiently. Suffered!
was suffering rather. It is a slow
fire, from which women-martyrs step forth
pure and white-robed—a fire that ofttimes
burns life-long.

When all was done, Hildred went away.
She breathed more freely the further behind
her she left the scene of her fiery ordeal.
She thought the new air would at once give
for strength. But she fell ill among strangers:
sick unto death, but she did not die.

Her strength, and with it the consciousness
of power, returned—as there was need
they should in the life she had chosen.

No matter what that life was. Hildred
Grey lived it out nobly. She was known as
a good, by many who could not recognise
in her, a great and gifted woman.

CHIP.

SMUGGLING NOTES.

IN the days when high-heeled French
boots were the pride of fashion, there
was a shoemaker in London who made a
fortune by the sale of the best Paris boots
at a price which all his fellow-tradesmen
declared ruinous. He undersold the trade,
and obtained troops of customers. These
boots must be stolen, said his rivals; but
there was no evidence that they were: certainly
they were not smuggled boots, for any
one could satisfy himself that the full duty
was paid upon them at the custom-house.
The shoemaker retired from business with a
fortune. Afterwards his secret was accidentally
discovered:—although he had paid duty
for the boots, he had not paid for everything
that was in them. There was a heavy duty
payable on foreign watches; and every boot
consigned to him from Paris had contained in
its high heel a cavity exactly large enough to
hold a watch. The great profits obtained by
the trade in smuggled watches, made it possible
for this tradesman, when he had filled up
their heels, to sell his boots under prime cost.
This was worth while, again, because of
course, by the extension of his boot-trade, he
increased his power of importing watches
duty-free.

Some years later, an elderly lady and a lap-dog
travelled a good deal between Dover and
Ostend. It came to be generally considered
at the custom-house that her travels were
for the sole purpose of smuggling Brussels
lace, then subject to exceedingly high duty:
but neither the examiners of her luggage,
nor the female searchers at the custom-house
who took charge of her person, could by the
narrowest scrutiny find matter for a single
accusation. At last, when she was about to
decline the smuggling business, this lady
accepted a bribe from a custom-house officer
to make him master of her secret. Calling
to her side the lap-dog, who was to all
strangers a very snappish little cur, she
asked the officer to fetch a knife and rip the
little creature open. Like a few of the
dogs (which have sometimes even proved to
be rats) sold in the streets of London, it
gloried outwardly in a false skin; and between
the false skin and the true skin was space
enough to provide a thin cur with the comfortable
fatness proper to a lady's pet, by
means of a warm padding of the finest lace.
In the reign of Louis the Eighteenth—it may
be noted, by the way—very fierce dogs were
trained to carry valuable watches and small
articles under false skins across the frontier.
They were taught to know and avoid the
uniform of a custom-house officer. Swift,
cunning, and fierce, they were never to be