“What is it?” exclaimed young Mr. Threpp.  The clerk turned on his lantern.

It was Hubert, Captain Monk’s son and heir.  He lay there with a face of deadly whiteness, a blue shade encircling his lips.

JOHNNY LUDLOW.

WINTER IN ABSENCE.

    The earth is clothed with fog and mist,
      The shrivelled ferns are white with rime,
    The trees are fairy-frosted round
    The portion of enchanted ground
    Where, in the woods, we lovers kissed
      Last summer, in the happy time.

    They say that summer comes again;
      In winter who believes it true? 
    Can I have faith through days like this—­
    Days with no rose, no sun, no kiss,
    Faith in the long gold summer when
      There will be sunshine, flowers and you?

    Keep faith and me alive, I pray;
      Feed me with loving letters, dear;
    Speak of the summer and the sun;
    Lest, when the winter-time be done,
    Your summer shall have fled away
    With me—­who had no heart to stay
      The slow, sick turning of the year.

THE BRETONS AT HOME.

BY CHARLES W. WOOD, F.R.G.S., AUTHOR OF “THROUGH HOLLAND,” “LETTERS FROM MAJORCA,” ETC.  ETC.

Morlaix awoke to a new day.  The sunshine was pouring upon it from a cloudless sky—­a somewhat rare vision in Brittany, where the skies are more often grey, rain frequently falls, and the land is overshadowed by mist.

[Illustration:  GATEWAY, DINAN.]

So far the climate of Brittany resembles very much that of England:  and many other points of comparison exist between Greater Britain and Lesser Brittany besides its similarity of name.  For even its name it derives from us; from the fact that in the fifth and sixth centuries the Saxons, as they choose to call them, went over in great numbers and settled there.  No wonder, then, that the Bretons possess many of our characteristics, even in exaggeration, for they are direct descendants of the ancient Britons.

They have, for instance, all the gravity of the English temperament, to which is added a gloom or sombreness of disposition that is born of repression and poverty and a long struggle with the ways and means of existence; to which may yet farther be added the influence of climate.  Hope and ambition, the two great levers of the world, with them are not largely developed; there has been no opportunity for their growth.  Ambitions cannot exist without an aim, nor hope without an object.  Just as in certain dark caves of the world, where daylight never penetrates, the fish found there have no eyes, because, from long disuse of the organ, it has gradually lessened and died out; so hope and ambition amongst the moral faculties must equally disappear without an object in life.

It is therefore tolerably certain that where, according to phrenologists, the organ of Hope is situated, there the Breton head will be found undeveloped.