single-man's house at Chevington Friars, to put in practice the taste which was now instinctively, and with an absence of the reasoning faculty, gratified. "By George! it's nice-I have not seen so nice a room for a long time," he muttered gently. In one of his waking moments Lord Robert's eyes fell on the handwriting of a letter lying on the little table close to his couch, and it roused him with a sense of familiarity with the spider-legged characters. Surely that was his sister Jane's handwriting? How long was it since she had written to him? Yet he and Jenny used to be good friends long ago. In his selfish bachelor and widower habits he had grown out of knowledge of the old place and the old people. Lady Catherine seemed to know more of them than he knew.

Thus life and consciousness ebbed and flowed, and was sinking lower and lower, before Lady Catherine at last returned from her "home," and was told of who had been brought to her door, and in what state he came. After a great effort, she entered the room where he lay, while the doctors and attendants drew off to the farthest window, whispered and shrugged their shoulders imperceptibly-the men of them because they could not allow themselves any other display of feeling as a pendant to that of the women, who shook their heads and wiped their eyes, men and women turning their backs on the couple's last meeting, to be quickly succeeded by a last parting.

A final flash of intelligence sprang into Lord Robert's eyes with Lady Catherine's presence, and enabled him to take it in, in its entireness, for a brief moment.

Lady Catherine was still in the dimity gown and garden bonnet in which she had gone on her accustomed morning avocations. Her face was simply what it would be in her coffin- -a face deeply scarred and blemished by small-pox, but the blurredness of the features, the blearedness of the eyes, the scantiness of the hair, were gone with the recentness of the attack and the weak health which had helped to occasion them. Age had softened the destruction worked by disease as it softens most destruetions, and, like the grey lichens and mosses which cling to and surmount ruins, Lady Catherine's white hair served as powder to touch tenderly and. even to crown the wreck of her beauty. Her expression had passed from the intuitive gladness, and then the boundless despair of the girl, to the peace and freedom of the old woman who has learnt self-forgetfulness and with it self-respect, patience, sympathy. If Lord Robert had possessed the strength he could have rubbed his eyes, though he had but to shut them in order to recall the hopeless, forlorn girl in the neglected, ugly invalid dress who had been an intolerable offence to all his perceptions when she had been out with him in the Peninsula.

Lady Catherine gazed down with brimming eyes and quivering lips on the prostrate figure of her once gallant bridegroom, on the helpless bulk, the swollen, discoloured face, the iron-grey hair damp and in disorder, the breathing becoming always more laboured and stertorous.

"I am very, very sorry for your accident, Lord Robert," she said

tremulously, touching him lightly in token of reconciliation, with an open, friendly, shaking old ivory hand.

He answered her irrelevantly, and with a groan.

Lady Catherine," he said, striving to keep steady the heavy eyes fixed upon her, "if you had been spared as you were when I knew you first (by heavens! you were the loveliest, sweetest creature), you would have been the happiest as well as the finest woman in England.”

He spoke in a high strained key, as if he sought to make her believe so much in their mutual justification.

"Ah! never mind; that is all past," she sighed, hastily.

"Past," he repeated in the same key; "and I am dead beat, but I wish that, knowing everything, I had it all to begin and do over again."

"The first thing that you have to do over again, is to get well and be about once more."

She tried to speak encouragingly while humouring his fancy.

But Lord Robert had ceased to see or hear her. His beginning and doing all over again was not to be in this world!

Formosa.

FORMOSA has ever been as great an object of terror to the sailors of the China seas as was Scylla to the Romans of old. Lying in the direct line between the southern and northern ports of China, and in the stormiest part of that typhoon-tossed ocean, it would, under any circumstances, present dangers to navigators of no ordinary kind. But add to this that the distance between the island and the mainland leaves little or no sea room in case of storm, but serves only as a funnel to collect and intensify the force of the wind, while the east coast-outside which sailing vessels are compelled to pass-is a series of rugged heights, without a single harbour of any kind, and is inhabited by savage and inhospitable natives, and we have a picture of perils scarcely to be surpassed. During certain seasons of the year, storms arise with such rapidity and violence that the eastern shore is strewn with the wrecks of hapless junks and vessels whose crews and cargoes are left to contend with the fury of the waves, and the even more hostile natives. There is reason to fear that the sailors of more than one English vessel have fallen victims to the savagery of the aborigines, who have uniformly treated in the same merciless fashion the survivors from Chinese and Japanese junks. representations on the subject have been made by the Mikado's Government to the Court of Peking, and the murder of fifty Japanese sailors, who were shipwrecked last year on the south-east coast of this island, was made an important point by the Embassy despatched last year to the Chinese capital. As is usual when complaints are made at Peking of the behaviour of natives in outlying districts, the Tsung-liYamun sheltered themselves behind the excuse that the native tribes in Formosa were virtually beyond their jurisdiction, and that therefore, though they abhorred the deed that had been committed, they were quite unable to inflict punishment for it. Somewhat to their surprise, the Mikado's Government replied that, if that was so, they felt bound to take the law into their own hands; and, with that energy which has lately characterised Japanese movements, an expedition was fitted out, and has already landed in the incriminated district. How the matter will end it is difficult to say; but at present the disposition shown by a majority of the native tribes, and by the Chinese settlers, has been decidedly favourable to the invaders. The fact of this expedition being the first trial of the new military system and weapons recently adopted by the Japanese has attracted considerable attention to it in Europe, and the

result will be watched with curiosity. On this occasion we do not intend to concern ourselves with the present warlike aspect of affairs, but rather to take advantage of the interest thus excited in Formosa to give some idea of its position, its inhabitants, and its products.

Situated at a distance of about eighty or ninety miles from the mainland, its highest mountains can be easily recognised from the neighbouring coast of the province of Fuh-keen. Its discovery, therefore, by the Chinese must have been contemporary with the first gaze directed seawards on a clear day by any of the early settlers in the districts about Amoy or Foochow. And so, when Chinese historians assert that its existence first became known to their ancestors in the year 1430, they probably mean that at that date emigrants from the mainland gained that footing on the island which they have never relinquished, and which has since developed into a system of constant encroachment, by which the level country has inch by inch passed from the ownership of the natives into the hands of the intruders. At all events, when the Japanese, two centuries later, attempted to establish a colony in the island, they found there a Chinese population sufficiently numerous to be formidable, and who, by the support they gave to the natives, succeeded in driving off these new bidders for the sulphur mines and camphor trees of Formosa. Against the Dutch, who arrived off the coast in 1634, they were not so successful; and, for a time, the European invaders were able to boast of a colony which threatened to compete with Macao for the carrying trade between China and the West. Dutch priests proselytised the natives, Dutch engineers built forts and entrenchments, and Dutch merchants exchanged the products of the island for the merchandise of Europe and of China. Then followed events of a nature which belongs peculiarly to the East. It chanced that near Amoy there lived a Chinese tailor, named Iquorn, who, being of an adventurous turn of mind, launched into commercial speculations at Macao, and, finding profit in the foreign trade, visited the Dutch in Formosa, and waxed fat on the result. Having in this way acquired considerable wealth, he settled in Japan for a time, and there increased in riches to such an extent that his fleet was said to number three thousand sail. With this force at his back the quondam tailor was seized with a desire for empire. He turned his ploughshares into swords, and converted his merchant fleet into a piratical flotilla. For a time he paralysed the trade of Southern China, and subsequently-by means of some subtle diplomacy accompanied by a display of force-gained possession of the province of Fuh-keen. But he was destined to fall into the net he had set for others. At an evil moment he determined to visit Peking, in the hope of gaining the recognition of the new Tartar dynasty for his independent kingdom; but scarcely had he set foot in the capital when he was seized and cast into prison as a rebel.

His son Koksinga, who on the forced retirement of Iquorn took possession of his goods, inherited a full share of his father's love of predatory adventure; and, having learnt by experience the extreme difficulty of

gaining a secure footing on the mainland, sailed for Formosa and announced his intention of establishing a kingdom for himself on that island. The Dutch resisted his landing, but ineffectually; and, in 1661, they were driven out by the invader. In the course of the following year an expedition was sent out from Holland to recover the lost colony, but “the floating castles" were ignominiously defeated by the junks of the pirate, who died king of Formosa. His son and successor, however, failed to keep what his father had won; and, in 1683, the island finally fell again under Chinese rule. Although occupying an area nearly as large as that of Denmark, Formosa is reckoned only as a Prefecture, and is placed under the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of Fuh-keen. The "Great Bay," as the name Taiwan-given by the Chinese to the island from its shapesignifies, has always been a thorn in the side to the vice-regal Government. Though nominally under Chinese jurisdiction from north to south and from east to west, the mountain districts are still held by the native tribes, who administer their own laws, and who refuse to acknowledge fealty to the Tartar race. On the level country the Chinese emigrants have established themselves; the deputies of the Viceroy hold sway, but the limits of their jurisdiction are perfectly well understood, and are clearly defined, for the most part, by some natural boundary, such as a stream or a range of hills. Across this no Chinaman dare venture, unless he be provided with a pass from the neighbouring native chieftain; and the mountaineers, having a wholesome dread of the encroaching tendencies of the colonists, seldom encourage them to cross the border. Roughly speaking, it may be said that the range of mountains which runs from north to south, dividing the island into two parts, forms the boundary between the possessions of the native tribes and of the Chinese Government; the latter holding sovereignty over the plains which stretch from the mountains westward to the sea, and the former maintaining their positions in the wild mountain tracts which separate the backbone of the island from the rocky shore of the eastern coast.

From the days of Candidius and David Wright, in the seventeenth century, down to the present time, few foreigners have voluntarily visited the mountain fastnesses of the Formosan aborigines. The inducements to do so are very small, and the danger of venturing among them is considerable. Of trade there is none, and the jealousy with which they view the presence of foreigners serves to surround a sojourn among them with a considerable amount of risk. Who they are and whence they came is a disputed point; but it is plain that there is no affinity of race between them and the Chinese. Their features are more prominent, and they resemble much more nearly the Malays than their Tartar neighbours. Similarities have also been discovered between the dialects spoken among them and those employed in the Malay Peninsula. The probability is, therefore, that they are, equally with the Lolos of Burmah and the Miantsze of China, an offshoot from the Malay stock. At the present time they are divided into several tribes, each speaking a dialect of its own,