hope fades from his sisters' faces, he
drinks and takes to opium-eating--and worse. He comes home from a
short absence, wrecked in body and soul. After this there is no rest
in the house. He sleeps in the room with that small, persistent
father of his, and often there are sounds of horrible strugglings
within it. And the girls lie awake, sick with fear, listening, till
their ears grow heavy and dull, for the report of their father's
pistol. At morning, the drunkard will stagger out, and look perhaps
into this glass, that gives him back more than all his despair.
"The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it," he
stammers; "he does his best--the poor old man! but it's all over with
me."

I see him go headlong at last and meet his end in the room above
after twenty minutes' struggle, with a curious desire at the last to
play the man and face his death standing. I see the second sister
fight with a swiftly wasting disease; and, because she is a solitary
Titanic spirit, refuse all help and solace. She gets up one morning,
insists on dressing herself, and dies; and the youngest sister
follows her but more slowly and tranquilly, as beseems her gentler
nature.

Two only are left now--the queer father and the eldest of the four
children, the reddish-eyed girl with the small hands, the girl who
"never talked hopefully." Fame has come to her and to her dead
sisters. For looking from childhood into this livid glass that
reflected their world, they have peopled it with strange spirits.
Men and women in the real world recognise the awful power of these
spirits, without understanding them, not having been brought up
themselves in front of this mirror. But the survivor knows the
mirror too well.

"_Mademoiselle, vous etes triste_."

"_Monsieur, j'en ai bien le droit_."

With a last look I see into the small, commonplace church that lies
just below the parsonage: and on a tablet by the altar I read a list
of many names. . .

And the last is that of Charlotte Bronte.

THE SMALL PEOPLE.

_To a Lady who had asked for a Fairy Tale_.

You thought it natural, my dear lady, to lay this command on me at
the dance last night. We had parted, two months ago, in London, and
we met, unexpectedly and to music, in this corner of the land where
(they say) the piskies still keep. And certainly, when I led you out
upon the balcony (that you might not see the new moon through glass
and lose a lucky month), it wa