States, nor from Rome, their Polish vassals have looked upon revolt as hopeless, and have submitted to the foreign yoke. Their language is forbidden in the schools and law courts of Posen, and even the streets are renamed in German, and the Polish terms are forbidden to be used. In Austrian Poland quite recently, no Polish actor was to be found, and when it was proposed to act a Polish play before the Emperor Francis Joseph, Polish players could only be obtained from the theatres at Vilna and Warsaw. Yet Austria's Polish subjects are but a million less than those of Russia, and the salt mines from which Austria derives a very considerable revenue, were the most lucrative appendage to the crown lands of ancient Poland.

(To be continued.)

SYMPATHY.

A CONVERSATION.

"You remember our conversation about Cant, Bell, and our idea that sympathy would be a potent weapon to fight it down with. Do you still adhere to that opinion now that you have had a glimpse of town work?" asked our friend Mrs. Wesley, who, you recollect, took part in that conversation, and at whose house I have been visiting for a week or two this winter. My nephew Septimus, also here, having come to fetch me home, pricked up his ears at the question, and listened for my answer.

"I freely confess," I said, "that my theories were but―and can but be-theories, for we women who lead quiet sheltered lives in our own home circle, and in the midst of our peculiar stratum of society, are incompetent to judge with any practical judgment."

"Nay, but lookers on see most of the game," said the Vicar, “our practical judgment is apt to get discouraged with its many failures in application."

"Well then, I may say that my belief in sympathy is strengthened, since I have been with you at Harwarham. I know it has quickened all the sympathy I possess to see the work here. I wish—”

"Wish what, Aunt Bell ?" asked Sep, mischievously.

"How now, Sep, am I sighing like a furnace ?"

"Only with emotional fervour !"

"You see the impertinent audacity of my nephew, Mr. Wesley!” "Ah yes, I know Sep," answered the Vicar, "but I do not laugh at your sigh; I could sigh I know," said he, with a short laugh that dispelled any notion of 'emotional fervour' on his part, “when I feel the want of sympathy, or its misappropriation, especially if it is to be the disperser of cant and shams."

"Have you been into any of the slums of Harwarham, Aunt Bell?" questioned Septimus.

Yes, I think I have seen pretty well all of them," I replied in all good faith. I found though that Mrs. Wesley and her husband were smiling, and Mr. Kelly, the curate, laughed outright, inquiring when we ladies ventured to so and so, and so and so, mentioning notorious parts of the parish.

"Well, surely I have seen some very low streets round about the church."

"They are not very aristocratic, certainly, but they are decent respectable second and third-rate Harwarham streets; those that lead off from them with their back yards and courts-those traps for disease and cages for vice-are slums, and no mistake. One knows less how to deal with those streets than with the slums, though," continued he, reflectively.

66 'How so, sir ?" asked Sep.

Why, you can take the slums by storm, i.e. you can get into them by hook or by crook, and either be kicked out to try again, or by dint of ready tact obtain a footing at once."

"Do you get any of the inhabitants to church ?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "We do get a representation, and we draw a good few to the mission services, if-always remembering that if-we speak plainly, and use no cant."

"The worst of it is," cried Mr. Kelly, our funds will not allow us to build a proper mission room, therefore we have to borrow one or other of the kitchens or house places, which of course does duty for living and sleeping to the numerous occupants of it."

"Consequently the use of our people's houses has this disadvantage, viz., that they have such bickerings among themselves, one will not go to this neighbour's house, nor another to that," explained the Vicar. "Their rows," ejaculated Sep.

"No, don't be too hard, call it lack of sympathy amongst themselves," said the Vicar, with a droll look at his wife and me.

"You can always muster plenty of sympathy for your slums, John," replied his wife.

Simply because they come and claim it. We are tolerably well known now, Kelly, I think, and whenever we show our faces we are surrounded by a clamouring lot."

"All but from the Irish colony," was Mr. Kelly's reply.

"Even there some of them are quite civil now, though they will have none of us."

"C I suppose there is a good sprinkling of Irish in your slums," inquired Septimus.

"O yes, but the Irish colony is a nest of them; you see the Irish are so quarrelsome they are obliged to get together, simply because the English will not have them among them, and the landlords tell me they cannot very readily be turned out because they are careful to pay the rent, otherwise the neighbours would insist on their exit. They are rigid Roman Catholics in faith if not in practice, and that accounts for their shyness of us. Of course we leave them entirely to their own clergy, and only ask for civility in passing through their quarters." "But now I want to know why the decent streets are harder to work than the slums ?" said I.

"Gentility!" muttered Sep.

Gentility is one obstacle, but there are others before we come to that. You know we have lost in a great measure the stratum of the middle class in those streets."

"Through want of sympathy !"

"Yes, you are right, Bessie," answered her husband. "No doubt about it, the Church left that class very much to itself, and Dissent, or the various forms of Indifferentism and Secularism have swallowed

it up."

"I think most of the young women, if not the majority of the young men, do belong to some sort of religious body," said Mr. Kelly.

"Yes, and we owe a great deal to them ourselves," exclaimed the Vicar, warmly, "for we get a good amount of help from them in the Sunday schools and other ways; but you ask how it is difficult to get at them? In the first place the shopkeepers in most cases are nonresidents cut off from us themselves, and letting off the dwelling part of the houses as warehousing, not lodging their assistants. Well, then, these young people-how are we to get access to them ?"

:

"Call on them, do not you, in the first place ?" said Sep.

"Yes, but it is difficult to do that. You cannot speak to them very well in a shop; besides their employers do not like them to waste their time, especially to the parson, so that if we went after them much we should be told pretty plainly that we were not wanted." "I never thought of that," said Sep, frowning.

"But there are ways and means," continued the Vicar.

"And Mrs. Wesley has been our right hand," cried Mr. Kelly. "I only felt a little sympathy," said Mrs. Wesley, " and I went now and then, as often as I could find time to, or find a little money to make a purchase by way of an excuse for going, and made friends."

"How did you do it?" I asked.

"Oh, I always try to remember faces, and if I had seen them at church I said so, or if John had done so I told them so, but something always crops up to say, sometimes we never mention church; try to get them, and then gradually they are led thither."

"Just as we care first for the slum people in a humanitarian way," exclaimed the Vicar. "If we were to go and thrust tracts in their faces, what good would it do? or talk in a preaching way either, but by showing as little repulsion as we can, we try to get their bodies a little decent, then we may hope for a groundwork for higher things." "But the sin you find! Can you pass that by at first ?”

"There are ways of showing abhorrence of that without abating pity for its consequences in its victims, and you are not long in finding out that even the most hardened sin is intensely cowardly, but it can't shrink altogether away from kindness before detection.”

Come, come, John, do leave off talking about your dear slums. We want to know how we women and lay folk can help in ordinary work among the middle class."

"Which part of it do you mean? 'tis just like an onion composed of layers."

"We were speaking of the second-rate shop layer then.”

A very decent layer too, if one can win it to the Church; plenty of energy to be utilised."

"How that is to be accomplished is the very crux we wish to know how to overcome."

"You ladies,—yes, your class ladies by birth,—can win them I find better than almost any one. The young women like you, and the

young men—I was going to make you vain. Well, you ladies can do good work by bringing them with your genuine friendliness and sympathy to us parsons, and we will find something for them to do."

"Yes, and," said Sep, "that is how you clergywomen and clergymen help to generate cant."

"Well said, cynical Sep!" laughed the Vicar.

"No, but hear me out," exclaimed Sep, slightly red and ashamed of his speech, "the ladies bring these people who come through flattered vanity, and that sort of thing, you think you utilise and attach them by plunging them into work,-religious work. They know nothing about it, consequently they acquire a smattering of outside service and a shibboleth of your school, the result being what I said before,-cant."

"Sep, I have not seen anything like cant at S. Samson's since I have been at Harwarham."

“Ah, but it is there, Isabel, a leaven of it," eagerly said the Vicar. "I know it, but still I trust we shall educate it out, if only we can interest and attach the canters to the Guilds, &c., the attrition with the good true members must do something. I am no judge possibly, but I think some of the meetings are both helpful and most pleasant, if the subjects to be discussed are well chosen and well sustained; they will thus go far to eradicate cant I hope, and in good time healthy principle, the outcome of a knowledge of sound doctrine, will ensue.

"I think that one great fault, a fault very common and perhaps almost peculiar to the fast life of the present day, is that a result is looked for immediately," remarked Mr. Kelly. "I am not speaking from my own observation only, for a friend who has had more experience than I have of the upper middle-class, to whom this fault is most common, was explaining this to me the other day in a variety of ways."

"Just so, Kelly, they of that class have hasted to be rich. Money is their power, and it is almost all-powerful in this age, but they think that intellectual and moral power can be wielded in the same speedy way as they can furnish a house or would plenish a feast.”

"I do not quite see the point in this allusion," said Sep.

"Why, my dear fellow, let me bring it home to you yourself without going off to the upper middle-class, of which we will speak presently; but you want a result immediately, you have no patience with