"He probably recalls somebody in quite a different station of life," he said to himself at length, and thereupon dismissed the subject.

As David walked away he smiled to himself, rejoicing at having so successfully concealed his identity, but presently he became grave.

"The old chap hasn't changed much," he said to himself. "I was uncommon foud of him once; but there, I can't forget how he failed me when I looked to him for help. If it hadn't a-been for the maid where should I be now?"

The image of his fugitive self rose up before his mind's eye; he saw the stooping figure creeping along by the hedgerow, dragging itself with fiercelybeating heart across the downs, crouching in the shadow of a gorse bush— dirty, ragged, faint with hunger and thirst. That was what he had been when Tamsine saved him!

Another vision rose before him. He saw himself divested of the dignity, almost of the outer semblance of a man; a human beast, herded with the vile, working out, with a bursting heart and a raging spirit, a meed of labor rendered horrible not so much by its nature as by the conditions under which it was enforced. Back again came the nightmare-like sense of being caged, tethered. He flung up his arms to the clear wide sky, where a great placid moon was already climbing; he had breasted the shoulder of the downs, and yonder in the hollow he saw a little twinkling light which came, he knew, from Tamsine's window.

The maid was there, thank God! He was safe, happy, free, through her.

He shook off his gloomy thoughts, as he would have shaken off the oppression of a bad dream, and strode gaily downwards to give his report of the interview.

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Tamsine migrated backwards and forwards between the farm and her parents' house during the ensuing three weeks, being careful to spend the Sundays at the latter place in order to fulfil, after the somewhat elastic rustic fashion, the obligation of residence in the parish where her wedding was to take place.

As it would have been unlucky, as well as disconcerting, to listen to the calling of her own banns, she absented herself from morning church, though she and David attended the evening service, using the same books and mingling their voices in the hymns; then they would take a little walk together down by the river or through the dewy fields, and Tamsine would point out familiar landmarks and relate anecdotes of her childish days brimming over with happiness, all the more because she could now enjoy these blissful hours without any pangs of conscience.

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""Tis so nice to feel as nobody can find fault wi' us now," she remarked on one occasion to David, passing her hand confidently through his arm, after she had given him her books to carry. "There's no need to feel afraid when we do hear a footstep, or hide ourselves away."

"Yes, but 'twas fun creepin' into the wold kiln," rejoined he, “and hearin' the steps go poundin' by an' the folks hollerin', knowin' they'd never find us. I did like those times very

well."

"Not so well as these, though?” queried she. "You couldn't ha' liked them so well as these."

He made no direct answer, but after a moment or two pressed her hand to his side:

"I'll like best of all when you an' me be joined together," he said irrelevantly.

The following lines are an almost literal rendering of a little bit of folksong from French Flanders. They were sung to the accompaniment of peculiar ceremonies at the funeral of a young girl.

Up in heaven they dance to-day,
Alleluia,

The young maidens dance and play,
They sing as they dancing go,
Benedicamus Domino,
Alleluia, Alleluia.

"Tis for Rosalie they sing,
Alleluia,

She has done with sorrowing,
So we dance, and we sing so,
Benedicamus Domino,

Alleluia, Alleluia.

This was called "La Danse des Jeunes Vierges." So late as 1840, a traveller heard it sung by the lace-makers of Bailleul. He wrote:

La cérémonie religieuse terminée, et le cercueil descendu en terre, toutes les jeunes filles, tenant d'une main le drap mortuaire, rétournerent а l'église, chantant la Danse des Jeunes Vierges, avec une verve, un élan, et un accent rhythmique, dont on peut se faire difficilement un idée, quand on ne l'a pas entendu.

"Alleluia" is, of course, the song of home-coming. "Alleluiare" is Dante's beautiful verb. He speaks of the Blessed at the Resurrection,

La rivestita voce alleluiando. (Purg. XXX., 15.)

The point, however, we wish to notice in this fragment of folk-song is the preservation of the ancient expression of religious joy by the image of a dance. There is no idea of motion allied to the endless music of the present conventional heaven. The popular hymns speak of it as a banquet, a feast, as anything you like, but never as a dance. But yet what simile for

blessedness can be compared with that of joyful motion? It is only since the sixteenth-century break with the inherited religious experience of mankind that the dance has been looked upon as profane, and unfitted to be the expression of worship and sacred joy. For instance, let us take Dante. A commentator describes the "dance" "as the rhythmic movement which Dante attributes to the Blessed as the index of their felicity." The reader will remember how, after the poet had been plunged into the water of Lethe to the strains of the "Asperges me," his Lady introduced him into the earthly Paradise

Dentro alla danza delle quattro belle. (Purg. xxx., 103.)

-her four handmaidens, who here were nymphs and stars in heaven. Again, the spirits whom he heard chanting the heavenly Sanctus, while they sang

Mossero a sua danza,
E, quasi velocissime faville
Mi si velar di subita distanza.

(Par. vii, 7.)

Once more, he describes the "carols" woven by the heavenly dancers. They danced in such various measure that some seemed to stand still and some to fly (Par. xxiv.). The word "carol," which Dante uses repeatedly, means, of course, a singing dance. Even in the restricted sense in which we now use the word, a carol is the purest expression of religions mirth and blitheness. In the Middle Ages, the angels of Christmas, for instance, as we may see in Fra Angelico's or Botticelli's pictures, not only sang, but danced. This came down from all tradition, Pagan, Christian, Jewish, and seemed to be, as indeed it is, the most natural thing in the world. To show that this danc

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ing of Fra Angelico's blessed souls or Dante's angels was no mere private fancy of their own, one need only mention the Preface of a Syrian liturgy, where the "dances of the Virtues" are introduced as a matter of course among the songs of the angels and all those other adorations of the Heavenly Host of which the Prefaces of all liturgies speak. The ancient world knew little of music apart from joyful, rhythmic motion, and did not banish the latter from its sacred solemnities. travelled so far away from this agelong religious sense of the whole race that we now smile at the tradition, supported by an apocryphal gospel, that our Lord and His disciples joined hands and danced in a ring at the Last Supper. To the Early Christians and to the whole ancient world there would have been nothing incongruous or profane in the thought. By those who first heard the story of the Prodigal Son, the "joy in the presence of the Angels" over the return of the penitent would, no doubt, be thought of as of a piece with the "music and dancing" that welcomed his return on earth. It is hardly necessary to refer to the Psalms. "Let them praise His name in the dance; let them sing praises unto Him with tabret and harp," and again, "Praise Him with the cymbals and dances; praise Him upon the strings and pipe" (Ps. cxlix.-3 and cl.-4). David himself, girded with a linen ephod, "danced before the Lord with all his might, leaping and dancing befor the Ark" (II. Sam. 6). "How glorious was the King of Israel this day," said the scornful Michal, who had watched him from her window. He answered that the Lord had made him ruler over His people; "therefore will I play before the Lord." David, the dancer and singer and harper, was the "Joculator Domini." This dance of his was a true carol-Dante's "carola." It is pleasant to think that even the

carols which we know to-day, all, so to speak, spring from and belong to Bethlehem, David's town, where David was. To large sections of our own people "psalm-singing"-"psalm-smit

ing," we believe, is the opprobrious phrase has come to be looked upon as a synonym for long-faced melancholy. But the Psalms are not tame. In a great Psalm of David there are trumpets and tambourines; "stellæ et lumen," there are stars and light; there are dark storm-clouds, "nix et grando," in the sullen masses of their angry blue. Long before David, we hear of a triumphant night, when "Miriam took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dances" (Ex. xv.-20). "To play before the Lord"-how natural the idea must have seemed to simple-hearted, primitive religious people. In a strenuous, irreligious age, there is no place for the "jongleur de Dieu."

A few precious remnants of the oldworld sacred merriment still exist in remote parts of Europe, but they are few and far between. The Spanish writer, Fernan Caballero, in one of her books describes a dance of children, in which, at every pause, they click the castanets before the image of the Divine Child with a devout exclamation. The dance of the Seises, also with castanets, is still performed on Christmas Day and Corpus Christi by the chorister boys before the High Altar of the Cathedral of Seville. The boys are dressed as pages of the time of Philip II. The above-named writer describes it as the most thrilling and touching sight it is possible to imagine. Let us hope that no reforming Pope, or rigid official clique, will ever sweep it away. If we are not mistaken, several attempts to do so have been made. The most ultra-montane Clericals often appear to desire to puritanize and rationalize the great

tradition into a religion of conventional propriety. A dancing procession takes place every year near Grenoble to commemorate the simultaneous recovery of all the invalids in the town during a procession in the sixteenth century.

One sees the scene;

the arrival of the joyful news, the benign and portly father clapping his hands, and saying: “Qu'on danse," the sudden striking up of flutes and fiddles, and the spontaneous outburst into joyful agitation. In the sixteenth century this would still seem a carrying-out of the apostle's advice: "Is any man merry? let him sing psalms."

As in Dante's heaven, so in the world we know, "rhythmic motion" is always the expression of joy. One must not talk of the flight of birds; indeed, one cannot do so. One is dumb before a swallow's flight; but is there anything in the world that gives a sensation of ecstasy like it? Or what shall we say of the fluttering of a red admiral butterfly over a clump of flowering autumn daisies, that sways and rustles in a silken west wind? Dante's image of the liberated soul, or, one should rather say, of the glorified human being, is the "angelica farfalla." Again, who has not watched the dance of the snowflakes, or upward flying sparks of thistledown, of straws in gusty weather? The dancing of flowers is, in its way,

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as beautiful as the flight of birds. that can be said has been said of this by Wordsworth in the poem of the daffodils. With some measure of his feeling, we saw recently an acre of snowdrops growing in green grass, every tiny bell a-quiver in the March wind. "They're very marvellous," said a little meek-faced man, "and very pretty." The poet and the writer and the little meek-faced man all felt in their degree the same emotion. One may very reasonably think the beautiful ancient myth of the moving, singing spheres to be true. The whole universe would thus perform a carol. This may be religiously thought of as the repetition of a sacred dance, of which the convolutions are reflected in the strange and graceful forms of creatures-the owl, the tortoise, the squirrel, the swan, the deer, the peacock, the giraffe-the color and expanse of skies and seas, the motion and the calm of wind and air, the rhythmic flight of birds and beat of waves, all the dancing play of the Divine Wisdom, "ludens coram Eo," now kissing a hand, now tossing a flower, making the movements that are caught by falling water and by leaping flame, by sea-gull and by butterfly and swallow, "per singulos dies" with changing shapes of beauty day by day, in a dance of infinite variations through unnumbered years.

minded and who seek for light. Would the adoption of the Referendum be a natural constitutional growth, or an innovation inconsistent with our Constitution, so far as such exists? Much the same questions have of late been sometimes put thus: Would the introduction of the Referendum be a mechanical or an organic change? Would

it come as an apt remedy for new maladies, a measure consonant with democracy as it exists here, or is it an institution fitted for a wholly different set of circumstances from ours? The complexity of our present Constitution is great. Upon the advocates of the Referendum it is incumbent to show that it is advisable still further to increase that complexity. Those who have denounced the Referendum, often in needlessly offensive language, as an "exotic," had, I suppose, in view the fact that it is with a nation as with an individual; character grows gradually if it grows at all; the Constitution of a nation, the embodiment of its political character, should do the same; the additions to it should be of a piece with that which exists. I venture to think that answers to these questions are of more importance than information as to how the Referendum works in Switzerland. The true Referendum may be defined as the power of the people (ie., the body of electors) to reserve to themselves the right of proposing and enacting laws or rejecting them independently of the Legislature, or of approving or rejecting any Act passed by the Legislature. The Referendum may be obligatory or optional; it may be applicable to all questions or to some; it may, as in some American States, be in terms inapplicable to "emergency legislation"; it may be confined to amendments in the written Constitution. It may be easily set in motion by a small number of electors, or it may be subject to conditions which render the use of it rare. But one essential it must have: it must be supreme over the Legislature. I do not therefore include in the category of Referendum such measures as those adopted in Illinois and Texas, which give facilities for the electorate to express formally upon proposals opinions to which the Legislature may pay no heed. The history of the measure

has been told by MM. Duguit and Monnier and by M. Esmein.' I will only mention one or two elementary facts. The Convention having adopted the principle of direct legislation, the Referendum was inserted in the French Constitution of 1793 and in that of 1795. It was the logical deduction of the "Contrat Social," the Bible of the party in power; the outcome of what its author called "le simple droit de voter dans tout acte de souverainété, drot que rien ne peut ôter aux citoyens" (Lib. IV., c. I.). At present the Referendum forms part of the Federal Constitution of Switzerland, the Constitutions of certain cantons of that country and of certain States in America, and of the Federal Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth. Wherever the Referendum is found two or three conditions exist, of which the first is a purely democratic theory of government; the prevalence of a theory that political power is derived from the people in the sense of the majority of the electors; that the members of the legislative bodies are delegates with limited instructions, to which they are bound to conform; that so far as is possible that power should be exercised directly by the voter. I do not say that this theory is carried out anywhere to the letter; it is most nearly reached wherever the Referendum exists. It follows from this theory that when the "mandate" given to the representatives or delegates does not cover the particular qustion before the country there should be a reference to the electors in order that their instructions be obtained. A second condition is that there should be either a rigid constitution or a special set of laws, marked off from ordinary legislation (constitutional laws, organic laws), not to be altered except in a special manner prescribed in the Constitution,

1 "Elements de Droit Constitutionnel," 260, et seq.