wish you not to think that I should judge you to have acted wrong; and though I am not in your own station in life, I know that you like to have, and deserve to have, as a good master the esteem and affection of all who are in your service or who are connected with you. This is why, sir, I wish to say that I for one have no feeling against Roman Catholics. I once knew an Irishman who was a Catholic, who was a very good, kind man, though not a very good gardener, for the best gardeners, as we all know, mostly come from Scotland. But this man did seem to hold more firmly to his religion and go to church more regular than most Protestants do. And he used to tell me things about the goodness of Catholic priests and Sisters of Mercy which made me feel sure that it could not be a bad tree which brought forth such good fruits. Sir, I always have thought that a most true saying of our blessed Lord about judging by fruits, for what else have we to judge by in the long-run, and it shows that our Lord went about observing what he saw. My grandfather used to tell us how a gentleman called Mr. Cobbett made a speech in his time at a meeting at Newbury, and

he said, in the old days in England the clergy shared their goods with the poor, not having families of their own, much more than they do now; though I am not blaming the parsons, because if a man is married the first duty is to his own wife and children. I have heard of other gentlemen and ladies who have become Roman Catholics, and I think that it is natural for them to become Roman Catholics when they wish to lay hold of something real and stiff in religion, just as it is for poor and uneducated persons to lay hold of the Salvation Army or some such body because it does seem more real religion.

I hope, sir, that you will pardon me for this great liberty which I take as an old servant of your family to assure you of my sentiments, and hoping that you are in good health and happiness, I remain, Sir, your obedient humble servant,

JOHN POTTS.

Then, in a very artificial and affected handwriting, came a letter from a Berkshire neighbour of Bevor's, Mrs. Jerningham, of Witch

lea Park, whose husband also had a house in Eaton Square, which the family occupied without fail from April to the end of July in every year. Two of her daughters were very well married, but two yet remained at home, very nice girls, who always did and said the correct thing, and looked bright, well dressed, and pretty, but were not thought nearly so clever as their mother. Mrs. Jerningham

wrote thus:

DEAR MR. BEVOR,

WITCHLEA PARK,

Wednesday, 27th April.

I could not help feeling some

dismay when I read that notice in the Times Not that I have any narrow feel

about you. ing or bigoted dislike to Roman Catholicism. So many men and women of the best sort are or have become Catholics, and some friends of mine among them, especially dear Lady Avenel, that it would be absurd and presumptuous on my part to condemn their religion. But I do feel that to be a Roman Catholic

does, for a man in your position, lead to great difficulties.

In the first place, it may to some extent restrict the range within which you can find a wife who is in other respects desirable. There is a great deal of inconvenience and difficulty when the husband is a Roman Catholic and the wife a Protestant, or vice versâ, and many people don't like to expose their daughters to the risk either of conversion after marriage, or to that of discovering too late after marriage that a difference of opinion and religious practices, which seemed during honeymoon fervours easy to surmount, were in the humdrum of marriage life not so easily manageable. Then there is the difficulty about the education of the children in mixed marriages. On the other hand, if you marry a Catholic girl your choice is limited by their paucity of numbers, I mean among those whom you could otherwise marry; and then I am not at all sure whether that convent education which so many of them receive is the best kind of education for a wife and woman of the world to have had. Mrs. Aimless, who had such an education, told me that it

had given her the most extraordinarily exaggerated idea of the pleasures of the world, and that she is only just beginning at the age of fifty to discover how hollow many of these pleasures are. Of course you might be very fortunate in finding the right sort of Catholic girl-but I doubt it. If you could find a girl who had been bred in our way, but would become a Catholic for your sake, it would perhaps be the best plan. There are some girls who would do this, I am sure, but it often would cause an unpleasant breach in their families, and it is a most disastrous thing to marry a girl against the wish of her family.

You secure yourself

a number of enemies of the worst and closest kind for life, and she herself would probably regret the marriage, or be soured and embittered by the quarrel with her own relations. This would not, of course, happen if all parents were like me, tolerant in matters of religion, and not expecting every one, even our children, to think in the same way as we do; but such parents are not very common, though many people express tolerance. When it comes to action their tolerant theories mostly break down. I am sure