1666, 'some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City.' The sight, however, did not much alarm the family, 'so went to bed again, and to sleep.' But in the morning it is plain that there is an infinite great fire,' and that night it had increased, 'in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame.' 'It made me weep to see it. The churches, houses and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine.' So, on the Sunday following, 'I to church, where our parson made a melancholy but good sermon; and many and most in the church cried, specially the women.' And on the last Sunday of that month, 'Up, and to church, where I have not been a good while; and there the church infinitely thronged with strangers, since the fire came into our parish; but not one handsome face among them, as if, indeed, there was a curse, as Bishop Fuller heretofore said, upon our parish.'

Even the Fire, though he dreamed of it every night, did not destroy the good spirits of the Clerk of the Acts. One Sunday, he says, 'My taylor's man brings my vest home, and coat to wear with it, and I like myself mightily in it, and so does my wife.' On a Christmas Day, Mrs. Pepys sleeps long, 'having sat up till four this morning, seeing her maids make mince-pies. I to church where our parson Mills made a good sermon. Then home, and dined well, on some good ribs of beef roasted, and plenty of good wine of our own, and my heart full of true joy; and thanks to God Almighty for the goodness of my condition at this day.'

Once he goes to Hackney Church,

'chiefly,' as he says, 'to see the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great store, and very pretty.' And on another Sunday, ‘After dinner I did go by water alone to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done.' And again, on a Sunday afternoon, to the same church, 'thinking to see Betty Michell; and did stay an hour in the crowd, thinking by the end of a nose that I saw, that it had been her; but at last the head was turned towards me, and it was her mother, which vexed me.'

Alongside of these merry notes, however, are much more serious comments. Mr. Gifford preached on the text, 'Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, and all things shall be added unto you.' Pepys says: 'A very excellent and persuasive, good and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy.' Mr. Stillingfleet preached at Whitehall Chapel. 'He did make a most plain, honest, good, grave sermon, in the most unconcerned, and yet easy and substantial manner, that ever I heard in my life.' 'To my great joy,' he says again, 'I find Mr. Frampton in the pulpit; and I think the best sermon, for goodness and oratory, that ever I heard in my life. The truth is, he preaches the most like an apostle that ever I heard man; and it was much the best time that ever I spent in my life. at church.' The text was from Ecclesiastes: 'But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the years of darkness, for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity.'

It seems a strange text for the applause of Pepys, rejoicing as he was in the midst of his years. It is to be hoped that the preacher mitigated somewhat the pessimism of the Scripture, and emphasized the vanity of the present rather than the vanity of the future. Probably what impressed Pepys was the setting forth of the seriousness of life. Back of all the frank confidences of the diary, there is a sufficient disclosure of a serious mind. The Pepys who dons the camlet cloak, and who wonders what the people think when for the first time he wears a periwig to church, and who inspects the congregation with a perspective glass during the sermon, looking at the pretty women, was at the same time, 'the right hand of the navy,' a man of large and important duties, 'infinitely busy,' as he says, and burdened with responsibility. The difference between him and his most dignified and substantial neighbors was not apparent at the time. 'He was a philosopher,' said Jeremy Collier, 'of the severest morality.' Indeed, the principal difference is that other men are judged by their public manners, but Pepys by all his private thoughts.

When Pepys came to his last illness,

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in the seventy-first year of his life, and the thirty-fourth after the conclusion of his diary, he was attended by the nonjuring Dean of Worcester. The Dean said: 'The greatness of his be haviour, in his long and sharp tryall before his death, was in every respect answerable to his great life; and I be- · lieve no man ever went out of this world with greater contempt of it, or a more lively faith in everything that was revealed of the world to come.' He added: 'I never attended any sick and dying person that dyed with so much Christian greatnesses of mind, and I doubt not but he is now a very blessed spirit.' 'He was universally beloved,' says Evelyn, 'hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation.'

Thus did the church and the world praise him. No doubt, he joined honestly enough in the words of the church service: 'We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.' But the prayer in which these words occur is called, very properly, a 'General Confession.'

RACHEL MARQUIS paused a moment with her hand on the library-door. She had had John placed in here because it was the room she herself loved best, and she knew that it was here she would prefer to sit beside him in these last hours of waiting. Yet she had hesitated to come down, and even now, with her hand on the door-knob, she lingered again to re-strengthen herself before entering. The very unusualness of an unfamiliar sight in the familiar room would add, she knew, to the sharp strangeness of the whole event. She almost hoped, as she waited this moment, for another practical duty of some sort, which would postpone again her entrance to the room.

But no sound came from any part of the silenced house, and she opened the door and entered. The long casket stood awkwardly across the blank fireplace, for she had chosen to give no direction to the undertaker and he had followed his own professional judgment. Everything was arranged, however, with a sort of intention which indicated the intrusion of the professional into the private. In spite of the stronger feeling of the moment, Rachel Marquis noticed this, with sharp disapproval. But she went directly to the chair which had been placed beside the casket and seated herself, bowing her head long on her folded arms before she looked on the familiar face beside her.

It was now only twenty-four hours since the strange accident had happened, and she had not yet adjusted herself, even so far as to determine her

fundamental emotion. It was grief, of course, but the kind or degree of that grief was still undefined. The hours since they had brought him home had been so full of the unfamiliar practical things which arise at such a time, of the sudden necessities and small perplexities which muddle and chafe sorrow, that there had been scarcely a moment for her to look consciously at the great fact. Even now, as she covered her eyes, to be the more alone with herself, she felt rather a welcoming of momentary inactivity, than the relaxation of grief. She realized, with a sort of pang of disapproval, that she did not need to relax from any tension of anguish. She did not know what she wished to say to herself in this communion. She was sorry, bitterly sorry; but what elements went into the making of that grief?-She could not yet tell.

So she leaned with covered eyes, almost as if she were waiting for something outside of herself to give her a cue. As the minutes passed, however, the great simple fact that John was dead and that his place beside her would now be empty, engrossed all supplementary feelings, and her genuine regret had its way. She wept long, and ever more bitterly, absorbed, as one may be, in a mere physical expression of grief. The activity of sorrow overcame thought for the time, and left her no energy for analysis of feeling. Death alone seemed enough to weep over, and her tears still fell.

At last, as if having reached a natu

ral period, she rose and moved away to the window and sat down there, in a quiet reverie of sadness. She was sorry for the life cut off, shocked at the abruptness and completeness of the tragedy,-John himself, she was sure, the assertive, energizing John, would have hated this sudden subduing of himself, and she sympathized with such revolt, -sorry, sorry for it all.

As she thought, she looked gravely out across the garden, the gay stretch to which John had given so much time. She had never understood his devotion to that garden. He had not been ready to spend money on things to give æsthetic pleasure in the house, although in practical matters he had been willing enough to make outlays, ever since his business had been secure. She thought of their new car, of the signs of prosperity in their living. 'Poor John!' she said at last with a deep sigh, when, aware of the nodding line of rare dahlias on which her eyes were resting, she thought of all the pains he had taken in the propagation and selection of them. She had come to recognize this lavishness of care and money as a sort of blind expression of the one æsthetic element in his nature, and had felt a quiet approval of it. 'Poor John!' she sighed again, and turned from the window to go.

But even as she did so, the simplicity of her mood passed, and the old complexity of feeling returned with a keenness which was for the moment bewildering. As she left the window, the long black shape across the fireplace confronted her again, and she paused, startled anew; it was so strange and so tremendous a thing in her room.

For the library was, above everything else in the world, hers. It was such a room as shows it has been taking on character through succeeding decades, cumulative of its type, slowly drawing to itself an atmosphere of fineness and

greatness. The credit of it belonged only remotely to Rachel Marquis. She was the possessor, but not the maker of it. She had kept it and loved it, but her own contribution to it had been slight. A few shelves of new books not yet mellowed down to the tone of the others, standing as if waiting to be proved, and a bit of renewing of texture here and there, whose freshness showed need of the softening of time, were the only marks of her hand or taste. But it was such a room as any lover of the long effects of books would cherish.

In the midst of its harmonies, the heavy black box undoubtedly looked harsh and intrusive. Rachel recognized, as a sort of confidence with herself, that bringing it here was an invasion. Because she loved the room herself she had placed John here, without thought of the inappropriateness of the act. But now the incongruity of the choice struck her. Why should he be brought here, she thought pitifully, to the room he never frequented, where she scarcely welcomed him, she acknowledged? Why should she sit beside him here, when she had so seldom done so before? She remembered very well the manner with which he occasionally sought her here, tentative, unfamiliar, and yet assertive. She had resented every element of that manner. Anywhere else in the house he was more nearly himself; here everything she did not desire in him was accentuated.

It had been, she thought, with an instinctive desire to do the best for him in every way, that she had directed that he should be placed here; just as she had ordered everything of the choicest and had given her most careful attention and taste to every detail. But this thought had been a failure.

'Poor John!' she said gently once more, with a pity in her thought all the greater for this very incongruity, as she came over and stood beside him.

But as her eyes rested on his face, she felt almost compelled to withdraw the phrase. The dead man seemed to allow no such pity. The unfamiliar in the familiar, which is stranger than a new thing, held her startled attention as she looked. She had thought that she knew John Marquis to the last shred of his character, but death seemed to have laid a fineness she had never known over the stubbornness and taciturnity of the face. The dignity of the last great experience of his life seemed to mark him. He seemed to be gathering himself away from her pitying kindness. Very soon she went out again and closed the door.

When Richard Hughes, the last of his family, left his mother's old home to John and Rachel Marquis, no one had wondered. Rachel was a sort of cousin and John, too, a distant connection by somebody's marriage. And they lived in the town and nothing was more natural than that he should give them a home there, and whatever else he had to leave.

What no one knew but Rachel was that Richard Hughes had wished to marry her, and that she had refused him and chosen John Marquis instead. Richard Hughes, fifteen years her senior, quiet and inexpressive, shut in with books and remote from life, was far less to her mind than John Marquis, who was of her own generation, with whom she went to parties and talked the light talk of youth, and had a thousand things in common, as she thought. John was bright and jolly, and played tennis and danced with her and took her out in a canoe, and was sweettempered and loved to laugh, and between times talked seriously about the business he was starting and the money he expected to make. John belonged to the whole format of her life at that time, and it was perfectly natural to

choose to marry him, with the expectation that life would go on as she and John had both known it and liked it in other homes, comfortable, sensible, ambitious of practical things, real, as their kind would call it. It seemed an impossible thing for her not to marry John.

In the first years of their marriage she was proud of coming quickly to understand John's business. She was proud of her management and her welltimed economies, proud that John could talk affairs over with her with satisfaction, that she was beginning to take the place her mother and other successful women had taken in practical life. But after two or three years had passed, the space taken by practical things in her life began to shrink; her familiarity with them detracted from their interest and allowed her to dispose of them more readily. She began to feel a restlessness which called for new interests.

At the same time John's affairs were not prospering. Difficulties he could not manage hampered him. All Rachel's advice and economies were of little help among the inevitable conditions of the time. She was becoming tired of the continual effort to acquire, and impatient of the atmosphere of practical things. But she made a show of readiness when she suggested that they give up the cheerful modern home they had fitted about themselves, with the conventions of comfort and the furnishings and decorations to which they had been adapted.

It was just at this time that Richard Hughes left them his home and the little money he owned. Nothing could have been more opportune for them. Whatever other feelings John may have had were absorbed in sheer relief at the assistance the bequest brought him. The money, with that from the sale of their own house, tided him over his difficulties and even helped to develop