Welsh Journals

THE INDUSTRIOUS APPRENTICE. HIS name was Thomas Arbuthnot Edwards and he was very good, and hers was Mary Johnson and she was happy. A dreary A.B.C. shop in London was their meeting place, and thither they repaired at lunch time, she for rest and a little food, and he for the opportunity of quiet and study, with enough nourishment thrown in to serve as an excuse for his presence-or rather those were their original reasons, for, in time, their object was each other. Every day for months past he had sat himself down on the uncomfortable horsehair seat, taken a book from his pocket, spread it on the cold marble-topped table in front of him and then and there had set to work to digest it-the digestion of his meagre meal could cause him no uneasiness. His books were chiefly those that had some bearing on law, which was his ladder of advancement, but he was far from resting content with that alone. He intended to be Cultured with a very large capital C, and in pursuance of this ambition had read through Paradise Lost and the Historical plays of Shakespeare, Sesame and Lilies and the poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, besides several novels of Thackeray, Dickens, and Miss Corelli. He knew the names, and something more, of many great men, including Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, Bergson, the Hon. John Collier, Swift, Tolstoy, Homer, Sophocles, whom he was apt to confuse with Socrates, Richard Wagner and Cesare Borgia, and could bring them into his conversation quite easily. But for all this he was a nice boy with a certain strength of moral purpose and kind human eyes. She was of a different sort altogether young-she could not have been more than eighteen-with dark hair and eyes that were perpetually on the verge of laughter, a short lithe figure that spoke of animal health, and movements that were both free and a joy to look upon. Her voice was cheerfully and frankly Cockney and she was beneath him." She had noticed him for several weeks and had become attracted to him, and womanlike she grew in time to want to mother him and perhaps attract him also. He was so very serious and yet his eyes were kind. She sat by him for several days before the ice was broken, but in the end, as women do, she had her way. Could yer tell me where Charles Street is ?" she asked him. He looked embarassed and answered hesitatingly. Er-yes I I'm just going there,— that's where my office is." "P'raps you'll show me then, I'm awful bad at finding new places." He caught sight of her eyes as she said it, and he thought them beautiful, and was glad. Certainly," he said; and they left the A.B.C. together. And so the ice was broken. She had noticed his office address on several of his papers. After this you could see them sitting together at lunch time, she all animation and humour, and he a little puzzled. She always puzzled him she was so different from anything he had met before she seemed so careless, so completely absorbed by the ever-exciting present. And all the time he was a little nervous. At one moment he resented her intrusion into his reading hour,-at another he would crown her as a goddess, until, suddenly, she would swoop through all pretences to earth and laugh him into confusion; she made, he had to own, but a poor heroine in a novel Oh chuck it Tom," she would say at length. What's the use of sayin' I'm like these silly old people of yours after all I am alive, which is more than they ever were." His attempts to interest her in Culture were doomed to failure from the beginning. She was always laughing at him: and he thought her far too free," yet liked her freedom." One day, when he had a headache, she shocked him greatly. Poor old boy she said, I am sorry," and stroked his hand gently. He removed it hurriedly, blushing he was tingling all over. "Why not? she persisted smiling, and she stroked the sleeve of his coat and laughed him into acquiescence. She was queer. Sometimes he would ask himself what her game was, but she so obviously was not playing any game, was indeed so transparently honest that the query was absurd. It was her frank humanity that puzzled him, as it puzzles so many others. She was too real. And his work suffered. It was not only the luncheon hour that was now curtailed, for even in his evenings he found her present to his thoughts, persistently and increasingly present. He found himself despising books and was instantly shocked. But somehow Culture with its'big C and Mary would not be mixed he began to see the cross-roads. One day in summer she proposed that they should spend a Sunday on the river with her brother and his girl, and rather fearfully he accepted. The great day had come. A short way from them the boat was fastened to a tree and they were sitting