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"All my evasions vain. And reasonings, though through mazes, lead me still But to my own conviction." --MILTON.

THAT celebrated appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober might have been made with almost equal effect from the Rev. Mr. Lydiat on board ship to the Rev. Mr. Lydiat on land. I don't think his ingenious theory of the necessity for the due development of a sea-brain as well as of sea-legs could account quite satisfactorily for those uncut volumes on his cabin shelf, or altogether explain the lack of zest he had felt latterly with regard to the process of induction, as shadowed forth by Bacon. A passing glance at him, as he stands with his elbows on the bulwarks of the vessel, looking across at the watery clouds that fleck the margin of the horizon, would impress you very probably with his listlessness.

A tall young man, in a plum-coloured vest, and a coat whose clerical cut seems to demand an absence of all triviality, with a fair complexion, becomingly browned by the tropical sun, a jaw slightly underhung, but square and clean-shaved, a general squareness of forehead and shoulders, typical of an unyielding English framework, and eyes, if you take them under their present aspect, of more latent than active power. You would hardly credit him with having gone through twelve and fourteen hour days' work in the most villanously crowded parish in the crowded East of London--to the point, in fact, of bringing very dark rings round those somewhat deep-set eyes, and making it a matter of imperious necessity that he should abandon the miserably multiplying souls in the afore-mentioned crowded parish.

Perhaps this enforced rest was partly accountable for his present air of dreamy inquiry. Hitherto that constant dedication of active thought to the service of others, which more than art or literature, or any self-evolved occupation, has the power of lifting man out of himself--and which, thank Heaven! is within the reach of the merest nullity in creation--had left no room for questionings or musings of any kind. But then how had this new unsatisfactory communing with self been brought about?

Could it be that the influence of the great unpeopled space around, following upon the constant pressure of the burdens of overplus humanity, had shaken his proper parochial views? It is one thing, certainly, to learn that there is a Pacific Ocean, truthfully represented in your atlas by a speckled blue patch, and another to spend days and nights, and weeks and months in crossing it, to be engulfed by it sometimes, or maybe never to reach the shore you are steering for. And it is one thing to know that there is an ocean of doubt appearing in your theological charts as a parti--coloured patch called heterodoxy, and another to embark upon it on your own account, and to find it just as treacherous and just as unfathomable as the great Pacific itself.

But I have no warrant for referring Mr. Lydiat's abstracted air to a voyage upon such ever-explored, and yet ever-unexplored seas. I daresay, seeing that he is a young man, and just now undeniably an idle man, and--despite the clerical coat and the self-renunciatory mien it implies--a man of quick sensibilities and responsive enthusiasm, there is some human agency at work, after all, in the impressing of his sea-brain with its present sea--perplexity.

It is so evident that Bacon's directions for phenomenal research have not solved his present problem, and again, the problem is apparently of so mixed a nature--half-delightful, half unsatisfying--as would appear from the changing expression in his deep-set grey eyes, that I feel sure it would be useless to look for it either in the Organum or the ocean. For the sea, if it can be commonplace, is commonplace to-day. A regular work-a-day sea, of uniform indigo, neatly ridged over with little white curves of foam, quite at one with the wind. As for the sky, it is as uniform as the sea, only becoming a little indistinct and watery where it seems to merge into the circle around. Taking it altogether, a useful sea, but of a sort that, seen for the fiftieth time, could scarcely arouse any particular impression of sublimity.

Failing the sea, there is nothing left for it but to go below. In that little commonwealth lining the saloon are varieties as distinct as any you will find in the vast world itself; jumbled together as oddly as sometimes happens in life, though journeying in company, it is true, towards a more definite end.

From cabin No. I a dreadful family aroma of babies' partially-sucked biscuits, orange-peel, and linen drying in eight feet square of space--a scale of the cries of human young, graduating from the quavering clamour of a six-weeks-old baby to the patient chant of an elder sister. This is the cabin of the M'Brides, Irish, improvident, and impoverished. "And it's in Australia they'll make their fortune, sure!" is Mrs. M'Bride's unvarying hopeful assertion. This fund of hope is common to the tribe of M'Bride, being, in fact, the only thing Mr. M'Bride will have to bequeath them. But it is a fund that on board ship, where the dinner for the day is not a matter for forethought, seems quite inexhaustible, and by means of which every sturdy juvenile M'Bride is already appreciated at the parental rate of estimation in free Victoria.

Two doors from the M'Brides' cabin, which it may be as well to leave just now to the sanctity of its torn curtain and its privacy, is a little cabin of very different appearance--more like a boudoir, indeed, than a cabin. The berths are covered with fine white quilts. The pillowcases are frilled. On the miniature floor is spread a soft white rug. The shelves are filled with women's toilet nick-nacks, arranged in ship-shape fashion. It is all so tiny and so tidy. You think of birds in a cage or squirrels in a trap. Some faint suggestion of perfume, such as escapes from a chest of lavender--besprinkled linen, seems to detach itself from the clothes. It is a cabin that links you with the air wandering about an English garden more than with the warm brine-laden breeze from without.

But cabins are only a makeshift at best. I will spare you an inventory of the boxes and the books--passing over the little gilt keepsakes on the shelves, and even the open novel on the swing-tray--and come at once to the living presences. We are still in quest of some tangible cause for that unexplained reverie on the part of the Rev. Mr. Lydiat. And though, so far, it is only possible to assert hypothetically that there is any tangible--that is to say, any flesh-and-blood--cause at all, a scrutiny of the inmates of this fragrant cabin may help to throw some light upon the quest.

For one of them is ready to bear a very close scrutiny indeed. That sage who once defined women as one of "Nature's agreeable blunders" would have granted that Nature had seldom blundered more agreeably than in the framing of Sara Cavendish. Look at her as she lies in her berth, with half--shut eyes, and heavy hair pushed back from her delicately-veined temples. You are reminded of the Magdalen in the wilderness. Her head, a little thrown back, in a pose that would be fatal to any but faultless nostrils and well-curved lips, is the daintiest, shiniest head conceivable.

That is the real test of beauty, to come upon it unawares, with loosened hair and undiscovered bust. For I maintain that it is only spurious beauty at best which needs gaslight and a French dressmaker to bring it into prominence. Genuine beauty needs nothing but health, of which Sara is blessed with an inordinate share. Perhaps, under the board-ship régime of perpetual meals, with a little too much, as shown in her full-blooded red lips, and that faint foreshadowing of a double chin, determined by a tiny crease. But then the skin itself reflects such an opalescent light. If Madame Rachel have could approached within the most distant imitation of it, she might have found fresh victims to roast and to rob to the end of her days. That texture of skin is the purest accident, as we all know; but such accidents may sometimes alter the destiny of a kingdom. Yet Sara is by no means high-coloured, despite the redundancy of health to which she is subject. The general hue of her face is rather colourless, and just now, as the mingled green and yellow light streaming through the open port-hole travels over her uncovered neck and arms, you would almost suppose her to be plastered. Though such an illusion only helps in another sense to deepen the impression of having come upon a very fine piece of statuary, and gives a strange air of sculptured reality to the line called by artists the collier de Venus, clearly traceable where the neck merges into the shoulders.

Sara's eyes, as I have said, are half closed, and as she is not likely to open them so long as her eldest sister, Margaret, continues to read Macaulay's Essays in a cheerful monotone, I must explain what they are like. In the first place, because, as somebody has said, "Eyes are the windows of the soul," and it is possible to take a peep through a window as well as out of one; and, in the next, because I have not forgotten that the Rev. Mr. Lydiat, of ascetic principles--of almost superhuman renitence, where the affections are involved--and of a determined bias respecting his mission in life--is still standing on the forecastle, with the Novum Organum opened at the same place, and his face still full of thought. To come back to Sara's eyes. It might have been nothing but their dark setting of lash and brow, or the peculiar colouring, that almost seemed like a reflection of the sea; it might have been a something subtle in their expression, like the piercing of a mind through mere crystalline matter; it might have been none or all of these that gave them their special charm. The effect of fine eyes is often felt, like colour or music, neither of which can be analysed as to the emotions they produce, however wisely we may graduate their component parts. Sara's eyes were invariably the first attraction which lured you on to the inspection of her charming face.

But how it comes about that I enter into such a minute description of them, following the portrayal of Mr. Lydiat's attitude on the forecastle, requires thus much of an explanation.

Some few weeks ago there had been tropical Sundays, when even the vessel lay at rest, fretting, as it seemed, at the delay. For she was wont to creak complainingly all over, her sails slapping the air petulantly, her ropes stretching and straining themselves unaccountably. Metaphorically speaking, she yawned all over like a tired woman in the sulks. It is true that at these times the sea was usually of most seductive smoothness, giving vent once in a way to a long uniform heave, as if it were content that the sun out west should flatten himself in a broad warm sheet upon its treacherous surface before wishing it goodnight.

But the passengers, for the most part, were more influenced by the humours of the ship than of the sea. When she grumbled because there was no "getting on" they grumbled too. The captain, I may surmise, was chief grumbler, and being very much in the position of that pedagogue whose frown was enough to set all the little boys in the class whimpering, helped to depress his passengers proportionally during these tropical calms. Yet it was on Sundays such as these that Mr. Lydiat's sea-brain seemed to awake. You would have thought sometimes that it was the only active element on board. To begin with, he read prayers beneath the awning on deck in orthodox clerical garb. No longer the indolent young man in the plum--coloured vest, but a grave curate, with a little infusion of High Church sentiment in his priestly mien, with face clean shaven, allowing full scope for the play of his well-cut flexible mouth, with light brown hair, brushed in a broad sweep away from his square white forehead, with much sweetness of expression in his deep-set grey eyes. He seemed to find a fund of imagery in the grand desolation around. Even Father M'Donnell, the apple-cheeked Catholic priest, found it in his heart to regret that such power of exposition could not have been enlisted under the banner of the Pope. And later on, towards sunset, when all the children on board claimed him for their Sunday hour, and a little horde of M'Brides and others hedged him in, he never failed or flagged. The cadence of his voice blended so harmoniously with the subdued swish of the tired waves, that he seemed to be speaking to the measure of a music that it was only given to him to detect.

Like St. Augustine haranguing his congregation of fishes by the seaside, it would sometimes befall the Rev. Mr. Lydiat to find himself addressing a little audience of a comprehension not greatly beyond the standard attained by the fish-brain. At such times he could be marvellously succinct--simplifying each short illustration, yet driving the moral home. Any one who has seen that old picture of the saint, standing with outstretched arm by the seashore, must remember the open-mouthed interest of the fishes. It would seem that St. Augustine was telling them, from a fish point of view, of the deadly danger that lay concealed beneath the appetising wriggles of the agonised worm. Mr. Lydiat, in the same way, could deduce examples without end of the deceitfulness of appearances, pointing to the beautiful, treacherous sea, and instancing his meaning by stories that made the children as round-eyed and open-mouthed as St. Augustine's fish.

But somehow these arguments of his never took more definite shape than when the younger Miss Cavendish stole into the group of children that surrounded him. What if a mermaid, with sad oval eyes of beautiful human comprehension, had suddenly regarded St. Augustine from the midst of his staring fish congregation? Don't you think he would have fortified himself by affirming with fresh ardour that the hook lay surely concealed behind everything that was graceful--whether worm or whether sweet feminine eyes. And the more pleading the mermaid's glances, the more strenuous, I am convinced, the saint would have become.

Now, with regard to eyes, such as are potent to lure away a man's immortality, any mermaid might have envied Sara Cavendish. Sunday after Sunday--with an expression that made them look, according to Tennyson's beautiful simile, like "homes of silent prayer," Sara would fasten these speaking eyes upon the young clergyman, as he discoursed to the listening children. Sunday after Sunday the young clergyman, with inflexible resolution, would look steadfastly before him. That a woman's gaze should move him to eloquence, instead of that ardent consciousness of his Christ--given task, which had carried him unflinching through the slums and pollution of the thieves' alleys of London, was abhorrent to him. But now these Sundays were nearly at an end. Tokens of the nearness of the Australian coast had already drifted past the Henrietta Maria as she sped to the eastward before a southerly breeze. And the Rev. Mr. Lydiat, looking from the forecastle across the blank before him, saw with his mental gaze the great blank of his life to come, stretched with equal clearness before him too. He could not see where it would be absorbed into the life to come, any more than he could see where the boundary-line of the ocean--obscured, as I have said, by a watery haze--merged into the horizon above. He could see nothing clearly, either here or there. I doubt whether Sara, lying in sleepy contentedness on her berth, could have had any notion of the tumult she had raised in his soul. The greater tumult that he had forced back all expression of it until now--and now, seeing the inevitable separation surely approaching, the truth had confronted him, defying him to gainsay it. A brief outline of his life hitherto is here called for, if only to prove that it was no shallow mind that this new emotion had stirred to its depths.