" The founders of the Republic were not fools, and while they did not, as Gladstone seems to intimate, have the inspired wisdom to develop a wonderful Constitution by sheer intuition unaided by experience, they did have the ability to make of their very errors the stepping-stones to a higher destiny.

But is this conquest of Sicily to be the extreme limit of our campaign?" "Heaven," answered Pyrrhus, "alone can give us victory and success; but these conquests would merely prove to us the stepping-stones to greater things.

Lady Egerton bowed stiffly to the recognising smile the dowager now condescended to bestow; but Sarah, remembering a certain handsome lord in the family, was more urbane, determining at the moment to make the promotion of her mother and sister stepping-stones to greater elevation for herself.

Bugeaud, Lamoricière, Cavaignac, and Changarnier were his four stepping-stones to advancement.

I'm a great believer in a man making his own stepping-stones anyway," she went on with a friendly smile; "we ought to rise up on ourselves, like the poet says, and not on our cousins.

The latter prefers to make Madame Loisel and her husband chiefly of putty so that they may illustrate the blind thrusts of accident rather than the power of personality to turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.

I remember Jeeves, who, however much he may go off the rails at times in the matter of dress clothes and in his advice to those in love, has always had a neat turn of phrase, once speaking of someone rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.

It is well that men of lofty genius and pure patriotism should learn, equally with the most shallow empiric or the most self-seeking demagogue, that false steps in politics can rarely be retraced; that concessions once made can seldom, if ever, be recalled, but are usually the stepping-stones to others still more extensive; that what it would have been easy to preserve, it is commonly impossible to repair or to restore.

History is a record not merely of human sufferings,these are inevitable,but also of the stepping-stones of progress, which indicate both the permanent welfare of men and the Divine hand which mysteriously but really guides and governs.

Men who advance the history of the world make stepping-stones of their own lives.

Upon stepping-stones of our slain selves we mount to new altitudes.

A horrible story it was, for when their eyes were thrust out with needles they were led to a causeway, and those who crossed the stepping-stones without stumbling were taken back; and the priest thought of the assembled horde laughing as the poor blind men fell into the water.

Work had to be found for him, and Shakespeare, whose difficulties were stepping-stones to his triumphs, gave him Touchstone and Feste, the Porter in Macbeth and the Fool in Lear.

In the former case, we have the marked events, which are, as it were, the stepping-stones of biography,events belonging to the narrative of the time,and the individual receives a reflected light from many men and things.

"Knowledge and virtue are, emphatically, the stepping-stones to individual distinction.

[Illustration: Valentine & Sons, Ltd. LANERCOST PRIORY AND STEPPING-STONES.] CHILLINGHAM CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND =How to get there.=Train from King's Cross.

Walls, outbuildings, the quaint cellar-hut, even the diamond-shaped stepping-stones along the way, all help to make up a characteristic colonial scene.

The men, who are always with them, stride on erect and unburdened, but when they come to a difficult place they "kindly" pile stepping-stones for their patient pack-animal wives, "just as they would prepare the way for their ponies.

I must notice here a little picture by Adrian Vander Werff, in which the Virgin, carrying her Child, holds by the hand the old decrepit Joseph, who is helping her, or rather is helped by her, to pass a torrent on some stepping-stones.

There were a half dozen stepping-stones between the path we were on and the place where it began again on the opposite side.

Now, journeying rapidly west, our faces set towards the Mayfield hills, we passed two or three small, cold brooks, on stepping-stones, where the dark sky, set with stars, danced in the ripples.

"Mount," I whispered, as he lingered waiting for us at the stepping-stones in the dark, "some one has passed this trail since I stood here an hour ago."

Before she knew what instinct had taken her there, she found herself standing by the four little gardens, listening to the cheerful dance of the water among the stepping-stones, and looking at the small footsteps of the children, which were printed all over their property.

"Admitting that, by keeping mid-channel, she goes clear of White Stone and Frogs," he said, giving to Throgmorton's its vulgar name, "he must be a wizard, to know that the Stepping-Stones lie directly across his course, and that a vessel must steer away northerly, or bring up on rocks that will as surely hold him as if he were built there.

The front entrance had no porch; and beneath the door, as stepping-stones of entrance, lay two circular slabs of wood resembling sausage blocks, one half superposed.