CHAPTER XII.

"You need not tell Jack," Georgy had said to me when we made the appointment, with a sudden smile and half blush; but I resisted the suggestion, and told Jack at breakfast that I should call upon Miss Lenox at noon.

"I am so glad!" said he, "for, on my word, I am too busy to go near her in the daytime. Tell her I should like to have gone with you, but must dig, dig, dig, or I shall never pass those examinations."

I have always been glad I was true to Jack in the letter of my actions. As for the spirit, it is hard for any young fellow of twenty, with ardent impulses just awakening, to keep it cribbed within prudent limitations. Georgy's smiles had thrown a sudden illumination into my soul, and I understood myself better than I had done yesterday. I had hitherto thought myself a quiet fellow, but nothing to-day could cheat me out of the knowledge of my youth.

I found Georgy in a little back parlor, the third room of Mrs. Dwight's gorgeous suite, curled up on a blue sofa in a white morning dress of the simplest make, and her hair on her shoulders in the old fashion, quite transforming her from the brilliant young lady she had seemed the night before. She did not move as I came in, but lay still, pale and heavy-eyed, and stretched out a little lifeless hand. "I am too tired to lift my head," she said plaintively; and I, feeling myself an intruder, proposed to go away at once.

"Oh, nonsense, you foolish boy!" she cried, laughing. "That is the very reason I wanted you to come. I am always dreary after excitement, and I knew you would put me in good spirits. Sit down."

I took a chair at the other side of the fireplace.

"Why do you go away so far?" she asked pettishly. "Are you afraid I shall eat you? Come here;" and she indicated a chair close by her sofa at which I had looked longingly while fearing to venture so near.

"There!" she said with an air of comfort, and looked into my face with the open-eyed simplicity of a child. "Oh, Floyd," she exclaimed, but under her breath, "I am so glad to see you again! Are you glad to be here with me?"

"Very glad: it is not worth while saying how glad."

"Why not? I never enjoyed anything half so much as I enjoyed last evening, and half of it was because you were looking on. Tell me honestly now, was I a success?"

"So great a success that I wondered so superb a belle cared to speak to a boy like me. I often used to think of your future, Georgy, and had many brilliant dreams for you: I have no doubt that you will fulfil them all."

She had quite lost her air of weariness, and flashed into life and brilliance, and, starting up, was so close to me that I could feel the warmth and fragrance of her cheek and hair. I should have drawn away my chair, but that she had herself placed it; and now she fastened her little slippered feet on the rounds and looked into my eyes thus closely with the enchanting freedom of a child.

"It is so nice to hear you say such things!" she ran on, cooing into my ear. "I am so glad you meet me kindly! I have cried sometimes to think that my naughtiness at The Headlands had quite estranged you."

"Oh no. Why should you blame yourself?"

"Because I was to blame. But, Floyd, if you only knew what I have suffered you would forgive me. Say that you forgive me."

She slid a slim satin hand into mine. I was not at all certain to what she was alluding, but I took pleasure in assuring her that if I had anything to forgive, I forgave it from my heart.

She withdrew her hand after a time with a sudden hauteur and caprice of prudery, which was perhaps one of those delightful little ways to which Thorpe had alluded.

"I missed you so after you left Belfield," she went on, her color deepening as she spoke. "Everything seemed dull. No matter what we tried to do, it seemed duller than what had gone before."

We were all of us strong in quotations in those days; accordingly I quoted--

"Peter was dull: he was at first Dull--oh, so dull! so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote or rehearsed, Still with the dulness was he cursed-- Dull--beyond all conception dull."

"Oh, how clever!" she exclaimed. "Did you write it?"

"Well, no: I think not."

"But you can do such things. You are so clever, everything is easy to you. That is why I always liked you better than any one else. You have sympathy, wit, imagination. You understand things up to the heights and down to the depths. Harry Dart is a little like you: he has wit and imagination, but he is flippant, he has no sympathy. Poor old Jack has plenty of sympathy, but neither wit nor imagination."

"Nevertheless," said I, trying to control my voice, "it is Jack who has won you: the rest of us are nowhere. He is the lucky one of us three."

"Do you think him lucky?" she asked with a trembling, uncertain little laugh. "I am very grateful to him for trying to win me: not many would have done it, knowing all the circumstances of my family--all our faults and humiliations. I am not like other girls, Floyd. They may fall in love, and strive and hope and wait, with poetic dreams and trembling desires, to end in rapturous fulfilment. Not so with me. I must marry early, and marry a man who has wealth, to help those who expect everything from me. My destiny came to me ready-made: I accepted it. The poetry and the romance and the wild wish to love and be loved, as I might be if I could afford to wait, were all put by for hard, practical common sense."

I could see only the sweet pathetic droop of the lips, for her face was turned away and downward. There was a moment's silence between us, but she broke it with another of those uncertain little laughs and a glance at me. "I don't know why I have told you this," she said softly. "Don't think I under-value Jack. He has all the best qualities a man can possess for success in life, but none of those essential for winning a woman's heart. Why, Floyd--But tell me, could you do your stupid old lessons with me looking over you?"

Our eyes met, and we both laughed: I shook my head.

"Oh, but Jack can," she cried triumphantly. "He amuses me that way sometimes, and my fascinations never disturb the even tenor of his thoughts: he will plod on with his foolish old mathematics with my head on his shoulder. There! I oughtn't to have said that," she added with a little grimace. "Don't tell Jack."

I certainly had no thought of telling Jack.

"As for you, Floyd," she went on more softly, "you will never grow so hard-hearted. To the end of your life all the beautiful faces in the world will set you dreaming. Do you think I have forgotten the old days when you told me about Mignon and Rosalind, Mary Queen of Scots, Helen, Cleopatra, and Gretchen in that tiresome German poem you used to be so fond of reading. Even the thought of those fair women--some of them mere poetic creations, others mortal women long since gone to dust--used to cause you more heart-throbs than Jack will ever feel for all the rosy cheeks and bright eyes that are close beside him."

"Upon my word," said I abruptly, "you don't begin to know Jack's feeling for you."

"Pshaw! That is what he is always telling me. I know he wants to marry me: he has a talent for the domestic. His most romantic dream is of a fireside, an easy-chair and me." She looked up at me and laughed. "I suppose," she went on with a resigned air, "that I shall have to wear aprons and make puddings. But enough of our prosaic ménage: I shall not be married for a year yet. Talk to me about something else--about your mother, Mr. Floyd and Helen--about everybody except that odious Mr. Raymond."

"My mother is in New York with my aunt, Mrs. Woolsey," I returned. "We were all--my mother, Helen and Mr. Raymond, and I--at Mr. Floyd's house in Washington through the holidays. I have seen none of them since."

Georgy looked at me with peculiar intentness. "Tell me about that," she said eagerly.

"About our visit? Oh, it was pleasant. Mr. Floyd had planned it several times, but something had always happened hitherto to prevent it. Of course we saw constantly all the foremost people. Mr. Floyd had a dinner-party every night, and my mother and Helen were no end of belles."

"Helen! little Helen a belle?"

"You would have thought so. She presided at the table, and the old men were in ecstasies over her beauty, grace and grand manners. Mr. Floyd was so happy and proud he could not keep his eyes from her."

"She is only fifteen," observed Georgy, a little dissatisfaction clouding her lovely face. "She is too young to be in society. But she has everything, can do everything: it has always been so. Oh, if I were that girl!--I suppose you are in love with her, Floyd."

"I in love with Helen?" I did not say any more. Helen was a tall, slim girl now, but with a frigid air about her which indisposed me to admiration. How different from Georgy, whose smile and glance thawed reserve and drew me close to her! I did not define the meaning of the warm lovelight in her eyes, nor ask whether it was a perpetual fire, a lure to all men, or merely a sign for me. Sitting beside her, I was conscious of an atmosphere emanating as it were from the warmth and kindness of her smile and glance--an atmosphere which in itself was delicious and complete, predisposing me to dreamy, happy silence. To be near her was to feel in a high degree the beauty and power of woman: full of loveliness as were the arch, mobile face, the glorious hair, the eyes with their life and tenderness, the perfect lips, they were but a small part of her charm, which seemed to breathe from the statuesque pose of bust and neck and head, and the supple grace of her every movement.

She questioned me minutely concerning Mr. Floyd. He was no longer in office now, but was spending his time at The Headlands with Mr. Raymond and Helen until I should be ready in July to sail with him for Europe. It was quite easy to perceive that the moment we touched upon this new subject Georgy's composure and gayety were alike banished, and as I knew that reasons existed which made The Headlands and Helen's society forbidden ground for her, I would have changed to other topics; but she kept on pertinaciously in her questionings until, with all my wish to please her, I grew weary.

It was quite as well, however, that my first enchantment should be a little abated before I left her, and I went away thinking for a time more about her curiosity concerning Helen and Mr. Floyd than about the rose on her cheeks and the light in her eyes. I had no intention of bidding her a final good-bye when I shook hands with her, but it fell out that more than two years were to pass before I looked upon her face again.

I think my mental equilibrium was perhaps a little disturbed by this interview with her. She had--perhaps carelessly, perhaps with some faint suggestion of truth--said some things which I could not forget. Had she not told me she liked me better than anybody else? What did she mean? how much did she mean? I knew that she spoke heedlessly at times--that she possessed no intellectual discipline, no mental accuracy to measure the force of her words. I knew, too, that coquetry and feminine instinct impelled her to use her strongest weapons against any masculine adversary. Yet, subtracting all these influences from her speech, it was still left fraught with delicious meaning. I had no wish to wrong Jack, but my vanity was tickled by the suggestion that I had something which was my own hidden treasure. I found a line which suited the sentimental nature of my thoughts. "The children of Alice call Bertram father." I used to repeat it to myself with exquisite pain, and think of the time when I should see Jack with his wife beside him, their children at their feet. "The children of Alice call Bertram father." I was impressed with the deep romance of common life, and wrote more bad verses at that period than I would have confessed to my dearest friend.

Harry Dart, who was the closest observer of our coterie, was not long in making the discovery that I was despondent about something, and presently taxed me with being in love with Georgy Lenox. I found myself terribly vexed with him, and also with myself, but not on my own account. I could not reply to his raillery. It seemed to me horribly unfair for him to steal my shadow of a secret and then proclaim it aloud; but I was not so badly off but that I could stand what he said about myself. In fact, I was glad to be held up to ridicule, and, thus disillusionized, see my fault in its true colors. It seemed to me unworthy of Harry to attack a defenceless girl in this way, engaged, too, as she was to his cousin. Had I not known him all my life as well as I knew myself, I should have suspected that something underlay his malice--that she had injured him in some way, and that he was ungenerous enough thus to gratify an unreasonable spite.

Jack and I were out one evening, and returning entered our sitting-room together, and found Harry there with two or three men not belonging to the college, and among them Thorpe. It was evident to me that they changed their subject as we entered, but the talk at once flowed again, and Harry excelled as usual in quaint fancies, happy repartees and sharp flings at all of us while he lay stretched out in my reclining-chair smoking before the fire. Jack had evidently been to see Georgy, and looked dreamy and content, and joined the circle instead of going at once to his books. Thorpe made allusion once or twice to his pleasant abstraction, but Jack was indifferent, and even after the visitors were gone he sat looking at the fire with a sort of smile on his face.

"Well, old fellow," said I after a time, "don't waste all that pleasant material for dreams on yourself."

He rose, stretched himself, and laughed in his soft, pleasant way. "I've got three hours' hard work before me," he remarked, "and I had better go at it at once."

"Where have you been?" asked Harry dryly.

"With Georgy," Jack answered unsuspiciously.--"Boys, I warn you against being engaged while you have a demand for brains. I should like to dawdle here before the fire until morning thinking of her."

"Spare me!" exclaimed Harry cynically. "I have heard enough praise of Miss Georgy for one evening. Ted Hutchinson was talking about her." And with a burst of wrath he went on, retailing the gossip of the night: Ted knew nothing of her engagement, and was wild about her--had sent her a bracelet anonymously, and been thrilled with delight when she showed it to him on her white arm, wondering who could have been so kind. Thorpe too had collected various items of news about her. There was old Blake, a widower--who ought to have known better, for he had three grown-up children--sending her bouquets, driving her about the country and getting boxes at the theatre. There was Bob Anderson, who had laid a wager that he would--

"Stop, Harry," said Jack, his kind face very sober. "I do not think you remember that you are talking to the man who has the honor to be engaged to Miss Lenox."

"I think the man who does her that honor ought to know the talk prevalent among the fellows who meet her night after night and visit her day after day."

"It is a woman's misfortune that the men who are most at leisure to seek her society are apt to be those who are least worthy to meet her on intimate terms. The men who will use a woman's name freely in public are men who will not hesitate to slander her."

"I am not slandering her," cried Harry, starting up and facing Jack with a white face and blazing eyes. "She has accepted a bracelet from Ted Hutchinson. I know the very price he paid for it. Thorpe helped him to choose it, and told Miss Lenox so next day."

Jack's face puckered. "The bracelet will go back," he said in a low voice.

Harry burst out laughing: "You will find that if she is to return her _gages d'amour_, a good many fellows will be richer than they are to-day. She will accept anything a man offers her; and a wise man does not give jewels for nothing, Jack."

I went out quietly. I had feared it would come to this, and since Harry was determined to ease his mind to his cousin, it was better that none but Holt's ears should burn with what he had to hear. I was not ignorant of the talk that was going on; and perhaps it was better that Jack should know a little of the weakness that lessened his darling in the eyes of men. But I had not left them ten minutes before Jack opened the door of my room and called me back. The sound of his voice startled me, and the sight of his stern, cold face awed me somewhat, as it had awed Harry, who looked at me uneasily as I came in. We all three stood regarding each other a moment in silence, then Dart withdrew to the window and leaned against it, his arms folded and his eyes downcast.

"You heard the first of Harry's allegations against Miss Lenox," said Holt, breaking the pause: "he has followed them up with accusations more definite.--Harry, repeat what you just told me."

Harry seemed quite crestfallen, "D----the business!" he muttered doggedly: "it's none of my affair."

"But you seem to have made it your affair," pursued Holt with calmness. "I request you to repeat to Floyd what you said to me concerning him."

"I said," exclaimed Harry recklessly, "that I knew Miss Lenox to be very generous with certain favors which as a rule are reserved by discriminating young ladies for their engaged lovers."

"Go on: I do not call that a definite accusation."

"I said," pursued Harry with a peculiar glance at me, "that I knew fellows who had kissed her. Jack is bent on knowing the name of one of these fellows, and I mentioned yours."

I felt my face flame, and in spite of myself my eyes fell.

"Tell me the truth, Floyd," said Jack gently. "Have you come between Georgy and me as a lover of hers, winning away her regard for me?"

"Good Heavens!" I exclaimed, "no, no, no! I never kissed Georgy but once, and then I lay an almost hopeless cripple in my chair at Belfield, and she kissed me as she would have kissed any other sick, miserable boy."

Jack laughed, and his face cleared. "Oh, Harry," said he, "you foolish fellow! to talk such nonsense!--I beg your pardon, Floyd, for seeming to believe for a moment that you were not an honest friend of mine." We shook hands.--"Come here, Harry," he went on with perfect good-nature: "I promise to forgive and forget this talk of yours on condition that you do not meddle in future between Georgy and me. You never liked her--you never did her justice. Come, now, are you prepared to hold your tongue in future?"

Harry shrugged his broad shoulders. "Done!" said he, holding out his hand. "I had no business to listen to Thorpe--less still to gossip to you--less still to tell lies about Floyd here. I'm awfully ashamed of myself. Don't lay it up against me."

"I am a quiet fellow," said Jack, eying us both keenly--"I don't parade my feelings--but there is no child's play in the regard I have for the girl I love. I know her faults--I pity them: I hope, please God, to root them out, for they are the fruit of an imperfect education and a false example. She does not yet have the protection of my name, yet I should have hoped that my friends would have respected me enough not to listen to any light mention of the woman sacred to me above all others. I have no jealousy in me, but if a man, friend or no friend, dared to come between me and the girl I loved--" He broke off abruptly, and his clenched right hand opened and shut. "Mark me," he added, controlling himself, "I have perfect faith in Georgina. The one who tries to make me distrust her wastes his breath.--Remember this, Harry. I have heard you once, and forgive you and love you all the same, but my forbearance has its limits." He went into his room and shut the door.

The moment we were alone I turned on Harry. "What on earth did you mean?" I demanded, half in anger, half in a stupefaction of surprise, at his daring to calumniate me.

"Lay on," said he, sinking into the nearest chair: "I richly deserve it. But the truth was, I had already said too much. I knew that you were behaving respectably, and could deny what I alleged; whereas in some other cases we might have got shipwrecked upon grim facts."

I stared at him: "Do you mean to say that you knew what you were talking about?"

He bowed his head. There was a dejected look about him: he glanced at his watch, yawned and went to bed.

Throughout the remainder of the term Georgy's name was not once spoken among us, and Harry's affection and devotion to his cousin were touchingly displayed. Men as they were, I have seen Harry on the arm of Jack's chair talking to him with his hand over his shoulder. Dart was to sail for Europe before commencement, and the cloud of separation seemed to lie upon him heavily.

ELLEN W. OLNEY.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

COMMUNISTS AND CAPITALISTS.

A SKETCH FROM LIFE.

The Countess von Arno was Mr. Seleigman's confidential clerk. Not that M---- smiled over any such paradox: the countess called herself simply Mrs. von Arno.

M---- is a picturesque town on the Mississippi, devoted in general to the manufacture of agricultural implements. The largest plough-factory is Seleigman's: he does business all over the world. A clerk who wrote French, German and Italian fluently was a godsend. This clerk, moreover, had an eminently concise and effective style, and displayed a business capacity which the old German admired immensely. As much because of her usefulness as the modest sum she was able to invest in the business, he offered her a small share in it four years after she first came to M----. She had come to M---- because Mrs. Greymer lived there. Therese Greymer had known the countess from her school-days. When her husband died she came back to her father's house, but spent her summers in Germany. Then old Mr. Dare died suddenly, leaving Therese with her little brother to care for, and only a few thousand dollars in the world. About this time the countess separated from her husband. "So I am poor," said she, "but it will go hard if I can't take care of you, Therese." Thus she became Mr. Seleigman's clerk. M---- forgave her the clerkship, forgave her even her undoubted success in making money, on account of Mrs. Greymer. It had watched Therese grow from a slim girl, with black braids hanging down her white neck as she sat in the "minister's pew" of the old brick church, into a beautiful pale woman in a widow's bonnet. Therese went now every Sunday to the same church where her father used to preach. The countess accompanied her most decorously. She was a pagan at heart, but it pleased Therese. In church she spent her time looking at her friend's profile and calculating the week's sales.

The countess had a day-dream: the dreams which most women have had long ago been rudely broken for her, and the hopes which she cherished now had little romance about them. She knew her own powers and how necessary she was to Seleigman: some day she saw the firm becoming Seleigman & Von Arno, the business widening, and the ploughs, with the yellow eagle on them, in every great city of Europe. "Then," said the countess to herself, standing one March morning, four years after she had first come to M----, by the little dining-room window--"then we can perhaps persuade the workmen to buy stock in the concern and have a few gleams of sense about profits and wages."

She lifted one arm above her head and rested her cheek against it. Otto von Arno during his brief period of fondness had been used to call his wife "his Scandinavian goddess." She was of the goddess type, tall, fair-faced and stately, with thick, pale gold hair, and brown lashes lifted in level lines from steady, deep gray eyes. "Pretty" seemed too small a word for such a woman, yet "beautiful" conveys a hint of tenderness; and Mrs. von Arno's face--it might be because of those steady eyes--was rather a hard face, notwithstanding the soft pink and white of her skin, and even the dimples that dented her cheek when she smiled.

Now she was not smiling. The air was heavy with the damp chill of early spring; and as the countess absently surveyed a gravel-walk bordered by limp brown grasses and a line of trees dripping last night's frost through the fog, she saw a woman's figure emerge from the shadows and come slowly up the walk. She was poorly dressed, and walked to the kitchen-door, where the countess could see her carefully wipe her feet before rapping.

"That must be Bailey's wife," she thought: "I saw her waiting for him yesterday when he came round to the shops for work.--William, my friend, you are a nuisance."

With this comment she went to the kitchen. Lettice, the maid-of-all-work, was frying cakes in solitude. "Mrs. Greymer had taken Mrs. Bailey into the library," she told the countess with significant inflections.

The latter went to the library. It was a tiny, red-frescoed room fitted up in black walnut. There were plants in the bay-window: Mrs. Greymer stood among them, her soft gray wrapper falling in straight and ample folds about her slender figure. Her face was turned toward the countess; a loosened lock of black hair brushed the blue vein on her cheek; she held some lilies-of-the-valley in her hand, and the gold of her wedding-ring shone against the dark green leaves.

"She looks like one of Fra Angelico's saints," thought the countess: "the crimson lights are good too."

She stood unnoticed in the doorway, leisurely admiring the picture. Mrs. Bailey sat in the writing-chair on her right. Once, probably, she had been a pretty woman, and she still had abundant wavy brown hair and large dark-blue eyes with curling lashes; but she was too thin and faded and narrow-chested for any prettiness now. Her calico gown was unstarched, though scrupulously clean: she wore a thin blue-and-white summer shawl, and her old straw bonnet was trimmed with a narrow blue ribbon pieced in two places. Her voice was slightly monotonous, but low-keyed: as she spoke her hands clasped and unclasped each other. The veins stood out and the knuckles were enlarged, but they were rather white than otherwise.

She went on with her story: "The children are so good, Mrs. Greymer; but six of them, and me not over strong--it makes it hard. We hain't had anything but corn meal in the house all this week, and the second-hand woman says our things ain't worth the carting. The children have got so shabby they hate to go to school, and the boys laugh at Willie 'cause his hat's his pa's old one and ain't got no brim, though I bound it with the best of the old braid, for I thought maybe they'd think it was a cap. And the worst was this morning, when there was nothin' but just mush: we hadn't even 'lasses, and the children cried. Oh, I didn't go to tell you all this: you know I ain't a beggar. I've tried to live decent. Oh dear! oh dear!" She tried to wipe away the tears which were running down her thin cheeks with the tips of her fingers, but they came too fast. Mechanically, she put her hand in her pocket, only to take it out empty.

Mrs. Greymer slipped her own dainty handkerchief, which the countess had embroidered, into the other's hand. "You ought to have come to me before, Martha," she said reproachfully--"such an old friend as I am!"

"'Tain't easy to have them as has known you when you were like folks see you without even a handkerchief to cry on," said Mrs. Bailey. "If I'd known where to turn for a loaf of bread, I'd not ha' come now; but I can't see my children starve. And I ain't come to beg now. All we want is honest work. William has been everywhere since they sent him away from Dorsey's just because the men talked about striking, though they didn't strike. He's been to all the machine-shops, but they won't take him: they say he has too long a tongue for them, though he's as sober and steady a man as lives, and there ain't a better workman in M----, or D---- either. William is willing to do anything: he tried to get work on the streets, but the street commissioner said he'd more men he'd employed for years asking work than he knew what to do with. And I thought--I thought, Mrs. Greymer, if you would only speak to Mrs. von Arno--"

"Good-morning, Mrs. Bailey," said the countess, advancing. She had a musical voice, clear and full, with a vibrating quality like the notes of a violin--a very pleasant voice to hear, yet it hardly seemed reassuring to the visitor. Unconsciously, she sat up straighter in her chair, her nervous fingers plaiting the fringe of her shawl.

"I heard you mention my name," the countess continued: "is there anything you wish of me?"

Therese came to Mrs. Bailey's assistance: "Her husband is out of work: can't you do something with Mr. Seleigman, Helen? Bailey is a good workman."

"He is indeed, ma'am," added Bailey's wife eagerly, "and as sober and faithful to his work: he never slights one bit."

"I don't doubt it," said the countess gravely; "but, Mrs. Bailey, if we were to take your husband on, and the union were to order a strike, even though he were perfectly satisfied with his own wages, wouldn't he strike himself, and do all he could to make the others strike?" Mrs. Bailey was silent.

"A strike might cost us thousands of dollars. Naturally, we don't want to risk one; so we have no union-men. If Bailey will leave the union he may go to hammering ploughshares for us to-morrow, and earn, with his skill, twenty dollars a week."

Mrs. Bailey's face worked. "'Tain't no use ma'am," she said desperately: "he won't go back on his principles. He says it's the cause of Labor, and he'll stick to it till he dies. You can't blame him, ma'am, for doing what he thinks is right."

"Perhaps not. But you see that it is impossible for us to employ your husband. Isn't there something I can do for you yourself, though? Mrs. Greymer tells me you sew very neatly."

"Yes, I sew," said Mrs. Bailey in a dull tone, "but I'd be obliged to you, ma'am, if you'd give me the work soon: I've a machine now, and I'll likely not have it next week. There's ten dollars due on it, and the agent says he'll have to take it back. I've paid fifty dollars on it, but this month and lost times was so hard I couldn't pay."

The countess put a ten-dollar bill in her hand. "Let me lend you this, then," she said, unheeding the half shrinking of Mrs. Bailey's face and attitude; and then she avoided all thanks by answering Lettice's summons at the door.

"Poor little woman!" she said to Mrs. Greymer at breakfast--"she didn't half like to take it. She looked nearly starved too, though she ate so little breakfast. How did you manage to persuade her to take that huge bundle?"

"She is a very brave little woman, Helen. I should like to tell you about her," said Mrs. Greymer.

"Until a quarter of eight my time is yours, and my sympathy, as usual, is boundless."

Mrs. Greymer smiled slightly. "I have known her for a great many years," she said, disregarding the countess's last speech: "she went to school with me, in fact. She was such a pretty girl then! Somehow, she took a fancy to me, and used to help me with my Practical Arithmetic--"

"So called because it is written in the most unpractical and incomprehensible style: yes, I know it," interrupted the countess.

"Martha was much brighter than I at it, anyhow, and used to do my examples. She used to bring me the loveliest violets: she would walk all the way over to the island for them. I remember I cried when her people moved to Chicago and she left school. I didn't see her for almost ten years: then I met her accidentally on Randolph street in Chicago. She knew me, and insisted on my going out with her to see her home. It was in the suburbs, and was a very pretty, tidy little place, with a garden in front, where Martha raised vegetables, and a little plot for flowers. She was so proud of it all and of her two pretty babies, and showed me her chickens and her furniture and a picture of her husband. They had bought the house, and were to pay for it in six years, but William was getting high wages, and she had no fears. Poor Martha!"

"Their Arcadia didn't last?"

"No. William got interested in trades-unions: there was a strike, and he was very prominent. He was out of work a long time, and Martha supported the family by taking in sewing and selling the vegetables. Then her third child was born, and she was sick for a long time afterward: she had been working too hard, poor thing! His old employers took William on with the rest of the men when the strike ended, but very soon found a pretext for discharging him; and, in short, they used up all their little savings, and the house went. William thought he had been ill-used, and became more violent in his opinions."

"A Communist, isn't he?"

"I believe so. Martha with her three children couldn't go out to work, but she is a model housekeeper, and she opened a little laundry with the money she got from the sale of some of their furniture. William got work, but lost it again, but Martha managed in a humble way to support the family until William had an offer to come here; so they sold out the laundry to get money to move."

"Very idiotic of them."

"After they came here they at first lived on Front street, which is near the river, and Martha caught the chills and fever. William soon lost his place, and they moved across the river to D----. He became known as a speaker, and things have been going from bad to worse; the children have come fast, and Martha has never really recovered from her fever; and they have had simply an awfully hard time. I haven't seen Martha for three months, and have tried in vain to find out where she lived. Poor Martha! she has never complained, but it has been a hard life for her."

"Yes, a hard life," repeated the countess, rising and putting on her jacket; "but it seems to me she has chiefly her own husband to thank for it. And six children! I have my opinion of Mr. William Bailey."

"You are hardly just to Bailey, Helen: he has sacrificed his own interests to his principles. He is as honest--as honest as the Christian martyrs, though he _is_ an infidel."

"The Christian martyrs always struck me as a singularly unpractical set of people," said the countess.

"Maybe: nevertheless, they founded a religion and changed the world. And, Helen, you and the people like you laugh at Communism and the complaints of the laboring classes, but it's like Samson and the Philistines; and this Samson, blind though he is, will one day, unless we do something besides laugh, pull the pillars down on his head--and on ours."

"He will _try_" said the countess: "if we are wise, we shall be ready and shoot him dead." She kissed Mrs. Greymer smilingly, and went away. Her friend, watching her from the window, saw her stop to pat a great dog on the head and give a little boy a nickel piece.

One Sunday afternoon, two weeks later, the two friends crossed the bridge to D---- to visit the Baileys. When they reached the end of the bridge they paused a moment to rest. The day was one of those warm, bright spring days which deceitfully presage an immediate summer. On the river-shore crawfishes were lazily creeping over the gravel. The air rang with the blue jay's chatter, a robin showed his tawny breast among the withered grasses, and a flicker on a dead stump bobbed his little red-barred head and fluttered his yellow wings. Beneath the bridge the swift current sparkled in the sun. Over the river, on each side, rose the hills. The gray stone of the government works was visible to the right through the leafless trees: nearer, square, yellow and ugly, stood the old arsenal. A soldier, musket on shoulder, marched along the river-edge: the cape of his coat fluttered in the breeze and his slanting bayonet shone like silver. Before them lay D----, the smoke from its mills and houses curling into the pale blue air.

The countess drew a long breath: she had a keen feeling for beauty. "Yes, it is a lovely place," she said. "The hills are not high enough, but the river makes amends for everything. But what are those hideous shanties, Therese?"

"Are they not hideous?" said Mrs. Greymer. "They are all pine, and it gets such an ugly dirt-black when it isn't painted. The glass is broken out of the windows and the shingles have peeled off the roofs. When it rains the water drips through. In spring, when the river rises, it comes up to their very doors: one spring it came in. It is not a nice place to live in."

"Not exactly: still, I suppose people do live there."

"Yes, the Baileys live there. You see, the rent is low."

The countess lifted her eyebrows and followed Mrs. Greymer without answering. Some sulky-looking men were smoking pipes on the doorsteps, and a few women, whose only Sunday adorning seemed to have been plastering their hair down over their cheeks with a great deal of water, gossiped at the corner. Half a dozen children were playing on the river-bank.

"They fall in every little while," Therese explained, "they are so small, and most of the mothers here go out washing. This is the Baileys'."

William Bailey answered the knock. He was a tall man, who carried his large frame with a kind of muscular ease. He had a square, gray-whiskered face with firm jaws and mild light-blue eyes. The hair being worn away from his forehead made it seem higher than it really was. He wore his working clothes and a pair of very old boots cut down into slippers. The only stocking he had was in his hand, and he appeared to have been darning it. Close behind him came his wife, holding the baby. The bright look of recognition on her face at the sight of Mrs. Greymer faded when she perceived the countess. Rather stiffly she invited them to enter.

The room was small and most meanly furnished, but it was clean. The walls were dingy beyond the power of soap and water to change, but the floor had been scrubbed, and what glass there was in the windows had been washed. There were occasional holes in the ceiling and walls where the plaster had given way: out of one of these peered the pointed nose and gleaming eyes of a great rat. Judging from sundry noises she heard, the countess concluded there were many of these animals under the house, though what they found to live on was a puzzle; but they ate a little of the children now and then, and perhaps the hope of more sustained them. A pale little boy was lying on a mattress in the corner covered with a faded blue-and-white shawl.

Therese had mysteriously managed to dispose of the basket she had brought before she went up to him and kissed him, saying, "I am sorry to see Willie is still sick."

"Yes," said Bailey, smiling bitterly. "The doctor says he needs dry air and exercise: it's damp here."

"Tommy More has promised to lend us his cart, and Susie will take him on the island," Mrs. Bailey said hastily; "it's real country there."

"But you have to have a pass," answered Bailey in a low tone.

"Any one can get a pass," said the countess; "but if you prefer I will ask the colonel to-day, and he will send you one to-morrow."

For the first time Bailey fairly looked the countess in the face: his brows contracted, he opened his lips to speak.

"Oh, papa," cried the boy in a weak voice trembling with eagerness, "the island is _splendid_! Tommy's father works there, and they's cannon and a foundry and a _live eagle_!"

"Yes, Willie dear," said his father as he laid his brown hand gently on the boy's curls. He inclined his head toward the countess. "I'll thank you," he said gravely.

The countess picked up a pamphlet from the table, more to break the uncomfortable pause which followed than for any other reason. "Do you like this?" she said, hardly reading the title.

"I believe it," said Bailey: "I am a Communist myself." He drew himself up to his full height as he spoke: there was a certain suppressed defiance in his attitude and expression.

"Are you?" said the countess. "Why?"

"Why?" cried Bailey. "Look at me! I'm a strong man, and willing to do any kind of work. I've worked hard for sixteen year: I've been sober and steady and saving. Look what all that work and saving has brought me! This is a nice place for a decent man and his family to live in, ain't it? Them walls ain't clean? No, because scrubbing can't make 'em. The grime's in the plaster: yes, and worse than grime--vermin and disease sech as 'tain't right for me to mention even to ladies like you, but it's right enough for sech as us to live in. Yes, by G---! to _die_ in!" He was a man who spoke habitually in a low voice, and it had not grown louder, but the veins on his forehead swelled and his eyes began to glow.

"It is hard, truly," said the countess. "Whose fault is it?"

"Whose fault?" Bailey repeated her words vehemently, yet with something of bewilderment. "Society's fault, which grinds a poor man to powder, so as to make a rich man richer. But the people won't stand this sort of thing for ever."

"You would have a general division of property, then?"

"Indirectly, yes. Power must be taken from bloated corporations and given to the people; the railroads must be taken by government; accumulation of capital over a limited amount must be forbidden; men must work for Humanity, and not for their selfish interests."

"Do you know any men who are working so?"

"I know a few."

"Mostly workingmen?"

"All workingmen."

"Don't you think a general division of property would be for _their_ selfish interests?"

"I don't call it selfish to ask for just a decent living."

"I fancy the chiefs of your party would demand a great deal more than a bare decent living. Mr. Bailey, the rights of property rest on just this fact in human nature: A man will work better for himself than he will for somebody else. And you can't get him to work unless he is guaranteed the fruits of his labor. Capital is brain, and Labor is muscle, but the brain has as much to do with the creation of wealth as muscle: more, for it can invent machines and do without muscle, while muscle cannot do without brain. You can't alter human nature, Mr. Bailey. If you had a Commune, every man would be for himself there as he is here: the weak would have less protection than even now, for all the restraints of morality, which are bound up inseparably with rights of property, would have been thrown aside. Marx and Lasallis and Bradlaugh, clever as they are, can't prevent the survival of the fittest. You knock your head against a stone wall, Mr. Bailey, when you fight society. You have been knocking it all your life, and now you are angry because your head is hurt. If you had never tried to strip other men of their earnings because you fancied you ought to have more, as skilful a blacksmith as you would have saved money and been a capitalist himself. Supposing you give it up? Our firm will give you a chance to make ploughshares and earn twenty dollars a week if you will only promise not to strike us in return the first chance you get."

The workingman had listened with a curling lip. "Do you mean that for an offer?" he said in a smothered voice.

"I mean it for an offer, certainly."

"Oh, William!" cried his wife, turning appealing eyes up to his face.

He grew suddenly white, and brought his clenched hand heavily down on the table. The dishes rattled with the jar, and the baby, scared at the noise, began to scream. "Then," said Bailey, "you may just understand that a man ain't always a sneak if he _is_ poor; and you can be glad you ain't a man that's tempting me to turn traitor."

"I am sure my friend didn't mean to hurt your feelings," Mrs. Greymer explained quickly, giving the countess that expressive side-glance which much more plainly than words says, "Now you _have_ done it!" Mrs. Bailey was walking up and down soothing the baby: the little boy looked on open-eyed.

"I am sorry if I have said anything which has seemed like an insult," said the countess: "I certainly didn't intend one. Perhaps after you have thought it all over you will feel differently. You know where to find me. Good-evening."

She held out her hand, which Bailey did not seem to see, smiled on the little boy and went out, leaving Mrs. Greymer behind.

A little girl with pretty brown curls and deep-blue eyes was making sand-caves on the shore. The countess spoke to her in passing, and left her staring at her two hands, which were full of silver coin. At the bridge the countess paused to wait for her friend. She saw her come out, attended by Mrs. Bailey: she saw Mrs. Bailey watch her, saw the little girl give her mother the money, and then she saw the woman, still carrying her baby in her arms, walk slowly down the river-bank to where a boat lay keel uppermost like a great black arrowhead on the sand. Here she sat down, and, clasping the child closer, hid her face in its white hair.

"And, upon my soul, I believe she is crying," said the spectator, who stopped at the commandant's house and obtained the pass before she went home.

On Monday, Mrs. Greymer proposed asking little Willie Bailey to spend a week with them. The countess assented, merely saying, "You must take the little skeleton to drive every day, and send the livery-bills to me."

"Then I shall drive over this afternoon if Freddy's sore throat is better," said Mrs. Greymer.

But she did not go: Freddy's sore throat was worse instead of better, and his sister had enough to do for some days fighting off diphtheria. So it happened that it was a week before she was able to go to D----. She found the Baileys' door swinging on its hinges, and a high-stepping hen of inquisitive disposition investigating the front room: the Baileys had gone.

"They went to Chicago four days ago," an amiable neighbor explained: "they didn't say what fur. The little boy he cried 'cause he wanted to go on the island fust. Guess _he_ ain't like to live long: he's a weak, pinin' little chap."

Only once did Therese hear from Mrs. Bailey. The letter came a few days after her useless drive to D----. It was dated Chicago, and expressed simply but fervently her gratitude for all Mrs. Greymer's kindness. Enclosed were three one-dollar bills, part payment, the writer said, "of my debt to Mrs. von Arno, and I hope she won't think I meant to run away from it because I can't just now send more." There was no allusion to her present condition or her prospects for the future. Mrs. Greymer read the letter aloud, then held out the bills to the countess.

She pushed them aside as if they stung her. "What does the woman think I am made of?" she exclaimed. "Why, it's hideous, Therese! Write and tell her I never meant her to pay me."

"I am afraid the letter won't reach her," said Mrs. Greymer.

Nor did it: in due course of time Therese received her own letter back from the Dead-Letter Office. The words of interest and sympathy, the plans and encouragement, sounded very oddly to her then, for, as far as they were concerned, Martha Bailey's history was ended. It was in July the countess had met them again. She was in Chicago. Otto was dead. He had given back to his wife by his will the property which had come to him through her: whether because of a late sense of justice or a dislike to his heir, a distant cousin who wrote theological works and ate with his knife, the countess never ventured to decide. The condition of part of this property, which was in Chicago, had obliged her to go there. She arrived on the evening of the fifteenth of July--a day Chicago people remember because the great railroad strike of 1877 reached the city that day.

The countess found the air full of wild rumors. Stories of shops closed by armed men, of vast gatherings of Communists on the North Side, of robbery, bloodshed and--to a Chicago ear most blood-curdling whisper of all--of a contemplated second burning of the city, flew like prairie-fire through the streets.

The countess's lawyer, whom she had visited very early on Thursday morning, insisted on accompanying her from his office to her friend's house on the North Side. On Halstead street their carriage suddenly stopped. Putting her head out of the window, the countess perceived that the coachman had drawn up close to the curbstone to avoid the onset of a yelling mob of boys and men armed with every description of weapon, from laths and brickbats to old muskets. The boys appeared to regard the whole affair as merely a gigantic "spree," and shouted "Bread or Blood!" with the heartiest enthusiasm; but the men marched closer, in silence and with set faces. The gleaming black eyes, sharp features and tangled black hair of half of them showed their Polish or Bohemian blood. The others were Norwegians and Germans, with a sprinkling of Irish and Americans. Their leader was a tall man whom the countess knew. He had turned to give an order when she saw him. At that same instant a shabby woman ran swiftly from a side street and tried to throw her arms about the man's neck. He pushed her aside, and the crowd swept them both out of sight.

"I think I have seen a woman I know," said the countess composedly; "and do you know, Mr. Wilder, that our horses have gone? Our Communist friends prefer riding to walking, it seems." They were obliged to get out of the carriage. The countess looked up and down the street, but saw no trace of the woman. Apparently, she had followed the mob.

By this time some small boys, inspired by the occasion, had begun to show their sympathy with oppressed labor by pelting the two well-dressed strangers with potatoes and radishes, which they confiscated from a bloated capitalist of a grocer on the corner. The shower was so thick that Mr. Wilder was relieved when they reached the Halstead street police-station, where they sought refuge. Here they passed a sufficiently exciting hour. They could hear plainly the sharp crack of revolvers and the yells and shouts of the angry mob blending in one indistinguishable roar. Once a barefooted boy ran by, screaming that the police were driven back and the Communists were coming. Then a troop of cavalry rode up the street on a sharp trot, their bridles jingling and horses' hoofs clattering. The roar grew louder, ebbed, swelled again, then broke into a multitude of sounds--screams, shouts and the tumultuous rush of many feet.

A polite sergeant opened the door of the little room where the countess was sitting to inform her the riot was over. They were just bringing in some prisoners: he was very sorry, but one of them would have to come in there. He was a prominent rioter whom they had captured trying to bring off the body of his wife, who had been killed by a chance shot. It would be only for a short time: the gentleman had gone for a carriage. He hoped the lady wouldn't mind.

The lady, who had changed color slightly, said she should not mind. The sergeant held the door back, and some men brought in something over which had been flung an old blue-and-white shawl. They carried it on a shutter, and the folds of a calico dress, torn and trampled, hung down over the side.

Then came two policemen, pushing after the official manner a man covered with dust and blood.

"Bailey!" exclaimed the countess. Their eyes met.

Bailey bent his head toward the table where the men had laid their burden. "Lift that," he said hoarsely.

The countess lifted the shawl with a steady hand. There was an old white straw bonnet flattened down over the forehead; a wisp of blue ribbon string was blown across the face and over the red smear between the eyebrow and the hair; the eyes stared wide and glassy. But it was the same soft brown hair. The countess knew Martha Bailey.

"There was women and children on the sidewalk, but they fired right into us," said Bailey. He spoke in a monotonous, dragging voice, as though every word were an effort. "They killed her. I asked you to give me work in your shop, and you wouldn't do it. Here's the end of it. Now you can go home and say your prayers."

"I don't say prayers," answered the countess, "and you know I offered you work. But don't let us reproach each other here. Where are your children?"

"Ain't you satisfied with what you have done already?" said Bailey. "Leave me alone: you'd better."

"Gently now!" said one of the policemen.

"Whatever you may think of me," said the countess quietly, "you know Mrs. Greymer was always your wife's friend. We only wanted to help her."

Bailey shook off the grasp of the policemen as though it had been a feather: with one great stride he reached the countess and caught her roughly by the wrist. "Look at _her_, will you?" he cried: "you and the likes of you, with your smooth cant, have killed her! You crush us and starve us till we turn, and then you shoot us down like dogs. Leave my children alone."

"None of that, my man!" said the sergeant.

The two policemen would have pulled Bailey away, but the countess stopped them. She had turned pale even to her lips, but she did not wince.

"Curse you!" groaned the Communist, flinging his arms above his head; "curse a society which lets such things be! curse a religion--"

The policemen dragged him back. "You'd better go, I think, ma'am," said the sergeant: "the man's half crazy with the sun and fighting and grief."

"You are right," said the countess. She stopped at the station-door to put a bill in the policeman's hands: "You will find out about the children and let me know, please."

Mr. Wilder, who had been standing in the doorway, an amazed witness of the whole scene, led her out to the carriage. "He's a bad fellow, that rioter," he said as they drove along.

The countess pulled her cuff over a black mark on her wrist. "No, he is not half a bad fellow," she answered, "but for all that he has murdered his wife."

Nor has she ever changed her opinion on that point; neither, so far as is known, has William Bailey changed his.

OCTAVE THANET.

AT FRIENDS' MEETING.

Sunshine and shadow o'er unsculptured walls Hang tremulous curtains, radiant and fair; The breath of summer perfumes all the air; Afar the wood-bird trills its tender calls. More eloquent than chanted rituals, Subtler than odors swinging censers bear, Purer than hymn of praise or passionate prayer, The silence, like a benediction, falls. The still, slow moments softly slip along The endless thread of thought: a holy throng Of memories, long prisoned, find release. The sacred sweetness of the hour has lent These quiet faces, calm with deep content, And one world-weary soul alike, the light of peace.

SUSAN M. SPALDING.

LETTERS FROM MAURITIUS.--I.

BY LADY BARKER.

EASTER SUNDAY, April 21, 1878.

"How's her head, Seccuni?"--"Nor'-nor'-east, quarter east, saar." Such had been the question often asked, at my impatient prompting, of the placid Lascar quartermaster during the past fortnight. And the answer generally elicited a sigh from the good-natured captain of the Actæa, a sigh which I reproduced with a good deal of added woe in its intonation and a slight dash of feminine impatience. For this easterly bearing was all wrong for us. "Anything from the south would do," but not a puff seemed inclined to come our way from the south. Seventeen days ago we scraped over the bar at the mouth of D'Urban harbor, spread our sails, and fled away before a fair wind toward the north end of Madagascar, meaning to leave it on the starboard bow and so fetch "L'Ile Maurice, ancienne Ile de France," as it is still fondly styled. The fair wind had freshened to a gale a day or two later, and bowled us along before it, and we had made a rapid and prosperous voyage so far. Sunny days and cold, clear, starry nights had come and gone amid the intense and wonderful loveliness of these strange seas. Not a sail had we passed, not a gull had been seen, scarcely a porpoise. But now this radiant Easter Sunday morning finds us almost becalmed on the eastern side of Mauritius, with what air is stirring dead ahead, but only coming in a cat's-paw now and then. Except for one's natural impatience to drop anchor it would have been no penance to loiter on such a day, and so make it a memory which would stand out for ever in bold relief amid the monotony of life. "A study of color" indeed--a study in wonderful harmonies of vivid blues and opalesque pinks, amethysts and greens, indigoes and lakes, all the gem-like tints breaking up into sparkling fragments every moment, to reset themselves the next instant in a new and exquisite combination. The tiny island at once impresses me with a respectful admiration. What nonsense is this the geography-books state, and I have repeated, about Mauritius being the same size as the Isle of Wight? Absurd! Here is a bold range of volcanic-looking mountains rising up grand and clear against the beautiful background of a summer sky, on whose slopes and in whose valleys, green down to the water's edge, lie fertile stretches of cultivation. We are not near enough to see whether the pale shimmer of the young vegetation is due to grass or waving cane-tops. Bold ravines are cut sharply down the mountainous sides and lighted up by the silvery glint of rushing water, and the breakers, for all the mirror-like calm of the sea out here, a couple of miles from shore, are beating the barrier rocks and dashing their snow aloft with a dull thud which strikes on the ear in mesmeric rhythm. Yes, it is quite the fairest scene one need wish to rest wave-worn and eager eyes upon, and it is still more beautiful if you look over the vessel's side. The sea is of a Mediterranean blue, and is literally alive with fish beneath, and lovely sea-creatures floating upon, the sunlit water. It appears as if one could see down to unknown depths through that clear sapphire medium, breaking up here and there into pale blue reflections which are even more enchanting than its intense tints. Fishes, apparently of gold and rose-color or of a radiant blue barred and banded with silver, dart, plunge and chase each other after the fragments of biscuit we throw overboard. Films of crystal and ruby oar themselves gently along the upper surface or float like folded sea-flowers on the motionless water. A flock of tiny sea-mews, half the size of the fish, are screaming shrilly and darting down on the shoal; but as for their catching them, the idea is preposterous, for the fish are twice as big as the birds.

Still, we want to get on: we sadly want to beat another barque which started a couple of hours after us from Natal, and we are barely drifting a knot an hour. It is not in the least too hot. D'Urban was very sultry when we left, but I have been shivering ever since in my holland gown, thinking fondly and regretfully of serge skirts and a sealskin jacket down in the hold. It may be safely taken as an axiom in travelling that you seldom suffer from cold more than in what are supposed to be hot climates, and the wary _voyageuse_ will never separate herself hopelessly from her winter wraps, even when steering to tropical lands. In spite of all my experience, I am often taken in on this point, and I should have perished from cold during this voyage as we got farther south if it had not been for the friendly presence of a rough Scotch plaid. Even the days were cold on deck out of the sun, and the long nights--for darkness treads close on the heels of sunset in the winter months of these latitudes--would have indeed been nipping without warm wraps.

But no one thinks of wraps this balmy Easter Sunday. It is delicious as to temperature, only we are in an ungrateful hurry, and the stars find us scarcely a dozen miles from where they left us. I sit up to see myself safe through the narrow passage between Flat Island and Round Island, and fall asleep at last to the monotonous chant of so many "fathoms and no bottom," for we take soundings every five minutes or so in this reefy region. An apology for wind gets up at last, which takes us round the north end of the island, and we creep up to the outer anchorage of Port Louis, on its western shore, slowly but safely in that darkest hour before dawn.

Bad news travels fast, they say, and some one actually took the trouble of getting out of his bed and rowing out to us as soon as our anchor was down to tell us, with apparently great satisfaction, that we had lost our race, and that we should have to go into quarantine with the earliest dawn. Having awakened all the sleepers with this soothing intelligence, and called up a host of bitter feelings of rage and disappointment in the heart of every one on board, this friendly voice bade us good-night, and the owner rowed away into the gloom around, apparently at peace with himself and all the world.

How can I set forth the indignation we all felt to be put in quarantine because of a little insignificant epidemic of fever at D'Urban, in coming to a place noted as a hotbed of every variety of fever? If it was measles, or even chicken-pox, we declared we could have understood it. But _fever_! This sentiment was found very comforting, and it was a great disappointment to find how little convincing it appeared to the authorities. However, the anticipation proved to have been much worse than the reality, for as we were all perfectly well, and had been so ever since leaving D'Urban, the quarantine laws became delightfully elastic, and in a couple of days or so the yellow flag was hauled down, and a more gay and cheerful bit of bunting proclaimed to our friends on shore that we were no longer objects of fear and aversion.

In two minutes F---- is on board, and in two minutes more I am in a boat alongside, being swiftly rowed to the flat shore of Port Louis through a crowd of shipping, for the fine harbor of the little island seems to attract to itself an enormous number of vessels. From Calcutta and China, Ceylon and Madras, Pondicherry, London, Marseilles, the Cape, Callao and Bordeaux, and from many a port besides, vessels of all varieties of rig and tonnage come hither.

In the daytime, as I now see it for the first time, Port Louis is indeed a crowded and busy place, and its low-pitched warehouses and unpretending-looking buildings hold many and many thousand tons of miscellaneous merchandise coming in or going out. But at sunset an exodus of all the white and most of the creole inhabitants sets in, leaving the dusty streets and dingy buildings to watchmen and coolies and dogs. It is quite curious to notice, as I do directly, what a horror the English residents have of sleeping even one single night in Port Louis; and this dread certainly appears to be well founded if even half the stories one hears be true. Some half dozen officials, whose duties oblige them to be always close to the harbor, contrive, however, to live in the town, but they nearly all give a melancholy report of the constant attacks of fever they or their families suffer from.

Certainly, at the first glance, Port Louis is not a prepossessing place to live, or try to live, in. I will say nothing of the shabby shops, the dilapidated-looking dwellings, one passes in a rapid drive through the streets, because I know how deceitful outside appearances are as to the internal resources or comforts of a tropical town. Those dingy shops may hold excellent though miscellaneous goods in their dark recesses, and would be absolutely unbearable to either owner or customer if they were lighted with staring plate-glass windows. Nor would it be possible to array tempting articles in gallant order behind so hot and glaring a screen, for no shade or canvas would prevent everything from bleaching white in a few hours. As for the peeled walls of house and garden, no stucco or paint can stand many weeks of tropical sun and showers. Everything gets to look blistered or washed out directly after it has been renovated, and great allowances must be made for these shortcomings so patent to the eye of a fresh visitor. What I most regretted in Port Louis was its low-lying, fever-haunted situation. It looks marked out as a hotbed of disease, and the wonder to me is, not that it should now and for ten years past have the character of being a nest for breeding fevers, but that there ever should have been a time when illness was not rife in such a locality. Sheltered from anything like a free circulation of air by hills rising abruptly from the seashore, swampy by nature, crowded to excess by thousands of emigrants from all parts of the coast added to its own swarming population, it seems little short of marvellous that even by day Europeans can contrive to exist there long enough to carry on the enormous trade which comes and goes to and from its harbor. Yet they do so, and on the whole manage very well by avoiding exposure to the sun and taking care to sleep out of the town. This is rendered possible to all by an admirable system of railways, which are under government control, and will gradually form a perfect network over the island. The engineering difficulties of these lines must have been great, and it is an appalling sight to witness a train in motion. So hilly is the little island that if the engine is approaching the chances are it looks as if it were about to plunge wildly down on its head and turn a somersault into the station, or else it seems to be gradually climbing up a steep gradient after the fashion of a fly on the wall. But everything appears well managed, and the dulness of the daily press is never enlivened by accounts of a railway accident.

For two or three miles out of Port Louis the country is still flat and marshy, and ugly to the last degree--not the ugliness of bareness and trim neatness, but overgrown, dank and mournful, for all its teeming life. By the roadside stand, here and there, what once were handsome and hospitable mansions, but are now abodes of desolation and decay. The same sad story may be told of each--how their owners, well-born descendants of old French families, flourished there, amid their beautiful flowers, in health and happiness for many a long day until the fatal "fever year" of 1867, when half the families were carried off by swift death, and the survivors wellnigh ruined by hurricanes and disasters of all sorts. Poor little Mauritius has certainly passed through some very hard times, but she has borne them bravely and pluckily, and is now reaping her reward in returning prosperity. Sharp as has been the lesson, it is something for her inhabitants to have learned to enforce better sanitary laws, and there is little fear now but that their eyes have been opened to the importance of health regulations.

One effect of the epidemic which desolated Port Louis has been the creation of the prettiest imaginable suburbs or settlements within eight or ten miles of the town. These districts have the quaintest French names--Beau Bassin, Curépipe, Pamplemousse, Flacq, Moka, and so forth, with the English name of "Racehill" standing out among them in cockney simplicity. My particular suburb is the nearest and most convenient from which F---- can compass his daily official duties, but I am not entitled to boast of an elevation of more than eight hundred feet. Still, there is an extraordinary difference in the temperature before we have climbed to even half that height, and we turn out of a green lane bordered by thick hedges of something exactly like English hawthorn into a wind-swept clearing on the borders of a deep ravine where stands a bungalow-looking dwelling rejoicing in the name of "The Oaks." It might much more appropriately have been called "The Palms," for I can't see an oak anywhere, whilst there are some lovely graceful trees with rustling giant leaves on the lawn; but I cannot look beyond the wide veranda, where Zulu Jack is waiting to welcome me with the old musical cry of "Jakasu-casa!" and my little five-o'clock tea-table arranged, just as I used to have it in Natal, on the shady side of the house. Yes, it is home at last, and very homelike and comfortable it all looks after the tossing, changing voyaging of the past two months, for I have come a long way round.

BEAU BASSIN, May 21st.

I feel as if I had lived here all my life, although it is really more unlike the ordinary English colony than it is possible to imagine; and yet (as the walrus said to the carpenter) this "is scarcely odd," because it is not an English colony at all. It is thoroughly and entirely French, and the very small part of the habits of the people which is not French is Indian. The result of more than a century of civilization, and of the teachings of many colonists, not counting the Portuguese discoverers early in the sixteenth century, is a mixed but very comfortable code of manners and customs. One has not here to struggle against the ignorance and incapacity of native servants. The clever, quick Indian has learned the polish and elegance of his French masters, and the first thing which struck me was the pretty manners of the native--or, as they are called, creole--inhabitants. Everybody has a "Bon soir!" or a "Salaam!" for us as we pass them in our twilight walks, and the manners of the domestic servants are full of attention and courtesy. Mauritius first belonged to the Dutch (for the Portuguese did not attempt to colonize it), who seem to have been bullied out of it by pirates and hurricanes, and who finally gave it up as a thankless task about the year 1700. A few years later the French, having a thriving colony next door at Bourbon, sent over a man-of-war and "annexed," unopposed, the pretty little island. But there were all sorts of difficulties to overcome in those early days, and it was not even found possible--from mismanagement of course--to make the place pay its own working expenses. Then came the war with England at the beginning of this century; and that made things worse, for of course we tried to get hold of it, and there were many sharp sea-fights off its lovely shores, until, after a gallant defence, a landing was effected by the English, who took possession of it somewhere about 1811. Still, it does not seem to have been of much use to them, for the French inhabitants naturally made difficulties and declined to take the oath of allegiance; so that it was not until the great settling-day--or rather year--of 1814, when Louis XVIII. "came to his own again" and definitively ceded Mauritius to the British, that we began to set to work, aided by the inhabitants with right good-will, to develop and make the most of its enormous natural resources.

I really believe Mauritius stands alone in the whole world for variety of scenery, of climate and of productions within the smallest imaginable space. It might be a continent looked at through reversed opera-glasses for the ambitious scale of its mountains, its ravines and its waterfalls. When once you leave the plains behind--it is all on such a toy scale that you do this in half an hour--you breathe mountain-air and look down deep gorges and cross wide, rushing rivers. Of course the sea is part of every view. If it is lost sight of for five minutes, there is nothing to do but go on a few yards and turn a corner to see it again, stretching wide and blue and beautiful out to the horizon. As for the length and breadth of the island representing its area, the idea is wildly wrong. The acreage is enormous in proportion to this same illusory length and breadth, which very soon fades out of the newcomer's mind. One confusing effect of the hilly nature of the ground is that one dwarfs the relative length of distances, and gets to talk of five miles as a long way off. At first I used to say--rather impertinently, I confess--"Surely nothing can be very far away here!" but I have learned better already in this short month, and recognize that even three miles constitute something of a drive. And the chances are--nay, the certainty is--that three miles in any direction will show you a greater variety of beautiful scenery than the same distance over any other part of the habitable globe. The only expression I can find to describe Mauritius to myself is one I used to hear my grandmother use in speaking of a pretty girl who chanced to be rather _petite_. "She is a pocket Venus," the old lady would say; and so I find myself calling L'Ile Maurice a pocket Venus among islets.

This is the beginning of the cool season, which lasts till November; and really the climate just now is very delightful. A little too windy, perhaps, for my individual taste, but that is owing to the rather exposed situation of my house. The trade winds sweep in from the south-east, and very nearly blow me and my possessions out of the drawing-room. Still, it would be the height of ingratitude to quarrel with such a healthy, refreshing gale, and I try to avoid the remorse which I am assured will overtake me in the hot season if I grumble now. Of course it is hot in the sun, but ladies need seldom or never expose themselves to it. The gentlemen are armed, when they go out, with white umbrellas, and keep as much as possible out of the fierce heat. At night it is quite cold, and one or even two blankets are indispensable; yet this is by no means one of the coolest situations in the island, though it bears an excellent character for healthiness. Of course I can only tell you this time of what lies immediately around me, for I have hardly strayed five miles from my own door since I arrived. There is always so much to do in settling one's self in a new home. This time, I am bound to say, the difficulties have been reduced to a minimum, not only from the prompt kindness and helpfulness of my charming neighbors, but because I found excellent servants ready to my hand, instead of needing to go through the laborious process of training them. The cooks are very good--better indeed than the food material, which is not always of the best quality. The beef is imported from Madagascar, and is thin and queerly butchered, but presents itself at table in a sufficiently attractive form: so do the long-legged fowls of the island. But the object of distrust is always the mutton, which is more often goat, and consequently tough and rank: when it is only kid one can manage it, but the older animal is beyond me. Vegetables and fruit are abundant and delicious, and I have tasted very nice fish, though they do not seem plentiful. Nor is the actual cost of living great for what is technically called "bazaar"--_i.e.,_ home-grown--articles of daily food. Indeed, such things are cheap, and a few rupees go a long way in "bazaar." The moment you come to _articles de luxe_ from England or France, then, indeed, you must reckon in dollars, or even piastres, for it sounds too overwhelming in rupees. Wine is the exception which proves the rule in this case, and every one drinks an excellent, wholesome light claret which is absurdly and delightfully cheap, and which comes straight from Bordeaux. Ribbons, clothes, boots and gloves, all things of that sort, are also expensive, but not unreasonably so when the enormous cost of carriage is taken into account. Everything comes by the only direct line of communication with England, in the "Messageries Maritimes," which is a swift but costly mode of transmission. Still, all actual necessaries are cheap and plentiful in spite of the teeming population one sees everywhere.

In our daily evening walk we cut off a corner through the bazaar, and it is most amusing to see and hear the representatives of all the countries of the East laughing, jangling and chatting in their own tongues, and apparently all at once. Besides Indians from each presidency, there are crowds of Chinese, Cingalese, Malabars, Malagask, superadded to the creole population. They seem orderly enough, though perhaps the police reports could tell a different tale. If only the daylight would last longer in these latitudes, where exercise is only possible after sundown! However early we set forth, the end of the walk is sure to be accomplished stumblingly in profound darkness. Happily, there are no snakes or poisonous reptiles of any sort, nor have I yet seen anything more personally objectionable than a mosquito. I rather owe a grudge, though, to a little insect called the mason-fly, which has a perfect passion for running up mud huts (compared to its larger edifices on the walls and ceiling) on my blotting-books and between the leaves of my pet volumes. The white ants are the worst insect foe we have, and the stories I hear of their performances would do credit to the Arabian Nights. I have already learned to consider as pets the little soft brown lizards which emerge from behind the picture-frames at night as soon as ever the lamps are lit. They come out to catch the flies on the ceiling, and stalk their prey in the cleverest and stealthiest fashion. Occasionally, however, they quarrel with each other, and have terrific combats over head, with the invariable result of a wriggling inch of tail dropping down on one's book or paper. This cool weather is of course the time when one is freest from insect visitors, and I have not yet seen any butterflies. A stray grasshopper, with green wings folded exactly like a large leaf, or an inquisitive mantis, blunders on to my writing-table occasionally, but not often enough to be anything but welcome. As my sitting-room may be said, speaking architecturally, to consist merely of a floor and ceiling, there is no reason why all the insects in the island should not come in at any one of its seven open doors (I have no windows) if they choose.

The houses are very pretty, however, in spite of their being all doorway. The polished floors--unhappily, mine are painted _red_, which is a great sorrow to me--the large rooms, with nice furniture and a wealth of flowers, give a look of great comfort and elegance to the interior. The wide, low verandas are shaded on the sunny side by screens or blinds of ratan painted green, and from the ceiling dangle baskets, large baskets, filled with every imaginable variety of fern. I never saw anything like the beauty of the foliage. The _leaves_ of the plants would give color and variety enough without the flowers, and they too are in profusion. Every house stands in its own grounds, and I think I may say that every house has a beautiful shrubbery and garden attached to it. Of course, with all this warm rain constantly falling, the pruning-knife is as much needed as the spade, but the natives make excellent and clever gardeners, and every place is well and neatly kept. Mine is the only overgrown and yet empty garden I have seen, but, all the same, I have more flowers in my drawing-room than any one else, for all my neighbors take compassion on me and send me baskets full of the loveliest roses every morning. Then it is only necessary to send old Bonhomme, the gardener, a little way down the steep side of the ravine to pick as much maiden-hair or other delicate ferns as would stock the market at Covent Garden for a week.

If it were not for everybody being in such a terror about their health, this lonely little island would be a very charming place. But ever since _the_ fever a feeling of sanitary distrust seems to have sprung up among the inhabitants, which strikes a newcomer very vividly. The European inhabitants _look_ very well, and the ladies and children are far more blooming--though I acknowledge it is a delicate bloom--than any one I saw in Natal. Still, you can detect that the question of health is uppermost in the public mind. If a house is spoken of, its only recommendation need be that it is healthy. There is very little society at night, because night air is considered dangerous: even the chief attraction of lawn-tennis, the universal game here, is that "it is so healthy." And to see the way the gentlemen wrap up after it in coats which seem to have been made for arctic wear! Of course they are quite right to be careful, and it is a comfort to know that with proper care and the precautions taught by experience there is no reason why, under the blessing of God, a European should not enjoy as good health in Mauritius as in other places with a better reputation. There are nearly always cases of fever in Port Louis, and three or four deaths a day from it; but then the native white and creole population is very large, and the proportion is not so alarming.

One of the things which I think are not generally understood is, how completely the whole place is French. It is not in the least like any colony which I have ever seen. It is a comfortable settlement, where families have intermarried and taken root in the soil, regarding it with quite as fond and fervent an affection as we bear to our own country. Instead of the apologies for, and abuse of, a colony (woe to you if _you_ find fault, however!) with which your old colonist greets a new arrival, I find here a strong patriotic sentiment of pride and love, which is certainly well merited. When you take into consideration the tiny dimensions of the island, its distance from all the centres of civilization, its isolation, the great calamities which have befallen it from hurricane, drought and pestilence, and the way it has overlived them all, there is every justification for the pride and glory of its inhabitants in their fair and fertile islet. Never were such good roads: I don't know how they are managed or who keeps them in order, except that I believe everything in the whole place is done by government. Certainly, government ought to be patted on the back if those neat, wide, well-kept roads are its handiwork. But, as I was saying, it is a surprise to most English comers to find how thoroughly French the whole place is, and you perceive the change first and chiefly in the graceful and courteous manners of the people of all grades and classes. Instead of the delightful British stare and avoidance of strangers, every one, from the highest official to the poorest peasant, has a word or bow of greeting for the passer-by; and especially is this genial civility to be admired and noticed at the railway-stations and in the carriages. You never hear English spoken except among a few officials, and a knowledge of French is the first necessity of life here. Unhappily, there is a patois in use among the creoles and other natives which is very confusing. It is made up of a strange jumble of Eastern languages, grafted on a debased kind of French, and gabbled with the rapidity of lightning and a great deal of gesticulation. At a ball you hear far more French than English spoken, and at a concert I attended lately not a single song was in English. Even in the Protestant churches there is a special service held in French every Sunday, as well as another in Tamil, besides the English services; so a clergyman in Mauritius needs to be a good linguist. The polished floors, well _frotté_ every morning, and the rather set-out style of the rooms, all make a house look French. The business of the law-courts and the newspapers are also in French, with only here and there a column of English. The notifications of distances, the weights and measures, the "avis aux voyageurs," the finger-posts, wayside bills, signs on shop-fronts, are all in French. When by any chance the owner of a shop breaks out into an English notification of his wares--and it is generally a Chinaman or Parsee who is fired by this noble ambition--the result is as difficult to decipher as if it were a cuneiform inscription.

The greatest difference, as it is the one which most affects my individual comfort, which I have yet found out between Mauritius and an ordinary English colony is the poverty of the book-shops. Your true creole is not a reading character, though, on the other hand, he has a great and natural taste for music. I miss the one or even two excellent book shops where one could get, at quite reasonable prices too, most of the new and readable books which I have always found in the chief town of every English colony. At Cape Town, Christchurch, New Zealand, Maritzburg, D'Urban, there are far better booksellers than in most English country towns. Here it appears to me as if the love of literature were confined to the few English officials, who devour each other's half dozen volumes with an appetite which speaks terribly of a state of chronic mental famine. I keep hoping that I shall always be as busy as I am now, and so have very little time for reading, for if it is ever otherwise I too shall experience the universal starvation.

BEAU BASSIN, June 20th.

It has never been my lot hitherto, even in all my various wanderings, to stand of a clear starlight night and see the dear old Plough shining in the northern sky whilst the Southern Cross rode high in the eastern heaven. But I can see them both now; and the last thing I always do before going to bed is to go out and look first straight before me, where the Plough hangs luminous and low over the sea, and then stroll toward the right-hand or eastern side of the veranda and gaze up at the beautiful Cross through the rustling, tall tree-tops. It is much too cold now to sit out in the wide veranda and either watch the stars or try to catch a glimpse of the monkeys peeping up over the edge of the ravine in the moonlight, thereby awakening poor rheumatic old Boxer's futile rage by their gambols. My favorite theory is that one is never so cold as in a tropical country, and I have had great encouragement in that idea lately. We are always regretting that no fireplace has been included in the internal arrangements of this house, and when we go out to dinner part of the pleasure of the evening consists in getting well roasted in front of a coal-fire in the drawing-room. I am assured that a few months hence I shall utterly deny this said theory, and refuse to believe the fireplaces I see occasionally could ever be used except as receptacles for pots of ferns and large-leaved plants. At present, however, it is, as I say, delightfully, bracingly cold in the morning and evening, and almost too cold for comfort at night unless indeed you are well provided with blankets. We take long walks of three or four miles of an evening, starting when the sun sinks low enough for the luxuriant hedges by the roadside to afford us occasional shelter, and returning either in the starlight dusk or in the crisper air of a moonlight evening. In every direction the walk is sure to be a pretty one, whether we have the hill of the Corps-de-Garde before us, with its distinctly-marked profile of a French soldier of the days of the Empire lying with crossed hands, the head and feet cutting the sky-line sharp and clear, or the bolder outlines of blue Mount Ory or cloud-capped Pieter Both. Our path always lies through a splendid tangle of vegetation, where the pruning-knife seems the only gardening tool needed, and where the deepening twilight brings out many a heavy perfume from some hidden flower. Above us bends a vault of lapis-lazuli, with globes of light hanging in it, and around us is a heavenly, soft and balmy air. Whenever I say to a resident how delicious I find it all, he or she is sure to answer dolefully, "Wait till the hot weather!" But my idea is, that if there _is_ this terrible time in front of us, it is surely all the more reason why we should enjoy immensely the agreeable present. That there is some very different weather to be battled with is apparent by the extraordinary shutters one sees to all the houses. Imagine doors built as if to stand a siege, strengthened by heavy cross-pieces of wood close together, and, instead of bolt or lock, kept in their places by solid iron bars as thick as my wrist. Every door and window in the length and breadth of the island is furnished with these _contre-vents_, or hurricane-shutters, and they tell their own tale. So do the huge stones, or rather rocks, with which the roofs of the humbler houses and verandas are weighted. My expression of face must have been something amusing when I remarked triumphantly the other day to one of my acquaintances, who had just observed that my house stood in a very exposed situation, "But it has been built a great many years, and must have stood the great hurricanes of 1848 and 1868." "Ah!" replied Cassandra cheerfully; "there was not much left of it, I fancy, after the '48 hurricane, and I _know_ that the veranda was blown right _over_ the house in the gale of '68." Was not that a cheerful tale to hear of one's house? Just now the weather is wet and windy as well as cold, and the constant and capricious heavy showers reduce the lawn-tennis players to despair.

If any one asked me what was the serious occupation of my life here, I should answer without hesitation, "Airing my clothes." And it would be absolutely true. No one who has not seen it can imagine the damp and mildew which cover everything if it be shut up for even a few days. Ammonia in the box or drawer keeps the gloves from being spotted like the pard, but nothing seems to avail with the other articles of clothing. Linen feels quite wet if it is left unused in the _almirah_, or chest of drawers, for a week. Silk dresses break out into a measle-like rash of yellow spots. Cotton or muslin gowns become livid and take unto themselves a horrible charnel-house odor. Shoes and books are speedily covered a quarter of an inch deep by a mould which you can easily imagine would begin to grow ferns and long grasses in another week or so.

Hats, caps, cloth clothes, all share the same damp fate, whilst, as for the poor books, their condition is enough to make one weep, and that in spite of my constant attention and repeated dabbings with spirits of wine. And this is not the dampest part of the island by any means. Do not suppose, however, that damp is the only enemy to one's toilette here. I found a snail the other day in my wardrobe which had been journeying slowly but effectively across some favorite silken skirts. Cockroaches prefer tulle and net, and eat their way recklessly and rapidly through choicest lace, besides nibbling every cloth-bound book in the island. On the other hand, the rats confine their attentions chiefly to the boots and shoes of the resident, and are at all events good friends to the makers and sellers of those necessary articles. So, you see, garments are likely to be a source of more trouble than pleasure to their possessor if he or she is at all inclined to be always _tiré à quatre épingles_.

Except these objectionable creatures, there is not much animal life astir around me in the belle isle. It is too cold still for the butterflies, and I do not observe much variety among the birds. There are flocks of minas always twittering about my lawn--glossy birds very like starlings in their shape and impudent ways, only with more white in the plumage and with brilliant orange-colored circles round their eyes. There are plenty of paroquets, I am told, and cardinal birds, but I have not yet seen them. A sort of hybrid canary whistles and chirps in the early mornings, and I hear the shrill wild note of a merle every now and then. Of winged game there are but few varieties--partridges, quails, guinea-fowl and pigeons making up the list--but, on the other hand, poultry seems to swarm everywhere. I never saw such long-necked and long-legged cocks and hens in my life as I see here; but these feathered giraffes appear to thrive remarkably well, and scratch and cackle around every Malabar hut. I have not seen a sheep or a goat since I arrived, nor a cow or bullock grazing. The milch cows are all stall-fed. The bullocks go straight from shipboard to the butcher, and the horses are never turned out. This is partly because there is no pasturage, the land being used entirely for sugar-cane or else left in small patches of jungle. As might be expected from such a volcanic-looking island, the surface of the ground is extremely stony, but the sugar-cane loves the light soil, and I am told that it thrives best where the stones are just turned aside and a furrow left for the cane-plant. After a year or so the furrow is changed by the rocks being rolled back again into their original places, and the space they occupied is then available for young plants. The wild hares are terrible enemies to the first shoots of the cane, and we pass picturesque _gardiens_ armed with amazing _fusils_ and clad in every variety of picturesque rag, keeping a sort of boundary-guard at the edges of the sprouting cane-fields. There are a great many dogs to be seen about, and they are also regarded as gardiens; for the swarming miscellaneous Eastern population does not bear the best reputation in the world for honesty, and the police seem to have their hands full. All that I know about the use of the dogs as auxiliaries is that they yelp and bark hideously all night at each other, for every one seems to resent as a personal insult any nocturnal visit from a neighbor's dog.

The horses are better than I expected. When one hears that every four-footed beast has to be imported, one naturally expects dear and indifferent horses, but I am agreeably surprised in this respect. We have horses from the Cape, from Natal, and even from Australia, and they do not appear to cost more here than they would in their respective countries. I may add that there is also no difficulty whatever in providing yourself with an excellent carriage of any kind you prefer, and it is far better to choose one here than to import one. I mention this because a carriage or conveyance of some sort is the necessary of necessaries here--as indispensable as a pair of boots would be in England. I scarcely ever see any one on horseback: people never seem to ride, to my great regret. I am assured that it will be much too hot to do so in the summer evenings, and that the hardness of the roads prevents riding from being an agreeable mode of exercise. Every village can furnish sundry _carrioles_ for hire, queer-looking little conveyances, like a minute section of a tilt-cart mounted on two crazy wheels and drawn by a rat of a pony. Ponies are a great institution here, and are really more suitable for ordinary work than horses. They are imported in large numbers from Pegu and other parts of Birmah, and also from Java, Timur and different places in the Malay Archipelago. They stand about twelve or fourteen hands high, and are the strongest, healthiest, pluckiest little beauties imaginable, full of fire and go. Occasionally I meet a carriage drawn by a handsome pair of mules, and they are much used in the numerous carts and for farm-work, especially on the sugar estates. They are chiefly brought from South America and from the Persian Gulf, and have many admirers, but I cannot say I like them as a substitute either for horses or for the gay little ponies. This is such an exceedingly sociable place that I have frequent opportunities of looking at the nice horses of my visitors, and most of the equipages would do credit to any establishment. The favorite style of carriage in use here is very like a victoria, only there is a curious custom of _always_ keeping the hood up. It looks so strange to my eyes to see the hood, which projects unusually far as a screen against either sun or rain, kept habitually up, even during the brief and balmy twilight, when one fancies it would be so much more agreeable to drive swiftly through the soft air without any screening _soufflet_. Of course it would be quite necessary to keep it up in the daytime, or even late at night against the heavy dew, but this does not begin to fall until it is too dark to remain out driving.

I must say I like Mauritius extremely. It is so _comfortable_ to live in a place with good servants and commodious houses, and the society is particularly refined and agreeable, owing chiefly to the mixture of a strong French element in its otherwise humdrum ingredients. I have never seen such a wealth of lovely hair or such beautiful eyes and teeth as I observe in the girls in every ball-room here; and when you add exceedingly charming--alas! that I must say foreign--manners and a great deal of musical talent, you can easily imagine that the style of the society is a good deal above that to be found in most colonies.

What weigh upon me most sadly in the Mauritius are the solitude and the intense loneliness of the little island. We are very gay and pleasant among ourselves, but I often feel as if I were in a dream as far as the rest of the world is concerned, or as if we were all living in another planet. Only once in a month does the least whisper reach us from the great outer world beyond our girdling reef of breaking foam: only once in four long weeks can any tidings come to us from those we love and are parted from--any news of the progress of events, any thrilling incidents of daily history; and it is strange how diluted the sense of interest becomes by passing through so long an interval of days and weeks. The force of everything is weakened, its strength broken. Can you fancy the position of a ship at sea, not voyaging toward any port or harbor, but moored in the midst of a vast, desolate ocean? Once in a weary while of thirty days another ship passes and throws some mailbags on board, and whilst we stretch out clamorous hands and cry for fuller tidings, for more news, the vessel has passed out of our reach, and we are absolutely alone once more. It is the strangest sensation, and I do not think one can ever get reconciled to it. True, there is a great deal of talk just now about a connecting cable which is some day to join us by electric wires to the centres of civilization; but no telegraphic message can ever make up for letters, and it will always be too costly for private use except on great emergencies. Strange to say, the mercantile community, which is a very influential one here, objects strongly to proposals of either telegraphic or increased postal communication. They have no doubt good reasons for their opinion, but I think if their pretty little children were on the other side of the world, instead of close at hand, they would agree with me that it is very hard to wait for four weeks between the mails.

AN ADVENTURE IN CYPRUS

"So this is Cyprus?" cries my English companion, Mr. James P----, turning his glass with a critical air upon the glorious panorama that lies outspread before us in all the splendor of the June sunrise. "Well, upon my word, it's not so bad, after all!"

Such a landscape, however, merits far higher praise than this thoroughly English commendation. To the right surge up against the bright morning sky, wave beyond wave, an endless succession of green sunny slopes which might pass for the "Delectable Mountains" of Bunyan. To the left cluster the vineyards which have supplied for nineteen centuries the far-famed "wine of Cyprus." In front extends a wide sweep of smooth white sand, ending on one side in a bold rocky ridge, and on the other in the tall white houses and straggling streets and painted church-towers and gilded cupolas of the quaint old town of Larnaka, which, outlined against a shadowy background of purple hills, appears to us as just it did to Coeur de Lion and his warriors when they landed here seven hundred years ago on their way to the fatal crusade from which so few of them were to return.[A] And all around, a fit frame for such a picture, extend the blue sparkling sea and the warm, dreamy, voluptuous summer sky.

"Wasn't it here that Fortunatus used to live?" says P----. "I wish I could find his purse lying about somewhere: it would come in very handy just now."

"You forget that its virtue ended with his life," answer I; "and, moreover, the illustrious man didn't live here, but at Famagosta, farther along the coast, where, I dare say, the first Greek you meet will show you 'ze house of Signor Fortunato,' and the original purse to boot, all for the small charge of one piastre."

Our landing is beset by the usual mob of yelling vagabonds, eager to lighten our pockets by means of worthless native "curiosities," "antiques" manufactured a month before, or vociferous offers to show us "all ze fine sight of ze town, ver' sheap." Just as we have succeeded in fighting our way through the hurly-burly a venerable old Smyrniote with a long white beard, in whom we recognize one of our fellow-passengers on the steamer, accosts us with a low bow: "Want see ze old shursh, genteelmen? All ze Signori Inglesi go see zat. You wish, I take you zere one minute."

"All right!" shouts P---- with characteristic impetuosity: "I'm bound to see all I can in the time. Drive on, old boy: I'm your man."

Away we go, accordingly, along the deep, narrow, tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by tall blank houses such as meet one at every turn in Cairo or Djeddah or Jerusalem, between whose projecting fronts the sunny sky appears like a narrow strip of bright blue ribbon far away overhead, while all below is veiled in a rich summer twilight of purple shadow, like that which fills the interior of some vast cathedral. But ever and anon a sudden break in the ranked masses of building gives us a momentary glimpse of the broad shining sea and dazzling sunlight, which falls upon many a group that a painter would love to copy--tall, gaunt Armenians, whose high black caps and long dark robes make their pale, hollow faces look doubly spectral; low-browed, sallow, bearded Russians; brawny English sailors, looking down with a grand, indulgent contempt upon those unhappy beings whom an inscrutable Providence has doomed to be "foreigners;" stolid Turks, tramping onward in silent defiance of the fierce looks cast at them from every side; sinewy Dalmatians, with close-cropped black hair; dapper Frenchmen, with well-trimmed moustaches, casting annihilating glances at the few ladies who happen to be abroad; and barefooted Greeks, with little baskets of fruit or fish perched on their heads--ragged, wild-eyed and brigand-like as the lazzaroni who rose from the pavement of Naples at the call of Masaniello.

"Awful rascals some of these fellows look, eh?" remarks P---- in a stage whisper.

"Yes, their faces are certainly no letter of recommendation. There is some truth, undoubtedly, in the _last_ clause of the old proverb: 'Greek wines steal all heads, Greek women steal all hearts, and Greek men steal everything.'"

But at this moment our attention is drawn to a crowd a little way ahead, the centre of attraction being apparently a good-looking young Greek from the Morea, whose jaunty little crimson cap with its hanging tassel sets off very tastefully his dark, handsome face and the glossy black curls which surround it. He is leaning against the pillar of a gateway in an attitude of unstudied grace that would charm an Italian painter, and singing, to the accompaniment of his little three-stringed guitar, a lively Greek song, of which we only come up in time to catch the last verse:

Look in mine eyes, lady fair: There your own image you'll see. Open my heart and look there: _There_ too your image will be.

The coppers that chink into the singer's extended hat show how fully his efforts are appreciated; but at this moment P----, with the free-and-easy command of a true John Bull, elbows his way through the throng, and calls out: "Holloa, Johnny! we only got the fag-end of that song. Tip us another, and here's five piastres for you" (about twenty-five cents).

The musician seems to understand him, and with a slight preliminary flourish on his instrument pours forth, in a voice as clear and rippling as the carol of a bird, a song which may be thus translated:

Men fret, men toil, men pinch and pare, Make life itself a scramble, While I, without a grief or care, Where'er it lists me ramble. 'Neath cloudless sun or clouded moon, By market-cross or ferry, I chant my lay, I play my tune. And all who hear are merry.

When summer's sun unclouded shines, And mountain-shadows linger, I watch them dance among the vines As quicker moves my finger; And so they sport till day is o'er, And black-robed Night advances, And where the maidens tripped before, The lovely moonbeam dances.

When 'neath the rush of winter's rain The dripping forests welter, The shepherd opes his door amain, And gives me food and shelter. I touch my chords, I trill my lay, The firelight glances o'er us, And wind and rain, in stormy play, Join in with lusty chorus.

'Mid rustling leaves, 'neath open sky, I live like lark or swallow: There's not a bird more free to fly Than I am free to follow. And when grim Death his bow shall bend, My mortal course suspending, Oh may my life, howe'er it end, Have music in its ending!

Such music, supplemented by such a voice, strongly tempts us to remain and hear more; but our impatient guide urges us onward, and in another minute we stand before the dark, low-browed archway of the old church which we have come to see.

The quaint architecture of the outside is strange and old-world enough, but when we enter, the dim interior, haunted by weird shadows and ghostly echoes, has quite an unearthly effect after the bustling life of the city. As is usual in Greek and Russian churches, there are no seats of any kind, the whole interior being one wide bare space, dimly lighted by the two tall candles on the altar and a few little oil-lamps attached to the pictures of saints adorning the walls. The decorations have that air of tawdry finery which is the most displeasing feature of the Eastern churches; but the four frescoes at the farther end (representing the Adoration of the Magi, our Lord's Baptism, the Crucifixion, and the Descent into Hell), rude as they are, have a grim power which takes hold of our fancy at once. Dante himself might approve the last of the four, in which the lurid atmosphere, the hideous contortions of the demons, and the surging flight of the half-awakened dead, with their blank faces and stony eyes, contrast magnificently with the grand calmness of the divine Figure in the centre--a perfect realization of the noble words of Milton:

Some howled, some shrieked, Some bent their fiery darts at thee, while Thou Sat'st unappalled in calm and sinless peace.

The only occupant of the building is a tall, dignified-looking priest, who at once takes upon himself the part of expositor; but he is suddenly interrupted by the hurried entrance of a man who whispers something in his ear. The priest instantly vanishes into the sacristy, and, reappearing with something like a casket under his arm, goes hastily out, muttering as he passes us some words which my comrade interprets as "Follow me."

We obey at once; but, in truth, it is no light matter to do so, for the good father sets off at a pace which, considering the heat of the day and the weight of his trailing robes, is simply astounding. Up one street, down another, round a corner, along a narrow lane--on he rushes as if bent upon rivalling that indefatigable giant who "walked round the world every morning before breakfast to sharpen his appetite."

"By Jove!" mutters P----, mopping his streaming face for the twentieth time, "what he's going to show us ought to be something special, by the hurry he's in to get to it. Anyhow, it's a queer style of showing us the way, to go pelting on like that, and leave us to take care of ourselves. I'll just halloo to him to slacken speed a bit."

But just as he is about to do so the priest halts suddenly in front of a high, blank wall of baked clay, in the midst of which a door opens and swallows him as if by magic. We come tearing up a moment later, and are about to enter at his heels when our way is unexpectedly barred by an ugly old Greek with one eye and with a threadbare crimson cap pulled down over his lean, sallow face, which looks very much like a half-decayed cucumber. "What do you want?" he growls, eying us from head to foot with the air of a bulldog about to bite.

We explain our errand, and are electrified with the information that we have been on the point of intruding ourselves into a private house; that the priest's business there is to pray over the master of it, who is dangerously ill; and that, in short, we have been "hunting upon a false scent" altogether. Having imparted this satisfactory information, Cerberus shuts the door in our faces (which are sufficiently blank by this time), and leaves us to think over the matter at our leisure.

"Confound the old mole!" growls P---- wrathfully: "if he didn't want us, why on earth did he tell us to follow him, I should like to know?"

"Are you quite sure that he _did_ say so?" ask I. "What were the Greek words that he used?"

"'Mê akolouthei,' or something like that."

"Which means, '_Don't_ follow,'" I retort, transfixing the abashed offender with a look of piercing reproach. "If _that's_ all that's left of your Greek, you'd better buy a lexicon and take a fresh start. However, there's nobody to tell tales if _we_ don't, that's one comfort."

And so ends the first and last of our adventures in Cyprus.

DAVID KER.

NEIGHBORLY LOVE.

Eine Welt zwar bist du, O Rom; doch ohne die Liebe Wäre die Welt nicht die Welt, wäre denn Rom auch nicht Rom.--GOETHE: _Elegy I_.

"Maytide in Rome! The air 's a mist of gold, In rainbow colors are the fountains springing, The streets are like a garden to behold, And in my heart a choir of birds are singing. Haste to thy window, love: I wait for thee. High o'er the narrow lane our glance may meet, Our stretched hands all but clasp. Hither to me, And make the glory of the hour complete.

"No sound, no sign! The bowed blinds are not stirred. I dare not cry, lest from the common street Some passing idler catch one sacred word That's dedicate to her. How may I greet My love to-day? how may I lure her near? Ah! I will write my message on her wall In living sunshine. She shall see and hear: The silent fire of heaven shall sound my call."

He draws his casement: on the glittering glass A captured sunbeam flashes sudden flame: Between her blinds demure he makes it pass: Its joyous radiance tells her whence it came. She feels its presence like a fiery kiss; Mantling her face leaps up the maiden's blood; She flies to greet him. Oh immortal bliss! For ever thus is old Rome's youth renewed.

EMMA LAZARUS.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

POE AND MRS. WHITMAN.

Burns's Highland Mary, Petrarch's Laura, and other real and imaginary loves of the poets, have been immortalized in song, but we doubt whether any of the numerous objects of poetical adoration were more worthy of honor than Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the friend and defender of Edgar A. Poe. That he should have inspired so deep and lasting a love in the heart of so true and pure a woman would alone prove that he was not the social pariah his vindictive enemies have held up to the world's wonder and detestation. The poet's love for Mrs. Whitman was the one gleam of hope that cheered the last sad years of his life. His letters to her breathed the most passionate devotion and the most enthusiastic admiration. One eloquent extract from his love-letters to Mrs. Whitman will suffice. In response to a passage in one of her letters in which she says, "How often have I heard men, and even women, say of you, 'He has great intellectual power, but no principle, no moral sense'!" he exclaims: "I love you too truly ever to have offered you my hand, ever to have sought your love, had I known my name to be so stained as your expressions imply. There is no oath which seems to me so sacred as that sworn by the all-divine love I bear you. By this love, then, and by the God who reigns in heaven, I swear to you that my soul is incapable of dishonor. I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush to my cheek or to yours."

Carried away by the ardor and eloquent passion of her poet-lover, and full of the sweetest human sympathy and the tenderest human charity for one so gifted but so unfortunate, Mrs. Whitman, against the advice of her relatives and friends, consented to a conditional engagement. It was in relation to this engagement, and the cause of its being broken off, that one of the most calumnious stories against Poe was told, and believed both in America and in Europe, but especially in England. Why the engagement was broken, and by whom, still remains buried in mystery, but that Poe was guilty of any "outrage" at her house upon the eve of their intended marriage was emphatically denied by Mrs. Whitman. She pronounced the whole story a "calumny." In a letter before me she says: "I do not think it possible to overstate the gentlemanly reticence and amenity of his habitual manner. It was stamped through and through with the impress of nobility and gentleness. I have seen him in many moods and phases in those 'lonesome, latter years' which were rapidly merging into the mournful tragedy of death. I have seen him sullen and moody under a sense of insult and imaginary wrong. I have _never_ seen in him the faintest indication of savagery and rowdyism and brutality."

Some of the most tenderly passionate of Mrs. Whitman's verses were inspired by her affection for Poe. She wrote six sonnets to his memory, overflowing with the most exalted love and generous sympathy. The first of these sonnets ends thus:

_Thou_ wert my destiny: thy song, thy fame, The wild enchantments clustering round thy name, Were my soul's heritage--its regal dower, Its glory, and its kingdom, and its power.

When malice had exhausted itself in heaping obloquy upon the name of the dead poet, it was the gentle hand of woman that first removed the odium from his memory. It was Mrs. Whitman--who loved him and whom he loved--that dared to penetrate the "mournful corridors" of that sad, desolate heart, with its "halls of tragedy and chambers of retribution," and tell the true but melancholy story of the unhappy master of the Raven. It was she who generously came forward as "one of the friends" of him who was said to have no friends. She was his steady champion from first to last. Whether it was some crackbrain scribbler who tried to prove Poe "mad," some accomplished scholar who endeavored to disparage him in order to magnify some other writer, or some silly woman who attempted to foist herself into notice by relating "imaginary facts" concerning the poet's hidden life, Mrs. Whitman was always ready to defend her dead friend.

One of the most touching incidents in Poe's early life was his affection and fidelity to Mrs. Helen Stannard, who had completely won the sensitive boy's heart by her kindness to him when he came to her house with her son, a favorite school-friend. This lady died under circumstances of peculiar sorrow, and her young admirer was in the habit of visiting her grave every night. It was she--"the one idolatrous and purely ideal love" of his passionate boyhood--who inspired those exquisite lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me." Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his article on Poe published in _Harper's Monthly_ for May, 1872, says, in allusion to Mrs. Stannard: "The memory of this lady _is said_ to have suggested the most beautiful of his minor poems, 'Helen,' though I am not aware _that Poe ever countenanced the idea_." As Mrs. Whitman had distinctly stated in _Edgar Poe and his Critics_ that Mrs. Stannard _had_ inspired the poem, she addressed a note to Mr. Stoddard upon the subject, to which he sent the following reply: "MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN: So many months have elapsed since I wrote the paper on Poe about which you write that I am unable to remember what I said in it. I certainly had no intention to discredit any statement that you made in _Edgar Poe and his Critics_, and if I have done so I am sorry for it, and ask your forgiveness."

In one of Mrs. Whitman's letters, now lying before me, she says: "So much has been written, and so much still continues to be written, about Poe by persons who are either his avowed or secret enemies, that I joyfully welcome every friendly or impartial word spoken in his behalf. His enemies are uttering their venomous fabrications in every newspaper, and so few voices can obtain a hearing in his defence. My own personal knowledge of Mr. Poe was very brief, although it comprehended memorable incidents, and was doubtless, as he kindly characterized it in one of his letters of the period, 'the most earnest epoch of his life;' and such I devoutly and emphatically believe it to have been. You ask me to furnish you with extracts from his letters, literary or otherwise. There are imperative reasons why these letters cannot and _ought_ not to be published at present--not that there was a word or a thought in them discreditable to Poe, though some of them were imprudent, doubtless, and liable to be construed wrongly by his enemies. They are for the most part strictly _personal_. The only extract from them of which I have authorized the publication is a fac-simile of a paragraph inserted between the 68th and 69th pages of Mr. Ingram's memoir in Black's (Edinburgh) edition of the complete works of Poe. The paragraph in the original letter (dated November 24, 1848) consists of only eight lines: 'The agony which I have so lately endured--an agony known only to my God and to myself--seems to have passed my soul through fire, and purified it from all that is weak. Henceforward I am strong: this those who love me shall see, as well as those who have so relentlessly endeavored to ruin me. It needed only some such trials as I have just undergone to make me what I was born to be by making me conscious of my own strength.' This and a protest against the charge of indifference to moral obligations so often urged against him, which I permitted Mr. Gill to extract for publication from a long letter filled with eloquent and proud remonstrance against the injustice of such a charge, are the only passages of which I have authorized the publication. Other letters have been published without my consent. I have endeavored to reconcile myself to the unauthorized use of private letters and papers, since the effect of their publication has been on the whole regarded as favorable to Poe."

It was Mrs. Whitman who first attempted to trace Edgar Poe's descent from the old Norman family of Le Poer, which emigrated to Ireland during the reign of Henry II. of England. Lady Blessington, through her father, Edmund Power, claimed the same illustrious descent. The Le Poers were distinguished for being improvident, daring and reckless. The family originally belonged to Italy, whence they passed to the north of France, and went to England with William the Conqueror. In a letter dated January 3, 1877, Mrs. Whitman says: "For all that I said on the subject I _alone_ am responsible. A distant relative of mine, a descendant, like myself, from Nicholas le Poer, had long ministered to my genealogical proclivities by stories which from my childhood had vaguely haunted and charmed my imagination. When I discovered certain facts of Poe's history of which he had previously made little account, he seemed greatly impressed by my theory of our relationship. Of course I endowed him with my traditional heirlooms. John Savage, who wrote some fine papers on Poe, which I _think_ appeared in the _Democratic Review_, perhaps in 1858, said to a friend of mine that the things most interesting and valuable to him in my little book (_Poe and his Critics_) were its genealogical hints."

When M. Stephane Mallarmé, an enthusiastic admirer of Poe's, undertook to translate his works into French, he addressed Mrs. Whitman a complimentary letter, from which the following passages are translated: "Whatever is done to honor the memory of a genius the most truly divine the world has seen, ought it not first to obtain your sanction? Such of Poe's works as our great Baudelaire left untranslated--that is to say, the poems and many of the literary criticisms--I hope to make known to France. My first attempt, 'Le Corbeau,' of which I send you a specimen, is intended to attract attention to a future work now nearly completed. I trust that the attempt will meet your approval, but no possible success of my future design could cause you, madam, a satisfaction equal to the joy, vivid, profound and absolute, caused by an extract from one of your letters in which you expressed a wish to see a copy of my 'Corbeau.' Not only in space--which is nothing--but in _time_, made up for each of us of the hours we deem most memorable in the past, your wish seemed to come to me from _so_ far, and to bring with it the most delicious return of long cherished memories; for, fascinated with the works of Poe from my infancy, it has been a long time that your name has been associated with his in my earliest and most intimate sympathies. Receive, madam, this expression of a gratitude such as your poetical soul may comprehend, for it is my inmost heart that thanks you."

Mrs. Whitman translated Mallarmé's inscription intended for the Poe monument in Baltimore. The last verse was thus rendered:

Through storied centuries thou shall proudly stand In the Memorial City of his land, A silent monitor, austere and gray, To warn the clamorous brood of harpies from their prey.

E.L.D.

A LITTLE PERVERSITY IN WOMEN.

MRS. PHILIP MARKHAM. PHILIP MARKHAM. MISS ETHEL ARNOLD. FRANK BEVERLY.

(The four have been dining together and discussing the people they had met some hours before at a reception.)

_Philip Markham._ At all events, I call her a very beautiful woman.--Don't you say so, Beverly? I am telling Miss Arnold that I considered Miss St. John handsome.

_Mrs. Markham._ Oh, Philip, how can you say so?

_Beverly._ I admired her immensely.

_Mrs. M._ (with a shrug). Oh, I dare say. A round, soulless face, a large waist--

_Philip._ You women have no eyes. She has cheeks (to quote Cherbuliez) like those fruits one longs to bite into, a pair of fine eyes, well-cut lips--(Breaks off and laughs).

_Mrs. M._ (severely). Pray go on.

_Philip._ Not while you regard me with that virtuous air of condemnation.

_Mrs. M._ I confess I saw nothing to admire in the girl except that she looked healthy and strong.

_Miss Arnold._ Nor did I. Moreover, she had the fault of being badly dressed.

_Beverly._ She was beautiful, then, not by reason of her dress, as most of your sex are, but in spite of it. You women always underrate physical beauty in each other.

_Mrs. M._ (pretending not to have heard Beverly's remark). Yes, Ethel, very badly dressed, and her hair was atrociously arranged.

_Philip._ Oh, we did not look at her hair, we were so much attracted by her face and figure.

_Mrs. M._ (piqued). Take my advice, Ethel, and never marry. While we were engaged Philip never thought of seeing beauty in any girl except myself: now he is in a state of enthusiasm bordering upon frenzy over every new face he comes across.

_Beverly._ He knows, I suppose, that you do not mind it--that you are the more flattered the more he admires the entire sex.

_Mrs. M._ Of course I do not _mind_ it: the only thing is--

_Philip._ Well, what is the only thing, Jenny?

_Beverly._ You remember, Cousin Jenny, I was talking the other day about the perversity of your sex. You either cannot or will not understand your husbands: they hide nothing, extenuate nothing, yet you fail to grasp the idea of that side of their minds which is at once the best and the most dangerous. If Philip did not regard all women with interest, and some with particular interest, he could not have had it in his head to be half so much in love with you as he is.

_Philip._ That is true, Frank--so true that we won't ask how you found it out.

_Miss A._ You men always stand by each other so faithfully! Now, I have observed these traits among my married friends: the husbands invariably give a half sigh at the sight of a beautiful girl, implying, "Oh, if I were not a married man!" while the wives, on meeting a man who attracts admiration, as uniformly believe that, let him be ever so handsome, clever or fascinating, he cannot compare with their own particular John.

_Mrs. M._ That is true, Ethel; and it shows how much more faithful women are than men.

_Philip._ Now, Jenny, that is nonsense.

_Beverly._ Oh, I dare say there is a soupçon of truth in it. But I think I could give wives a recipe for keeping their husbands' affections, which, unpopular although it might be, would yet prove salutary.

_Miss A._ Give it by all means, Mr. Beverly. Anything so beneficial would naturally be popular.

_Beverly._ Pardon me, no. Were I to suggest a pilgrimage, a fast, or scourgings even, the fair sex would undertake the remedy at once, for they like some éclat about their smallest doings. All I want them to do is to correct their little spirit of self-will and cultivate good taste.

_Mrs. M._ Women _self-willed_! Most women have no will at all.

_Beverly._ I never saw a woman yet who had not a will; and I am the last person to deny their right to it. What I suggest is that they suit it to the requirements of their lives, not let it torment them by going all astray, by delighting in its errors and persisting in its chimeras.

_Miss A._ I grant the first, that we have wills, but I do insist that we have good taste.

_Beverly._ Now, then, we will consider this abstract question. I maintain that, considering their interest in women and their natural zest in pursuing them, men show more right up-and-down faithfulness and devotion to their obligations than women do.

_Philip._ Hear! hear!

_Miss A._ Oh, if you start upon the hypothesis that man is a being incapable of--

_Beverly._ Not at all. You must, however, grant at the outset that man is the free agent in society--has always been since the beginning of civilization. He has made all the laws, enjoying complete immunity to suit the requirements of his wishes and needs, yet everybody knows that, in spite of the clamor of the woman-suffragists, all the laws favor women. The basis of every system of civilized society proves that men are inclined to hold themselves strictly to their obligations toward your sex. There is no culprit toward whom a jury of men are less lenient than one who has manifested any light sense of his domestic duties. Is not that true?

_Mrs. M._ I suppose it is. But it ought to be so, of course. It is impossible for men to be good enough to their wives.

_Beverly._ Just so. But what I claim is, that while every man holds, at least theoretically, to the very highest ideal of a man's duties in the marriage relation, very few wives render their husbands' existences so altogether happy that these obligations become not only the habit but the joy of their lives.--Don't interrupt me, Jenny.--Not but what the lovely creatures are willing--nay, anxious--to do so, but just at the point of accomplishment their little failings of blindness and perversity come in. They are determined to retain their husbands' complete allegiance, but their devices and contrivances are mostly dull blunders. Considering what a frail tie, based on illusion, binds the sexes, my wonder as a bachelor is that men are, as a rule, as faithful to their wives as they seem to be.

_Philip._ We have been friends, Frank, for fifteen years, and I married your first cousin, but notwithstanding all that Jenny will insist now that I give up your acquaintance.

_Mrs. M._ No, Philip, I am not angry with Frank: I only feel sorry for him.

_Miss A._ So do I. Yet I am curious to know, Jenny, what he means by saying that wives' devices to keep their husbands' love are mostly dull blunders.

_Beverly._ I am waiting for a chance to develop my views. I know plenty of men who are absolutely loyal to their wives--faithful to the smallest obligation of married life--yet who regard their marriage as the great folly of their youth. Now, a woman's intuitions ought to be, it seems to me, so clear and unerring that she should never permit her face and voice to become unpleasant to her husband. And this effect generally comes from the absurdity of her attempts to hold him to her side: they have ended by repelling him. Now, if your sex would only remember that we are horribly fastidious, and that it is necessary to behave with good taste--

_Mrs. M._ Oh! oh! Monster!

_Miss A._ Barbarian!

_Beverly._ I will give you an instance. In our trip up and down the Saguenay last summer you both remember the bridal couple on board the boat?

_Philip._ I remember the bride, a charming creature. The young fellow could not compare with her in any qualities of cleverness or good looks.

_Beverly._ Perhaps not. At the same time, he was her superior in some nice points. Pretty although the bride was, and enviable as we considered his good-luck, one could not help wincing for him when this delicate, refined little creature "showed off" before the crowd of indifferent passengers. At table she put her face so close to his, and when they stood or sat together on deck she hung about him in such a way, that, as I noticed over and over, it brought the blood to his cheeks and made him ashamed to raise his eyes. Depend upon it, that young man, in spite of his infatuation, said within himself a hundred times on his wedding-journey, "Poor innocent little darling! she has no idea of the attention she attracts to us."

_Mrs. M._ (eagerly). Yes, she did know all about it. She was so proud of being newly married that if everyone with whom she came in contact would not allude to her position she made a point of confiding the fact that she was a bride of a week, and actually wore me out with pouring her raptures into my ears.

_Miss A._ Jenny, you should not have told that. It will confirm Mr. Beverly in his cynicism regarding her want of taste.

_Philip._ I remember the morning the young fellow and I walked into Chicoutimi together that I said to him, "Lately married, I believe?" and he only nodded stiffly and pointed out the falls in the distance.

_Beverly._ Now, it is a deliciously pretty blunder for a bride to proclaim her good-luck, but it is a blunder nevertheless. For six months a man forgives it: after that he has no fondness for being paraded as a part and parcel of a woman's belongings. By that time he has probably found out that she is not all gushing unconsciousness. Besides this adorable innocence I observed something else in this pretty bride. Despite her fresh raptures, she was capable of jealousy: if her husband left her for an hour he found her a trifle sullen on his return.

_Miss A._ She had nobody else.

_Mrs. M._ She naturally wanted to feel that he was interested in nothing besides her.

_Beverly._ But she should not have shown it. This is another perverse and suicidal inconsistency on a woman's part: she should never exhibit these small meannesses of pique, sullen tempers, jealousy, to her husband, since they place her wholly at a disadvantage, making her less attractive than the objects she wishes to detach him from.

_Mrs. M._ (a little embarrassed and looking toward her husband deprecatingly, at which he laughs and shakes his head). Woman is a creature of impulse. She does not study what it is most politic for her to do: she gives herself utterly--she simply asks for everything in return.

_Beverly._ Does she give herself utterly? Does she not generally keep an accurate debit-and-credit account of what is due to her? Then the moment she feels her rights infringed upon, what is her usual course? She holds it her prerogative to set out upon a course of conduct eminently qualified to displease the very man whom it is her interest and her salvation to please.

_Mrs. M._ But he should try as well to please her.

_Beverly._ That is begging the question. Besides, her requirements are unreasonable. She holds too tight a rein: a man is never safe after he feels that strain at the bit. Now even you, Jenny--whom I hold up as a model of a wife--you will not let Philip express his admiration for a pretty woman without--

_Mrs. M._ (eagerly). I delight in having him admire any one whom I consider worthy of admiration. I do not like to see any man run away with by an infatuation for mere outside beauty.

_Beverly._ Yet "mere outside beauty" is clearly the most important gift Nature has bestowed upon women.

_Mrs. M._} Oh! oh! oh! _Miss A._}

_Philip._ What is your recipe, Frank, for putting an end to disagreements between husbands and wives?

_Beverly._ Wives are to give up studying their own requirements, and try to understand their husbands.

_Miss A._ And what will the result be?

_Beverly._ All men, instead of remaining bachelors like myself, will become infatuated with domestic life. No man could resist the prospect of being constantly caressed, waited upon, admired, flattered. And once married, a man's own home would become so fascinating a place to him that he would never, except against his will, exchange it for his club or the drawing-room of his neighbor's wife.

_Miss A._ And in return are husbands prepared to give up a nice sense of their own requirements and study to understand their wives?

_Beverly._ Not at all: they are far too stupid to understand their wives: there is something too fine and elusive about a woman's intellect and heart to be attained by one of our sex. Besides, are things ever equal--two souls ever just sufficiently like and unlike exactly to understand each other? Let women perfect themselves in the art of giving happiness, and the good action will command its own reward.

_Miss A._ Do you comprehend, Jenny, what the full duty of woman is? For my part, I think it is better to go on in the old way, since it is said that "a mill, a clock and a woman always want mending." I think women have their own little requirements.

_Mrs. M._ (who has left her seat and gone round to her husband, and is cracking his almonds with an air of being anxious to conciliate him). The fact is, Ethel, you unmarried women know nothing at all about it.

L.W.

ORGANIZATIONS FOR MUTUAL AID.

A French gentleman, M. Court, has lately published in _La Religion Laïque_ a series of articles upon this subject that have attracted much attention. He proposes the establishment of a national fund for the support of the aged and infirm, managed by eight members chosen annually, half by the Chamber of Deputies, half by the Senate. The fund is to be raised by legacies and donations; by a gift from the state of ten millions of francs; by a percentage deducted by the state, the departments and the communes from the pay of those who contract to furnish materials for building, to do work, etc.; by a tax upon all who employ servants or other laborers (one franc a month for each employé); and by a deduction from collateral inheritances (_successions collatérals_). In time, about every member of the community would be subjected directly or indirectly to taxation for the support of the institution, and would have a right to its benefits.

To the ordinary mind the plan appears wholly impracticable from its magnitude, if for no other cause; but it is evidently presented in good faith, and is further proof of the general growth of the sentiment that capital owes a debt to the labor of the world which cannot be satisfied with the mere payment of wages. Most of the "sick funds" or other provisions for the care of disabled workmen in great industrial establishments owe their origin to the initiative of the proprietor. M. Godin, the founder of the _Familistère_, a palatial home for the families of some five hundred men employed in his iron-works at Guise, was one of the first to institute a fund for mutual assistance and medical service, supported by means of a tax of twenty cents a month on the salary of each workman. Foreseeing the troubles that would arise should he attempt to manage this fund in the interest of his men, he wisely refused to have any share in this work, and induced them to elect a board of managers from their own number having entire responsibility in the matter. The board is composed of eighteen members, each of whom receives from M. Godin an indemnity of five francs a month for time lost in visiting the sick, committee-work, etc.

"The assessment," writes M. Godin, "for the support of the fund to which the workmen consented amounted to about one per cent. of their earnings. The chief of the establishment at the same time contributed all the money resulting from fines for spoiling work and for infractions of the rules of the manufactory. Thanks to this combination, the three principal causes of discord between patron and workman on the subject of relief-funds are removed. First, mistrust and suspicion are avoided. The managers of the treasury are of their own number, and therefore the workmen feel perfectly free to hold them to strict account for every sou received or disbursed. Second, as the fines for breaking the rules are devoted to the fund, the workmen themselves are the sole gainers. This teaches them to respect the rules, and they are little disposed to side with the refractory when they oppose a fine. Third, fines for spoiling work cause no ill-will; indeed, they are submitted to with a good grace. The fine benefits the fund; and, moreover, as in the case of fines for breaking rules, the workman has always a jury of his peers to appeal to: the board of managers is always at hand to approve or disapprove of the fine."

The fund thus administered has proved a great blessing to those who have claims upon it, and the members of the board have worked together over twelve years in the most exemplary harmony; or, in M. Godin's words, it has "parfaitement fonctionné sans conflits, sans contestations d'aucune sorte, et de manière à donner d'excellentes résultats." The average yearly receipts have been eighteen thousand nine hundred francs; average disbursements, eighteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-four francs. Possibly these facts and figures may be of service to some of our chiefs of industry who are studying to improve the condition of their employés.

M.H.

NEW YORK AS AN ART-PATRON.

That cities, like individuals, have idiosyncrasies that may be defined and estimated, and that may be depended upon to lead to the adoption of a certain line of action by the community in view of a certain set of circumstances, is a fact which is continually receiving fresh illustrations. The attitude of New York toward Mr. Theodore Thomas is a case in point. There is among the works of the Scottish poet Alexander Wilson, better known as the "American Ornithologist," a ballad entitled "Watty and Meg; or, The Wife Reformed." Its moral is for all to read. Watty's measure of domestic felicity was but scant, and when the burden laid upon him became greater than he could bear he determined to leave the cause of his misery:

Owre the seas I march this morning, Listed, tested, sworn an' a', Forced by your confounded girning. Farewell, Meg! for I'm awa'.

In view of losing her husband and victim, Meg repented and swore to mend her ways, conceding even Watty's stipulation to keep the family purse:

Lastly, I'm to keep the siller: This upon your saul you swear.

Mr. Thomas gave New York no such opportunity, and she is now lamenting him as Tom Hood's "female Ranter" mourns "The Lost Heir," "for he's my darlin' of darlin's." She wonders why he did not continue

Sitting as good as gold in the gutter, a-playing at making dirt-pies: I wonder he left the court, where he was better off than all the other young boys, With two bricks, an old shoe, nine oyster-shells and a dead kitten by way of toys.

And, in truth, Mr. Thomas got little more from the city he has for twenty-five years clung to and taught. If he came back, is it not likely he might meet with the Lost Heir's reception? In the Scotch ballad also we are left in uncertainty as to the genuineness of Meg's tears and promised reform; and in any case no one can blame Mr. Thomas for announcing his intention only after it was beyond alteration.

It is not that New York cares for the money which would have kept him. When did it refuse money when its sympathies were aroused? Look at its magnificent charities, its help to Chicago, to famine-stricken China, and the thousands that were daily poured into the hands of the sufferers from yellow fever in the South. Religion is supported with the same munificent liberality. But when literature, music or art are to be sustained, the community becomes either flighty or apathetic. The best of New York's monuments are the gifts either of societies formed upon the basis of a common sentiment with which society at large has no active sympathy, or of men of other nationalities. It has been broadly hinted that New York would never have acquired the Cesnola collection of Cypriote pottery, gems and statuary had it not found a competitor in England. The luxury of beating the Britishers was too tempting to be declined, and led to a result which might not have been reached had the question been nothing more than one of art and art-education. Competition supplied the stimulus which should have been furnished by a sense of the desirability of securing a collection so rich and in every way, historically and artistically, so valuable. The New York public, again, was never really interested in the Castellani collection. It grudged the additional entrance-fee of twenty-five cents levied by the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum. No leader arose to open its eyes to the true value of a complete collection of majolica and mediæval jewelry. The only known authority upon the subject of ceramics proved to be a blind leader of the blind, and the only result of Mr. Clarence Cook's interference was to leave the aforesaid gentleman in the melancholy plight of a plucked crow. The collection was reshipped to Europe while the feathers were still flying, and the public felt itself to be a gainer to the extent of witnessing a piece of good sport. No sense of loss spoiled its enjoyment of the fun.

When, some months ago, it was announced that a college of music was to be founded, New York scarcely paused to examine the plans of the proposed building. The scheme fell prone to the ground upon the day of its birth. The few who were in earnest communicated none of their fire to the community at large. Society looked upon Mr. Thomas in a precisely similar manner. It complacently regarded him as the greatest conductor of the age, and its complacency was fed by its having an imaginary proprietary interest in him. But while the few who really understood him and the themes he handled bowed to him as their Apollo, the many had no real homage to pay either of heart or head. He educated the people, and the people believed in him and in the dictum of judges more competent than they. But he was always above them, the men of influence and wealth who in all such matters represent and _are_ society. He led them to lofty heights, but no sooner had they reached one than he was seen flying to another loftier still and still more perilous. He worked, moreover, as only a genius and an enthusiast could work. He began by winning his auditors. He went down to their level, humored them, pleased them, and then filled their ears with music that was ravishing even when only partially intelligible. Insensibly they grew to like it, and although defections were large and many refused to rise above the "popular" standard, there is no doubt that he succeeded in elevating the taste of the general public. Year by year he was bringing his audiences nearer to himself, and year by year he was winning new converts from the love of the meretricious and flashy to that of the noble and pure.

He alone derived no benefit from his labors. He had no adequate support, no relief from the most sordid and worrying cares of life. He found himself almost forced into competition that was degrading. Had he entered into it he would have thrown down with his own hand the structure he had spent his life in rearing. He was alternately warmed by the admiration and love of a few and chilled by general apathy, and has chosen wisely in going where he will at least be lifted above the necessity of struggling for subsistence. New York has lost him, but had it known that Cincinnati was trying to coax him away it would have let him go never.

It is singular that the matter of making New York attractive to the lovers of art and music is never looked at by its wealthy citizens from the commercial point of view. Art and music exert influences that can be computed upon strict business principles, and the policy of neglecting them is extremely short-sighted. Every addition to the attractions of a city, and especially of a city essentially commercial, is an addition to its prosperity. The prestige that would have accrued to New York, and the wealth that would certainly have been attracted to it, had it adopted Cincinnati's course of action, would unquestionably have far more than compensated for the outlay attending the endowment of a college of music and the engagement of Theodore Thomas. With this assumption the idiosyncrasy of New York may be viewed in full. Like the prudent merchant of moderate attainments and medium culture, it is not far-seeing when a question arises not strictly in its line of business. Sympathetic, outwardly decorous, keenly sensitive, full of pity for the suffering, New York enters the field of art in a purely mercantile spirit. It has no love, but only that peculiar kind of affection that is the outgrowth of triumph over a rival. An individual parallel might be found in the case of the old gentleman who haunted the auction-rooms and filled his house with loads of vases, bronzes and the like. "It's not the things I care for," he said, "but there isn't a millionaire in the city I haven't outbid in getting them together."

J.J.

ONE OF THE SIDE ISSUES OF THE PARIS EXPOSITION.

Slowly, but not the less surely, does the succession of international industrial expositions strengthen the sentiment of peace among the nations. Those who were interested in observing how gradually our civilization is becoming industrial can remember during the Centennial Exposition several notable instances of this. The Exposition of Paris and the recent arbitration at Berlin have both stimulated the thought of Europe in this direction, and the following instances of the direction it is taking will be of interest, especially as they are such as are not likely to be noticed by the regular correspondents.

A pamphlet has been published at Foix, one of the provincial towns of France, entitled, _Les Rondes de la Paix_. It was written by M. Adolphe de Lajour, and its scope will appear from the following extract: "Why not declare Constantinople and the Straits neutral? Why not declare Constantinople the city for congresses of _unity_--the metropolis, the Washington, of the United States of the two worlds? Why from the various populations, differing in race, in manners, in religion and in language, who inhabit the Balkan peninsula, should not a confederation of the United States of the Danube be created on the model of Switzerland?"

In the Exposition itself a printed sheet has been distributed, entitled "La Marseillaise de la Paix." It was printed by the associated compositors in the office of M.A. Chaix, who has recently organized his establishment so that a share in the profits is accorded to the workers. The first two verses of this new version will suffice to show its character:

Allons, enfant de la patrie, La jour de gloire est arrivé. De la Paix, de la Paix chérie, L'etendard brillant est levé! (_bis_) Entendez-vous vers nos frontières, Tous les peuples ouvrant leurs bras, Crier à nos braves soldats: Soyons unis, nous sommes frères! Plus d'armes, citoyens, rompez vos bataillons! Chantez, Chantons! Et que la Paix féconde nos sillons!

Pourquoi ces fusils, ces cartouches? Pourquoi ces obus, ces canons? Pourquoi ces cris, ces chants farouches, Ces fiers défis aux nations? (_bis_) Pour nous Français, oh! quelle gloire, De montrer au monde dompté, Que les droits de l'humanité Sont plus sacrés que la victoire! Plus d'armes, etc.

E.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Superstition and Force: Essays on the Wager of Law, the Wager of Battle, the Ordeal, Torture. By Henry C. Lea. Third Edition, revised. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea.

Many will be tempted to say that this, like the _Decline and Fall_, is one of the uncriticisable books. Its facts are innumerable, its deductions simple and inevitable, and its _chevaux-de-frise_ of references bristling and dense enough to make the keenest, stoutest and best-equipped assailant think twice before advancing. Nor is there anything controversial in it to provoke an assault. The author is no polemic. Though he obviously feels and thinks strongly, he succeeds in attaining impartiality. He even represses comment until it serves for little more than a cement for his data. What of argument there is shapes itself mostly from his collation. The minute and recondite records he throws together, in as much sequence as the chaotic state of European institutions and society in the Middle Ages will allow, are left to their own eloquence. And eloquent they are. Little beyond the citation of them is needed to show the brutality of chivalry, the selfish cruelty of sacerdotalism, and the wretchedness of the masses enslaved by political and religious superstition, until Roman law had a second time, after an interval of a thousand years, effected a conquest of the Northern barbarians. The work does not confine itself, historically, to that period nor to Europe, but what excursions are made outside of that time and country are chiefly in the way of introduction and conclusion. The moral defects which produce and perpetuate the follies and abuses discussed by Mr. Lea are confined to no time or race. They are inherent and abiding, and he takes care not to let us forget that the struggle to subdue them cannot anywhere or at any time be safely relaxed. We inherit, with their other possessions, the weaknesses and proclivities of our ancestors, and we even find some of their specific acts of error and injustice still imbedded in the institutions under which we live, and more or less vividly reproduced in the routine of individual, corporate or public existence. The compurgator slides into the witness and the juryman, bringing with him the oath on the Bible and trial for perjury, and the feed champion of the Church into the patron. The ordeal of battle is fought out bloodlessly by lawyers, with often quite as little regard to the merits of the case as could have been shown in the olden lists. Only the baser physical ordeals, of fire, hot and cold water, etc., with torture as a part of the regular machinery of justice, have died out, evidencing the great rise in intelligence and independence of the bulk of the people--the "lower orders" to whom these gross expedients were chiefly applied. Other forms of legal outrage, however, less apparent and palpable to the senses, have run deep into the nineteenth century, and are not yet wholly abolished. Mr. Lea, by the way, does not, we observe, refer to the trial of Bambridge in 1729 for torturing prisoners for debt "in violation of the laws of England." Perhaps he threw it aside in the redundance of other illustrative material. We must add, as proof of his impartiality, the comparatively slight mention made of torture under the Inquisition--a thing of which we have been told so much as to have fallen into a sort of popular belief that the Holy Office had a monopoly of this particular atrocity.

Man will always, in some guise or other, manifest his faith in and dependence on miracles, and will never cease to implore the special interposition of the Deity. It is so much simpler thus to make a daily convenience of his Creator than to consult those dry abstractions, the laws of Nature. Of this deep and tiresome _x_ and _y_ he has not time to solve the equation, granting it to be, in its ultimate terms, soluble. Who shall say in each instance whether the impulse to decline that method and adopt the shorter be superstition or religion?

Whether looked on as a picture or a mirror, a work such as this has lasting value. It enables us at any time to gauge the progress of enlightenment, to ascertain what real gain has been made, what is delusive, and what remains to be done that it is possible to do; for we must not expect the record of human fatuity to be closed in our day.

The Witchery of Archery. By Maurice Thompson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

The author of this little volume certainly succeeds in proving the truth of his title to the extent of convincing his readers that archery has its witchery; and we gather from his words that he has made practical converts and imparted to many some portion of his own devotion to the immemorial implement he may be said to have, in this country and among its white inhabitants, reinvented. Seated in our easy-chair, we follow him gayly and untiringly into the depths of the woods, drink in the rich, cool, damp air, and revel in the primeval silence that is only broken by the twang of the bowstring or the call of its destined victim. We enjoy his marvellous shots with some little infusion of envy, and his exemplary patience under ill-success and repeated failure with perhaps more. We end, like his "Cracker" friend, with respecting sincerely the "bow-and-arrers" we were at first disposed to view with amused contempt; and we close the book with an unqualified recognition of the value of the bow as a means of athletic training--a healthful recreation for those who have difficulty in finding such means.

This ancient weapon of war and the chase, which has won so many battles and conquered so many kingdoms, has since the introduction of gunpowder been too readily allowed to sink into a plaything for boys. They retain something of a passion for it. Many can remember when they were wont to select the choicest splits of heart-hickory from the wood-pile, lay them aside to season, and then shape them, or have them shaped by stronger and defter hands, into the four-foot bow, equivalent to the six-foot bow of the man. The arrows were harder to get in any satisfactory quantity, for they were rapidly shot away, and they were hard to properly point and scientifically feather. The processes were altogether too abstruse to come out well from homemade work in boyish hands. So the results were not usually brilliant, being confined to the destruction of a few sparrows, the breaking of some windows and the serious maltreatment of the family cat. Such achievements did not commend themselves to parents, and archery rested under a cloud from which it failed to emerge as the youthful practitioners grew up. It retained its charm for them in books, however. The visit of Peter Parley to Wampum was the most delightful part of that historian's works; and Robin Hood and William Tell earned a yearning and trustful admiration which refuses to yield to the criticisms employed in reducing those characters to myths--triumphs of the "long-bow" in another sense. And here we are reminded that Mr. Thompson's affection is lavished wholly on the long-bow. The cross-bow, a weapon which largely superseded it in the Middle Ages for war and sport, the English gentleman's "birding-piece" before he took to the gun, he will not hear of. The sportsman of tender years often prefers it. It is less troublesome in the matter of ammunition. Any missile will answer for it, from a sixpenny nail to a six-inch pewter-headed bolt--projectiles which travel two hundred yards with force and precision. The draft on the muscular strength is of course the same with either form of the bow, but the long-bow admits of its being more easily graduated, and is therefore preferable for the exercise-ground.

Mr. Thompson, we observe, seems to disregard the spiral arrangement of the feather, and the rotary movement around the axis of flight imparted by it to the arrow. He uses three strips of feather, which is better than two flat ones for the purpose of keeping the missile steady, but still does not prevent its swerving toward the end of its course, as more than one vexatious incident of his hunting record shows. This usage may help to account for the superiority of the old bowmen to the amateurs of to-day in accuracy at long ranges. The best targets reported on the part of the latter, such as "eleven shots in a nine-inch bull's-eye, out of thirteen, at forty yards," and "ten successive shots in a sheet of paper eight inches square at thirty yards," are poor by the side of the exploits of the yeomen and foresters on the archery-grounds of yore. To split a willow-wand at two hundred paces must have required something in the way of practice and system more precise and absolute than the guesswork Mr. Thompson concedes to be unavoidable to-day with the utmost care and experience. It could not have been done with a missile liable, in the calmest atmosphere, the moment it passed the point-blank, to unaccountable aberrations, vertically and horizontally.

The China-Hunters' Club. By the Youngest Member. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The literature of which this is a new specimen would have astonished the reading public of ten years ago, as it probably will that of ten years hence. Library shelves which knew it not at the former period are nearly filled now, and fast becoming crowded. Shall we predict that at the future date named their contents will be nearly invisible for dust? No. Much of what is going through the press on the subject of pottery will have its use as promoting the advancement and clearing up the history of fictile art, and will therefore be preserved, while a larger portion will interest only the few who delve into the records of human caprice and whim. Even these will not particularly care to know or remember what factory-brand was borne by the teapots and saucers of our grandmothers, and what Staffordshire modeller or woodcutter was responsible for the usually atrocious decorations of those utensils. They will smile but once over the pleasant lunacy of a hunt, printed and illustrated, among New England cottages for forgotten and more or less damaged crockery. The Youngest Member herself--by that time promoted probably to the ranks of the matrons whose treasures she delights to ransack--will be slow to recall and understand her enthusiasm of to-day, and marvel at her ever having detected charms in the homely things of clay she deems worthy of the graver. We, her contemporaries, however, living in the midst of the contagion to which she is a conspicuous victim, can follow her flying footsteps in the chase after potsherds with some sympathy, lag though we may far in the rear. We enjoy the lively style in which she depicts her "finds," and the bright web of sentiment and story with which she weaves them into unity. The receptacles of beer, tea, cider and shaving-soap that figure in her woodcuts are old friends we are glad to see again, and none the less so for the somewhat startling duty they are made to perform in the illustration of æsthetic culture. We learn secrets about them we never dreamed of before. We are told where they came from, have explained to us the mystic meaning of their designs, and are pointed to the stamps on their bottoms or some other out-of-the-way part of their anatomy infallibly betraying their age, nativity and parentage. Every reader will be treated to special revelations of this sort, some more, some less, some one and some another. For our individual share we are favored with enlightenment as to three of our private possessions. One of these is the Dog Fo, a little white Chinese monstrosity. We have been familiar from childhood with two of him, seated in unspeakable but complacent hideousness at the opposite ends of the chimney-piece. No. 2 is a gallon pitcher, sacred to the gingerbread of two generations, and ornamented with a ship under full sail on one side and a coat-of-arms on the other, not now remembered, the whole article having recently disappeared in some way or direction unknown and untraceable unless by the most indefatigable of ceramists. The third is a smaller pitcher in mottled unglazed clay, antique in shape and ornamentation, except that a figure in the costume of Queen Bess's time stands cheek-by-jowl with a group resembling that on the Portland Vase. This anachronism caused us to be puzzled by the word Herculaneum impressed on the bottom, not unworthy as the general beauty of the work was of such a source. The mystery stands explained by the book before us. Herculaneum was the name of a manufactory of earthenware near Liverpool, in this case almost as misleading as the inscription of Julius Cæsar on a dog-collar too hastily inferred to have been worn by a canine pet of the great dictator.

The author concludes, "as a result of our hunting along the roads of New England, that there is a great deal of money-value in old crockery which lies idle in pantries, and that collectors who have money to spend do a great deal of good in a small way by giving the money for the crockery. And, strange as you may think it, it is very rare to find an owner of old pottery in the country, whatever be the family associations, who would not rather have the money."

_Books Received._

Plays for Private Acting. Translated from the French and Italian. By Members of the Bellevue Dramatic Club of Newport. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

A Primer of German Literature. By Helen S. Conant.--A Year of American Travel. By Jessie Benton Fremont.--Hints to Women on the Care of Property. By Alfred Walker. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

A Handbook of Politics for 1878: Being a Record of Important Political Action, National and State, from July 15, 1876, to July 1, 1878. By Hon. Edward McPherson, LL.D., of Gettysburg, Pa. Washington: Solomons & Chapman.

Christine Brownlee's Ordeal. By Mary Patrick.--A Beautiful Woman. By Leon Brook. (Nos. 7 and 8 of Franklin Square Library.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

The Cossacks: A Tale of the Caucasus in 1852. By Count Leo Tolstoy. Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

D'ye Want a Shave? or, Yankee Shavings; or, A New Way to get a Wife: A Three-Act Comedy. By William Bush. St. Louis. William Bush.

Colonel Dunwoddie, Millionaire. (No. 5 Harper's Library of American Fiction.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

Play-Day Poems. Collected and edited by Rossiter Johnson. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Maid Ellice: A Novel. By Theodore Gift. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Chums: A Satirical Sketch. By Howard MacSherry. Jersey City: Charles S. Clarke, Jr.

The Student's French Grammar. By Charles Heron Wall. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The Ring of Amethyst. By Alice Wellington Rollins. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The Crew of the "Sam Weller." By John Habberton. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Saxe Holm's Stories. Second Series. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Samuel Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. New York: Harper & Brothers.

_Music Received._

The Battle Prayer. By Himmel. Part-songs for Male Voices, No. 4. (Lotus Club Collection.) Composed and arranged by A.H. Rosewig. Philadelphia: Wm. H. Boner & Co.

Weep no More: Song. Words by Mrs. A.B. Benham; Music by Augustus V. Benham, the great Child Pianist. Philadelphia: Wm. H. Boner & Co.

Who is Sylvia? Song for Soprano or Tenor. (English, German and Italian Words.) By Franz Schubert. Philadelphia: Wm. H. Boner & Co.

Whoa, Emma! Written and Composed by John Read. Philadelphia: Wm. H. Boner & Co.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Lord Beaconsfield is not the first to appreciate the strategic value of Cyprus. It was fully valued by the Venetians, as well as by the Knights of St. John, who would fain have made _it_ their island-fortress instead of Rhodes; while Napoleon singled it out as one of the principal points in his projected anti-Turkish campaign in 1798.