S. Y.

THE CRIES OF THE MARCHANDS.

The other morning I was lying quietly in bed, waiting for the bonne to fetch my cafe noir, when a most extraordinary sound caught my ear. The cries of Paris marchands early in the morning are curious enough usually, but this one exceeded in quaintness all that I had heard since my arrival. Between the words "Chante, chante, Adrienne!" a horrible braying broke forth, resounding through our quiet faubourg in a manner which brought many a bonnet de nuit to the windows. I got up to see what was the matter.

"Chante, chante, Adrienne!" re-echoed again over the smooth asphalte.

By this time a crowd of gamins—the gamins are always up, no matter how early—had gathered in the middle of the street around the object of the disturbance. It was a marchand of vegetables in a greasy blouse, leading an ass. There was a huge pannier on the ass's back full of kitchen vegetables, which the marchand was crying and praising to our sleepy faubourg. With an economy worthy of Silhouette, the scamp had taught Adrienne—for that was the beast's name—to bray every time he said "Pommes de terre, de terre—terre!" As often as he said this, or "Chante, Adrienne, chante!" Adrienne would switch her tail and chante lugubriously, setting the whole neighborhood in commotion. So adroitly had he trained the creature—with her thigh-bones sticking in peaks through her hide, and a visage of preternatural solemnity—that when her master but lifted his finger Adrienne would go through her part with admirable gravity, thus helping her lord to get his daily bread. I laughed till the bonne came with my coffee, and was glad to see the pannier gradually emptying as the grotesque procession defiled through our street, with a rear-guard of exhilarated urchins poking at poor meek Adrienne in a manner the most mechant. And so on they went till the peasant and his invaluable assistant were quite out of hearing.

There is no end to the originality of the Parisians. If you but go to a kiosque to get a Figaro, the white-capped marchande has something clever to say. The rain, the air, the clouds, the sun are full of esprit for her—are to her banques de France, upon which she has an unlimited credit—credit fonder, if you will, credit mobilier, or what not. The conducteur who stands behind his omnibus and obligingly helps you in, says Merci! with an accent so exquisite that it is like wit or poetry or music, utterly throwing you into despair after your months and months of travail and dozens and dozens of louis lavished on incompetent professors.

"Pronounce that for me, please," said I one day to a gentleman who had just spoken some word whose secret of pronunciation I had been trying to filch for weeks—some delicate little jewel of a word, faint as a perfume, expressive as only a tiny Parisian word can be—and he did so in the politest manner in the world, adding some little witticism which I do not recall. Whereupon I went home and instantly dismissed my "professor."

But to return to our theme, the cries of the marchands. It would take a pen like Balzac's, as curiously versatile, as observant, as full of individual ink, to catch all the shades of these odd utterances. You may recollect as you lay in your sweet English bed in London, just as the fog was lifting over the great city early in the morning, the distinct individuality of the voices which, although you did not see their owners, told each its story of sunrise thrift and industry as it cried to you the early peas or the wood or the melons of the season. You may remember, too, how perplexing, how fantastic, many of those cries were, making it impossible for you to understand what they meant, or why a wood-huckster, for example, should give vent to such lachrymose sentimentality in vending his fagots. But quite different is the Paris marchand. With a physiognomy of voice—if the expression be pardoned—quite as marked as the cockney's, what he says is yet perfectly clear, often shrewd, gay, cynical, sometimes even spiced with jocularity, as if it were pure fun to get a living, and the world were all a holiday.

Some years ago a marchand was in the habit of visiting our neighborhood whose specialty it was to vend baguettes, or small rods for beating carpets, tapestry and padded furniture. His cry was—"Voila des baguettes! Battez vos meubles, battez vos tapis, battez vos femmes pour UN sou!"

It is said that as this gay chiffonnier went one morning by the fish-markets uttering this jocose cry, a squad of those formidable poissardes, the fishwomen of Paris, got after him, and administered a sound thrashing with his own baguettes. Such is the vengeance of the French-woman!

But there is a curious pathos in many of these cries—queer searching tones which go to the heart and set one thinking; tones that come again in times of revolution, and gather into the terrible roar of the Commune. I sometimes wonder if they ever sell anything, those strange sad voices of the early morning struggling up from the street. They are the voices of Humanity on its mighty errand of bread and meat. Some dozen or so traverse our quarter through the day—some of feeble old women, full of sharp complaint; some of strong, quick-stepping men; some of little children with faint modest voices, as if unused to the cruel work of getting a living. It is these poor people who walk from Montmartre to Passy in the morning, and in the evening fish for drowned dogs or pick up corks along the canal of the Porte St. Martin. For a dog it is said they get a franc or two, and corks go at a few sous a hundred.

Such is an inkling of the life-histories wafted through our summer windows by the voices of the street. Well, the sun is brilliant, the Champs are crowded with the world, the jewelers of the Palais Royal are driving a thriving trade, the great boulevards are margined by long lines of absinthe drinkers. Who cares? Only it is a little disagreeable in the early morning to have one's sleep broken by the pathos of life. Let us sleep well on our wine, and dine to-morrow at the Grand Hotel. We shall forget the misery of these patient voices which visit us with their prayer for subsistence every day.

G. F.

THE ANGEL HUSSAR.

I think some of the best talks I have had in my life have been with chance companions on whom I have happened in the course of a roving life—sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes in the railroad-car or steamboat, and not unfrequently in the smoking-room of a hotel.

If you have ever been in Dublin, you know Dawson street, and in Dawson street the Hibernian Hotel. I am not prepared to endorse all the arrangements of that hostelry, nor indeed of any other in that part of the United Kingdom called Ireland: I have suffered too much in them. Still, I will say that the Hibernian is to be praised for a really comfortable and handsome smoking-room, containing easy-chairs deservedly so called, and a capital collection of standard novels. One raw evening in the spring of 1871 I sauntered in, and found some gentlemanlike-looking fellows there, who proved pleasant company, and presently a remarkably distingue-looking young man, with an unmistakably military cut, came in and sat down near me. We fell to talking. He was quartered at the Curragh, and was up in Dublin en route for the Newmarket spring meeting. He told me that he made some L700 a year by the turf. "I've a cousin, you see, who is a great sporting man, and thus I'm 'in with a stable,' and get put up to tips," he said. "But for this the turf would be a very poor thing to dabble in." And this led to a talk about officers' lives and their money-affairs. "Oh," he said, "you've no notion of the number who go to utter grief. Why now, I'll tell you what happened to me last season in London. I was asked to go down and dine with some fellows at Richmond; and being awfully late, I rushed out of the club and hailed the first hansom I could see with a likely horse in Pall Mall. I scarcely looked at the man, but said, 'Now I want to get down to the Star and Garter by eight: go a good pace and I'll pay you for it.' Well, he had a stunning good horse, and we rattled away at a fine rate; and when I got out I was putting the money into his hand, when he said, 'Don't you know me, B——?' I looked up in amazement, and in another moment recognized a man whom I had known in India as the greatest swell in the —— Hussars, the smartest cavalry corps in the service, and who, on account of his splendid face and figure, went by the sobriquet of 'the Angel Hussar.'

"Well, it gave me quite a shock. 'Good Heavens, H——!' I said, 'what in the world does this mean?' 'Mean, old fellow? It means that I'd not a farthing in the world, and didn't want to starve. It's all my own cursed folly. I've made my bed, and must lie on it.' I pressed a couple of sovereigns into his hand, and made him promise to call on me next day. He came and gave me the details of his descent, the old story of course—wine and its alliterative concomitant, conjoined with utter recklessness." "Well, and could you help him?" "I'm glad to say I could. I got him the place of stud-groom to a nobleman in the south of Ireland: he's turned over a new leaf, is perfectly steady, and doing as well as possible."

* * * * *

NOTES.

There is an old story that Augustus, being once asked by a veteran soldier for his aid in a lawsuit, told the petitioner to go to a certain advocate. "Ah," replied the soldier, "it was not by proxy that I served you at Actium!" So struck, continues the tradition, was Augustus with this response, that he personally took charge of the soldier's cause, and gained it for him. Possibly it may be on the theory that his subjects "do not serve him by proxy" when he needs their services that the Austrian kaiser even to this day holds personal audiences with his people regarding their private desires or grievances. Evidently traditional, this custom is so singular as to merit a more general notice than it habitually receives: indeed, its existence might be doubted by the foreign reader, did not a Hungarian journal, Der Osten, furnish a detailed description of it. The only prerequisite to an audience would seem to be the lodging of the subject's name and rank with one of the emperor's secretaries, who thereupon appoints the day and hour for his appearance at the palace. If the emperor has been long absent from Vienna, his next audience-day is always a trying one, as the waiting-room is then crowded with hundreds of both sexes, and all ranks and ages. They are in ordinary dress, too, so that the imperial ante-chamber presents a motley and picturesque scene—the gold-broidered coat of the minister of state and the brilliant uniform of the army mingling with the citizen's plain frock, with the Tyrolean or Styrian hunter's jacket, with the bunda of the Hungarian, with the long, fur lined linen overcoat of the Polish peasant; while the rustling silks of the elegant city lady are side by side with the plain woolen skirt of the farmer's wife. Each of these in regular turn, as written on the list from which he calls them, a staff-officer ushers into the emperor's study. There the petitioner states his case. The emperor listens without interruption, then receives the written statements and documents, sometimes asks a question, but generally dismisses the visitor with a simple formula of assurance that a decision will be duly rendered. There is evidently much form in the matter, as if it were but the empty perpetuation of some ancient ceremony designed to show that the monarch is the father of all his people, and hence is personally interested in their individual troubles. But yet it appears that the emperor does listen to the harangues, for he is occasionally known to affix his initials to some documents; which act is always interpreted as a good sign, it being equivalent to a special recommendation to the secretaries, indicating that prima facie the cause has seemed to the sovereign to be just. However, the precaution of a written statement is always taken, because it would be impossible for him to remember all the oral explanations. Only a few weeks after each of these audiences the suitors are individually notified of the result. The emperor's sense of etiquette does not allow him to give any sign of impatience during the interview, though some of the visitors are as long-winded and importunate as Mark Twain pretends to have been at one of President Grant's receptions. The emperor answers the German, Hungarian, Tzech, Croat or Italian each in the suitor's own tongue. It is quite possible that in the preliminary registry of the names and condition of suitors care is taken that the emperor shall not be subjected to too great annoyance from any abuse of this curious and interesting privilege.

Among the canonizations of the past few months a notable place must be assigned to that of the beatified Benoit Labre. That he was faithful in doctrine needs hardly be said, but it was his manner of life which procured him this posthumous honor, in order that those who read of his career may rank him among those saints who, as in Tickell's line, have both "taught and led the way to heaven," and may seek to imitate his example. The decree of canonization, in reciting his characteristic virtues, says that though of very honorable birth, yet, scorning earthly things as dross, he clothed himself in rags, and ate and drank only what chanty gave him. His shelter was the Coliseum or the doorways or desert places of Rome. He washed not, neither did he yield to the effeminacy of the comb; his hair and nails grew to what length Nature wished: in short (for some of the additional details are better fancied than described), he so utterly neglected his person that he became an object of avoidance to many or all. But his neglected body was after death placed under a glass shrine in the church of the Madonna del Monti. The decree calls upon others to follow the example of the blessed Benoit, or at least as far as the measure of spiritual strength in each will allow; but we apprehend that many will modestly confess that the peculiar virtues of the saint are inimitable.



LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Little Hodge. By the author of "Ginx's Baby." New York: Dodd & Mead.

The pamphlet has changed since the days of Swift and Dr. Johnson, and the modern method, which seeks to influence opinion by means of a short, pointed story, is certainly a gain in persuasiveness and pictorial vigor. It is hard to say what the dean of Saint Patrick's would have thought of The Battle of Dorking, or Ginx's Baby, or Lord Bantam, or Little Hodge, by the author of the last two of these. The dean's ferocity of expression no modern writer can allow himself; and the engine of a tremendous intellect is by no means apparent, as it was in his work, behind the efforts of our modern pamphleteers. But the nerves of pity, when exquisitely touched, are as apt to influence action as the feelings of hate or scorn, and Swift's proposal, from the depths of his bleeding heart, to fat and eat the Irish children, was no more adapted to produce reformed legislation than is the picture in Little Hodge of the ten deserted children starving under the thatch, the eldest girl frozen and pallid, the father shot by a gamekeeper, after having failed to support his motherless brood. Swift would have put in some matchless touches, but the picture seems adapted to our day of average, mechanical commonplace. It has a nerve of tenderness in it which will work upon the gentler souls of our communities. The father of Little Hodge is represented as an honest field-laborer, working for Farmer Jolly at nine shillings a week. The birth of his manikin baby and the accompanying death of his wife increase his cares past bearing. He thereupon commits three crimes in succession: he applies to Jolly for an increase of pay, he joins the agrarian movement of a year ago, and he attempts to run away and find work elsewhere. He is inexorably, minutely and witheringly punished for these several acts, and at last gets his only chance of comfort in a violent death, leaving his poor problems unsolved and his children naked and starving. Such a picture, if drawn by a foreigner, would arouse English indignation from shore to shore; but it is home-drawn. The only foreign delineation is in the author's Jehoiachin Settle, a stage Yankee, whose avocation is planting English children in Canada after the manner of Miss Rye. Settle is a preposterous failure, but every other limb of the writer's argument is strong and operative.

At His Gates. By Mrs. Oliphant. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

The author of Miss Marjoribanks, who is said to keep writing first a good novel and then a poor novel in careful alternation, will leave her friends in some doubt as to which category she means her last story to be placed in, for it is impossible to call it poor, and conscience-rending to call it good. It is long, and depicts many persons, of whom only one, Mr. Burton's cynical wife, is at all original. Mr. Burton aforesaid, a pompous business-man, places "at his gates," just outside his villa walls, the widow of a man whom he has used as a catspaw. The catspaw was a guileless artist, whom Burton has tempted to take a directorship in his bank when the latter was about to break, he himself retiring in time. The poor painter, in despair, jumps into the water, and his wife, who is proud and aristocratic, is condemned to be the pensioner and neighbor of a vulgar villain, every favor from whom is a conscious insult. Presently the tables are turned. Whether the asphyxiated artist really comes undrowned again, and returns rich from America, nothing could persuade us to tell, as we disapprove of the premature revelation of plots. But the tiresome Burton, at any rate, is bound to come to grief, and his headstrong young daughter to run off with his partner in atrocity, a man as old as her father, and his wife to adapt her cold philosophy to a tiny house in the best part of London. There is one scene, worth all the rest of the book, where this lady tries to bargain with her son, whom she is really fond of, for a manifestation of his love: she is about to yield to his opinion that she should give up her own private settlement to the creditors of her ruined husband, and then, just as she is consenting to this sacrifice, not disinterestedly but maternally, the boy blurts out his passion for a parvenu girl, the lost painter's daughter in fact—a rival whom he introduces to her in the moment of her supreme tenderness. She simply observes, "You have acted according to your nature, Ned—like the rest." If there were ten such chapters in the book as the one containing this scene, the novel would be something immortal, instead of what it is—railway reading of exceptional merit. It forms the first of a "Library of Choice Fiction" projected by Messrs. Scribner, Armstrong & Co., of which it forms a very encouraging standard of interest.

Memoirs of Madame Desbordes-Valmore. By Sainte-Beuve. With a Selection from her Poems. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Sainte-Beuve, with whom the art of female biography seems to have died, and who has given us so many softly touched and profoundly understood portraits, is here engaged with one of his own personal friends and contemporaries. This is no study of a heroine long dead, and draped in the obsolete and winning costume of the Empire or the Revolution, but of an anxious woman concerned with the hardship and grime of our own day, "amid the dust and defilement of the city, on the highway, always in quest of lodgings, climbing to the fifth story, wounded on every angle." Only sympathy and a poetic touchstone could bring out the essence and sweetness of a nature so unhappily disguised; but Sainte-Beuve, discarding with a single gesture her penitential mask and hood, finds Madame Desbordes-Valmore "polished, gracious, and even hospitable, investing everything with a certain attractive and artistic air, hiding her griefs under a natural grace, lighted even by gleams of merriment." The poor details of her life he contrives to lose under a purposed artlessness of narrative and a caressing superfluity of loyal eulogy. We learn, however, that Mademoiselle Desbordes was born at Douai in 1786, and died in Paris in 1859. Daughter of a heraldic painter, the necessities of her family obliged her to make a voyage, as a child, to Guadeloupe, in the hope of receiving aid from a rich relative, and a little later to go upon the stage. In the provinces, and occasionally at Paris, she played in the role of ingenue with an exquisite address, succeeding because such a part was really a natural expression of herself: she thus won the abiding friendship of the great Mars, who turned to the young comedienne a little-suspected and tender side of her own character. Mademoiselle Desbordes' artistic charm was infinite, and she controlled with innocent ease the fountain of tears, whitening the whole parterre with pocket-handkerchiefs when she appeared as the Eveline, Claudine and Eulalie of French sentimental drama. But she felt keenly the social ostracism which was still strong toward the stage of 1800, and bewailed in her poetry the "honors divine by night allowed, by day anathematized." In 1817 she married an actor, M. Valmore, who subsequently disappeared into obscure official life, accepting with joy a position as catalogue-maker in the National Library. Her relatives, and even her eldest daughter, received small government favors, while her own little pension, when it came, was so distasteful that for a long time she could not bring herself to apply for the payments. She was a confirmed patriot, shrank from the favors of the throne, was ill for six weeks after Waterloo, and hailed with delight the revolution of '48, which for some time stopped her pension and impoverished her. After twenty years of the stage she retired into the greater privacy of literature, and published various collections of verse which struck a note of pure transparent sentiment rare in the epoch of Louis Philippe. She had, in an uncommon degree, the gift of intelligent admiration: her addresses to the great men of her time appear to be as far as possible from a spirit of calculation or self-interest, but they secured her an answering sympathy all the more valuable as it was never bargained for. Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas; Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars, when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her; Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, now Madame Emile de Girardin, wrote of her poetry, "How could one depict better the luxury of grief?" M. Raspail, the austere republican, called her the tenth muse, the muse of virtue; and Sainte-Beuve himself, thinking less of her literary life than of her family life and manifold compassions, terms her the "Mater Dolorosa of poetry." His memoir, however, is valuable for its own grace as much as for the modest sweetness of its subject: without his friendly eloquence the name of Madame Desbordes-Valmore would not have got beyond a kind of personal circle of native admirers, nor the present translator have rendered for foreign ears the whispering story of her pure deeds and the plaintive numbers of her verse.

Memoir of a Brother. By Thomas Hughes, Author of "Tom Brown's School-days." London: Macmillan & Co.

Here is a book that was never meant to be dissected and analyzed by critics and reviewers. It is not hard to imagine the "discomfort and annoyance" which the writer has (he tells us) felt in consenting to give to the public a memoir compiled for a private family circle. Still, on the whole, it is altogether well, and there is good reason to call attention to it, for there is much benefit in the book for many readers. It is the loving record of a life that, from first to last, never challenged the world's attention—that was connected with no great movement or event, political, theological or social; but a life, all the same, that was lived with a truth, an earnestness and a straightness that won the affection and respect of all who came within its influence, and will, or we are much mistaken, glow warmly in the hearts and memories of just all whose eyes now light upon this story of it.

How many boys—ay, and grown men and women too—got up from Tom Brown's School-days consciously the better from the reading of it! But there was withal a vague feeling of incompleteness, an unsatisfied longing. The story left off too soon. One wanted to know more of Tom after his school-days. And then, it was, after all, a novel, a fiction. One would have liked to come across that Tom, and perhaps felt half afraid that he might not readily be found outside the cover of the volume. It is true that that longing to know something of the hero's after-life which is one accompaniment of the perusal of a thoroughly good work of fiction was, in the case of Tom Brown, partially gratified. Everybody had the chance of seeing Tom Brown at Oxford, and watching their old favorite's course through undergraduate days to that haven and final goal of fiction-writers, marriage. But there he is lost to view for good and all, and one is left to the amiable hypothesis that he lived happy all his days, without being either shown how he managed to do so, or taught how we might manage to do likewise.

Now this Memoir of a Brother may be said just to supply the want that we have here endeavored to indicate. It is the whole life—the child life, the school-boy life, the college life and the adult, responsible life in the world and as a family head—of a real flesh-and-blood, actualized Tom Brown; and it stands out depicted with an intense naturalness of coloring that charms one more than the laborious effects of imaginative biography.

George Hughes, the subject of the memoir before us, was the eldest son of a Berkshire squire, and little more than a year older than his brother and biographer. Very pleasant is the glimpse of child life in an English county forty years ago that is given in the story of his first years. From the first he showed the calm fearlessness, the practicality and the helpfulness which seem to have been among his most prominent characteristics. These qualities, and with them a rigorous conscientiousness, a sensitive unselfishness, and—no trifling advantage in these or any other days—a splendid physique, he took with him, and preserved alike unaltered, through Rugby, Oxford and after years. Little wonder that the possessor of such gifts became a Sixth-form boy and football captain at his public school, and achieved boating and cricketing successes, an honorable degree, and the repute of being the most popular man of his day at the university. Most people who take an interest in boat-racing, and many who do not, have heard of that famous race upon the Thames at Henley, in which a crew of seven Oxford oarsmen snatched victory from a (not the) Cambridge "eight;" but not everybody knows—for the feat was done now thirty years ago, and names are lost while the memory of a fact survives—that George Hughes pulled the stroke-oar of that plucky seven-oared boat.

Oxford days over, and after a three-years' spell of private tutoring—a not uncommon temporary resort of English graduates while they are making up their minds as to what profession or business to take up for life—we find George Hughes settled in London, reading law in Doctors' Commons. By this time his biographer, who has been close by his side, and following his lead in work and play, through all the years of school and college life, is at work in London too, and the two brothers are again together under one roof. The similarity, one may almost say identicality, of the circumstances of their bringing up might, but that such things, luckily, don't always go by rule, have led one to expect to find in them, now full-grown and thoughtful men, something like a coincidence of sympathies and opinions. Nothing of the sort. George is by temperament and conviction a Tory of the kindly, old-fashioned school: his younger brother has become an advanced Liberal, an enthusiastic promoter of workingmen's associations, and a leading spirit among the so-called Christian Socialists. Needless to add that, though never for one moment sundered one from the other in heart or affection by differences of opinion, the two could not work together in this field. Downright, practical George has his objections, and states them. Listen: "'You don't want to divide other people's property?' 'No.' 'Then why call yourselves Socialists?' 'But we couldn't help ourselves: other people called us so first.' 'Yes, but you needn't have accepted the name. Why acknowledge that the cap fitted?' 'Well, it would have been cowardly to back out. We borrow the ideas of these Frenchmen, of association as opposed to competition, as the true law of industry and of organizing labor—of securing the laborer's position by organizing production and consumption—and it would be cowardly to shirk the name. It is only fools who know nothing about the matter, or people interested in the competitive system of trade, who believe or say that a desire to divide other people's property is of the essence of Socialism.' 'That may be very true, but nine-tenths of mankind, or, at any rate, of Englishmen, come under one or the other of these categories. If you are called Socialists, you will never persuade the British public that this is not your object. There was no need to take the name. You have weight enough to carry already, without putting that on your shoulders.... The long and short of it is, I hate upsetting things, which seems to be your main object. You say that you like to see people discontented with society as it is, and are ready to help to make them so, because it is full of injustice and abuses of all kinds, and will never be better till men are thoroughly discontented. I don't see these evils so strongly as you do, don't believe in heroic remedies, and would sooner see people contented, and making the best of society as they find it. In fact, I was bred and born a Tory, and I can't help it.'" However, our biographer tells us, "he (George) continued to pay his subscription, and to get his clothes at our tailors' association till it failed, which was more than some of our number did, for the cut was so bad as to put the sternest principles to a severe test. But I could see that this was done out of kindness to me, and not from sympathy with what we were doing."

After a few years of law-work in the ecclesiastical courts, the call of a domestic duty took George Hughes—not, one may well imagine, without a severe struggle—from the active practice of his profession, and bade him be content thenceforward with home life. Idle or inactive of course a man of prime mental and bodily vigor could not be. The violoncello, farming, volunteering, magistrate's work, getting up laborers' reading-rooms and organizing Sunday evening classes for the big boys in his village, gave outlets enough for his superfluous energies. And meanwhile he was now become a pater-familias, and had boys of his own to send to Rugby, and to encourage and advise in their school-life by letters which—and it is paying them a high compliment to say so—are almost as good as those which his father had, thirty years before, addressed to him at the same place. It is impossible to overestimate the advantage to a school-boy of having a father who can appreciate and sympathize with boyish thoughts and aims, and knows how to use his natural mentorship wisely. We shall be much surprised if readers do not find the letters from George's father to him, and his to his own boys, among the most attractive parts of this book. Like most men who care heartily for anything, George Hughes always continued to feel a strong interest in public affairs, though circumstances had "counted him out of that crowd" who do the outside working of them. He had a considerable gift of rhyming, and that incident of the ex-prince imperial's "baptism of fire" with which the late Franco-Prussian war opened drew from him some vigorously indignant lines. Here are a few of them:

By! baby Bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting, Bath of human blood to win, To float his baby Bunting in, By, baby Bunting,

What means this hunting? Listen, baby Bunting— Wounds—that you may sleep at ease, Death—that you may reign in peace, Sweet baby Bunting.

Yes, baby Bunting! Jolly fun is hunting. Jacques in front shall bleed and toil, You in safety gorge the spoil, Sweet baby Bunting.

Perpend, my small friend, After all this hunting, When the train at last moves on, Daddy's gingerbread salon May get a shunting.

It is not our place here to do more than record how that suddenly, in the early summer of last year, the true strong man was struck down by inflammation of the lungs and passed away. What the loss must be to all whom his influence touched the pages before us sufficiently attest. It is perhaps well, though, that no life can be faithfully lived in the world without leaving such sore legacies of loss behind it.

* * * * *

Books Received.

The Relation of the Government to the Telegraph; or, a Review of the Two Propositions now Pending before Congress for Changing the Telegraphic Service of the Country. By David A. Wells. With Appendices. New York.

The Country Physician. An Address upon the Life and Character of the late Dr. Frederick Dorsey. By John Thomson Mason. Second edition. Baltimore: William K. Boyle.

Addresses delivered on Laying the Cornerstone of an edifice for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, October 30, 1872. Philadelphia: Collins.

Mysteries of the Voice and Ear. By Prof. O. N. Rood, Columbia College, New York. With Illustrations. New Haven: C. C. Chatfield & Co.

The Poems of Henry Timrod. Edited, with a Sketch of the Poet's Life, by Paul H. Hayne. New York: E. J. Hale & Son.

Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches. By Justin McCarthy. New York: Sheldon & Co.

The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier. Household edition. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.

The Earth a Great Magnet. By Alfred Marshal Mayer, Ph. D. New Haven: C. C. Chatfield & Co.

The Two Ysondes, and Other Verses. By Edward Ellis. London: Basil Montagu Pickering.

Jesus, the Lamb of God. By Rev. E. Payson Hammond. Boston: Henry Hoyt.

Social Charades and Parlor Operas. By M. T. Calder. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

The Yale Naught-ical Almanac for 1873. New Haven: C. C. Chatfield & Co.

Julia Reid: Listening and Led By Pansy. Boston: Henry Hoyt.

THE END