cross-road leading to a village not far from the Seine. There was an old church, one of the very oldest in the neighborhood, that he wanted them to see. He had done an etching of it for the Beaux Arts. The lamp was burning dimly in the little church before the high altar, where a black verger stood in his robes. There was a silver dove hanging from the middle of the roof, and a gilt sun, with brassy rays like an organ, which shone upon the altar. Little pictures, bright-colored, miraculous, covered the bare walls with representations of benevolent marvels heavenly hands and protruding arms in terposing from the clouds to prevent disaster here on earth; runaway horses arrested, falling houses caught in the act. There was a huge black crucifix with a colored figure of Death a somewhat terrible and striking reminder to the living of the future and the past. More cheerful tinselled ornaments were piled upon the altar, whose fine cloth was guarded by a chequered linen top. The wooden pulpit was painted to look like precious veined marble, so was the battered old confessional with the thumb-marks of the penitents. Outside the little church, in the Place, the cocks and hens cackled, becketed in the grass; a little stream ran close by the opened door with a pleasant wash of water. They had passed the curé's house close at hand, with its laburnums, and the field beyond where the linen strips were bleaching, and the children squatting in the dust, and the man with the wooden shoes and the oilskin hat and the torn blouse, breaking flints in the sunshine. Everything outside looked hot and bright and delicate and business-like, while everything inside was dark and dreamily fervent. To people accustomed from childhood to Catholic chapels, the scent of the lingering incense seems to be the breath of the prayers and hymns of the pious who have lingered here genera tion after generation on their way from the streets and the sunshine outside, to the quiet churchyard across the field. All a dozen wicked were being swallowed then and there by a huge green monster. these quaint, familiar things hung undisturbed as they had hung in the young man's recollection for the quarter of a century he could look back to. The bright silver hearts and tokens, the tallow can. dles peacefully smoking on the triangle all meant childhood and familiar faces and everyday innocent life to him. He did not feel here in the little village church as at St. Roch on the day of the great celebration. There he had chafed and revolted. Tempy herself could not have felt more repelled than Max du Parc; but this was his whole childhood, one of his simplest and most intimate associations. How curiously the same emblems affect different minds! To Tempy they meant terrors and superstition; to Jo a picturesque and characteristic episode of foreign travel; and to Susanna they meant something like a strange dream of reality, like an image of all that was in her heart just then. There was the charm, the intense attraction of that which was not and must never be her creed; and also a terror of that remorseless law which spared not, which accepted martyrdom and selfrenunciation as the very beginning of the lesson of life of that life which since the world began had been crying out so passionately for its own, for its right to exist, to feel, to be free. This afternoon Mrs. Dymond seemed to have caught something of Du Parc's antagonistic mood on that day at St. Roch's; she was thinking how these pale saints had turned one by one from the sunshine and the storms of daily life, from the seasons in their course, from the interests and warm fires of home, to a far-away future, of which these sad tapers, winking and smoking, these glittering silver trinkets, were the symbols; they had given earnest and pas sionate prayers in the place of love and living desires and the longing of full hearts; they had taken pain and selfinflicted sufferings in place of the natural submission and experience of life, and the restraints of other's rights and other's needs. 66 Max looked round to-day with friendly eyes at his old playmates, St. Cosmo and "I can't think how people can endure St. Damian, those favorite martyrs at such superstition," said Tempy, flouncing St. Dominic in his black robe, St. Catha-out into the porch. Come, Jo, it makes rine with her pointing finger, St. Barbara me sick," and she nearly tumbled over an with her wheel, good St. Ursula with a old couple who had been kneeling in the detachment of maidens, standing by the shadow of the doorway. well-remembered sketch of the Day of Judgment, where six or seven just persons escorted by two virtuous little angels were being trumpeted up to heaven, while over Susy blushed up, as she often did, for Tempy's brusquerie, and looked anxiously at Du Parc, who had caught the young lady by the arm as she stumbled. "Take care," he said in English; "go gently, and don't upset those who are still on their knees. After all there are not many people left upon their knees now," he added as they came out together, "and I don't see that much is gained by having everybody running about the streets instead." "At all events it is something gained to hear people speaking the real truth, and saying only what they really think, as we do in our churches," said Tempy, with one of her stares. Du Parc made her a low bow. "If that is the case, mademoiselle, I shall certainly come over to England and get myself admitted into your religion by a reverend with a white tie." Tempy seemed to rouse some latent | surprised, half-laughing, half-disapproving opposition in Max du Parc. glance, and the elder woman would blush and look amused, appealing; she seemed to be asking her stepdaughter's leave to be brilliant for once- to answer the friendly advances of the French gentlemen who called with red ribbons, and the French ladies with neatly poised bonnets. One or two invitations came for them through Mr. Bagginal. Sometimes Susy, animated, forgetting, would look so different, so handsome, that Tempy herself was taken aback. Mrs. Dymond's black dignities became her the long lappets falling, the silken folds so soft, so thick, that moved with her as she moved. She had dressed formerly to please her hus band, who, in common with many men, hated black, and liked to see his wife and his daughter in a cheerful rainbow of pink Tempy didn't answer, but walked on. and green and blue and gilt buttons. Jo burst out laughing. Susy didn't Now that she was a widow she wore plain laugh; she was in this strange state of long dresses, soft and black, suiting her emotion, excitement, she could not laugh. condition and becoming to her sweet and Something had come to her, something graceful ways. She had bought herself a which in all her life she had never felt as straw hat, for the sun was burning in the now, a light into the morning, a tender avenues of Neuilly, and with her round depth in the evening sky, a meaning to hat she had given up her widow's cap. the commonest words and facts. There A less experienced hand than Max du is a feeling which comes home to most of Parc might have wished to set this graceus at one time or another; philosophers | ful blackness down forever as it stood on try to explain it, poets to write it down, only musicians can make it into music, it is like a horizon to the present a sense of the suggestion of life beyond its actual din and rough shapings. This feeling gives a meaning to old stones and fluttering rags, to the heaps and holes on the surface of the earth, to the sad and common things as well as to those which are brilliant and successful. Had this supreme revelation come to Susanna now? or was it only that in France the lights are brighter, the aspects of life more delightful that with the sight of all this natural beauty and vivacity some new spring of her life had been touched which irradiated and colored everything? But it was not France, it was the poetry of to-day and the remembrance of yesterday which softened her sweet looks, which touched her glowing cheek. It was something which Susy did not know, of which she had never guessed at until now, widow though she was, mother though she was. Susanna for the last few years had been so accustomed to silence, to a sort of gentle but somewhat condoning courtesy, that it seemed to her almost strange to be specially addressed and considered. Tempy could not understand it either. Once or twice Susanna met the girl's the green outside the little chapel that summer's day. The children were still playing, the geese were coming up to be fed, the dazzle of light and shade made a sweet out-of-door background to the lovely light and shade of Susy's wistful pale face as she stood facing them all, and looking up at the carved stone front of the shabby little church. They walked home slowly two by two. Tempy, who had not yet forgiven Du Parc his religion or his bow, took her brother's arm. Two figures that were hobbling along the path a little way in front of them, stopped their halting progress, and turned to watch the youthful company go by. They were forlorn and worn and sad, and covered with rags and dirt; the woman carried a bundle on a stick, the man dragged his steps through the spring, limping as he went. 66 Yes," said Max, answering Susy's look of pity, 'one is happy and forgets everything else, and then one meets some death's-head like this to remind one of the fact. Think of one man keeping all that for himself," and he pointed back to a flaming villa with pink turrets beyond the field, and another reduced to such shreds of life." 66 "I don't think people in England are ever quite so miserable," said Susy. 66 You think not?" said Max. "I have seen people quite as dirty, quite as wretched in London. I remember 66 Susy wondered why he stopped short. Max had suddenly remembered where and when it was he had seen two wretched beggars thrust from a carriage door, and by whom. "And in Soho near where you lived," the young man continued after a moment, speaking in a somewhat constrained voice and tone. Any night, I think, you might have seen people as sad and wretched as these. I used to go to a street in that quarter for my dinner very often, and while I dined they walked about outside. Once,” he added more cheerfully, as another remembrance came into his mind, "I met a member of your family, madame, at my dining-place, Monsieur Charles Bolsover. Poor fellow," said Max, returning to his French, "I hope he is in happier conditions than he was then - he had a friend whom I met afterwards. He seemed in a doleful state." "What, madame, even you," said Max, "do you find nothing kinder to say of the poor boy? Drinking! He had not been drinking any more than I had he was ill, he was in a fever for a week afterwards. I used to go and see him in his friend's lodgings. They told me the story." Max glanced ahead at Tempy laughing and twirling her parasol - "Forgive me," he said, "I am meddling with what is not my concern.' "But it concerns me, Monsieur du Parc," said Susy, trembling very much. "It concerns me very, very nearly; if Charlie has been unjustly accused if he was ill, poor boy, and we did not know it." "It is a fact, madame," said Max dryly; "if you were to ask his friend, the Reverend White, he will tell you the same thing. Your nephew is not the first of us who has been overcome by an affair of the heart. I gathered from him that your that you disapproved of his suit." "My husband was afraid to trust his daughter's happiness to any one of whom we had heard so much that was painful," said Mrs. Dymond coldly, and remembering herself. Max civilly assented. "A father must judge best for his child," she continued, melting as he froze, and speaking with an unconscious appeal in her voice and her eyes. Why was it that she felt as if Du Parc's opinion mattered so much? She could not bear him to misjudge things; to think any one cold, or hard. Of course you have to consider what is best," said the young man, softening to her gentleness; "but believe me that is not a bad young fellow. Poor boy, it was a heart of gold. I can scarcely imagine the young lady having inspired such a devotion," he said, for a moment forgetting the near relationship between the two women; "but to me she seems strangely fortunate." "Ah! You don't know her," said Susy eagerly; "you don't know how noble she is, how good, how lovable." "What would you have, madame?” said Du Parc, laughing. "Of you I am not afraid, but of the miss I am in terror, and she detests me too. Ask madame, your mother." They had come to the gates of the villa by this; Phrasie appeared in the doorway with madame to welcome them back. Mrs. Marney's loud voice was heard call. ing from within. Max was not overpleased to see a visitor under the tree waiting the ladies' return. It was their north-country neighbor, Mr. Bagginal from the Embassy, who had been making himself agreeable to madame in the meanwhile. He had a scheme for a walk in the wood at St. Cloud, and a dinner. The court was there, and the gardens closed, but the young man with some pride produced an order of admission. Thank you, we shall like it very much indeed," says Tempy. Susy looked at Du Parc. "Shall you have time to come, too?" she asked. "Monsieur Caron is in the studio waiting for you, Max," said his mother; "he has got his pocket full of proclamations, as usual," and without answering Mrs. Dymond, Du Parc slowly turned and walked into the studio. From The Fortnightly Review. MR. J. R. LOWELL. "IT will take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage towards us, or even passably to conceal them. She cannot help confounding the people with the country and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just now, and lavishes sugarplums on us as if we had not outgrown them." It is nearly twenty years since Mr. Lowell wrote these words; but though written at a time when he was certainly less well-disposed towards this country than he is now, they must surely have sometimes recurred to his mind during the last year or two of his residence among us. Indeed he may well have reread the whole of the pungent essay from which this extract is taken with a humorous appreciation actually sharpened by closer acquaintance and more cordial relations with the people at whom it was chiefly aimed. The critic's keenly satirical remarks "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" have certainly lost none of their point since he first laid his finger on this foible; rather, he may congratulate himself on the prophetic instinct which led him to predict that it would "take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage." True, the condescension of the foreigner towards Mr. Lowell's countrymen has not remained absolutely unaffected in form by the lapse of years. It is not quite so naif now as in the days referred to in the following passage, when the "young American giant first began to assume the respectable appearance of a phenomenon." It was something to have advanced even to the dignity of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the relation of the individual American to the individual European was bettered by it; and that, after all, must adjust itself comfortably before there can be a right understanding between the two. We had been a desert; we became a museum. People came hither for scientific and not social ends. The very cockney could not complete his education without taking a vacant stare at us in passing. But the sociologists (I think they call themselves so) were the hardest to bear. There was no escape. I have even known a professor of this fearful science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross-examined as a chemist cross-examines a new substance. Human? Yes, all the elements are present, though abnormally combined. Civilized? H'm! that needs a stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such experiences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being of these explorers. I was a curiosity; I was a specimen. The "I" of this passage is not to be taken perhaps as strictly autobiographic. The writer is speaking, not in his own person, but in that of "the American" of the "auto-American," to use the language of Platonic idealism; and the American, as such, has doubtless ceased to attract the wandering gaze of cockney and sociologist as a mere specimen. But the stage which the American man has now left behind him is being passed through at this moment by the American man of letters, considered in his relation to the instincts of curiosity prevailing in the fashionable world. To the smaller world of literature in either country this observation does not of course apply. The English literary class a very much smaller body, by-theby, than is sometimes assumed - requires no enlightenment at this time of day as to the great merit of much of the work, creative as well as critical, which has been produced in the United States during the last generation. The terms on which the two countries exchange books with each other leaves much to be desired, but there is no fault to be found with their mode of exchanging ideas. All that fol lows in this connection must be understood as referring solely to that large and ever-growing class, that broad and ever-broadening fringe, of society which reaches up (or down) into the world of letters, that many-headed creature of fashion into whose innumerable ears has been whispered the injunction to "have a taste" in art and literature, and who are determined to have it, come what may. The shrewd and humorous critic who has just left our shores after perhaps the most successful term of office ever fulfilled by an American minister, can hardly, one thinks, have failed to rate the homage so effusively paid to him by this class of his English admirers at its true value. Probably he has many times asked himself as he has cast an eye round Mrs. Leo Hunter's drawing-room how many of its assembled "persons of culture are really acquainted with his works, or could give, I will not say a critical valuation of their comparative literary merits, but even a rough estimate of their physical bulk. As to Mrs. Leo Hunter herself, who has far too much to do in distinguishing be tween the names of her guests to know anything about their works, one trembles to think what result a viva voce examination of that lady on the subject of Mr. Lowell's writings would too probably bring forth. To begin with, she has almost certainly never regarded him in the light of a serious poet at all. To her, indeed, there is, and ever has been, but one | many a time found himself repressing a American poet. 'Longfellow, you know good-humored smile at the frank imperti - that beautiful poem, don't you remem- nence which displays itself in so much of ber? what was its name? Oh! Evan- this sort of drawing-room admiration. geline!' and 'I stood on the bridge at Even the compliments which semi-litermidnight' charming though I don't ary society in this instance rather follike Balfe's setting of it so well as the one lowing at the heels of "society" when by that other man, I forget now what his it ought to have set its namesake the exname is." Of course she is not ignorant ample-has heaped upon him in such of all the performances of any one of her profusion can have hardly produced on a lions; Mrs. Leo Hunter never is. There man of Mr. Lowell's just pride in the indeis sure to be some one achievement of his pendent merits and claims of Transatlanwhich she heard spoken of when she first tic literature quite the effect which those heard his name, and ascertained from her well-intentioned authors designed. The friend, Mrs. Sanger-Wombwell, that he late American minister, for instance, is an was "quite a celebrity, my dear; " and if excellent hand none better at unveilthe name of the particular work of the lit-ing a memorial of a departed man of leterary lion happens to be at all a peculiar ters. His address at the Westminster one, it is quite possible that Mrs. Leo Chapter House on the occasion of the Hunter may remember it. In Mr. Lowell's case, she certainly has this advantage, and if interrogated as to what her American guest had written, she would probably reply with pride, "Is it possible you don't know? Why surely you must have read those delightful Biglow Papers,' and and the Innocents Abroad' - or stay, isn't that Bret Harte or Mark Twain ? yes, Mark Twain. But, my dear, you should read the Biglow Papers,' they are quite too funny, particularly the spelling. Don't you recollect those lines George is always quoting, 'Don't never prophesy until you know;' and 'A merciful providence fashioned him hollow, in order in order' I forget how it goes on; but you really should get the book and read it. I don't know that I like it quite so much as 'Eye-Openers,' but it is very amusing." By those whose acquaintance with Mr. Lowell's works goes a little deeper than Mrs. Hunter's, and extends to the fact that he has written serious poetry, a more instructed but not much more complimentary homage is offered up. Here the mental attitude of the starer at the American man of letters is pretty closely analogous to what is described by Mr. Lowell in the above extract as the attitude of the starer at the American man. The simple-minded, empty-headed man or woman of fash ion has merely been astonished by the discovery that there are poets hailing from America, whose names are not Longfellow, and is examining the particular specimen with curiosity. The author of the "Fable for Critics," who has with such humor and acuteness assigned their places in literature to some half-dozen notable American poets, must, one imagines, have honor recently paid to Coleridge was a delightful essay on the works and genius of the poet; and the donor of the memorial being a fellow-countryman, there was a peculiar fitness in his selection for the discharge of the duty which he then undertook. But Mr. Lowell, like the shoetying gentleman who aroused the ire of the unsuccessful gambler, is "always unveiling memorials of English men of letters or oratorically assisting thereat. He played the former of these parts at Taunton some months ago in honor of Fielding, and the latter quite recently at Cambridge in honor of Gray - an occasion when he himself was unable to refrain from a sly reference to the extraordinary demand in which he found himself for these functions. But, indeed, for some time past there have been few conspicuous ceremonies performed or meetings held in connection with any literary matter, at which Mr. Lowell's presence has not been regarded as indispensable; and only his unfailing good-nature could have enabled him to accept cheerfully so serious an addition to the duties political and social of his Legation. So keen a humorist and so close an observer of buman nature as he must have discerned many another indication of that singular want of measure in the manifestations of its tastes and sympathies which distinguishes our English society of to-day; but after being thus privileged to supply it with material for the illustration of this foible in his own person, he might easily add another half-dozen pages to the essay "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." There is a truly diverting gaucherie, an unsurpassable left-handedness, in the compliments which a full five |