suffer by being transplanted to Lincoln's these are filled with water from the last
Inn. So might little Annie herself. A rains. The new buds are but just "ex-
lapsed "1" in a country hayfield has much ploding" into leaf; here and there the
less significance than when lost at a Lon- Dryades have laid down a carpet of white
don dinner-table. How is it, I wonder, anemone flowers to dance on; trailing
that while the dear child generally speaks brambles lie across the track, with Octo-
of 'ay and 'ouse, she invariably besmirches ber's bronze and purple-green leaves, still
with the strongest of aspirates the unfor- hale and hearty, making an exquisite con-
tunate village of H'Orton? Still, it would trast with the young, brilliant, fan-folded
be easy to correct this, delightful to edu- shoots just springing at their base.
cate her during our quiet evenings, to
read with her all my favorite prose writers
and poets! And, even supposing she
couldn't learn, is classical English in the
wife an infallible source of married happi-
ness? Let me penetrate below externals
and examine into the realities of things.

I spend most of Friday and Saturday in this examination without making any sensible progress until supper on Saturday night, when I casually mention to Annie, who is laying the table, that I am bound to leave Down End on the following Monday, as terms begin on the 15th.

"Must you really go? Well, we shall miss you, surely," says Annie. And I am not mistaken; there is a wistfulness in her blue eyes, a poignant regret in her voice that goes to my heart.

I will find an opportunity to speak to Annie this very afternoon. She is likely to be less busy to-day than at other times. I need not trouble much as to how I shall tell her. She is sure to listen to me in a sweet, bewildered silence. She will have no temptation to laugh at the most beautiful and sacred of earthly themes. There is, to my mind, something incurably frivolous about a woman who laughs when a man is in earnest. I have tried over and over again to impress this upon Catherine, but it never had any other effect but to increase her amusement. She is a young woman entirely without the bump of veneration, and this, I should say, far more than an elegant pronunciation, is the desideratum in a wife.

Sunday evening. I am in the mental No, Annie! that decides me; I have condition of "Truthful James." I ask suffered too much from blighted affection myself: “Do I wake? Do I dream?" I ever to inflict the same pangs on another. inquire at set intervals whether the CauI am too well read myself in Love's sad, casian is played out? So far as I repreglad book to mistake the signs written in sent the race, I am compelled to reply your innocent face. Without vanity I can in the affirmative. This is what has hapsee how different I must appear in your pened. I was smoking my post-prandial eyes from all the farm hands and country cigar in the terraced garden, lying back in bumpkins you have hitherto met; without a comfortable basket-chair. fetched out fatuity I can understand how uncon- from the sitting-room, when a shadow fell sciously almost to yourself you have given upon the grass, and Mrs. Anderson apme your young affections. Well, to-mor-peared in her walking things to know if row you shall know you have won back mine in exchange.

If Catherine could but guess what is impending!

April 13 (Sunday). Annie in the maroon and magenta gown, carrying a clean folded handkerchief and a Church Service in her hand, has gone up to church.

The bells are still ringing, and I am wandering through the little copse on the right of the farm. This wood, or plantation rather, flourishes down hill, fills up the narrow, interlying valley, and courageously climbs the eminence beyond. As I descend, it becomes more and more sheltered. The wind dies away and the church bells are heard no longer. I am following a cart-track used by the woodcutters. It is particularly bad walking. The last cart must have passed through in soft weather, the ruts are cut so deep, and

there was anything I was likely to want, as she and " Faäther" and the little boys were just starting for H'Orton.

"Don't trouble about me," said I; "go and enjoy yourself. No one better deserves it than you, Mrs. Anderson." And I add diplomatically: "Doesn't Miss Annie also go with you?"

"Annie's over Fuller's Farm way," says the good woman, smiling; and I smile too, for no particular reason. "She mostly walks up there of a Sunday afternoon."

I know Fuller's Farm. I have passed it in my rambles. You skirt the copse, cross the sunny upland field, drop over the stile to the right, and find yourself in Fuller's Lane. The farm is a little further on, a comfortable homestead, smaller than Down End, but built of the same grey, lichened stone, and with the same steep roof and dormer windows.

I

So my card castle came to the cloth. Here was a genuine case of true idyllic boy and girl love, that had strengthened and ripened with mature years. Annie had no more given me a thought - what an ass, what an idiot I am! But really, I think Catherine's cruelty has turned my brain. I am ready to plunge into any folly.

I gave the Andersons ten minutes' start, | Christmas only, but I've known him all then rose, unlatched the gate, and fol- my life. We always sat together in school; lowed Annie. I reached the upland field. | he used to do my sums for me, and I've It was dotted with sheep; ewes and lambs; got still a box full of slate pencil ends long shadows sloped across it; a girl which he had touched." stood at the further gate. This was Annie, but alas! some one was with her; a loutish figure that I at first took to be that of son Robert. But as I came nearer, I saw it was not Robert but his equally loutish friend, the young fellow I had seen working with him by the threshing machine. That day, in his working clothes, he had looked what he was, a strong and honest young farmer. To-day, in his Sunday broadcloth, with a brilliant blue neck scarf, a brass horseshoe pin, and a large bunch of primroses in his buttonhole, he looked a blot, an excrescence, on the sunny earth. Personally, he might have been tall, but for a pronounced stoop; fair, but that he was burnt brick color; smoothfaced, but for the multitude of lines and furrows, resulting from long exposure to the open air. His voice I couldn't help admitting was melodious and manly, yet the moment he caught sight of me he shuffled his feet like an idiot, and blushed like a girl. He whispered something to his companion, dropped over the stile like a stone from a catapult, and vanished from view.

And it would have been folly. After the first second's surprise and mortification, I felt my spirits rise with a leap. I was suddenly dragged back from moral suicide. The fascinating temptation was placed forever beyond my reach. And it was Edward Fuller who thus saved me! Good young man! I fall upon your neck in spirit, and kiss you like a brother.

I am still free! who knows what tomorrow may bring.

April 14. To-morrow is here and has brought a letter from Catherine. I find it lying by my plate when I come down to breakfast. I take it up, look at the superscription, partly in Catherine's well-known writing, partly in my landlady's spider scrawl - for it had gone first to my London rooms. I turn it over, feel it, decide it contains one sheet of paper only, and put it resolutely down. After breakfast is time enough to read it; nothing she can say shall ever move me more.

I pour out my coffee; my resolutions waver and dissipate themselves like the steam rising from my cup. I tear the letter open, and find myself in Heaven straightway. And these are the winged words that bore me there:

"Why do you not come and see me? Why are you so blind? It is true I do not like you! But I love you with all my heart. Ah! could you not guess? did you not know?"

A RECENT Communication of Herr Büchner | at an elevation of ten thousand to twelve thouto the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg announces that, among other objects obtained in the Chinese province of Kansu by Herrn Potanin and Beresowski, during their expedition of 1884-87, was a skin of Eluropus melanoleucus. This very remark able bear-like animal is hitherto known only from the specimens which were procured by Père David in the principality of Moupin, in the north of Szechuen, and which are now in the Paris Museum. Herr Beresowski met with it in the mountains of southern Kansu,

|

sand feet, where it inhabits the bamboo bushes, and is known to the natives as the Pei-ssjun or Chua-ssjun, i.e., white, or spotted, bear. Few presents, we imagine, would delight the heart of the director of the British Museum of Natural History more than examples of this rare and little-known mammal. As France and Russia can now both boast of specimens, England, whose interests in China are so predominant, surely ought to be able to obtain some likewise.

Nature.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

From The Quarterly Review.
THE NEW PAPYRI.*

and style, and affords a new and amazing proof of the myriad-minded versatility of ancient Hellas.*

THE present century has been rich in important additions to our store of clas- A century rich in real literary gains is sical knowledge. In 1816 Niebuhr found naturally also fertile of forgeries, and some a palimpsest in the Library of the Chapter of these have had a temporary success. at Verona containing a copy of the Epis- As Ireland's fictitious plays of Shaketles of St. Jerome; under this writing he speare imposed on Garrick, who actually deciphered the text of the Institutes of put "Shakespeare's Vortigern on the Gaius, and thus immensely enhanced the stage, so the sham-antique ballads of value of what is perhaps Rome's greatest Surtees took in even the great master of bequest to us, her system of jurisprudence ballad lore and maker of ballad poetry, and law. Shortly afterwards, the discov- the inimitable Sir Walter Scott himself ery of a great part of Cicero's treatise a fact which can only be put beside Scal"De Republica," by Cardinal Mai, in a iger's belief in the genuineness of two Vatican palimpsest, supplied a further comic Latin fragments of great alleged proof of the matchless powers of the great antiquity, submitted to him by Muretus, Roman orator in every department of lit- who himself had written them. Ever erary achievement, and contributed not a since Onomacritus wrote the poems of few choice blossoms to a future florile- Orpheus, the literary forger has been from gium of the wit and wisdom of Cicero. time to time at work; but in recent ages Hardly had this precious piece of flotsam he has not been so successful as those from the sea of time received the last pol- artists whom some suppose to have fabish from the hands of scholarship, before ricated the Homeric poems under Pericles. the four now famous orations of Hype- The Rowley MSS. of Chatterton and the rides, existing piecemeal in papyri, pur- Ossian of Macpherson, though they had chased by Mr. Harris Warden and Mr. many enthusiastic believers in their auStobart at Thebes in Egypt about 1850, thenticity, had however only a temporary created for us a new figure in literature. triumph; and quite recently the Greek Hyperides had hitherto been but a name Simonides and the Jew Shapira have in lists and lexicons, like those of Har- failed egregiously in their attempts to impocration and Pollux, ever since the loss pose their sham antiques on the learned or destruction in the capture of Buda world. We shall again have occasion to Pesth by the Turks of the codex of Hype- refer briefly to the Shapira MSS., to point rides, which had been the ornament of out the characteristic notes of disingenthe library of the king of Hungary. Quite uousness which marked the manner in recently large additions to his remains which they were presented to the public, have been made by the papyri of the and to put before our readers, by way of Archduke Rainer. This acquisition was contrast, the history, so far as we know it, soon succeeded by one which was in some of the leaves which contain the "Constiturespects even more interesting, the papy- tion of Athens," and which certainly are rus fragment of three pages containing not a modern forgery. We may here rea portion of Alcman's marvellous old mark that the tendency of modern literary hymn to the Dioscuri, with its strange criticism is towards undue scepticism laconisms, and its curious companion pic-about the monuments of antiquity which tures of Agido and Hagesichora. It was we possess, rather than too great readifound by M. Marietti in 1855 in a tomb near the second pyramid; it is quite unique among Greek poems in its tone

1. Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens. Edited by F. G. Kenyon, M.A., Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. London, 1891.

2. Hermathena: A Series of Papers on Literature, Science, and Philosophy. No. XVII. Dublin, 1891.

ness to accept fabricated imitations of them as genuine. The Germans are leav ing no nook in Helicon unrifled in their wild chase of the "Unecht." The method of Wolf's Prolegomena has fascinated his countrymen. Kirchhoff has dissected the

It is printed in the fourth edition of Bergk's "Poetæ Lyrici Græci," vol. iii., pp. 30-45.