distinctness of trees and shrubs and very difficult to take with the line, and flowers, which, in the light of the stars and the lantern, seemed to belong to a world with which I was but vaguely familiar, although I had travelled all over it in dreams. Sometimes I used to go out fishing with the Otter on the Dordogne. When the casting-net was left at home (it was of little use when the water was clear) chub-fishing with the flying-line was generally the chosen form of sport. Here I may say that my companion, who could turn his hand to anything, made his own rods from hazel sticks. Where the water was sufficiently deep the boat was rowed and steered with a single short oar, but where it was shallow much better progress could be made by punting. These are the two methods invariably used by the fishermen and ferrymen of the Dordogne, and it is astonishing with what success they can get a boat up the rapids without having recourse to the towing line. When we went chub-fishing, we took the boat a mile or so up-stream, and then let it drift down with the current near a bank that was fringed with willows and acacias. Although we needed only six inches of water, the depth was sometimes miscalculated, and we went aground on a bank of pebbles. Then the Otter, whose bare feet were always ready for such emergencies, stepped out into the sparkling current and hauled or pushed the punt over the obstacle. What with rapids and banks of pebbles, the excitement of boating on the Dordogue above Lalinde never flags. It looked very easy to throw a line with a worm on it towards the shore, and then draw it back, but the chub showed such little eagerness to be caught by me that I generally preferred to steer and watch my companion pulling them out as he stood in the prow, his face nearly hidden under the thatch of his straw hat. When the fish were in a biting humor, he had one on his hook every time he threw the line. There are few trout in this part of the Dordogne, but in tributary streams like the charming little Céou they are plentiful. Carp are abundant, but they are even with the net, except in time of flood, when they get washed out of their holes, and the water being no longer clear, their very sharp eyes are of little use to them. Then a lucky throw will sometimes bring out two or three carp weighing three or four pounds each. The fish commonly caught are mullet, perch, barbel, gudgeon, bream and chub. As a food-supplying river, the Dordogne is one of the most valuable in France, and, owing to the rapid current and the purity of the water, the fish is of excellent quality. The fixed belief of all the riverside people in this and other valleys is that fish should be cooked alive. You enter an inn and ask for a friture of gudgeon. In a few minutes you see the victims which have been pulled out of a tank with a small net on the end of a stick jumping on the kitchen table, and they are still jumping when they go into the boiling grease. I am not among those who have grown callous to such sights, common as they are in France. To see fish scraped, opened, and cooked while still alive gives me disgust for it when it afterwards appears on the table. I can imagine somebody saying: "Why look at what goes on in the kitchen?" That somebody does not quite understand what rural France is. In a country inn we invariably pass through the kitchen to reach the room set apart for guests, and it has often fallen to my lot to seek rest, shelter, and food in a poor auberge, where the kitchen is also the common room for the family and outsiders. September came and I was still at Beynac, although I had found another house. The fruit season was then at its height. Peaches were sold at three sous the dozen, a good melon cost about the same sum, and figs were to be had almost for nothing. On these terms quite a mountain of fruit could be placed upon the table for half a franc. There was often no necessity to run into this extravagance, for the people at Beynac are good-natured, and they would frequently send a basket of their earliest grapes or other fruit, and although the present might have been made by a woman with bare feet, her feelings would have been hurt had money been offered in return. dipped their wings in the water, the kingfishers that flew along the banks or perched on the willow stumps, and the graceful wagtails were for some miles my only river companions-excepting of course the fish, with which a treacherous current or a sunken rock might have placed me at any moment on terms of still closer intimacy. But time flew like the boat, and I soon came in sight The depth of the water was as variable as the strength of the current. Sometimes I saw the stony bed seven or ten feet below, and then quite suddenly the boat would get into rushing One day rather late in the month, water that sparkled with crystal clearhaving grown ashamed of inactivity, I ness over a bank of pebbles, and I excarried my knapsack down to the river pected momentarily to hear a grating and put it into the Otter's smallest noise and to feel myself aground; but boat, which he called the périssoire, the little boat went over the shallows although it was not really a canoe. He like a leaf. I passed a bank large was the chief builder of it, and as a enough to be called an island. The contrivance for bringing home to man water had not covered it for months, the solemn truth that life hangs to a and it was all thickly overgrown with thread or floats upon a plank—-perhaps | persicaria, which the late summer had the worse state of the two- it certainly stained a carmine red, so that the isldid him infinite credit. It was a flat- and was all aflame. The swallows that bottomed outrigged deal boat, very long, and so narrow that to look over one's shoulder in it was a manœuvre of extreme delicacy, especially where the rapids caused the water to be in wild commotion. I was told that it would go down stream like an arrow, and so it did. There was no need to row hard, for the current took the fragile skiff along with it so fast that the trees on the banks sped by as if they were run-of a charming little village whose ning races, and every five minutes brought a change of landscape. It was very delightful; only one sensation of movement could have been better that of flying. The water was as blue as the sky above, and over the valley, the wooded hills, and naked rocks lay the sunshine of early autumn, tender in its strength, mingling a balm with its burning. I seemed to be floating swiftly but gently down some lovely but On nearing St. Cyprien the current treacherous river of enchanted land. became swifter and the turmoil of the And where is the river that lends itself rapids so great that I prepared my mind better to this illusion than the Dor- here to being swamped by the waves. dogne-ever charming, changing, and The question whether I would abandon luring like a capricious, fascinating, and or try to rescue my knapsack after the rather wicked woman? Now it flows wreck was distressing. The risk being without a sound by the forest, where over, it was with a sigh of relief that I the imagination places the fairy people beached the boat, now half full of and the sylvan deities; now it roars in water, at the nearest spot to the small the shadow of the castle-crowned and town. Having moored it and given the savage rock, over which the solitary sculls into the charge of a man whose hawk circles and repeats its melancholy house was close by, I was soon walking cry; now it seems to sleep like a blue in the warm glow of the September lake in the midst of a broad, fair valley, afternoon by cottage gardens where the where in the sunny fields the flocks feed | last flowers of summer were blooming. drowsily. The small burg of less than three houses with peaked roofs seemed to have been piled one upon another. Here upon stones in the water I recognized the human form supported by two bare legs, and in the posture as of a person about to take a dive, which is not perhaps very graceful, but is one that certainly lends character to the riverside scenery of France. Two or three women were rinsing their linen. structure was patched up and considerably enlarged. Now, as I saw it in the dusk, it seemed a very ghost-haunted place. The building had not fallen into ruin; it was still roofed and might easily have been made habitable; but there was no glass in the windows; all thousand inhabitants which bears the to fortify it with walls; but centuries name of the African saint, was prob- later what remained of the original ably, like many others, much more important in the Middle Ages than it is now. In accordance with the building spirit of the past, sc strongly pronounced throughout Aquitaine, and obviously inspired by a defensive motive, the houses are closely packed together on a steep hillside. A few ancient the rooms were silent with that silence dwellings, notably one with a long exterior gallery, show themselves very picturesquely here and there. The town grew up at the foot of an abbey, of which the church still existing exhibits a massive tower that might easily be mistaken at a little distance for an early feudal keep. The lower part of this tower is Romanesque. The interior of the church is in the very simple, pointed style of the twelfth century, felt that I had lingered long enough on but the interest has suffered much from this desolate spot, and the thought of restoration. What is chiefly remark- the awaking hearths brightening the little town with the blaze of wood made me hasten through the heather and gorse that had grown up on the grave of many a vine. able here is the carved oak of the reredoses and pulpit. so deep and sad of the long-deserted house which is not sufficiently wrecked by time and decay to have lost the pathos of human associations. The breath of the dying twilight stirred the ivy-leaves upon the wall of the detached chapel where never a person had prayed for many a year, and the goblin bats came out from the shadowy places to flutter against the pale sky. Then I 66 There being still an hour or more of daylight, I continued the ascent of the hill above the houses and the solemn The next morning saw me afloat old church to find a certain Château de again. As I was getting away from the Fâges which I knew to be somewhere shore a man called out to me : Your in the locality. A woman working her boat is worth nothing! If you try to distaff and spindle with that meditative pass the third bridge you will go to the air which the rustic spinners so often bottom !" He spoke very seriously, have, her bare feet slowly and noise- and I wished to take further counsel of lessly moving over the rough stones, him, but having once got into the curpointed out to me a little lane that rent it carried me off at such a rate wound up the deserted hill between that while I was thinking of putting a briars bedecked with scarlet hips, then question I was taken out of speaking bits of ancient wall to which ferns and distance. I shot through one of the moss and ivy clung; all of which arches of the first bridge, and soon brought back a train of old impressions found myself in water that was a little in the waning golden light. I passed rough for my poor skiff. Here were through vineyards from which the the rapids again. I had been warned grapes had been gathered, then rose by against these before I left the inn. broom and blackthorn to the level land. There was no turning back now, and if I looked in vain for the castle. I might the commotion of water had been ever have searched for it until darkness so great I should have had to take my came, but for the help of a boy who chance in it. The Otter's advice when was taking home a goat. At length II came to rapids was to pull as hard found it lying in a hollow, a sufficient as I could in the middle of the cursign that it was never a stronghold. In rent. I followed it, and my shallow feudal times it was probably a small, castellated manor belonging perhaps to a knight who could not afford to build himself a donjon on some eminence and boat, which had just been described as worthless, darted into the midst of the turmoil and went through it all as swift as a swallow on the wing. The river, however, had risen considerably during of sundry patrician but dowerless single the night, and the strength of the cur- ladies. Benevolent institutions of this rent having much increased in conse- kind are not uncommon in Germany, quence my belief in the périssoire's and the Damenstift offers a dignified worthiness was not sufficient to make and stately refuge to many a stepme run the risk of being swamped at the third bridge. I therefore landed at the next one, which was close to the village of Siorac. It seemed that I had only just started from St. Cyprien, and yet I had travelled about six miles. With the help of a willing man the boat was carried to the railway station, which was not far off, and its journey home having been paid, I ceased for a while to be a waterfarer and became again a wayfarer. E. HARRISON BARKER. From The Sunday Magazine. WHO WAS ADELAÏDA? THE TRUE STORY OF A LOVE-SONG. BY MRS. PEREIRA. IT has somewhere been remarked whether in jest or earnest, who can tell?-that the writer of an essay on any given theme should approach his subject from the most distant possible point, and reach his goal by a gradual association of ideas which might at first sight appear irrelevant. We shall take this axiom au sérieux, and, in order to arrive at the climax of the simple but deeply pathetic life-story of the great tone-poet's heroine (than whom no heroine was ever more nobly, sweetly sung), we shall go back nearly two hundred years, and link with our slight narrative the name of one of the most distinguished and, at the same time, eccentric personalities that have adorned the pages of post-mediæval German history. Not many miles from Dessau is a certain village called Mosigkau, anglicé Mossy Mead, which owes whatever distinction it possesses to the fine adjacent park, bearing the same name as this little rural hamlet; for the park of Mosigkau contains a handsome château, surrounded by lovely gardens and extensive grounds, the aristocratic asylum daughter of Fortune who would otherwise be forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence doled out by the unwilling hands of those, perhaps, but one degree less needy than herself. Each of these little communities is ruled over by a lady abbess, and has its canonesses" and its "chapter" days, after the style of some religious order. But in the daily routine the secular element predominates; and where the abbess is a woman of refined and cultivated mind the intellectual life finds a kindly and congenial sphere for its development. The Stift at Mossy Mead was founded some century and a half ago, and is indirectly indebted for its existence to Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, the friend and companion-in-arms of Frederick William I. of Prussia, and a notable member of the renowned Tobacco Parliament. Varnhagen von Ense, upon whose biography of the "Old Dessauer" Carlyle so largely drew for the portrait which has rendered that worthy a familiar figure to the English reader, informs us that the house of Dessau contributed field-marshals to the Prussian army for three successive generations; but Leopold, the centre of the group, towers far above his father on the one hand, and the son, to whom he bequeathed his bâton, on the other. The story of Leopold's life, apart from its military significance, reads like the strangest medley of romance and whimsicality; and it has furnished both poet and dramatist with abundant subjects for the exercise of their genius. From earliest boyhood Leopold had manifested a stormy, turbulent disposition, and he had hardly attained to manhood when it was judged expedient to send him on a protracted tour, chiefly with the object of separating him from the apothecary's daughter, the lovely Anna Louise Föhse, who had gained his affection in the early days of boyhood. While on his travels, 66 Dog!" he raved; you." and in one of his paroxysms of mani- nise, the robust integrity of his bouracal rage, he threatened his chamber-geoise bride would have rebelled against lain, M. de Chalesac, with a pistol. His it, but publicly and solemnly, in the finger was already on the trigger. face of all the outraged courts of Eunow will I kill rope, and in the teeth of his mother's strenuous opposition. Nor was it long before he obtained a patent of the Empire declaring his consort of equal rank with himself, and securing the succession to her children. The marriage was a most felicitous one, and Leopold's advisers might have vainly sought among the ducal and princely houses of Germany for a bride who would prove herself as loving, faithful, and judicious a wife as his beloved "Annalise." Rather a ponderous speech under the circumstances, but it had a salutary effect. The weapon dropped from the hand of the abashed youth, who acknowledged the magnitude of the crime he had been on the point of committing, and besought De Chalesac's forgiveness. But he was not always so fortunate in having a mentor at hand to save him from himself. Returned to Dessau, he repaired one evening to the apothecary's to visit his beloved; when, passing the window of the room in which she happened to be, he beheld her in close conversation with a young man, apparently a stranger. Filled with suspicion and jealousy, Leopold drew his sword, rushed into the apartment, and, pursuing his supposed rival into an adjoining chamber, stabbed him to the heart. He learned when all too late that his victim was a near relative of the Föhse family, and that he had just returned home from abroad. So great was the horror produced in the popular mind by this dreadful occurrence, that when, a hundred years later, a gravestone was turned up in a churchyard at Dessau bearing the murdered man's name and a Latin inscription setting forth the circumstances of his death, the slab was at once reburied as a relic too terrible to be exposed to the public gaze. It might have been imagined that the prince's mistake and its fatal consequences would have cooled the ardor of the lovers; but no sooner had Leopold received from his mother, hitherto princess regent, the reins of government than he married the apothecary's daughter; not morganatically, for if he had been satisfied with such a compro Stern and rugged as a soldier Leopold continued all through life; and it is difficult to reconcile the features of his martial career, with those of his domestic life and character. In many points he seems to have resembled that still more enigmatical personage, his Majesty of Prussia himself. Like that monarch he also was pious after his fashion; he diligently attended the services of the established Lutheran Church, and his religious emotions found vent in the lusty and stentorian singing of the chorales there in use - of the words of the chorales, be it said, for, alas! Leopold was master of but one tune-the "Dessauer March " - and to that much-loved melody he fitted every metre, whether short or long, common or peculiar, to the great discomfiture of his fellow-worshippers. |