寵

So much for theory; but in case of of the Montmartre rats, which were emergencies, Mère Galipaux's walls pitilessly hunted and destroyed by the were lined with a regiment of bottles inhabitants of the quarter; but of course of all shapes and sizes, containing cor- the appeal was set down as quixotic, dials, simples, and extracts of her own and the army of rodents continued to wonderful herbal infusions and decoc- die lingering deaths in gins, as if no tions. For distilling purposes she pos- measures had been taken by their prosessed a conical apparatus which resem-tectress for their deliverance. bled the alembics used in the Middle The steep little alley where Mère Ages by alchemists and other votaries of the black art. Above this triple row of flasks hung bundles of dried aromatic plants which once were fragrant and

Galipaux lived was the happy huntingground for the whiskered fraternity of Montmartre. They grew and multiplied in the big sewer underneath the street level; they danced mazurkas on the

feathery on the lower slopes of the Puy-de-Dôme, and which even still, uneven cobbles, and darted between

though dead, contrived to impregnate the sabots of the working folk when

they returned from shop and factory at twilight; they climbed through the partitions of the old houses which had been built in the reign of Henri IV., and made the usual havoc in loaves and cheeses; their weird, shrill cries awoke the soundest sleepers at night-time, and even Bishop Hatto in his castle was not more surrounded by them than were the inhabitants of the Rue de la ferronnerie, Montmartre. And Mère Galipaux alone, of all her fellows, tol

the atmosphere with a piquant and not unpleasant odor. Surgical books and pamphlets lay upon the stained deal table, showing that the doctoresse, as much as her daily occupations permitted, took an interest in the progress of that science 'neath whose banner she marched, though she had no pretensions to be anything but a medical freelance. And the worthy dame, when not engaged in binding Mère Perrin's matou's left ear, which had been almost torn off by rival Toms on his last noc-erated and cared for the strange, deturnal promenade, or in setting the broken leg of Petit Poucet, the baker's errand boy's poodle, or in squirting soothing mixture into the inflamed orb of some Paris street gamin, or in distilling and experimenting, would always be seen with a book on her knee.

structive little creatures. She waged a silent war on her neighbors anent the rats, for, through close vigilance, she knew the whereabouts of every guttertrap and poison-dish, and after dark would light her lantern, and, armed with a few bandages and surgical apHer husband had left her in flourish-pliances, hie on her unsuspected errand ing circumstances, and since his death in the streets. Uninjured rodents she she continued to live on in the same set at liberty; those who were already old rooms she had occupied on coming in the convulsive throes she humanely to live in Paris forty years previously, despatched. She rinsed away the and nothing would induce her to re-death-conveying messes in the cracked place the old furniture by newer and less threadbare chairs, tables, and cupboards. The carved oaken clock she had brought with her from Auvergne, ticked pompously from its corner, just as it had done when it was placed in her great-grandfather's kitchen one hundred and seventy years ago.

Mère Galipaux was a member of the Paris branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and had even drawn up a petition requesting the president to interfere on behalf

dishes and flower-pots, and for these substituted harmless ingredients of a similar appearance. She then placed food remnants in the holes between the paving-stones, and rats that were slightly hurt she carried to her attic and saw to their wounds till they were cured.

Not a living soul in the neighborhood knew of this remarkable crusade. Life had taught Mère Galipaux a lesson which some folks find so hard to learn, and that was to keep her own counsel;

in plague-stricken places and fever haunts if, thereby, she could have lessened, by one iota, the distressing total of diseases and ills that menace her

she had forbidden the members of her occasions in the cause of humanity, so family to visit her of an evening; and la Mère Galipaux would have sojourned as, owing to her immense gifts and masculine strength of character, her authority was almost patriarchal, none dared to disobey her in the matter. The old medicine-woman was no re- fellow-creatures throughout the natural specter of persons, or rather, of the term of their lives. privileged among the animal species. Perhaps on that account, when she She did not see why there should be died, the crowd of mourners who fol one rule for the spirited race-horse, and lowed her to her tomb was so great that another for the costermonger's donkey; the traffic in the Boulevard Clichy was nor why white mice should be tended temporarily suspended, and the great and coddled by children in wicker deserted Montmartre Cemetery was cages, and their cousins the field-mice populous for the space of half an hour. cruelly exterminated. For her there were no grades in the divine order of life, whose dim beginnings in the creeping things and batrachia seem so repulsive to frivolous natures. She belonged to the race of healers in her humble way, as surely as Hippocrates, Claude Bernard, and Jenner did in theirs; and even as these great men would have imperilled their lives on all

Had la Mère Galipaux been the dean of the Academy of Medicine, she could not have received a warmer tribute to her memory than this spontaneous popular testimony, more eloquent in its undemonstrative fervor than the most polished funeral sermon preached by a fashionable deacon, or a volley of guns fired over her grave.

to be provided free of charge by every sanitary authority for housing those who are compelled to leave their homes whilst the process of disinfection is going on. So far this provision has not been carried out in every district; in fact, by only thirteen out of the forty sanitary authorities. What accommodation has been provided is open to improvement; in a few instances only is the accommodation provided for use by night as well as by day. Shelter by night, however, must be provided for in all cases, as the time occupied in the purification of the room-often the only room of the family-extends to many hours. Provision for baths to be used by those coming from infected houses should also be ensured. It is said that so far poor people are unwilling to use the accommodation thus provided, but when they find it really meets their convenience this is not likely to continue. But the shelters must be made reasonably attractive, or objections to them will never

THE WORK OF DISINFECTION IN LONDON. From a return just prepared by the medical officer of health of the London Council, it appears that sixteen sanitary authorities have provided themselves with disinfecting apparatus, in which disinfection is effected by steam; fourteen authorities possess apparatus in which disinfection is effected by dry heat; and eleven authorities have arranged with a contractor by whom steam is used. It is hoped dry heat apparatus will soon be entirely superseded by steam apparatus. The arrangements with a contractor to disinfect are not quite satisfactory, on the ground that this duty should not be in other hands than those who are responsible for the prevention of disease. It would be a good thing and more economical, the medical officer shows, if districts were to combine in the manner provided by the Public Health (London) Act, and find suitable sites for the erection of disinfecting apparatus in central districts of London. Section 60 of the Public Health be overcome. (London) Act requires a temporary shelter

British Medical Journal.

-1

National Review,

525

III. A GREY ROMANCE. By Lucy Clifford,
IV. THE ROMANTIC MARRIAGE OF MAJOR
JAMES ACHIlles KirkpATRICK, SOME-
TIME BRITISH RESIDENT AT THE COURT
OF HYDERABAD. By Edward Strachey, Blackwood's Magazine,

540

V. CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN ME

MOIRS. Mrs. Kemble. By Anne Ritchie, Macmillan's Magazine,
VI. My FIRST BEAR-HUNT. By Fred.

549

Whishaw,

Longman's Magazine,

555

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Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

WORLEBURY.

A PHILISTINE CONFESSION. FROM the rock-crown of a long woodland FAIN Would I sing in minor key of woe, hill, In modern fashion, could I only banish We watched the grandeur of the sunset The sunshine from my heart: 'tis quite

A lucid veil of splendor and of joy :

It made the rolling Mendips laugh in light,
It turned brown waters into billowy gold,
It kissed with kindling lips the coast of
Wales,

It lit the Brecon Beacon from afar,
And touched with lustre opaline the peak
Of giant Dunkery as sheer he soared

de trop;

But it won't vanish!

"Court pessimism," urge my cultured

friends:

"Think how brute-force the world sets

spinning blindly;

How to blank misery existence tends!" (They mean it kindly.)

"Surely," they cry, "at least you can despair?

Condemn to darkness all that once seemed brightest ?

Feel

you no loathing for the fate you share?"

No-not the slightest !

To reach the floating pearl of phantom Yet Fortune too has mocked me with her

cloud That sends the eternal softness of the west."

moods;

Her fickle wings, alack! she's lightly shaken;

And left me Care for comrade: while my goods

The jade has taken.

"Well then?" - well then, I smile (and so 'twere vain

For poor contentment's slave to ape the poet :)

"You think God's balance tilts the loss with gain ?"

Nay, friend, I know it!

Spectator.

R. K. H.

If all the world had a pleasure-garden,
And went there ever in early sun,
There were more to praise, there were less
to pardon

When the day is over and done.

There's an airy wisdom, a solemn light

ness,

A passion of power in brain and blood, Belong to the dew and the still cool bright

ness

When day is a flower in bud.

I have phloxes silver and phloxes rosy,
So sweet in service and glad to please,
With mines of wealth in their every posy
For jolly bacchanal bees.

MAUDE EGERTON KING.

1

From The London Quarterly Review.
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.1

the title-page, in striking contrast with her Paris-made costume, in the height of the hideous fashion of 1870, or thereabouts.

"VERY soon after my arrival in Egypt," writes Miss Chennels, in her introduction to these volumes, "I had The story of this poor child's short occasion to observe that the opinion life reminds one often of the proverbial prevalent among Mohammedans was disadvantages of sewing new cloth on that it was a disgrace to any woman old garments. The instincts of freefor her face to be seen, or her name dom, energy, and self-improvement imto be heard beyond the walls of the parted by an English education were harem." It was in deference to this inevitably and hopelessly at strife with prejudice that the publication of her the harem life of seclusion, idleness, "Recollections" was delayed till not mental and moral stagnation, to which only her royal pupil, but the children the customs of the East condemned her who shared her studies and pleasures, as soon as her childhood was over. were in their graves. Not that they The pathetic human interest which contain the faintest touch of scandal, thus attaches to the subject of Miss the slightest hint of indiscreet revela- Chennels's Recollections" is accention. The social life of the Khedive tuated by the fact that the narrator is Ismail and his family is painted in the obviously not writing for effect. She fairest colors, and the impression one sets down everything as it comes-picgains of him from these pages is that nics to the Pyramids and the humors of an amiable, somewhat over-indul- of Bairam, visits to the royal ladies, gent paterfamilias, scarcely to be rec-impertinences of the Arab servants, ognized as the "Oriental despot with a reflections on the slavery question, and Parisian veneer,' 11 2 "whose strength of will and perverse fertility of resource enabled him to maintain a powerful despotism in spite of general discredit and impending bankruptcy, and to baffle all the efforts of European diplomacy to make him govern on rational principles."

notes on the Cairo bazaars, with small care for any order beyond the chronological. But this only increases the impression of exactitude and good faith that grows on one as one reads. The author's view of things is open to the reproach of being a little "set" and conventional; the minor discomforts of Miss Chennels, in her notes and Eastern life take up a somewhat disprocomments on what she saw, restricts portionate place in her narrative; but herself carefully to her role of govern- she is throughout clear-sighted, sensiess; and though her narrative affords ble, not without perception of the now and then a side-light, "significant humorous; and the very profusion of of much," on the character of Ismail and the nature of his administration, yet its principal value consists in the almost photographic clearness and accuracy of the picture it gives of the private life of Mohammedan ladies of high rank just beginning to experience the disturbing influence of Western ideas. It is a drama of the clash of two civilizations; and the protagonist is the little princess, whose sweet, wistful face, with the soft, Oriental features, looks out of the photograph facing

1 Recollections of an Egyptian Princess. By Miss Chennels. Two vols. W. Blackwood & Sons. 2 England in Egypt, by Alfred Milner.

detail in which she indulges on the subject of her privations, helps one to realize how difficult it must be to educate a set of people so undisciplined, so idle, so ignorant of the value of time or the force of a promise, as those with whom she had to do, into any adequate conception of order, rectitude, and public duty.

Miss Chennels entered upon her duties in October, 1871. The educational staff of the Khedive Ismail's household then consisted of a Mr. Freeland, who acted as the tutor of Ismail's fourth son, Ibrahim Pasha, Mr. Micheli, the assistant tutor, and the Princess