day. "It will be the happiness of my old age, and a chance for you such as you never dreamed of. You will be enormously wealthy and all your friends will envy you; you can aspire to the highest position. With a Spanish nobleman for your husband, you can go to court. You will be maid of honor; you will be one of the principal ladies of Madrid.

"But, on the contrary, if you take Arturo, you will live in poverty and misery; you see how we live with an income equal to a captain's pay. Don't scorn my advice, dear child. I speak from love and a knowledge of the world."

Her words and your example exercise a great and profound influence on my mind.

Arturo carries himself well, he is discreet, agreeable and affectionate, although he lacks resources, and can expect absolutely nothing in the future. If I marry him I shall lead a life of privations and hardships. Married to the Marqués, I should live in luxury and ease.

What you tell me, dearest Luisa, is another reason why I should decide. Your lover shed tears-for men can cry, sometimes-but he dried those tears and found consolation soon after, too soon. Arturo will do the same; besides, military men have so many sacred obligations and imperious duties to absorb their attention.

Dear Arturo, I am so wretched, yet I feel your pain more than my own, because I am as sure of your love for me as you are of mine. I write to let you know my mother's orders. I feel wretchedly to cause you so much suffering, but my own is just as intense.

After a terrible scene mamma insisted, even demanded, that our engagement should end. Just imagineknowing as you do how dearly I love you-how much grief this resolution

causes me.

I sacrifice myself in order to obey my mother, and to give her, in her old age, luxuries which to-day she cannot enjoy.

I have not yet told you all; she wishes me to marry a man whom I do not love. She has worked upon my feelings of gratitude, telling me of her tenderness and the care which she has lavished on me ever since I was born, in order to oblige me to consent to such a monstrous union.

The Marqués de Peña Alta is old, and I am almost a child. We have different tastes and habits, and cannot be happy.

But what does it matter? He is immensely rich. He has superb palaces, magnificent carriages, and poor mamma will enjoy all this. It does not matter if I am unhappy, it does not matter if I live in sorrow and bitterness. Pity me, Arturo, because I shall never forget you, and your image will be engraved forever on the heart of your unhappy Margarita.

IV.

Peña Alta.

My dear Sir:

I send you the enclosed letter that you may better understand the woman whom you are shortly to marry. loved her with enthusiasm, with true passion, but to-day she inspires me with profound contempt. I believe that you will have the same impression when you know what she is and what she is worth.

on me that the papers had been originally written in secret ink, and later exposed to fire, or to the action of chemicals. To this now obvious explanation I did not consciously reason.

Beyond these simple mental phenomena we come to the cases in which a mathematical problem is solved, or a musical piece is composed, by a person "walking in his sleep." Several instances occur in books about psychology. Next we find the cases in

A man capable of doing what you have just done is rightly named a miserable wretch. You will receive, within a few hours, the visit of two persons whom I have asked to confer with two persons whom you may select, in order to arrange the conditions of a duel. It would not be right to leave unpunished the mean action of which you have been guilty, and I hope to give it deserved and just punishment.

The Marqués de Peña Alta.

VI.

The Marqués de Peña Alta to the Senorita Dona Margarita de Inestrosa.

My dearest one: Will you consult with your mother and fix the date of our wedding-day, when my happiness will be complete?

Ever your adoring

Eduardo, Marqués de Peña Alta. Translated for THE LIVING AGE by Jean Ray

mond Bidwell.

From The Illustrated London News. MENTAL ACTIVITY IN DREAMS.

Most people know the curious refreshing influence of sleep on the mind. The schoolboy goes to bed, unable to remember the lines he has tried to learn by rote; he wakens with his task achieved, "word perfect." For days this summer I puzzled over the peculiarities of the paper and ink in certain historical manuscripts. One morning I awoke with the idea flashing

a man some secret which he cannot remember to have ever known while awake. A story of this kind is told in a note to "The Antiquary." A gentleman, in dire need of certain documents, dreams that his dead father appears to him, and gives him the clue, with many curious particulars. Scott argues that the aream only revived some lost memory, perhaps of childhood.

Now, in the last "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research," there occurs a perfectly beautiful case of the mind so!: ing a problem in sleep, and solving it, apparently, by the aid of a person long dead, in the course of a dramatic dream. Here is no pretence of a spook; the perplexed mind, it is admitted, hits on the right solution in slumber, and throws it into highly artistic form.

The hero is Dr. Hilprecht, professor of Assyrian in the University of Pennsylvania. In March, 1893, the learned professor was trying to decipher the fragmentary inscriptions on two broken bits of agate, pieces, as was supposed, of old Babylonian fingerrings. He had not even the bits of stone before him, only sketches made from these originals. which were discovered by archæologists from the American university. The professor guessed their date, widely, at 17001140 B.C., and he did decipher one character as K U. He ascribed this "to King Kurigalzu (?)" and set down the fragments as "unclassifiable." Then he marked his proof "for press," and went to bed, tired and dissatisfied. The professor dreamed a dream. A

Chaldean priest took him into a temple treasure-chamber, wherein was "a large wooden chest, with scraps of agate and lapis lazuli on the floor." The priest then said that the two fragments, published on page 22 and page 26 of the professor's book, were not finger-rings. King Kurigalzu had once offered to the shrine of Bel an inscribed cylinder of agate, such as we have all seen in museums. Then the priests were suddenly ordered to make agate earrings for the god Ninib. Now the priests "were out of agate” in the rough. They therefore cut the cylinder of Kurigalzu into three parts whereof two were converted into Ninib's earrings. The priest, in the dream of course, bade Dr. Hilprecht put his two fragments together, and he departed. The professor (teste Mrs. Hilprecht) jumped out of bed, compared the two sketches of the fragments, and exclaimed, "It is so, it is so!" The fragments, even now, are incomplete. Certain characters are "entirely lost, and have been supplied by analogy from the many similar inscriptions." Thus filled up (just as we might add "Dei" to a coin, partially obliterated,

There was a difficulty even now, for in the sketches the fragments were represented as of different colors of agate. How, then, could they have originally been parts of the same cylinder? Dr. Hilprecht, in August, 1893, went to Constantinople and examined the two fragments, which he found in separate vitrines.

They fitted into each other, but, when originally sawn out of the cylinder, "the whitish vein of the stone appeared on one fragment, the larger grey surface upon the other."

The explanation of the discovery made in the dream is that, when wide awake, Dr. Hilprect's mind was led away from the original unity of the two fragments by their difference of color as exhibited in the sketches.

ANDREW LANG.

a

'Coventry and "Middlemarch."-It is probable that in very few years Coventry will hardly be recognizable as the "Middlemarch" of George Eliot. The life she sketches is that of a quiet country town. Mr. Vincy, the silk manufacturer, representative of a failing industry, with his indignant tirades in faulty English against the "newfangled dyes that rot the silk," and his cheerful, handsome wife in pink ribbons, with her innocent pride in the children, who are so much more cultivated, in a surface sense, than their parents; Mr. Bulstrode, the Methodist banker, the medical men of the new and old school and their lady partisans; Mr. Farebrother, the Broad Church whist-playing parson, and Mr. Tyke, his Evangelical rival-all these types seem already to be removed from us by much more than a generation. In George Eliot's book modern

industrialism has not displaced the old feudal feeling, and the shopkeepers of "Middlemarch" are more respectfully aware of the old county families than they are to-day in little boroughs like Leek or Uttoxeter, to take our instances from the Staffordshire country that our great novelist knew so well. George Eliot's connection with "Coventry" will be fresh in the recollection of readers of her life. The friendship which she formed there with Charles Bray and his family was the main influence that determined her career. Her translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu," which gave her the entree to London literary life, and brought her into relations with Chapman, the editor of the Westminster and with George Henry Lewes, was suggested by this citizen of Coventry.

From "Travel."