charmingly picturesque hamlet imaginable. I would have thought it the only one of its kind in the world, but I learned later that in its wooded seclusion, with the wide, treeless fields surrounding, it was a typical French village. Several narrow lanes checkered the wood with their irregular lines and linked house with house. The only place where the homes gathered in a close group was in the center of the grove, where stood a little church so hidden by trees that you would never suspect its existence from a dozen rods' distance. Both the barns and the houses, as a rule, had wattled walls of straw and mud, with roofs of tile or thatch. Except for a tarred strip a couple of feet wide around the base, the mud walls were whitewashed. When in good repair the walls looked very neat, but they are so thin that rents are easily made in them. Where the breaks are not repaired promptly, the mud keeps dropping away from the straw, the straw decays, and a neglected building soon falls entirely to pieces. The houses were set at haphazard along the crooked village lanes, usually snug to the wheel-tracks. If a yard intervened, it was pretty sure to be of hummocked and hardtrodden earth, with straw and other litter lying about. The space before the house door looked more like a barnyard than anything else. Often it contained a filthy pool where the green scum gathered. The hens made the yard their scratching-place, and the pigs took it for their wallowing-ground. Hogpens and chicken-roosts and stables were right by the door, or even under the same roof as the living-rooms. The smells were anything but sweet, yet there was so much that was delightful to the eye in the surroundings of these human sties that one was ready to forget the odors and the filth. The village ways were lined by high hedges, and everywhere were rows of tall trees, many of them without a sign of a branch until you came to a little tuft at the tip-top. It is the custom in France to let the shoots grow out thickly along the tree-trunks, A FRENCH COUNTRY HOUSE and as often as they get to be eight or ten feet long they are clipped off and used for firewood. In Holland tree-shoots are utilized in the same way, only there the trees are cut short off about a dozen feet from the ground, and the sprouts grow out at the top in a great bushy head. In England, too, material of the same grade is an article of commerce, but the English have still another method of producing it. They let a field grow to brush, and when the brush reaches the required height it is cut, made into bundles, and sold for kindling-wood. In America we count all such stuff rubbish and burn it as worthless. The effect of the French treatment of their trees is to make each individual tree, in the near view, remind one of a worn-out broom set wrong end up; but in the aggregate it gives the landscape a very peculiar grace and interest. In the heart of the grove around the little house of worship was a small churchyard, where the graves were nearly lost in rank weeds and tall grasses. Most of the graves were unmarked, but a few had headstones or iron crosses, and on these there hung many strange artificial wreaths of beadwork. Some of the wreaths were two feet across and very elaborate. A large share of them had been exposed to the weather so long that they were getting shabby and the beads were dropping on the graves. Funeral decorations are often curious and lacking in taste, but I never saw anything quite so grotesque as these bead wreaths. The village was so quiet and quaint and sheltered that it seemed as though it had fallen into a drowsy sleep that had perhaps lasted hundreds of years, in which time it had forgotten to make any progress. The people did not seem very busy-at least, they had plenty of time to visit with each other and to watch me. But I was most impressed with their leisureliness by a hair-cutting scene I witnessed. It employed the energies of a whole family, either as actors or onlookers. There was a small boy who was being shorn, his father who did the clipping, his mother who held him, and his sister, uncle, and grandfather who watched proceedings. It seemed a large force for the work in hand, but I think they all enjoyed it, with the possible exception of the boy. House doors were open, and I glanced into several of the cottage kitchens. There was little to see a few scanty furnishings, a great fireplace, and sometimes a colony of chickens picking familiarly about the apart ment. Frequently there was no other floor than one of rough, hard-trodden earth, very well suited to the chickens, I thought, but not to the human inhabitants, if they had any aspirations toward cleanliness. The only ambitions of this sort that I discovered, however, were concentrated on the outer walls of the cottages, which were often models of neatness-as white above as whitewash could make them, and as black along the base as applications of tar would permit. It was springtime and apparently the height of the house-furbishing season, for in my wanderings about the village I saw women patching rents in the walls with mud; women whitewashing; and one woman who had finished her work with the brush was wiping off the spatters that had fallen on the tarred strip below. When I left the village, I went out of the grove at the opposite side from the one by which I entered, and I found on that side that it was only slightly removed from a broad highway that ran in a straight line across the plain. Where the lane from the village joined this highway stood a house built of stone that looked as if it might be an inn. A good many people were gathered in the vicinity, and as I drew nearer I saw that a funeral was in progress. The wide front doorway was framed about with white cloth trimmed with green vines and leaves. This gave entrance, not to the room within, but to a little section of it that had been walled off into a white, grotto-like space in which the coffin rested, adorned with many of the queer artificial wreaths of glass beadwork. In front of the house, in the roadway, stood a group of black-gowned, white-capped women, and beyond them, in a group distinctly separate, were a number of men. Presently a priest with a crucifix and a sexton with a long staff appeared, both in robes and bareheaded, and a short service in the open air was begun at the white doorway. Just then a heavy cart came lumbering along the highway, but it stopped at a respectful distance, and the driver took off his hat and waited with bowed head till the procession formed to go to the grave. The priest, chanting as he walked, led, with the sexton close behind. Then came the coffin, with four women bearers; then several women carrying bead wreaths. These were followed by the other women, and the men brought up the rear. The heavy cart now resumed its rumble along the highway, but I stayed to watch the procession wend through the green lane and enter the cool depths of the village grove. They were lost to sight at length, the chant of the priest died away, and I heard only a skylark soaring and singing in the sunset light far up toward the clouds. U TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON Showing the recently completed Porch. Memorials of Phillips Brooks. By Herbert Sherman Houston NLIKE that sixteenth-century bishop who laid such stress on the material and the coloring in ordering his tomb for Saint Praxed's Church, it is easy to believe that Phillips Brooks, could he have chosen his memorials, would have deemed their meaning of far more importance than their form. To the great preacher the life of the spirit was always a dominating reality, and things measured their value to him by their relation to soul. Finer than bronze or tablet, in his view, was the good influence that perpetuated itself in men's lives. To have known that the "Candle of the Lord" or any other of his sermons had been a light on some dark way-and thousands know per sonally that it has been, because the dark way was their own-would doubtless have seemed to him a far more radiant light than any that could stream through memorial window. But this is not saying that Phillips Brooks lightly esteemed the beautiful or underestimated the material. Trinity Church, rising before his loving gaze, showed how fully he believed that no gift of money or of talent was too great to be used in rearing a temple to the glory and for the worship of God. If the result should be, as it was, the most beautiful building in all Boston, what could be more fitting? "Is the aim of any other higher ?" he would have asked. So, when preaching, it seemed sometimes that the memorial bust of Dean Stanley, to the left of his pulpit, quickening anew the inspiration that had come to him from Stanley's friendship and teaching, gave added power to his words. The spirit behind the form, the meaning in the memorial, were ever of most importance; but form and memorial were also important, because they "bodied forth" to the eye and preserved in enduring matter both the spirit and the meaning. It is after this formula in the spiritual philosophy of Phillips Brooks that the memorials of him, both here and abroad, have been and are being expressed; and in nothing are they more truly a memorial than in this fact. The means with which they have been secured have been spontaneous and generous tributes of love. There have been no dragooning subscription appeals. Offerings have come as unreservedly as did the expressions of grief in January six years ago when Phillips Brooks died. Then Trinity overflowed, and Copley Square was crowded with mourners from high and low, who seemed to reach out instinctively through their grief toward some expression of their love for the man whose life had been so much to them. The sense of personal loss was not dulled before funds began to grow, along various lines, for memorials. In a leading editorial the Boston "Herald" declared that Phillips Brooks deserved a place with Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips among Boston's great sons, and that both his contemporaries and posterity would assign it to him. This was merely expressing what was a common thought among all classes. Because it was a common thought, the contributions to a fund for a fitting memorial were not only quick and generous, but they were very many, coming alike from poor and rich. They came not only from Boston but from all the world, till the aggregate reached nearly a hundred thousand dollars. But Phillips Brooks was not only a son of Boston; he was also a son of Harvard, and from alumni and undergraduates over fifty thousand dollars were gathered for a memorial in the University. Alumni of the Protestant Episcopal Divinity School at Harvard raised money for a memorial in their chapel. So did members of Trinity Parish for some permanent expression of the loving memory in which they held their great rector and leader. In England Archdeacon Farrar received most will ing offerings, from friends of Phillips Brooks across the sea, for a memorial in London. At the same time a fund was quietly growing for a memorial in New York. It can doubtless be truly said that for no other American, excepting Lincoln, have memorial funds been gathered in so many places simultaneously and with such generous spontaneity as for Phillips Brooks. They show in a striking way into what a wide brotherhood of loving influence and sympathy this great preacher of brotherhood had come. Every fund has been a free-will offering of love, thus being in its very essence a true memorial. In the northwest corner of the college yard at Cambridge there has just been completed a home for the religious work in Harvard, and it bears the name of Phillips Brooks House. Before his death Bishop Brooks had promised to aid the religious societies of the University in securing money for a suitable building, so the erection of such a building at once suggested itself as the most appropriate form for the Harvard memorial. In speaking of it the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine" said: "This memorial to Bishop Brooks is the spontaneous outcome of veneration and affection which was felt for the man, and of the desire to perpetuate that influence which he exerted in the college world. Its purpose and design are almost the expression of his own definite thought. The funds which have been given for it have been offered without solicitation and received from a large number of persons scattered widely on three continents. What Phillips Brooks himself tried to do in Harvard was to develop a religious spirit which should result in action, in active positive forms of benefit in human lives, rather than simply to increase intelligence and the store of the world's knowledge. The pressing need which has existed for the accommodation of these activities will be satisfied in Phillips Brooks House." It is The architect, Mr. A. W. Longfellow, Jr., Harvard, '76, has sought in his design fully to adapt the building to its special work, and to harmonize it with its surroundings. agreed that he has succeeded admirably. A colonial treatment and use of red brick with light stone trimmings have resulted in a building that can hold architectural fellowship with its neighbors, Harvard Hall, Holworthy, Stoughton, and Holden Chapel, and that, taken with these, gives a generally symmetrical appearance to that portion of the yard. On the first floor are a large meetingroom and other rooms to be devoted to the |