sulky, and her mother appeared at the doorway. "Now then, mother," he said. "You see the dog over there is none the worse. It is barking as much as ever. Now listen to this," and he turned on the phonograph. The record apparently interested the At any dogs more than the people. rate, they were hugely concerned to find out where all the yelping came from, and the original dog perhaps more so than the others. "Now what do you think of it, mother?" asked Blebo. "Rubbish, you and your echo-box. Give Latu back her voice and don't make fools of us, as if we were dogs. Besides, the echo dog is barking quite differently from the real dog." She was going on, when suddenly the record began to give out the tirade of the morning. "Give Latu back her voice and stop your devil's tricks," it began. The old woman stared, and there was a shuffle among the villagers. "Have done with your villany, you -" said the cuckold, you--you-youphonograph, at almost the same moment that the old woman shrieked the same thing. Her com The villagers burst out laughing, and Latu first giggled and then guffawed in anything but invalid fashion. This was too much. The beldam screamed with fury and flung a bamboo. aim was, however, no better than that of most women. She missed both Blebo and the phonograph so pletely that it was impossible to say which she had intended to hit. What she did hit was a small boy, who, with the courage of ignorance and want of He set up ideas, had come close in. a howl, which was a sure sign that he was not much hurt, and his mother rushed forward and snatched him up. At the same moment the phonograph stopped. There had been a good deal of outside incident that Blebo had not expected, but he called out, "Now you can all see that there is nothing to be afraid of. The dog barks as well as ever, though the machine has echoed his barking. This angry old lady can speak at least as well as ever, though the machine imitates her. Latu will be able to say and sing what she likes whenever she chooses to do it." He took up the record and showed it to the headman. "It's exactly the same as the other, you see," he said; "there was no reason for anyone to be afraid." The headman took the record very turned it round and gingerly and round, and looked down the hole in the middle. "I do not understand it," he said very slowly. "Well, it's like the spirit-picture— the photograph that I showed you when I first came," said Blebo, and then he turned round to Latu and said: "Here's a mirror for you as a keepsake for your song. You'll find that you can sing it as well as ever, whenever you choose to try." Latu looked at it and gasped, "Oh my! Look at my headdress," and proceeded to do it up in the untutored fashion of the ladies who have no boudoirs. "Don't be cross with me, old lady," said Blebo to the mother, who was still looking very angry, though the mirror had silenced here abuse. "Here's a pipe for you-a briar-wood pipe. You may like it better than your own. will last longer, anyhow, and it isn't so heavy." It The old woman hesitated a little, and then laid down her own pipe, which was simply a length of bamboo with the root curved round and hollowed She took the briar, out for a bowl. turned it round, blew through both ends, and then went inside to get some sun-dried tobacco. "She's quieted down anyhow," said Blebo to the headman, who grinned and then remarked: "I should like a pipe like that too. Have you got any more?" "I'll see what I can do when I get back to my tent," said Blebo; and then he turned to the girl and showed her a handful of gaudy beads, which he had taken out of his pocket. "Now, if you'll sing that song, Latu, you shall have these. Think how fine you'll be when you look at yourself in the looking-glass!" Latu's eyes twinkled, and she put her hand over her face and looked at the beads through her fingers. "But "It it's not a day song," she said. ought to be sung at night by the firelight. It's a love song, and all the young men are about." "Oh, well, you might just try a little bit of it now," said Blebo insinuatingly, and he poured the beads from hand to the other. one Latu began singing in a queer little constrained sort of voice, and then broke off with a giggle: "I can't with all these men listening. That Ruma boy is laughing at me." By this time the entire village had crowded close up, and Blebo himself found it unpleasant enough; so he said, "All right; you'll sing it for me some other time, won't you?" and poured the beads into her lap. Latu jumped up and scuttled into the house holding her skirt well above her knees, and with a mischievous laugh. "Well, now it's all right, isn't it, headman?" said Blebo, turning round to that worthy. "The echo-box spirit seems to be a The Cornhill Magazine. good spirit," he admitted; "but when will you give me that pipe you promised me?" "All right, all right; I'll see if I can. find one," said Blebo. "You'll see that the coolies come and do work for me. now, won't you? It's evident no harm. is done, and I certainly won't use the echo-box any more." It was getting dusk by this time, so he went back to his camp. Next day the headman appeared with the sun to get his pipe. During the day about a dozen old women turned up and said in turn that they were the owners of the dog whose voice had been "swallowed by the box," and claimed to be rewarded for it. Groups of girls, in parties of three or four to give them-selves courage, came and offered to sing Latu's song, or any other song heliked, for Blebo, if he would give them beads or mirrors. He laughingly said they were songs for the night, and was somewhat taken. aback at the alacrity with which some of the damsels asked him to fix thetime for that night or any other night. They would sing as many songs as heliked for a mirror. He thought them forward minxes. A REAL LADY. when it is not produced by either van- lady. Miss Austen describes her, our Naturalness is not always very attractive. It depends upon the nature.. Many ladies are ladies who would not be ladies if they did not try. We understand from a fashionable lady. A certain self-consciousness, novelist that the makers of ephemeral fashions of speech and custom-the modistes of manners-no longer say of any one that she or he is a lady or a gentleman. The description, in all but its most technical sense, is now upon the "index." It is the fashion of an hour to denude words of all wealth of meaning--to cut from them all moral, literary, and historic associations-and if this be impossible, to debase or banural. The aim of these mischievish them. ous word-spoilers is apparently to create a change between the written and the spoken language. But, it may be said, is it not the uneducated who have debased the word "lady" by making it simply a polite synonym for "woman"? For our part, we do not see that in so doing they have touched its inner meaning at all. That meaning was not affected by the fact that it is the legal a ppellation of certain women without regard to their qualities, or indeed to their quality either. Many Knights' wives are not ladies in the social sense, some Peeresses are ladies in no other. The cance. omnibus-conductors of London have bestowed a courtesy title upon the feminine world; that is all they have done. The class above them, which again makes a somewhat indiscriminate use of the word, has exaggerated its moral to the exclusion of its social signifiThe desire to be ladylike has been so strong and so general among them as to make it inevitable that politeness should presuppose attainment in this particular. Refinement is the idol of a certain class, and perhaps it is as good an idol as the "naturalness" which is worshipped rather higher up. Absence of tradition and paucity of cultivation do not. at least in the best sense, prevent a woman from being a But whatever their abuse of the word, its inner meaning is not lost either in the middle or the lower class. "I should call 'er a perfick lydy," was. the verdict of a very little boy in a great London hospital. Now what was. his standard? The "lydy" thus distinguished from her fellow-nurses was in authority at the head of a ward, and, like most women in authority, she was authoritative. saying to one woman "Go" and she went, to another "Come" and she came. She had not much time. to give to the little patient, but she always spoke or smiled as she passed his bed, and she realized as by instinct that, while the poor little fellow liked to be occasionally kissed when his pain was very bad, he valued this expression of sympathy most when no bigger boys: could see. She respected his conventions as well as his wishes. After all, the little critic was a nice judge, though his only qualification, according to the other nurses, was that he himself was "a perfick gentlemen." "I 'oped you 'ad not 'eard," he said one day to a nurse whose grave face warned him that she had been distressed by the bad language proceeding from a near bed. The incident is illustrative of the dif ference between the gentlemanly and the exclusively moral points of view. It illustrates also the fact that the word "gentleman" covers a wider field than the word "lady." It prescribes a man's whole attitude towards women. A lady's attitude towards the other sex is, on the other hand, entirely individual. Weak and suffering, in the hands of a strong woman this little gamin yet put himself instantly in the correct position of respect and protection. He took for granted a more delicate moral perception, at least in one direction, than his own, and he valued and desired to preserve it, listening, as it were, with two sets of ears. Again, in another sense the significance of the word "lady" is narrower than that of "gentleman." A woman may be a lady without having quite a man's sense of fair play. It has been wittily said that "it is impossible for a lady to be a gentleman." This is of course a preposterously unjust judgment, but it does contain a grain of truth. Women are not brought up amid contests. Emulation is not instilled into them from their earliest years. Consequently the principles and considerations which keep emulation in due check are unfamiliar to them. A contest with a woman is often disagreeable to a man not so much because politeness bids him allow her an advantage as because the wish for victory prompts her to take one. On the other hand, you do sometimes find in a typical lady a more complete disinterestedness than is to be found in any man. There is an essentially feminine form of pride which prompts many a woman to give in, and makes her feel the most generous struggle to be beneath her. Social distinctions mean more to her than to a man. They please her more and interest her more. Nevertheless she knows far better how to obliterate them. She is able to enjoy intercourse in which she gives and asks nothing in return. She can sympathize to the full and ask no sympathy back. Just because she is a lady she can practise a reserve which almost annihilates herself. This reserve is the secret of her success with people of a wholly different degree of culture and education, people so preoccupied by getting that giving does not occur to them. If class distinctions could be done away with, the world, in the opinion of the present writer, would certainly be a more ideal but perhaps a less amusing place both for high and low. While things remained equal there would be no snobs; but there would be very few ladies. Not but that all the moral qualifications, and in a sense all the social qualifications, of a lady are occasionally to be found in every class; but they flourish much better in what we loosely call the upper classes. One thing which the little boy admired in his ideal lady was authority. Now women should never be domineering. The authority ascribed to "the Kings of the Gentiles" ought not to be theirs. But it is very dangerous to put a woman who is not a lady by grace or by circumstance in a position of authority, and in any small crisis it is the most typical lady present whom the cataclysm throws to the top. She is ready to take responsibility and the initiative. There are many shy women who are perfect ladies; but to be craven is to be underbred. The truth-and it is a truth with a very bitter side to it-is that feminine human nature seldom comes to perfection without some ease, some leisure, and some deference. Now and then Nature creates a perfect lady where the first two essentials do not exist. Hard work and a hard life do not destroy Nature's gifts; and deference is always obtained for them. No doubt there are a few humble uninfluential women to whom no one defers who reach a point of unresentful meekness, whom circum stanees buffet and their best friends ridicule. They are absolutely without a tinge of vulgarity or of underbreeding, and yet it is difficult to call them ladies in any but a technical sense. A saint and a lady are not synonymous terms. No one can become a lady by eliminating her own unladylike qualities. It is an ideal not to be reached The Spectator. by a process of exhaustion. The state of being a lady is positive, not negative, and it is closely allied on its higher side to sympathy and self-control, on its lower to prosperity. "A heart at leisure" may be found anywhere, but an atmosphere of small cares is not favorable to its development. CHRISTIAN POPULAR POETRY. The writer has often wished that his fairy godmother would give him a birthday present. He does not know if anything approaching the present that he wishes exists in the world. It is a possibility which would need a devotion and labor as of the Bollandists to make actual. It is nothing less than a raccolta, a gathering and harvesting, of the little spontaneous Christian songs and tales in verse, which spring up like wild flowers everywhere in Christian lands. What it would be to have them all together, and to turn from one language to another at will-the lovely cradle songs of the Rhine-land, the noëls of Burgundy, sung in remote villages on Christmas Eve by simple people going through deep snow to the Midnight Mass, the wild ballads of the Abruzzi, the lauds given the Divine Child in Spain to the click of the castanets and the rhythmic movements of the dance, the songs of the pifferari in Advent at street shrines in Rome and Naples, sung to the rustic music of the zampogna and the cenemella. Europe is everywhere alive with these little spontaneous popular songs, often only snatches of six or seven lines. It would be a life well spent to go about Christendom gathering them, as a botanist goes through strange lands looking for flowers. One comes upon snatches of this Christian poetry in books, say, like Fernan Caballero's, but to have in one's LIVING AGE. VOL. XLVIII. 2536 hands, in one's own room, a complete collection of these little poems, each in its own language, Flemish, or Tuscan. or Provençal, would be to have all the songs of Christendom rising about one at once. By the songs of Christendom, one does not mean the great Christian hymns, still less modern and subjective sacred poems, or the songs and solos, ground out on Sunday nights (often to an unduly protracted hour), by the gramophones of serious families. Nothing would be included that is assignable to any particular author, even such a one as il Pazzo di Cristo Fra Jacopone di Todi. A modern Italian writer says, by the way, of Fra Jacopone: "Nessun poeta canta a tutta gola come questo frate minore. s'è pazzo, è pazzo come l'allodola." tence, indeed, is as true as it is admirably written. But such singers as Fra Jacopone are ascetic-they leave life for devotion; the popular Christian poetry is above all things humanized, and is concerned intensely with human life. It turns the life around it into a mirror reflecting the Sacred Story. The sen It is in this spontaneous popular poetry that the essence, the very life, of Christianity, is to be found. Men look for it in the Epistles of St. Paul, the tomes of St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, the folios of Bellarmine and Suarez, the controversies of Hooker and Jewel, the sermons of Whitfield and |