66 arranged to have an answer ready if his crimson and her eyes shining, was standaccomplice should turn upon him. I ing with her back to the window; and suborned him?' he would say when facing her, half angry and half embarcharged 'I deny it. He has my name rassed, was Jim. Hoity toity, you two!" pat enough, but has he any proof? A I said, closing the door behind me. photograph? But that is not my photo-"These are early times for this kind of graph!' Do you see, major?" thing. What is up?" "I see," I said. "And now come home with me, both of you, and we will talk it over with Kitty." By this time, however, it was two o'clock. Jim, who had only arranged for a flying visit, found he must resign all hope of seeing Kitty to-day, and take a cab to Charing Cross if he would catch his train back. The colonel had a luncheon engagement- for which he was already late-and so we separated then and there in somewhat of a hurry. When I got back the first question Kitty-who, you may be sure, met me in the hall. asked me was: "Where is Jim, father?" The second: "And what does he say about the letter?" "God bless my soul!" I exclaimed, "I never gave a thought to it. I am afraid I never mentioned it, my dear. I was thinking about the photograph. I fancy we have got nearly to the bottom of that." "Pooh!" she said. And, upon my word, she pretended to take very little interest in the explanation I gave her, though the sly little cat! when I dropped the subject, she was quite ready to take it up again, rather than not talk about Jim at all. I am sometimes late for breakfast; she rarely or never. But next morning on entering the dining-room I found the table laid for one only, and Matthews, the maid, waiting modestly before the coffee-pot. "Where is Miss Bratton?" I said grumpily, taking the Times from the fender. "Miss Kitty had a headache," was the answer, "and was taking a cup of tea in bed." 66 Ho, ho!" thought I, "this comes of being in love! Confound the lads! Sausage? No, I won't have sausage. Who the deuce ordered sausages at this time of year? Bacon? Umph!- seems half done. This coffee is thick. There, that will do. Don't rattle those cups and saucers all day! Confound the girl!do you hear? You can go!" The way women bully a man when they get him alone is a caution. "I'll be hanged if I know, sir!" said Jim, looking rather foolish. "What have you got there, my dear?" I continued, for Kitty had one hand behind her, and I was not slow to connect this hand with the scornful expression on her pretty face. "He knows," she said, trembling with anger the little vixen. "I know nothing!" returned Jim sheepishly. "I came in, and when I — Kitty flew out and attacked me, don't you see, sir?" "Very well, my dear," I answered, "if you do not feel able to explain, Jim had better go. Only, if he goes now, of course I cannot say when he will come back." I will come back, Kitty, whenever you will let me," ," said the young fool. "Shut your mouth, sir," I replied. "Now, Kitty, attend to me. What is it?" "Ask him to whom he gave his photograph at Frome!" she said, in a breathless sort of way. "His photograph? Why, that is just what we were talking about yesterday," I replied sharply. "I thought it did not interest you, my girl, when I told you all about it last night." "That photograph!" - with withering contempt-"I do not mean that! Do you think I suspect him of that?" She stepped forward as though to go to him, and her face altered wonderfully. Then she recollected herself and fell back. "No," she said coldly, "to what woman, sir, did you give your photograph at Frome?" "To no woman at all," he said emphatically. I "Then look at this!" she said. She held out as she spoke a photograph, which I identified at once as the portrait we had seen at Gold's, or a copy of that one. snatched it from Jim with an exclamation. "Where did you get this, my girl?" I asked briskly. "It came this morning, with another letter from that woman," she murmured. I think she began to feel ashamed of herself, and in two minutes I got the letter also from her. It was written by the same hand as the letter of the day before, and was, like it, unsigned. Its purport was merely that the writer, in proof of her good faith, enclosed a photograph which Master Jim that gay Lothario, if the lady was to be believed-had given her. We were still looking at the letter when the colonel came in. I explained the matter to him, and I will answer for it, before he at all understood it, Kitty was more ashamed of herself than ever. "This photograph and the one at Gold's are facsimiles," said he thoughtfully. "That is certain. And both come from Frome. My conclusion is that the gentleman who obtained Jim's photograph for his own purpose last year to send to Gold, I mean- printed off more than one copy; and having this one by him, and wishing for some reason to cause mischief between Kitty and Jim, he thought of this and used it. The sender is, therefore, some one who passed his examination last year and is still at Frome." Jim shook his head. "If he passed, sir, he would not be at Bulcher's now," he said. "On second thoughts he may not be," replied the colonel. "He may have sent the two letters to Frome to some confidential friend with orders to post them. Wait wait a minute," my old chum added, looking at me with a sudden light in his keen eyes. "Where have I seen a letter addressed to Frome- within the last day or two? Eh? Wait a bit." We did wait; and presently the colonel announced his discovery in a voice of grim triumph. "I have it," he said. "It is that scoundrel, Farquhar!" "Farquhar!" I said. "What do you mean, colonel?" 66 my boy. None of that. The major and I will deal with him." Jim still lingered. Well, sir," he said, "I will only"Come back!" roared the colonel, imperiously, but with the most gracious smile in his eyes as he looked at his boy. "You will stop here, you lucky dog, you. And I hope this will be a lesson to you not to give your photograph to young ladies at Frome." If Kitty squirmed a little in her chair at that, well she deserved it. I said before that a woman's faith is a wonderful thing. But when there is another woman in the case umph! I "Mr. Farquhar, sir? Yes sir, he is in the house," said the club porter, turning in his glass case to consult his book. believe he went up-stairs to the drawing. room, sir." "Thank you," the colonel replied, and he glanced at me and I at him; and then, fixing our hats on tightly, and grasping our sticks, we went up-stairs. We were in luck, as it turned out, for not only was Farquhar in the drawing. room, but there was no one else in the long, stiff, splendid room. He looked up from his writing, and saw us piloting our way towards him between the chairs and tables, and I think he turned green. At any rate, my last doubt left me at sight of his conscience-stricken face. "A word with you, Mr. Farquhar," said the colonel grimly, keeping a tight hand on my arm, for I confess I had been in favor of more drastic measures. "It is about a photograph." "A photograph?" said the startled wretch, his mouth ajar. 'Just that, major. Do you remember his knocking against you in the hall at "Well, perhaps I should have said two the club the day before yesterday? He photographs," replied the colonel gravely; dropped a letter, and I picked it up. It"photographs of my son which are lying, was addressed I could not help seeing so much - to Frome." "Well," said Jim slowly, "he was at Bulcher's, and he passed last year. And I remember now that no one else from Bulcher's went up at the same examination." "And the letter," continued the colonel in his turn, "was in a large envelope. one that would contain a cabinet photograph." There was a dead silence in the room. Kitty's face was hidden. Jim moved at last towards her? No, towards the door. He had his hand on it when the colonel observed him. "Stop!" he said sharply. "Come back, one in the possession of Major Bratton. and one in the album of a certain friend of yours, Mr. Isaac Gold." He tried to frame the words, "A friend of mine!" and to feign astonishment and stare us down; but it was a pitiable at tempt, and his eyes sank. He could only mutter, "I do not know him. There is some mistake." "Perhaps so," said the colonel smoothly. "I hope there is some mistake. But let me tell you this, Mr. Farquhar. Unless you apply within a week for leave to resign your commission in her Majesty's service, I shall lay certain facts concerning these photographs before the commander-inchief and before the mess of your regi ' 0 p ment. You understand me, I think? Very well. That is all I wish to say to you." Apparently he had nothing to say to us in return, and we were both glad, I think, to turn our backs on that baffled, spiteful face, in which the horror of discovery strove with the fear of ruin. It is ill striking a man when he is down, and I was glad to get out of the house and breathe a purer air. We had no need to go to the commander-in-chief. Lieutenant Farquhar applied for leave to resign within the week, and her Majesty obtained, I think, a better bargain in Private Isaac Gold, who, following the colonel's advice, enlisted about this time. He is already a corporal, and, aided by an education rare in the ranks, bids fair to earn a sergeant's stripes at an early date. He has turned over a new leaf the colonel always maintained that he had a keen sense of honor; and I feel little doubt that if he ever has the luck | to rise to Farquhar's grade, and bear the queen's commission, he will be a credit to it and to his friend and brother officer the colonel's boy. Not, mind you, that I think he will ever be as good a fellow as Jim! No, no. From The Nineteenth Century. THE COMTE DE CLERMONT. Of late, owing possibly to the celebration of the centenary of the Revolution, an abundance of literature relating to the last decades of the French eighteenth century has flooded the book-market, throwing into the shade the not less instructive, though less sensational, era which comprised the reign of Louis the Fifteenth. Every reader is tolerably familiar with the celebrities of that reign, but it is not the least remarkable feature of the time that its minor notabilities played an important, if unconscious, part in precipitating the events of 1789, and should be remembered, because of the strange and striking example they afford of the character and customs of a system which brought upon itself such a tragic dissolution. Of his hero the Comte de Clermont it must be confessed that, though of illustrious birth, he was not an illustrious personage in the other and more creditable sense of the word, and perhaps his mem ory would be better served by being ig nored - a remark which, however, might apply with greater force to many of his more eminent contemporaries whose higher responsibility enhanced their guilt. He was the great-grandson of the great Prince de Condé, and Mlle. de Nantes, a legitimized daughter of Louis the Fourteenth and Mme. de Montespan, and third son of the Duc de Bourbon, and was born in 1709, a memorable date in French his tory. France had not been in such straits since 1420, when by the Treaty of Troyes Henry of Lancaster was made regent and heir to her throne. Her military power was humbled, her trade and commerce were paralyzed by religious persecution and half a century of those wars which Louis the Fourteenth sorrowfully admitted on his deathbed he had loved too passionately. Decimated on the battlefield abroad, and by famine at home, and oppressed by the wanton exercise of seignorial rights, the people were suffering indescribable misery. The various branches of the administration were thrown out of gear by the absolutism of a despot who was past the age to correct the abuses which his arrogance, his egotism, and his bigotry had caused. Nevertheless, all classes of the population submitted to the tyranny of Louis the Fourteenth, and seemed to endure with indifference the scandals of the Regency and the profligacy of Louis the Fifteenth. It should be borne in mind that liberty of the subject, equality before the law, and religious toleration were then as unknown in France as they are now in Russia; and it required all the vices and the long misrule of Louis the Fifteenth, and the growth of enlightenment and learning, to efface the glamor which the glory of the seventeenth century still shed on the darkening shadows of the eighteenth; and to dispel the idolatrous belief in the divine attributes of the king with which Louis the Fourteenth had saturated the whole of Europe. "Unquestionably there are certain functions,' were the words which he had written for the in To M. Jules Cousin we are indebted for a curious and valuable sketch of the life of the Comte de Clerinont, which has re-struction of the dauphin, “in which taking mained comparatively unknown. It was printed, so the author tells us, on good paper, and in fine type, but the issue was limited, so that it might minister to the enjoyment of bibliophiles alone. ... the place of God we seem to participate in his knowledge as well as in his author. ity. . . . Exercising on earth an entirely divine function, we must try to appear incapable of the agitations which can de tract from it.... Everything that exists | dispose of itself, the monarchy being rein our state, of whatever nature it may be, garded as a mere contract, which the conbelongs to us; the coin which is in our tracting parties had the right to revoke. cash-box, that which is in the hands of In this manner the first step was taken the treasury, or that which we grant to towards the Revolution. the trade of our people." For some time these demoralizing and corroding principles had been silently, but surely, undermining the old order of things. Their effects became manifest in 1715, when, on the death of Louis the Fourteenth, a cry of relief went up through the land, and the man who had been deified in his lifetime was spoken of as a good riddance the moment he was gone. The country was secured by the Peace of Utrecht from all external danger, but was thoroughly exhausted, and longed for a rest of which it could never be certain while the breath remained in the old king. Of the great statesmen, warriors, and writers whom he had honored, none were left to mourn the sovereign who had ended his days in a gloomy and priest-ridden court, or to assist his successor with their experience. A new generation had sprung up that had long chafed under severe restraint, and on the death of the monarch who had kept it in subjection broke into the most extravagant license with all the recklessness of youth and the vivacity of its race. Such was the state of affairs during the infancy of the Comte de Clermont. As a younger son he was condemned by the prevailing system of primogeniture to forego his share of the ancestral inher itance, and was marked out for the Church from his birth. The hardship of his lot, however, was not as great as might be supposed. France was studded with monasteries and convents, possessing rich endowments, the wealthiest of which were exclusively reserved for the benefit of the nobility. Remiremont and Fontevrault, the former situated in the Vosges, the latter near the Loire, were two small principalities whose abbeys enjoyed a splendid income, position, and privileges. To be admitted into the chapter of Remiremont, an unblemished ancestry extend. ing over two centuries was essential, and when the daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, brother of Louis the Thirteenth, expressed the desire to become its abbess, she was refused, on the ground that the house of Bourbon, by its alliance with the Medici, had derogated from its position. Fontevrault had five churches, its possessions and authority extended over four prov Of its abbess, who in default of a legiti mate, had at least to be an illegitimate princess of France, it was said that she wielded not a crozier, but a sceptre. On the throne sat a child of five, surrounded by a host of legitimate and legiti-inces, and it boasted of forty-five priories. mized princes and princesses, who had inherited all the arrogance, but none of the commanding qualities, of their blood, and used their position solely for the furtherance of their personal ends, and in utter contempt of the commonweal. The Duc d'Orléans was regent by right of birth, but during the last years of the previous reign he had been kept back in disgrace by the influence of the legitimized children of the king. So artfully had he been calumniated by them, that the prema ture deaths of the lineal descendants of the sovereign were laid to his charge, and at the funeral of the Duke of Burgundy he was nearly torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd. One of the first acts of the new government was to annul by parliamentary decree the will of Louis the Fourteenth, and to order that the legitimized princes should lose their royal rank and be ineligible for the succession to the throne. For the first time in French history the royal authority was represented in the State documents as a mandate, so that there was no longer any question of its sacred origin or inviolable character. The nation, under this new dispensation, had the right to But it should not be forgotten that there were two kinds of, abbés in France - the clerical and the lay abbé. The needy off. spring of a wide-spreading aristocracy, the abbé au petit collet, had nothing of the ecclesiastic about him but the garb, and used all the art at his command to obtain the favor of the great ladies, and the pa tronage of the great nobles, to secure the reversion of a wealthy abbey en commende, with whose religious duties he would have no concern, but whose revenues he could squander at his ease. These abbeys en commende were conferred by the king on lay clerics and by right, one-third of their revenue only could be appropriated by the abbé, while of the other two-thirds, one-third should go for alms and the re pairs of the church, and the remaining third to the support of the religious com munity. But lay cardinals, ministers, and princes of the blood asserted their claim to the same rights as the ecclesiastical abbés, and appropriated the whole income. turn, he had to abstain from interfering Cardinal Dubois drew 70,000l. a year from | were the monopoly of his class. His suc Many of the lay abbesses of France reflected as little dignity on the Church as their brethren the lay abbés. One of the most remarkable of them was a daughter of the regent, who, though more notorious for her devotion to the Duc de Richelieu than for any inclination to a monastic life, secured the removal of the reigning Abbess of Chelles in order to step into her place. In her capacity of abbess she employed her time in hunting and shooting, arranging displays of fireworks, and in giving ballets and balls. After the ceremony of her enthronement she presided at a grand banquet with the regent on one side and a nun on the other; when the company had retired, the crowd was allowed to come in and scramble for the remains of the feast. In this way she showed her consideration for the poor. To this career the Comte de Clermont, the youngest of three brothers, was destined. The eldest, the Duc de Bourbon the father of the Prince de Condé of the Emigration, and ancestor of the Duc d'Enghien, Napoleon's victim- became the nominal tutor of the young Louis the Fifteenth, and shortly afterwards prime minister. He amassed a large fortune in three years, and during his short administration he excelled by his venality and corruption, at a time when those vices Of the princesses who adorned the house of Condé, Mlle. de Charolais-the eldest, the brightest, and the most beautiful signalized herself above her sisters by the levity of her conduct. From the diaries of the time we learn that, though she had the honor of preceding Mme. de Pompadour in the affections of Louis the Fifteenth, the number of her previous and subsequent intrigues defies enumeration. However, she varied them with an occasional attack of devoutness, of which some diverting reminiscences are extant. One day fancying herself ill, and fearing that her last hour had struck, she cried out for the immediate assistance of a confessor, and a monk from a Capuchin monastery, who happened to be the nearest at hand, was brought to her bedside. On entering the apartment of the princess the good friar was transfixed with admiration and awe, so that he dared neither move nor utter a word while the fair penitent unburthened herself of her lengthy narrative. At the end, making a low bow, and in a voice trembling with emotion, he muttered, "Now perhaps her Highness will graciously permit me to give her absolution." For the advantage of these estimable relatives the Comte de Clermont was ton. sured at the age of six, and was presented with half-a-dozen of the fattest abbeys in the land. Some of these he afterwards was made to exchange for the abbey en commende of St. Germain-des-Prés, a monastery of the Benedictines, the richest ecclesiastical benefice of the kingdom. Besides a palace in Paris, the abbey owned the Château de Berny, on the Orleans road, and there Clermont passed the greater part of his life. Nominally he had his private apartments in the royal resi dence, but as these were often requisi |