his theatrical and musical criticisms, his reviews, chroniques, and faits divers, and at last he called on me to say had I my copy ready. "Had no notification it was wanted so soon."

He put on a fine fury, and threatened that he would hold me. accountable, under a penalty of twenty thousand francs, if I had not the first instalment in the printer's hands by the following Thursday.

"Soit," I answered, "it shall be forthcoming," but I was puzzled to make out where he would get that twenty thousand francs, should anything occur to prevent me from fulfilling my promise.

Then the curtains were closely drawn, the doors shut, the key-holes stuffed, the gas lowered, and a slim gentleman, with an Italian name, stood out in the middle of the sumptuous apartment, amid a hush of expectation. What was the meaning of this? Were they going to celebrate some modern form of Eleusinian mysteries? I was not long left in suspense. The Italian recited an ode of the exiled Victor Hugo. That was the explanation of all these precautions. The recitation was given in a subdued voice, and was not remarkably good, but the applause, if muffled, was intense, and there was a thrill of compressed excitement on every lip, and a flash of frenetic sympathy in every eye. These Frenchmen were tasting forbidden fruit. That was the secret of their animation. From this, some notion may be drawn of the malcontent forces, which were silently operating under the doomed empire.

Léon Cahun and I" stewed" over "La Cocarde Verte," and had the instalment ready at the appointed hour, but La Journée never lit up the horizon. The capitalist tired of dipping into his purse. Your average Frenchman, while extravagant in matters of show, is parsimonious at bottom, and utterly lacks the audacity of the speculator. As for G, he disappeared no one knew how or whither, but he managed to get in my debt, where he still remains, before he vanished. He may have been more to be pitied than condemned; but I fear me much he was slightly a humbug. George Loyes, a vivacious Burgundian chum of mine, was then pushing his way to the front as an artist. He has since won a deserved fame in England-for he has unwearying industry and a weird vein of originality-by landscape drawings, in which daring effects of light and shade are skilfully brought out, in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. Those who remember the signature, "Montbard," will recognise his pencil. In our joyous circle he was best known as Apollo; the beamy god of the bow and lyre, and I struck up an alliance, and ingenious were the shifts we were sometimes put to, in order to raise funds for some coveted merrymaking in delectable Saint Cloud, or a trip to the painters' retreat of Barbizon, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. One innocent device of ours was to invent the history of some foreigner of strange antecedents, who had dropped in upon the capital of pleasure to squander his gold, establish a religion, ex

pound a startling scientific theory, exploit an undreamt-of motive power, or exhibit some impossible beast from an unexplored region. Apollo supplied the sketches, and I the text, and as often as not the one suggested the other. These were given in a weekly journal, called the Chronique Illustrée, and the ready reward that sweetens toil lent inspiration to the collaborateurs. In turn, we mystified the lieges with an account of the Botocudos Indian who lived upon pounded chalcedony, of the four-legged birds from the interior of New Guinea, of the field-piece which could be transported through the ether from one position to another by the simple revolution of its own wheels, and of the human being who had been frozen in the Antartic circle fifty years before, but had providentially been thawed back into vitality and juvenility. Apollo occupied with his mother the first floor over the renowned Mère Moreau's, a house in a passage between the quay and the Rue de Rivoli, where prunes, cerises, and other varieties of fruity tidbits steeped in rectified spirit were dispensed by barmaids-the first of the craft in Paris-to idlers of capricious palate. I called on him one forenoon to consult as to the illustrations to a story of mine, "The Autobiography of a White Cravat," and met a big, boisterous, broad-shouldered young fellow, with crisp black hair and a laughing red face, who was descending the stairs three steps at a time.

"Who is your friend, Apollo?" I asked.

"A journalist, mon cher; there is his card on the table."

I read Victor Noir in script, and scribbled underneath an address at Nueilly (sic), an error gross as that of the Englishman who would put the "e" before the "u" in Tuesday.

"He, a journalist! Why he cannot spell."

"Just so, that is his certificate of identity; but he is smart and good-natured as a great Newfoundland that he is, and is liberal with passes for the theatres where he has his entrées. Tiens! The other night Tricot asked him for an order, and he wrote it on the spot. But the orthography is all wrong,' said Tricot. So much the better,' cried Noir, with a guffaw, they'll know it is not a forgery.'"

The real name of this jocund, full-blooded young giant was Salmon. His elder brother, Louis, had served in the Crimea, and a volume of his, narrating the exploits and quaint deviltries of the Zouaves in the campaign was as great a favourite with Napoleon as Gleig's "Subaltern" with the Iron Duke. Destiny uses queer agents to compass its ends. Who could have foreseen that on the life of the overgrown boy I had casually crossed would hinge the fortunes of an Empire, and that the pistol-shot which gave premature quietus to this great Newfoundland would precipitate the funeral volley over the grave of the Bonaparte dynasty? Yet

even so it was.

(To be continued.)

COME TO THE CLIFFS.

BY EDMOND MORRIS.

COME to the cliffs, my maid, with me,
The heat of the harvest day is o'er,
The sun sits red on the burnished sea
And rosy sunbeams are on the shore.
Oh, fair is the hour when the day is done
And the faint, fresh breeze of evening blows;
Oh, fair is the sea when the harvest sun
To sleep on the verge of the waters goes;
Come to the cliffs, my maid, with me,
The heat of the autumn day is o'er,
Red sets the sun on the burnished sea
And golden sunlight is on the shore.
We'll sit where the rocks tower high and steep,
And the foamy waves to the crag below
Roll gorgeously in o'er the great, wild deep
In soft, white ridges, like drifted snow.

We'll rest us together, side by side,

Thy small, white hand I will take in mine,

And I'll look till the flush on the sea will have died, My eternal truth in thy eyes of wine.

Come to the cliffs, my maid, with me,

It is sunset hour and the eve is fair:

We'll be happy as two in this world can be,

Alone in the exquisite solitude there.

I'll show thee the ocean, vast and far,

As vast and far as our eyes can see,

And I'll tell thee those realms, though full they are, Are not half so full as my love for thee.

The sun, I will show thee, my beautiful one,

Just half-way down in the fiery wave,

And I'll tell thee I'll love till my life, like that sun, Is a vanishing orb on the verge of the grave.

Come to the cliffs, my maid, with me,

The sun droops low in the rosy west,

And I'll tell thee my love on the rocks o'er the sea, While the sunset sleeps on the water's breast.

We'll not always be young, as we are to-day:
As fleet as wind will the years pass o'er:
The days of our youth will fly fast away,

And the season of love will be there no more.
Let me clasp thy soft, white hand in mine,

Let me dwell on thy face while the face is fair, Let me gaze in the waves of the eyes of wine While the light of the pure, young soul is there. Come to the cliffs, my maid, with me

It is golden sunset on sea and shore:

The days of our youth like the wind will flee,
And the season of love will come back no more.

I marvel much, when this world is o'er

And we pass to the world that is to be,
Shall we find any ocean and rock-bound shore,
Shall we see any sunset on the sea?

At eve, shall we sit on the cliffs of the land
And watch the sun in the waves decline?
Shall I see thy face, shall I clasp thy hand,
Shall I ever gaze in the eyes of wine?
Come to the cliffs, my love, with me—
We are young-it is sunset on the main :
Our lives will die like the gold on the sea

And who knows what may be when we wake again?

TINSLEYS' MAGAZINE.

FEBRUARY, 1884.

LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.

BY JOHN AUGUSTUS O'SHEA.

CHAPTER III.

WHEN we were evicted from the Rue de Lacépède, in that quiet imperious way characteristic of the man who rebuilt Paris, we moved, lodgers in a body, bag and baggage, to a boarding-house in the adjacent Rue des Fossés St. Victor, at the back of the Pantheon. It was said, at the time, that the broadening and alignment of streets were undertaken quite as much with the object of finding employment for the army of workmen and depriving insurrection of its pet battle-grounds, as of beautifying and ventilating the capital. If Baron Haussmann and his master thought that they could cut off the heads of "the revolutionary hydra" by their plan, they were wofully mistaken. M. Thiers, that physical pigmy, who fancied himself such a military Colossus, lived to see his famous belt of fortifications in the hands of the mob they were devised to overawe, and-destiny most curious!-that mob was opposing the forces of order directed by M. Thiers himself. And the magnificent new Paris was fated to be ridged. with the most artistic set of barricades the peaceful ever shuddered at. Discontent, when serious, will never be at a loss for the means of entrenching itself in the metropolis of France; the widest thoroughfare can be blocked in half-an-hour by the ruins of demolished houses, and the cemeteries with their maze of sheltering tombstones are as pretty arenas of combat as a madman with a Phrygian cap and a chassepot rifle could desire. This wholesale system of expropriation was looked upon as an unavoidable grievance, and borne with meekly; those who were expropriated

VOL. XXXIV.

k