That

and they speak in very plain terms about the bigger abuses of government. One must not look for exhaustive leading articles, but the papers are full of those short, crisp paragraphs which Frenchmen pen so well, and which turn disagreeable things and persons into ridicule. Day after day the press teemed with column upon column of these pithy epigrams and anecdotes, many of them untrue, no doubt, but all funny, and spiteful enough to make the most thickskinned victims wince. It was like a fine spray of salt water splashed at people in power, and when the spray had drenched minor placemen it began to wet the courtiers and ministers, and principally M. de Maurepas. venerable premier was surprised at this. He had been punning serenely all this time, and could not understand the altered spirit that had come over the country. Much like an English Whig in feeling, M. de Maurepas meant well, but thought the nation had all it needed, once he was in office. Those twenty years he had passed successfully as a minister in the prime of life had been the spoiling of him. If a minister rules well from twenty to forty it seems to be admitted that he can begin again as if he were the same man and as if the world were the same, five-and-twenty years afterwards; and M. de Maurepas was not the first, nor has he been the last politician who fancied that age had wrought no difference in him nor in the rest of mankind. When the press assailed him he concluded that journalism was being stricken with a passing madness, and he resolved to doctor it with the specifics familiar to him in his youth. He submitted to the King a decree for the appointment of seventy censors, who were to revise all books and periodicals before they were published; and to lay an embargo on foreign journals when they exceeded the liberty allowed to native prints.

Louis XVI. signed this decree without reluctance. He, too, having blown off his first whiff of reform zeal and being anxious for some rest, felt uneasy and shocked by the clamor of the newspapers. He was much in the mood

of a man who exclaims: "I gave that beggar a penny two years ago, and he is not yet satisfied!" It seemed to him unreasonable that men should be so eager to move on whilst he desired to sit still a while; and his courtiers were repeating to him so profusely that he had done more for his people than any king before him, that he believed this to be true, not being able to remember a historical precedent to the contrary. So the press decree was launched to kennel journalists, as it were, until the time should come when they might with more propriety give tongue again; but never was decree so ill obeyed nor so derisively greeted. It excited an Homeric laugh from one end of Paris to the other, and the circumstance should have warned the Court that it was no longer a tame multitude that peopled the capital. To begin with, ministers found it impossible to get seventy presentable censors. There had been censors under Louis XV., but the press was inclined to be obedient then; in the new temper of the public mind the office was thought to be ignominious, and the "Six Dozen minus Two," as the board got to be called, were poor literary hacks on whom newspaper editors proceeded forthwith to play every variety of practical jokes. The Journal de Verdun and three other periodicals, which were allotted one censor between them, made him disgracefully drunk on the first day of his functions and constrained him to sign a solemn statement that he was a fool which declaration was printed in conspicuous type on the front page of all four papers. The Mercure got a censor who stammered, and reports of his conversations were faithfully given from week to week as pronounced; but at the end of the month he effected an exchange and became censor to the two medical papers, "the which," remarked the Mercure," will thus have an opportunity of combining benevolence with amusement, by first listening to the poor devil and then curing him." These pleasantries were not all allowed to pass off unpunished; but another ominous symptom of the times was that the Parliament of Paris refused to inflict any heavier penalty than fines upon press delinquents. M. de Maurepas had recourse to the Bastile in a few instances; but the insubordination was growing

too general and too defiant for this to be of much avail. The quarrel between the Gluckists and the Piccinists added much to the perplexities of government. Under pretence of praising Piccini's music, journalists of the popular party made furious onslaughts on all the admirers of Gluck, who was the Court favorite; and, however transparent the allusions might be, it was difficult to punish such squibs as the following, which appeared in the Journal Politique for May, 1776:

Very dull music Monsieur Gluck's, perhaps dangerous music too. They say good music inspires noble resolutions; bad music, then, may do the contrary. Supposing a Farmer-General after listening to an act of "Zenobia" (by Piccini) were to find tears in his eyes, stand up in his box, and shout to a delighted pit: "I am a rogue, but I'll make restitution"? The supposition is preposterous we know, but this is spring-time and we can afford to be imaginative. Supposing then a robber - we beg pardon, a Farmer-General-did this, who would doubt the power of harmony? But Farmers General prefer Gluck. They listen to "Iphigénie en Aulide," and dream of new taxes. The screeching and squalling of those German notes reminds them pleasurably of some unfortunate family of peasants yelling and tearing their hair whilst the collector is walking off with their last cow. No music could be sweeter to a Farmer-General, but why is M. de Maurepas so found of Gluck?

Marie Antoinette was fond of Gluck too; but the papers continued to respect her, it being apparently their object to dissociate the Royal Family from the Court nobility, and to make the nation believe that the King was being prevented by his advisers from doing all the good he wished. In one or two of the foreign papers, however, some ill-natured comments might be read on the Queen's extravagance and the King's vacillating disposition, and this gave the "Six Dozen minus Two' an occasional opportunity of retrieving their character with the native press. The Parisian papers bore no love towards the more outspoken French journals, published abroad for home circulation, for these prints interfered considerably with their profits, and the only fault found with the Censors was that they frequently gave their visa to foreign matter, more subversive than would have been sanctioned at home. The journalist Mercier explained this by saying that Censors could only read Paris print.

We now reach the middle of the year 1776, when two highly important events occurred, which had a strong indirect influence in preparing the Revolution. The one was the establishment of the Courrier de l'Europe in London; the other a violent collision between the Ministry and the most distinguished journalist of the day, Simon Nicolas Linguet.

(To be continued.)

FOREIGN NOTES.

All the Year Round has lately fallen below the standard which was set for it by its founder, Charles Dickens. Its serial novels are rather poor, and it seldom gives us a brilliant short article, nowadays.

6

THE brilliant series of papers entitled "The Great World' in France," now publishing in the Pall Mall Gazette, is said to be from the pen of the author of "The Member for Paris," a novel which ought to have been a great success, but which attracted comparatively little attention two or three years ago.

THE new series of The Academy is a great success. The Academy was at first a publication for savans, with few features to interest the general reader. It now combines the best points of The Athenæum, The Spectator, and The Saturday Review, without losing any of its value as a scientific journal.

1 The term "journalist" must now be understood to mean any writer employed on the press. The term "gazetteer" fell out of use in Louis XVI.'s reign, for the old journals, which had been forbidden to treat of politics under Louis XV., became political with the new reign, and stood on the same footing as the gazelles.

THE Poet Laureate is probably not very well satisfied with the great marriage that has just taken place, inasmuch as it entails upon him the duty of composing an ode of welcome to the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna. The writing of court poems is not quite to the taste of Tennyson, who, it seems to us, shows his irony by never writing well about royalty except when he is writing a dirge.

A CORRESPONDENT of The Japan Mail of December 24th, sends that paper a long satire in rhyme, aimed at those tourists who laud the picturesque scenery and the barbaric splendor of life in Japan. This is the last stanza of the Yokohama poet's tirade:

'So, of all stupendous follies in these folly-haunted days, The worst, I still reiterate, is the preposterous praise That sentimental scribblers fling out with lavish hand On what they call the beauties of this God-forsaken land." WHEN a French publisher has in hand a work which is likely to create a sensation, — such, for instance, as Prosper Mérimée's "Let res á une Inconnue," he issues it first in a large paper edition, at seven or eight francs per volume. It is only rich readers, or public institutions, that can afford to purchase it in this shape, and though the book is published, it has not yet reached the people. Sometimes, however, as in the case of these posthumous letters of Mérimée, the work passes through several editions before it ap pears as a 12mo volume at two or three francs. The stereotype plates are then so worn that the cheap edition is scarcely worth having. As a rule, French books of the popular kind are vastly inferior, typographically, to American or English books of the same grade.

THE Figaro seems to have created a good deal of uneasiness in Paris by declaring that several young men have recently disappeared in a very mysterious manner. As the names and addresses of the missing parties are not withheld, it is only fair to presume that the statement is true. All the persons thus spirited away appear to have left home with the intention of remaining absent only a short time. One young man left his house to go and meet his father, who was late for dinner; while another, who was about to be married, left his mother to say a prayer for his intended at Notre Dame des Victoires, and said he would be back in twenty minutes. It is to be remarked that none of the seven persons whose disappearance is chronicled in the Figaro had any large sum if money about them, and their friends can imagine no reason for their prolonged absence. Paris is getting to be nearly as bad as New York.

WE find in a recent number of Chambers's Journal this passage from Dr. Robert Chambers's Scrap Book: "Relations are sometimes a torture. I have heard of some terrible cases of this kind. Take the following, which I lately (1845) learned about in London. Miss L -, a well. known poetess, had a silly and tyrannical mother. How difficult to believe that when the country was ringing with praises of the young lady's poem, the amiable authoress was dragged by the hair of the head by her mother to a garret, and there kept two days locked up, fed upon bread and water! Yet of this fact there can be no doubt. The tyranny of her mother obliged Miss L · to go to live in a boarding school, where it was that a distressing scandal overtook her. A quiet home, under the protection of a judicious and kind parent, would have saved her from this evil, the blight of her life. Miss L-educated a brother for the church. Of £300 which she received for a popular novel, £200 were spent at once in paying debts foolishly contracted by this young man, to enable him to go to a curacy in the country. He had not been six months in office when he was arrested for a debt of £72 for a fashionable fowling piece. Miss L-paid the debt, and expended some money besides in relieving him from the consequences of this folly; and all that she obtained of the proceeds of the novel for her own gratification was fifteen shillings, spent on a light dress and a few ribbons."

A PERSON with the singularly attractive name of Jephson Huband Smith has published a work entitled "Notes and Marginalia; Illustrative of the Public Life and Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate." A London critic thus neatly disposes of Mr. Jephson Huband Smith:

"Readers who may be attracted by the title of this volume will be disappointed when they examine the contents. It is a medley of feeble criticisms, interspersed with a few facts, or what the writer regards as facts, illustrative of Mr. Tennyson's career. A more contemptible book we have not met with for many a day, and we should be inclined to leave it unnoticed were it not that the writer announces that he has more to say, and hopes soon to appear again before the public. If Mr. Jephson Huband Smith has friends, we hope they will restrain him from any further exhibition of folly. The writer, in his 'Epistle dedicatory,' addresses the gentle reader,' and observes, quite correctly, that little claim to consideration from the public can be made upon this trifling production; but Mr. Smith's modesty does not prevent him from being offensive, and from alluding to men whom we love and honor, in the familiar and patronizing tone so frequently assumed by vulgar and ignorant writers. Oliver Goldsmith is mentioned as Goldy,' and when Mr. Smith wishes to praise Mr. Tennyson he designates him a smuggler, for has he not, by the force of his wondrous and exquisite art, smuggled himself into the affections of England's sons and daughters?' On another page we read: In the previous year (1862) the Laureate was called upon for another job.' Indeed, the author's lack of taste is conspicuous throughout. However, it would be unreasonable to look for refinement in a writer who represents himself as the owner of a peep-show at the beginning of the book, and calls himself a mountebank at the close. Mr. Smith is at all events honest, and on more than one occasion estimates his rambling rubbish at its proper worth."

PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE writes to the Pall Mall Gazette: "I have read with interest your remarks on the language of the future, and entirely agree with you that language, if it ever does make its epiphany, must be one of three: either German, Russian, or English - most likely English, partly from its own peculiar composite character, to which so noble a recognition was given by Jacob Grimm, partly from our colonizing habits and our lusty American cousinship. But whether we shall ever have one universal language for all civilized men-a consummation which I must confess I neither expect nor wishit is certainly a mot desirable thing that we should possess one generally understood language for all scientific men and persons of cosmopolitan culture; and I write this, with your permission, to say that, as the service hitherto performed by Latin in this respect has now from a variety of causes ceased, there is no language so justly entitled to assume its place as Greek. Among languages which belong as much to the world as to the people which uses them, there is none that for a moment can stand comparison with the dialect of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the New Testament. For not only does this language contain a greater amount of more rich and various culture than any other language, not even excepting English,- but it does, in fact, form the basis of the technical language of all the sciences, even the most recent. It is, moreover, the only language that forms a living bridge between the great past and the great present; and as a living language it holds a position not likely to be affected by any political changes that may take place in the countries where it is now spoken. In order, however, that the language of the enclycopædic Aristotle may become current, as the general medium of communication among learned men, it is absolutely necessary that a radical reform should take place in our methods of classical indoctrination, and that Greek should be taught, not from dead books only, but from living speech. This is the method which I have long practised, and which I offer myself to prove, if it were expertly carried out, would convey more Greek into the heart and head in six months than by the present methods is done in as many years. In a rational system of teaching any language, whether living or dead, the eye must be trained not by books merely in the first place, but by objects; and the ear and the tongue, now so wofully neglected and debauched, must be treated, not as the secondary, but as the primary sources of all linguistic acquisition."

EVERY SATURDAY:

A JOURNAL OF CHOICE READING, PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY, 219 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON;

NEW YORK: HURD AND HOUGHTON;
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MAGAZINES AND BOOKS.

THE general interest which the public takes in the leading magazines of the country is indicated by the special interest exhibited by the critics, who go so far even as to exercise their reserved right of unseating an editor against whom they may have an intelligible grudge, or at least of putting bent pins on the editorial cushion. In the more legitimate field of criticism, the magazines receive a degree of attention that plainly indicates the large place which they hold in the public mind and the importance which they are gradually assuming in the development of American literature. We say American, for we are dealing only with the conditions under which American periodical literature exists, conditions quite distinct from those controlling the scope and tendency of English magazines.

Time was when Americans were insatiable consumers of cheap books, and it was quite impossible to procure any substantial, dignified works in standard literature issued in American dress, that could satisfy a fastidious taste accustomed to the elegance and scholarly appearance of English publications. Now the English are the makers of cheap books, and some of the best editions of standard English authors are the products of American presses and binderies, while every where is heard the complaint amongst American publishers that it is impossible to publish new books without incurring such risks as make the one successful book simply a makeweight for a dozen unsuccessful ones. As the case now appears, standard books manufactured in America compete favorably with the same works manufactured in England; their style is often better and the price is lower; miscellaneous books, that is, new ventures in literature of every sort, when m.nufactured in America, whether of home or foreign authorship, compete unfavorably with the same class of books manufactured in England; style has to be sacrificed for economy, and then the English price is still below the American. Tool-books, as we may call them, including works required by professional men and the great mass of educational literature, are under different conditions; their character, requiring, in the main, special adaptation to home use, excludes them to a large extent from competition with foreign made books, and renders them subject to competition amongst themselves.

In consequence of this state of things, the cause of which we shall consider at another time, our book shops are full of English-made cheap books and popular literature, especially of the class intended for young people, while publishers' bins are filled with deal stock of home productions of the same class; little by little American publishers have been forced to abandon certain classes of publications as ruinous, and their energies are now directed toward the production of standard literature, furnishing, that is, for libraries, excellent editions of books whose reputation is secured, of tool-books for school and profesional use, and finally of magazines. By a similar force American authors, when their special studies and

qualifications have not led them into the preparation of tool-books, have found the magazines their main resource, and in this channel is now running the current of new American literature. Here the people find their cheap books, the publishers their field of activity, and the authors their only chance for a hearing.

That the life of American literature is setting in this direction finds evidence in the keen rivalry which is rising between the magazines, and the struggle for existence which is the lot of them all, in one form or another. We do not believe that competition produces excellence, or stimulates indeed the best effort; on the contrary, its first effect is to push forward show and noise to the front seats; yet the turning of money and energy and managerial skill into this channel undoubtedly makes a better chance for the author with a really good work, to get a hearing and a prompt representation. The danger, as intimated above, is twofold: that the editor and publisher will be eager for articles which by their brilliancy or by some taking quality may give a prominence to the magazine, and that authors, under the somewhat feverish impulse which magazine writing gives, shall write for the current month and not for all time. But these are dangers which lie near the surface. There remains the substantial fact that the monthly issues of the various magazines give a chance to the poet, the romancer, the philosopher, the discoverer, not to be found elsewhere. A true poem is printed in a magazine to be read by its hundred thousand readers, caught up by the newspaper press, ever lying in wait for novelties, and read by tens of hundreds of thousands. A novel which might otherwise amuse for an evening a few thousand readers is the monthly freshener of life for multiplied thousands.

If it be said with a sigh, as Choate said, "A book is the only true immortality after all," — granted. But the course which literature has taken tends to the winnowing of books. It is no true immortality to have one's name attached to a book which Hes buried in a public library; but to bestow one's thought in a frail magazine, and find that men demand it shall be brought again to their homes in the stouter ship of a book, that is nearer immortality. The subject opens wide as we come near the end of our space. What the magazine is yet to do, in what new ark literature will find its safety - these are questions to speculate upon. Enough now to know that he who writes for the monthly magazine is discovering that he must give his best, and no longer treat with contempt a vessel which bears the nation's best hopes; that he who edits and publishes begins to find that his function is not mean, but that weak things are confounding the mighty, and the magazine, that seems to be forever dying to make room for a new birth, has permanence and might because it is the one means now left in America of giving the best we have to the most in number.

NOTES.

A contribution to the useful list of subordinate histories has been made by Rev. A. D. Gridley in a "Ilistory of the Town of Kirkland, New York," published by Hurd and Houghton, New York; The Riverside Press, Cambridge. Kirkland was the former name of Clinton, the seat of Hamilton College and other educational institutions, and Mr. Gridley has gleaned diligently from all sources that could furnish material for the illustration of the settlement, the life of the Indians who lingered for a while, and the character of the men who builded patiently, with the remarkable soberness and confidence which characterized the history of American founders. Mr.

Gridley gives a good illustration of the quiet irony in the Indian's mind which seems sometimes to have been interchanged with his gravity. A missionary named Cram visited the Senecas on their Reservation in Western New York, and asked permission to preach Christianity to them. Red Jacket, one of the chiefs, confessed their own religion had failed, and was ready to try the white man's, if it was a sure thing. To test the power of Mr. Cram's religion he proposed that that gentleman should first go over to the village of Buffalo and try it for a few months on the whites there; if it made them honest, truthful, and kind, he might bring it to the Reservation and the Senecas would accept it.

The Academy, of London, prints the following extract from a private letter received from Hans Christian Andersen, which will interest our readers: My Muse has now for a long time slumbered. It is a whole year and five months since I was taken ill, and I am still suffering; my recovery progresses, but very slowly. My liver has been attacked; I am still asthmatical and rheumatic; it is only with great fatigue I move up and down stairs. I miss the enjoyment of visiting my friends, but they are faithful, and visit me instead. Notwithstanding all this, my physician is confident that the spring will restore me to health and strength, and then I shall travel as usual. How I long to visit England again, and see my English friends! but they tell me that would be too fatiguing, so I must be content to journey south, to the

mountains.

- It has been surmised that Thomas Hardy, now known to be the author of "Far from the Madding Crowd," is as much of a man as George Eliot. Men generally have escaped the charge of having written the Saxe Holm stories.

:

Quiet people are beginning to grow nervous over the prospect of a prolonged Fourth of July. The nurses of General Washington, who seems to have been a very tender infant, are all dead; the sturdy voters who voted for Washington have also split their last wood on election day and walked their last five miles to vote for the latest candidate; even the old soldiers and sailors have come from their hiding places for the last time, we think, though on this point we speak with becoming diffidence and now the centennial observances are filling the horizon. We have begun to celebrate the ante-bellum anniversaries; the rumble of old cannon is heard in the distance, and before long the thirteen colonies will be masquerading according to the taste of the several participants. It is always a drawback to the pleasure of an annual Thanksgiving and to the sadness of an annual Fast, that somehow each person has to generalize in order to accommodate his particular tendency to be melancholy at Thanksgiving time and joyous on Fast Day, but as a few go to church each time and by their faith give sincerity to the governor's proclamation and perpetuity to the custom, so in the midst of the national masquerading let us hope that a true impulse will be given to the actual historical study and political examination which will serve to deepen the currents of national life. We make but one suggestion, that the literary sociables which are justly becoming so popular should take a turn in this direction, and young and old vie in bringing to the light the sources of our national life, and the beginnings of institutions which may be commonplace to us, but represent struggle and sacrifice and earnest purpose in our fathers.

what form a memorial of Louis Agassiz should take. By a general consent of good sense the vote was unanimously in favor of an endowment which would put upon secure footing the great museum which Agassiz founded and carried on almost wholly by the force of his enthusiasm. It had been feared that when this personal force was removed the large plan upon which the museum was conducted would cause it to break in pieces, or at least that the government would be so crippled that the work undertaken would be checked and much of the labor expended be wasted. But by a most fitting law the very spirit which ruled the museum remains to complete it. Agassiz, living, by his energy and devotion drew the support of men to the institution; the memory of Agassiz, dead, is the power by which it will be placed on a firm financial foundation. At the meeting sixty-five thousand dollars was at once subscribed, and a committee appointed to organize a systematic appeal to all lovers of education. They have chosen an admirable mode by which the thousands who revere Agassiz's name and share his generous life, may contribute to the end proposed. On the 28th of May next, being the anniversary of Agassiz's birth, a simultaneous offering will be called for from every teacher and pupil in the United States, to form "The Teachers' and Pupils' Memorial Fund in honor of Louis Agassiz," to be applied to the uses of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

There is an association in Boston called the Boston Coöperative Building Company, which is quietly doing a most important work in the interest of civilization, by solving the problem of tenement houses. Instead of beginning by building new houses and making all the conditions favorable to success, it has resolutely taken the worst possible material in hand, - existing tenement houses of the most degraded character, and undertaken to redeem it. There was one block which had the reputation of being the nursery of the State prison, so vile was its moral and sanitary condition; this building the company bought, remodelled it from top to bottom, levied equitable rents and collected them, opened schools, closed grog-shops, established a savings bank, planned excursions, gave personal attention to the condition of the tenants; and now the result is seen in an orderly tenement, paying its expenses, not a charitable institution at all, and in an answer to the question so often raised regarding tenement houses. It has generally been assumed that when landlords could be convinced that there was a better investment in well-built, well arranged, and orderly houses, they would so employ their money, but the Company has proved that something more is needed a little spare righteousness in the land

lord.

-

The papers are full of Canon Kingsley. He is one of the historic Englishmen who transmit English life and thought, a national writer, whose nationality makes him bone of our bone, because it is intensely English and not superciliously British. We do hate the insular Briton Goldwin Smith was right there; but we not only do not hate, we heartily admire the true-born Englishman, and if we are somewhat overflowing in the expression of our like, we may plead nature; it is all very well to talk about the feelings of a child going home, has he not some feelings when his home comes to him in his absence? We cannot help wondering, by the way, what may be the sort of suggestion which comes to a historic Englishman, always eager for his country's reform, when he comes to a land which calls itself New England. Is it anything like what Milton prophetically saw?

VOL. I.]

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

CHAPTER VII. RECOGNITION: A TIMID GIRL.

BATHSHEBA withdrew into the shade. She scarcely knew whether most to be amused at the singularity of the meeting, or to be concerned at its awkwardness. There was room for a little pity, also for a very little exultation; the former at his position, the latter at her own. Embarrassed she was not, and she remembered Gabriel's declaration of love to her at Norcombe only to think she had nearly forgotten it.

"Yes," she murmured, putting on an air of dignity, and turning again to him with a little warmth of cheek, "I do want a shepherd. But "

"He's the very man, ma'am," said one of the villagers, quietly.

Conviction breeds conviction. "Aye, that 'a is," said a second, decisively.

"The man, truly!" said a third, with heartiness.

"He's all there!" said number four, fervidly.

Then will you tell him to speak to the bailiff," said Bathsheba.

All was practical now. A summer

eve and loneliness would have been necessary to give the meeting its proper fulness of romance.

The bailiff was pointed out to Gabriel, who, checking the palpitation within his breast at discovering that this Ashtoreth of strange report was only a modification of Venus the wellknown and admired, retired with him to talk over the necessary preliminaries of hiring.

The fire before them wasted away. "Men," said Bathsheba, "you shall take a little refreshment after this extra work. Will you come to the house?"

"We could knock in a bit and a drop a good deal freer, miss, if so be ye'd send it to Warren's Malthouse," replied the spokesman.

Bathsheba then rode off into the darkness, and the men straggled on to the village in twos and threesOak and the bailiff being left by the rick alone.

yer

"And now," said the bailiff, finally, "all is settled, I think, about coming, and I am going home-along. Good-night to ye, shepherd."

SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 1874.

"Can you get me a lodging?" inquired Gabriel.

That I can't, indeed," he said, moving past Oak as a Christian edges past an offertory-plate when he does not mean to contribute. "If you follow on the road till you come to Warren's Malthouse, where they are all gone to have their snap of victuals, I dare say some of 'em will tell you of a place. Good night to ye, shepherd."

The bailiff, who showed this nervous dread of loving his neighbors as himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still astonished at the rencontre with Bathsheba, glad of | his nearness to her, and perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman here. But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for

one.

Obliged, to some extent, to forego dreaming in order to find the way, he reached the churchyard, and passed round it under the wall where several old chestnuts grew. There was a wide margin of grass along here, and Gabriel's footsteps were deadened by its softness, even at this indurating period of the year. When abreast of a trunk which appeared to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure was standing behind it on the other side. Gabriel did not pause in his walk, and in another moment he accidently kicked a loose stone. The noise was enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who started and assumed a careless position.

It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.

"Good night to you," said Gabriel, heartily.

"Good night," said the girl to Gabriel.

The voice was unexpectedly attractive; it was the low and dulcet note suggestive of romance; common in description, rare in experience.

"I'll thank you to tell me if I'm in the way for Warren's Malthouse?" Gabriel resumed, primarily to gain the information, indirectly to get more of the music.

"Quite right. It's at the bottom of the hill. And do you know". The girl hesitated, and then went on again. "Do you know how late they keep open the Buck's Head Inn'?" She seemed to be won by Gabriel's

[No. 11.

heartiness, as Gabriel had been won by her modulations.

"I don't know where the 'Buck's Head' is, or anything about it. Do you think of going there to-night?"

"Yes." The female again paused. There was no necessity for any continuance of speech, and the fact that she did add more, seemed to proceed from an unconscious desire to show unconcern by making a remark, which is noticeable in the ingenuous when they are acting by stealth. "You are not a Weatherbury man?" she said, timorously.

"I am not. I am the new shepherd — just arrived."

66

Only a shepherd- and you seem almost a farmer by your ways."

66

Only a shepherd," Gabriel repeated, in a dull cadence of finality. His thoughts were directed to the past, his eyes to the feet of the girl, and for the first time he saw lying there a bundle of some sort. She may have perceived the direction of his face, for she said coaxingly,

"You won't say anything in the parish about having seen me here, will you? - at least, not for a day or two.'

"I won't if you wish me not to," said Oak.

"Thank you, indeed," the other replied. "I am rather poor, and I don't want people to know anything about me. Then she was silent, and shivered.