She said, "My dearest dear, both of us shall be slain."

venient for wet work, as it is made of a material strong enough and stout

valiant dragon.

are little worn now; and Mrs. Jones, who used to make them, material and smocking complete, for twelve-and-sixWe ask after Mrs. Edwards, who was pence, has little demand for her work. ill, and gone to the homely little workhouse in the valley to be cared for better than old Edwards could care for her in his poor house on the hillside exposed to all the winds that blew.

dragon, hold thy hand,

And thou shalt have my daughter and ten thousand pound in land!"

"Fight on," says the lady, "the portion is too small!"

his head down on the gate and cried.

Some natural tears he shed, but wiped them soon

shalt be heir to all!"

And here we must leave old Francis, a pathetic figure, surely, sitting by his cinder fire and repeating his ballads of youth and happiness. He is a very mine of information as to the old life of the district, and for our part we could listen to him, as indeed we have listened before now, all a winter's afternoon; but our readers might be less patient, and there are other dwellers in our Arcady.

Retracing our steps down the lane (we believe it is a highroad, but the highroads here are like lanes in their beauty and perhaps in their roughness), we come to the new bridge and there we see old Edwards looming large through the damp autumn mist. He has his great hedging-gloves on, and is turning a wild, tangled hedge into a neat but very dull one. We like these old hedging-gloves with their one space for the four fingers and another for the thumb. They have their likeness on a miserere of the fourteenth century in Worcester Cathedral; and we please ourselves by thinking that those of to-day are no great improvement on those of five centuries ago, as roughly stitched and as unfinished. Edwards wears a smock (a frock we call it here), another old-fashioned garment, but one which is singularly con

And then (do not think he did not really grieve, for indeed he did in his own fashion), he was telling us how she had been as good-looking a girl as ever stepped when he married her, and not one to go chanting about (chattering, we suppose). "But she was allus one as did complain, you mind, if things didn't go straight. Folks have said as I wasn't good to her, but I was. I never heft my hand on her, though mebbe I'd got the drink sometimes. I knew summat must have happened afore they sent to tell me, for the door fled open twice yesterday, and they did allus say that was a sign of summat." Then he goes off to the bridge by which he is working. Those were awkward corners to it, he thought; a man in drink might smash his ribs against them any day. To the moral that a man should not be in drink, he assents very readily. Ay, soberness, that's the thing; soberness is the main thing.

And now we come to a house which is plain enough outside, built of the colorless grey stone of the district and with a grey stone-tilted roof, but which inside has an individuality all its own from the old furniture, the curious old odds and ends from a vanished world, which it contains. But despite these treasures there is a forsaken look about the place. Mrs. Cole

is old and ill; a neighbor comes to look after her once or twice a day, but the rest of the time she is alone. She caunot read; she does not sleep much, she tells us. We wondered what thoughts she had as she sat there, what backward glances into that wonderful past in which she had lived. The life of to-day hardly touched her, and seemed to interest her very little; but, like old Francis, she has many recollections of older times, although they naturally take a more housewifely and domestic form than do his. She had lived in the days when there were spinning-wheels in every house, and when the weavers' looms were always full of work. She had lived in the days of flints and steels, and remembered how difficult. was for numbed fingers to strike light on those winter mornings, which seemed to be many degrees colder than those of to-day. Her account of the manufacture of rush-lights took one back to White's Selborne and the chapter on this industry, which, even when he wrote a hundred and twenty years ago, was dying out in his Hampshire; a testimony, surely, to the greater persistence with which old customs have lingered on in this remote Arcady of ours. Another wonderful recollection was of a leather suit of clothes worn by her father and very old-fashioned, as she told us, even in his day; a survival hardly of the fittest, for it was, she said, "mortal cold and stiff" for a day's hedging in wet February.

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The time did not seem to be wearisome to her, beyond the weariness of illness; she was very patient and never complained. Other lives we know of spent thus alone, and by choice, not necessity. On the hillside, in a little whitewashed hovel, lived, and may live still, an old man;

The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.

We first met him moving solemnly among the brown fern by his house on a November afternoon, carrying a load of it for bedding for some of those creatures whose companionship was a necessity to him in his lonely

life, and for whose comfort he was more careful than for his own. He wore no coat, but over his shoulders was a sack fastened together by a rusty nail. Yes, he had a coat in the house, he said, but he did not trouble to wear it. He had blankets, too, a parcel of blankets sent him by a friend, but he had not undone them; sacks and such-like coverings did well enough for him. Was not that load of fern heavy? No, not particular heavy, but he was getting old in years. He was eighty-five come next Christmas day. But why did he live up here all alone? It must be cold and lonely in the winter. No, he liked it; he had always been used to being lonesome, you see. Those whom he liked did not like him, and those who liked him he did not like; thus he summed up his life's romance, a history not singular indeed. As we left he thanked us for our visit. "It's very good of you to come and see carrion like me," he said, using a Shakespearian word. "Shall we send that foolish carrion, Mistress Quickly, to him?" asked Mrs. Ford of Mrs. Page.

The picture of that stooping figure under its load of withered fern, and the shadowed gloom and chill of the little homestead, for which already the sun had set although it was still shining on the opposite hill with a wan autumnal light, was very solemn, very sad. And yet we think the old man was happy in his own way, wanting no alleviation from the outer word, occupied with his own slow toils, thinking his own few thoughts.

But let us leave these sad ones. There is another house by the roadside into which we must look; a very contrast to that of Mrs. Cole with its Jacobean oak furniture and the, what might almost be Jacobean, dust upon it. It is the village shop, and, like most other village shops, its trade has suffered by the grocers' carts from the far-away towns which now penetrate even into this wilderness. But nothing can diminish that cheerfulness which Ann Price, licensed to sell snuff and tobacco, as the board over her

door announces, always keeps in stock. Her daughter, known as Poll of the Shop, was married last week to a fair-haired, blue-eyed Arcadian, and a very pretty village wedding it was, although Davy, the bridegroom, disturbed its solemnity somewhat by searching in every one of his huge pockets with hands covered by gloves with mile-long fingers at the moment when he should have produced the ring, and saying audibly, “I expect I ha' lost 'un!"

Mrs. Price is at home, dressed for the afternoon in a close-fitting black cap, a stuff dress made after the fashion of fifty years ago, and a many-colored check shawl over her shoulders. Mr. Price, too, has just come in, and although straight from work and stained with the red soil of the district, he looks curiously fresh and neat; indeed, nothing which was not so could find a home here. But he sits on a chair near the door, and glances nervously at his muddy boots, as if the lady of his house might resent their presence on her clean floor, which is freshly marked out with bands of whitening round the edges of those great flagstones of which it is made. The polished dresser, the china tea-service (given to her on her wedding, she tells us), the gleaming grate, the fire which seems to burn brighter here than anywhere else; it is a pretty cottage picture.

Strangely enough, though Mr. and Mrs. Price are the happiest couple in the parish and make their fourteen shillings a week go further than any one else can make them go, their conversation always turns, albeit cheerfully, on the general decadence of people and things. To-day the falling-off in the girls of the district (with a little pleasant pride, perhaps, in her own good Polly) is her theme. The subject was introduced by hearing a clatter of horse's hoofs outside, and by seeing ride by from market (no very surprising sight here) the servant-girl from the neighboring farm, dressed in all her Sunday finery, roses in her large hat, and a big market-basket on her

arm. Girls are that gigglety, Mrs. Price says. At the fair last week, she wouldn't have known the girls from their mistresses, they were that dressed, their hats and all! And then old Price takes up the tale. "Ay, but they don't keep girls like they did use to at the farms. We were counting a many housen round where they have nurrun [none]. And when I was a young chap there were a sight of squires about here, and now look at the place. I don't know what do ail the folks, I'm sure."

But Mrs. Price turns on him severely, mindful, maybe, of those muddy boots. "The gentlefolks won't care to hear about them things," she says, cutting him short in what we hoped was going to be something very interesting on the subject of agricultural depression from a laborer's point of view; and he sinks into silence in his chair by the door.

But now the short grey autumn afternoon is over.

Eve lets down her veil. The white fog creeps from bush to bush about.

No sound of bird or beast breaks the intense stillness as we cross the high lawns towards home; there is no movement even among the sodden bents above the wet grass. Solitary sheep steal silently up, like ghosts out of the mist, stare dumbly at you, and then stalk away to greater solitudes; and they are the only sign of life. This is Arcady seen at its worst perhaps; and yet even at its worst it has

charms for some of us.

From The Revue des Deux Mondes. A MODERN "MORALITY."

In the pleaid of our young dramatic authors M. Brieux occupies a distinct and singularly honorable place. The rest are all Parisians, dissipated, illhumored, disenchanted. M. Brieux is no Parisian, neither in spirit, for he is

absolutely innocent of blague or irony practised for its own sake, nor in the choice of his subjects. "Blanchette," "Réboval" and "Gear" (l'Engrenage) are provincial comedies. His very first piece, "Artists' Homes" (Ménages d'Artistes) was remarkable, as I remember it, for a certain wholesome directness, which appeared simply marvellous upon the shameless boards of the Théâtre Libre. Unlike many of our most brilliant writers, M. Brieux has an exceedingly clear and sure perception of the difference between good and evil, and he is fond of emphasizing this distinction. There is a touch of Poor Richard in him, or of Simon of Nantua. He makes no hunt for rare and nice cases of conscience. He shows his good sense by not shrinking from the commonplaces of morality. All his pieces are didactic comedies. They might almost better be called Moralities or even Banalities. "It is not good to educate poor girls above their station," (Blanchette). "Pharasaism, even when honest, is not virtue." (Monsieur de Réboval' "Politics are terribly demoralizing." (l'Engrenage). Each one of these pieces is, from beginning to end, and without deviation, a methodical demonstration of its own maxim. Where M. Brieux is eminently original is in possessing a spirit, not so much bold and daring-which is common enough-as genuinely brave. He approaches those great questions which concern our common humanity as an independent teacher of keen intellect, sound judgment, and a warm heart. Yet this candid preacher is also close, truthful, and often very penetrating observer of average humanity, and he contrives somehow to impart, even to his most chilling subjects, a certain degree of warmth and color. The marvel is that his "Moralities" live.

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His latest production "The Benefactors" (Les Bienfaiteurs) is a didactic comedy like the others, but glowing with philanthropic zeal, and happily enlivened by shrewd and satirical observation. It begins and proceeds,

after the regular fashion of the improving tale. A certain "gold-king" drops out of the clouds and places his millions at the disposition of the engineer Laudrecy and his wife Pauline, thus enabling them to set about realizing those dreams of charity, which they have hitherto made the mistake of confounding with the various forms of alms-giving. I cannot understand how the idea of the piece should ever have been considered obscure or uncertain. The whole end and aim of it is to illustrate the futility of administrative patronizing, fashionable charity, its disadvantages both for the helpers and the helped. It is a series of tableaux, each one of which proves a point in the thesis. In one part we have successively exhibited, first, vanity; second, pretentiousness; third, obtuseness; fourth, silliness; fifth, hypocrisy; sixth, rivalries—ladies who conduct their "works" with fuss and chatter. Then we are shown the stiff, cold, suspicious "benefactor" who distrusts himself and is afraid of being "done," and so on; in a word both benefactors and benefactresses corrupted by the way in which they bestow their benefits. Elsewhere is exposed the corresponding corruption of the beneficiaries, by a vicious manner of giving; their envy and hostiliy augmented by a sense of frightful condescension on the part of those who give; and how the latter, preoccupied with picturesque "unfortunates"-repentant prostitutes and regenerate galleyslaves,-incline of necessity to the lazy, the vicious, the liars and drunkards, to the exclusion of the honest and hard-working poor. The consequence is that while the administrative charity of Pauline is supplying food and drink to all manner of hussies and humbugs, one poor woman kills herself and her three children; and in spite of higher wages, schools, orphanages, free pharmacies, and bureaus of assistance, the more the Laudrecy hands get the more they want, until at last they go on strike. The "gold-king" meanwhile is looking on at the twofold experiment and laughing in his sleeve

Such as it is, with its commanding merits, and its undisguised defects. "The Benefactors," though exceedingly interesting, might strike one as a little hard (for, after all, these clumsy benefactors have almost all of them the best intentions; it is better to give ill than not to give at all, and it might seem, to borrow Augier's witticism, as though the chief discovery of M. Brieux about charity, is that one had better not attempt it) were not the generous thought of the author made as clear as daylight by the careful juxtaposition of two remarkable scenes. The first is where the workman Pluvinage comes to Laudrecy for comfort and counsel, and is briefly dismissed with a five-franc piece. The second is where the same workman tells his master the woful tale of his wife's death, and the master, entirely overcome, grasps the poor fellow's hand and lets him sob on his shoulder. These two episodes may not be the most novel in the work but their lesson is unmistakable.

That lesson is, that charity, or, more correctly, alms-giving, however abundant, and even were it possible, which it is not, to give it an organization less hard and fast than that of a government office, is never enough. There is need, beside, of kindness, openheartedness, and a familiar intercourse between rich and poor. A little humility even might not be out of place. In a story which I have read, and the purport of which was to develop a truism analogous to that of M.Brieux, a rich man, after practising a lavish and contemptuous charity, becomes convinced of his mistake and expresses himself thus: "Pascal was right when he said: The poor must be served after the fashion of the poor. We must get inside their hearts, and not look down upon them for the degradation and the narrowness of mind, to which we too would have been reduced, had we been crushed by the same necessities. Let us love them at least for their resignation, remembering that if they were to rise in their united wrath they could sweep the rich off the face of

the earth like so much chaff. Let us look carefully for some lingering vestige in them of dignity, of nobility. Most of all let us serve them in humility. As we would resign ourselves to our own sufferings, even so must we resign ourselves to the misery of others, in so far as it offends our delicacy. In attempting to relieve, we must not revolt against it; but accept it, as we accept the mysterious purposes of Him who knows the reason of things. The end of creation is not to produce plastic beauty, but to promote moral goodness."

There is a flavor of Christian mysticism about this, but any one may accept, as I do fully, the more laical conclusions of M. Brieux. I would also remind him that attempts have already been made to realize his idea. In London, and even, I am assured, in Paris, fine ladies have elected to live intimately, and on a footing of equality with the wives and daughters of the poor districts. They have a house, -a sort of modest club,-where they dispense tea and cakes and talk and where they go handsomely dressed, for the express purpose of showing that they put no force upon themselves, but are there as veritable friends. Every west-end lady has her east-end fa vorite, with whom she gossips as women will, who confides in her, and in whom she confides, whom she calls by a pet-name. Nor have I any doubt that there are excellent beings, who engage in this work with a touching good-faith. But I cannot help fearing that for every one who tastes in a reunion of this kind the pure joy of a return to "simplicity," there are several light and inquisitive spirits, who merely go in for the fun of keeping low company, and the sensation of being hand and glove for the moment, with some youthful outcast. What sort of things do they say to one another, I wonder, as they come away?

Oh, how hard it is, in the first place, to practise as much charity as we ought, and, in the second place, to practise it as we ought, and efficaciously! And yet it ought to be very