tions in the world. But let us examine these two types of modern heroines more closely.

Two famous heroines of the Outcast order-"Tess" and "Trilby"-belong to a type now crystallized in the pubic imagination. And to exhibit the nobility that lies in every one, however degraded, is now the favorite motif of the day. Heaven forbid we should deny the possibility of such good; but the thing may be carried a little too far, and it is coming to this nowadays, that such women are depicted as being capable of more generous action, more heroic impulse than their worthier sisters. The worst of the whole business is that no one can breathe a word against this new morality but the word Pharisee is whispered, and that dubious legend of Christ and the Magdalene adduced for argument. Moreover, so great is the cry for "Charity" just now, that it would be considered woeful harshness in any writer to describe a woman of scandalous antecedents without dowering her with such traits of nobility and generosity as wipe out the stain of sin, and melt the reader to tears of sympathy. We are becoming too lax altogether; the stern old rule "hate the sin and love the sinner" is being forgotten, and we are asked to condone the sin till there remains no more hatred of it, nor any looking for judgment upon it. Charity is a lovely grace; but sentimentality is a weak vice. Let us take care that the one does not lapse into the other. There may be here and there in the curious annals of the human race a "Tess" or a "Trilby"-but the most charitable must admit that they are exceptions, and only prove the rule that a bad life is a tolerably clear proof of a bad heart. This is a fact there is very little use in denying, though for the purposes of making interesting characterstudies the novelists are fond of doing

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These heroines of avowedly bad character yet redeemed by traits of nobility are, however, less dangerous favorites for the public fancy than the all-conquering Siren; for the good rea

son that they are such manifest creations of the imagination that very few people set much store by them-they like to read about them and wonder if they are possible characters, but they are doubtful, and possibly disapproving all the time. The Siren, on the contrary, seems to have fairly possessed the British imagination-it is scarcely possible to open a novel in which she does not appear. The Siren is a creature of wild unrestrained passions, desperate, unscrupulous, emotional yet heartless, incapable of sound judgment or of self-control, and quite without all womanly feeling. She is, in fact, a most repulsive character, yet we are asked to find her irresistible, a very Queen of Hearts to whom the whole male creation bend the knee in wonder and admiration. Now, no one doubts the reality of this character; who has not met a Siren?-they are all too common. But the curious thing is why we should be asked to admire her? Her morality is of such hopelessly involved order-submitting as it does to none of the recognized moral codes-that we follow her devious relations with the sterner sex in disgusted perplexity. She was always (alas for him!) a husband; for the unmated heroine is as extinct as the Dodo; then she is involved in intricate connections with some other woman's husband, there is also the man who should have been her husband, and there is always the husband of her soul, sometimes even the second husband-a very carnival of husbands-till we are fain to ask the Sadducee's question, "Whose wife shall she be at the Resurrection?"

This is the creature round whose character a myth as unsubstantial as vapor is being raised just now. Only she, we are told, can "taste the color of love"-less ardent natures are poor, and of necessity lead lives of foolish emptiness; only the passionate Siren is capable of the greater heroisms; passion holds the field; and the woman who does not exhibit this eminently feminine grace is not held to be worth writing about. There is no doubt that the Siren makes an effective figure in

fiction; but what of the truth of the presentation? A fire of straw throws out a prodigious glare, yet who would "watch a winter's night" beside it?

None of the authors who with such enthralling art have painted these pictures of outcast women-take "Tess" and "Trilby" once again as instancesnone of them ever continued the picture. Their heroines were invariably doomed to death, because the art insight capable of limning a Tess or a Trilby at the white-heat of passion knew too well to try to paint the impossible - Tess or Trilby trudging through life with the object of her ardors.

But, perhaps because her history has not often been recorded by masters of the craft, the Siren is not handled with this consistency. She is the darling of the scribbler, for her type is now so clearly defined that she is very easy to manage. She is shown to us in all her fervor, living at a white heat as great as ever Tess or Trilby went through; but instead of being consistently killed off, we are actually asked to believe that she lives on after the story closes. Imagination does not conjure up a very pleasant picture of the Siren's later years. She would, unless we are much mistaken, exhibit none of the charms of old age; try to fancy her at three score and ten, her beauty (which is always described as of the "alluring" type) gone; her many lovers grown cold in consequence; left alone with all her exotic passions burnt out, and her heart like a heap of ashes. Impossible that in her long pilgrimage she has gained the respect of any human being; she has no female friends, for the good reason that she thought no woman worth making friends with in the days of her youth; the husband she long ago deserted for another man, not unnaturally, has nothing to do with her now,

while the "other man" has also proved faithless; the children she neglected can scarcely be blamed for neglect ng her in their turn; and the curiously unexacting Deity whom she was supposed to worship, has vanished long ago into that limbo where the False Gods dwell.

This would be the inevitable age following upon a youth such as the Siren is supposed to lead. For we are not always young, and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life pass away like a dream, and with them there passes away every quality upon which this modern heroine depends for her charm. It is extraordinary if all the accumu lated experience of all the centuries has taught us no more than this, and if we can possibly bring ourselves to accept this exotic erotic creature as a heroic type of all that woman should be-if. indeed, we can bring ourselves to imagine that she has any heroic qualities whatever. No heroine, in the brave old significance of the word, was ever made of this stuff; which of us in age or weakness would lean on this broken reed?

I am no stickler for subject-let who will write about what he pleases, however unpleasant, so long as he writes truly; and the Siren, a type all too common in life, might well be common in books also, if she were only described as what she is, instead of as what she is not. In art, a "study" is valuable only as it is truthful; and something of the same holds good in literature. But there is one study often set to beginners in art-to paint white objects against a white background, and the tyro is clever indeed who gives them form and substance and yet retains the whiteness; white souls too are hard to paint, but will some clever painters not essay the task for very love of its difficulty?

JANE H. FINDLATER.

row entrance half-filled with chips and oak-dust; here dwelt the little groundsquirrel, whose silky flanks were striped so tastefully with brown-red and white and a dash of chocolate. He did not dare to climb up the great oak among the more aristocratic lodgers, and lived a modest, harmless life in the basement. But his cellars were bravely stocked with acorns, and such hickory-nuts as he could find on the ground; for he is a famous provider, and on every sunny day is to be found about the stumps and rock-piles on the hill, from which he returns with the elastic pouch in his jaw swollen out with acorns to an extent that suggests a fearful attack of the toothache. you walk near him up there he will sit perfectly still until you are within a few yards, and then, with comic precipitation, he flings up his scanty tail, gives a shrill, piercing chee-eep! of alarm, and scampers into a crevice of the rock-pile.

Even this Liliputian beast was not, however, the smallest of the oak's squirrel-folks. Between his home in the roots and the grey-coats' lofty abode, in a decayed limb very like that which holds the woodpeckers' nest, there were six timid flying-squirrels. They do not have the pride in their domestic arrangements which the woodpeckers show by keeping the edges of the entrance so marvellously smooth and round; but this is probably because a jagged edge would rumple and break the bird's feathers, while the soft, mouse-like fur of the flying squirrel allows her to be less careful. But when she is once inside, Mrs. Flying Squirrel makes a most comfortable, downy nest of pliable grass and moss and fibres and bits of fur, into which she and her family burrow for warmth, and lie there during the cold snaps, just as if some one had packed them nicely in excelsior. We tamed them with perfect ease, and shortly after their breeding season certain of the boys could scarcely stand examination, even during recitations and chapels, as to their pockets and sleeves and desks; for the soft little bead-eyed fellows were per

fectly satisfied to inhabit these close quarters.

And do they really fly? I never saw one start from the ground, flap a pair of wings, and go soaring off. But I have climbed, with a great expense of energy, a high tree to capture one, and have come within arm's length of him at the top, only to enjoy a good view of his graceful, parabolic flight to another tree, fifty yards away. When he extends his four legs, the loose skin forms a web on either side, which, though it cannot be flapped, allows him to skim down from a height, and then, as he seems about grounded, to rise a surprising distance with the momentum gained.

The oak gave shelter to other fourfooted creatures, too. A howling autumn northeaster once drove me to crouch in the great hollow at its base. As I was shivering at the cheerless prospect outside, my eye caught a long, thistle-like strand of fur, held in the rough bark at the edge of the opening. It told me that a 'possum was, or very lately had been, somewhere above my head. In a few minutes a lithe hickory pole with a forked end was experimenting in the dark hollow above, and presently it drew down the sly old marsupial, wearing a very sickly grin on his fox-like countenance. Though not a bit the worse for the adventure, he closed his eyes and lay down on the ground in a most palpable attempt to "play-off" dead. His face showed such a rank affectation of innocence held him up by the long, naked tail, and he looked so wohlbehagen, as the Germans say, in his fat, round sides and well-conditioned pelt, that it was a great temptation to see him play out his little farce. I put him on the ground and retired to a fallen log, which he could not see from his supine position Ten minutes he lay, a motionless corpse, and then, slowly and cautiously, his sharp snout was raised and his little pig-eyes reconnoitred the situation until they rested on me when the ineffable look of cunning immediately faded, and, realizing that the game was up, he trotted off with

as I