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low upon a delicate "quail on toast." And yet pork chops and Squeers have their relishy savors; and one softens in spite of himself and the vulgar surroundings, when Newman Noggs tells Nicholas, in a little blurred note, that "they draw good ale at the King's Head," and-"say you know me and I don't think they'll charge you for it!”

PRESENT TIMES AND TONES.

Who can tell where or how the tide turns, and when the literary flavors and reputations of the past go down, and those of to-day come up? There is no drawing stark lines of definement; the swell of Dibdin's sea songs has hardly subsided when some new billowy stir of the waters brings to us "Hobson's choice"; if we delight in the wonders of Kipling, or the bewitching enmeshments of Daudet, or Zola, 'tis not that we have forsworn or forgotten the kind, old, limping master of Abbotsford, who has for so long lessened our burdens, brightened our hopes, and sweetened our rest: Bradwardine, and Guy Mannering, and Ivanhoe, thank Heaven, still fling their standards to the breeze, over all the great "Keeps" of literature !

The "dead line" cannot be drawn here; who is more lively, pray, than many a dead one whose name is shining athwart these pages? And who is more dead than many a live one whose but we will not say it; we will guard our tongue, and pen, and good humor. If the reader discovers a flavor of the rue, or of agrimony on some one of the leaves of this storehouse of treasures, he shall find on pages following quickly thereafter a flow of the milk and the honey of Caanan!

There may be some names that will surprise one; we wipe our glasses for the deciphering of others; if some things are not familiar, 'tis a question if others are not too familiar; for one, I must confess that a little cringe of shamefacedness has stolen over me at sight of one or two such. Yet, how could it be otherwise? The great, generous drag-net which these liter

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ary purveyors have put to use must needs bring in some little finsters-sporting iris hues, and the pretty phosphorescence that preludes decay; and it would be odd if certain buoyant, turbulent swimmers did not refuse utterly to be caughtcopyrights or their own hystericky bounce intervening-and swim away at the head of little schools of their own in quiet bays of their own.

Although it may be difficult, amid the welter of names and of literary work, which belongs to the joining of the tides, to lay down nice and subtle distinctions, yet I think it will be clear to all that certain writers who have their enrollment in the latter volumes of this series do illustrate and express a certain modernity of thought and utterance which in a degree individuates them and plants them in the world-gardens, where the century alleys-nineteenth and twentieth-cross.

Such an one I think is that young British poet—who has not only spliced his own Saxon speech with the swear-words of soldier-folk in India and with the pungent Yankeeisms of Down-Easters, but who has also put a wonderful wheeze of humanity into the cranks and workings of an engine. Tolstoi, too, though doubting the Wagnerism of whatsoever artistic counterfeits, and though he "harks back" to the fables and the folklore of earlier days, has, by his singleness and simple utterances, and absolute truth, engaged the hearts and kindled the emotion of all the world—the humblest and most untaught even more surely than the ganté ones who must be educated to admire, and who train after the rulings of some literary clique or court, and shine in pipe-clay trappings. Then we have Ibsen, the Norwegian,- of the leonine locks and looks; no, it is not enough to say he writes interestingly; that is too tame a word even for such play as the "Doll's House"; he does more than interest; he sets the blood to flowing-scaldingly!

I might speak of a half-score of others,-young and brilliant countrymen and countrywomen of our own,—who are planting seed in these days from which great trees will grow and cast strong shadows and much fruit-whether bitter or

sweet-along the paths men will follow in the century about to open. We read their fresh young record here admiringly; we greet them cordially; we hope they may guard sacredly their allegiance to the great standards of truth and of simplicity.

As I give a last twirl to the pages where these names flash into view, I come upon a glimpse of the good, old, seedy Titbottom, in his spectacles-wisely filched from the pleasant story of "Prue and I”—not modern indeed, but carrying a rich, nineteenth-century revival of the eighteenth- (the bestelaborated character of that dainty workman, George William Curtis), shuffling across these lines of type haltingly—as befits an old battler with rheumatic twinges-with quaint observation and quainter figure; almost a cousin (as one might say) of the De Coverley family, or of those old bookkeeping clerks, in threadbare black, who glide up and down in the "Essays of Elia" — with such sea pungencies of salty odor in their clothes as might have been caught on Salem wharves, or in Salem Customhouse, when Hawthorne wrought therewithal very vivid and tender, with a delightful monotone of dreamy philosophy and of warm humanities !

But I must stay this tale of reminiscence and of reverie : even now I have brought to notice less than one out of every score of those who have freighted these treasure books with their savings and sayings.

It seems to me that I have been serving as a sort of signalman only-waving now a green light, and now a red—as the trainspeople have selected and shunted the laden cars together: and now that all is in order, and the couplings made good, nothing remains but for the completed train, rich in its freight and thunderous with its burden, to dash away toward a great white light I see shining far down the track.

Whereupon this signalman hangs his lantern on the wallwishing good luck to train, to trainsmen, and to all concerned.

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THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY

OF

FAMOUS LITERATURE.

THE GORGON'S HEAD.

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

[NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: American story-writer; born at Salem, Mass., July 4, 1804; died at Plymouth, N.H., May 19, 1864. His official positions, in the customhouse at Salem and as United States consul at Liverpool, furnished him with many opportunities for the study of human nature. His literary popularity was of slow growth, but was founded on the eternal verities. His most famous novels are "The Scarlet Letter," 1850; "The House of the Seven Gables," 1851; "The Blithedale Romance," 1852; "The Marble Faun," 1860; "Septimius Felton," posthumous. He wrote a great number of short stories, inimitable in style and full of weird imagination. "Twice-told Tales," first series, appeared in 1837; "The Snow Image and Other Twice-told Tales," in 1852; "Tanglewood Tales," in 1853.]

PERSEUS was the son of Danaë, who was the daughter of a king, and when Perseus was a very little boy some wicked people put his mother and himself into a chest and set them afloat upon the sea. The wind blew freshly and drove the chest away from the shore, and the uneasy billows tossed it up and down, while Danaë clasped her child closely to her bosom, and dreaded that some big wave would dash its foamy crest over them both. The chest sailed on, however, and neither sank nor was upset, until, when night was coming, it floated so near an island that it got entangled in a fisherman's nets and was drawn out high and dry upon the sand. The island was called Seriphus, and it was reigned over by King Polydectes, who happened to be the fisherman's brother.

This fisherman, I am glad to tell you, was an exceedingly humane and upright man. He showed great kindness to Danaë and her little boy, and continued to befriend them until Perseus had grown to be a handsome youth, very strong and active and skillful in the use of arms. Long before this time King Polydectes had seen the two strangers - the mother and her

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