Alps and the Pyrenees. But in more ingenious countries they make from the woods to the winding road at the bottom of the valley tracks on a very inclined plane, formed by logs fastened to crossbeams. Trains loaded with piles of wood slide slowly over these primitive tramways, conducted by a single man, who regulates the speed of the train by leaning his back against it and bracing himself against the logs of the track as it descends the slope. This is the method of the schlitteurs, very much in vogue in the Vosges and in Alsace.

There is still another mode of transportation which I ought to mention here; but this is not looked upon with favor by the forest administration, because it is employed principally by the gatherers of dead wood, and trespassers. I mean the carrying of wood on a man's back.

Among the people on the borders, it has always been admitted that the forest ought to support the village. Indeed, under the feudal system it frequently happened that the seigneurs generously ceded to the commune, or transferred in exchange for certain services, numerous rights in the forests belonging to them, - the right to cut wood for fuel and for wheelwright's use; the right to gather acorns, and for common pasturage; the right to burn charcoal, and to gather the forest fruits, dead wood, and dead leaves. When after the promulgation of the forest laws the administration took in hand the management of the forests, it began by severely revising all these privileges, and by reducing them as strictly as possible.

Among the privileges taken from the communes by the forest regulations, none was felt more by the peasants living on the borders of the forest than the gathering of dead wood. This was a resource to poor creatures who counted on this windfall to keep themselves warm in the winter season. So, in spite of the law and the guards, this gathering is made every day. The administration itself is indulgent on this point, and shuts its eyes; it is implacable only when the green wood is concerned. So, as soon as fall comes, in the paths of the woods one meets more than one old man or woman bent over beneath a load of dead branches on the back, and walking towards the nearest village. The gatherers of dead wood are to the woodcutters what the gleaners are to the harvesters. They wander through the forest, every corner of which is familiar to them. They appear especially after stormy days or nights, when the high winds of October have covered the

ground of the forest with débris. Sometimes, it must be admitted, they help to change the green wood to dead wood. A stroke with the billhook is very quickly made in a tuft of shoots; the green wood thus cut off is left to dry in the underbrush, then a week or two later they pass by, and without the least remorse pick up the branch, now useless.

Other rovers, still less scrupulous, have no hesitation in cutting a green bough of good size, and slipping it into their bundle, where it disappears among the dead branches. But the foresters have their eyes open. Just as the delinquent is slyly leaving the forest, a guard suddenly falls on him, forces him to untie his bundle of fagots, detects the presence of the green wood, and enters a complaint against him, after confiscating the corpus delicti, in spite of the fagot maker's lamentations.

Culprits of this sort are very numerous, but the foolish little thefts which they commit do not harm the forest to any extent. The greatest source of trouble to the guard is the habitual offender, who makes the illicit removal of wood a business and a trade. This forest ravager practices his profession boldly by night. He pulls up the young shoots by hundreds to sell; he cuts the finest branches from the cornel tree, the holly, and the wild medlar tree, to make whip handles; he breaks down the young trees unmercifully, and does not even respect the very old ones. In addition to this he has several occupations, and to the profession of trespasser joins that of poacher. His familiarity with the woods makes him acquainted with all the haunts where game is to be found, all the paths where it goes.

He hunts small and large game, feathers and fur alike, but not with the gun, which would too easily put the guards on his track, but with good snares of horsehair or wire. I knew one who made his traps so ingeniously that he caught deer in his snares, and one day a horse wandering through the woods was completely strangled in a master slip noose of wire stretched by this desperate poacher. The foresters had entered mountains of complaints against him, but he laughed at them and their documents. The court condemned him; but as he had no seizable property, and lived in the woods, he did not care. Sometimes the officers would catch him he would sleep in prison for two months, and then quickly return to take up his vagabond life again. One winter's day he was found dead in

:

a valley where he had spread his snares. He had been intoxicated the day before, had been overcome by the cold, and congestion had stiffened him out in the depths of the forest.

ROSES.1

BY LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.

(1835-.)

ROSES, that briefly live,

Joy is your dower

Blest be the Fates that give
One perfect hour:-

And, though, too soon you die,
In your dust glows
Something the passer-by
Knows was a Rose.

1

AT TINTERN ABBEY.2

BY LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.

THE gray day's ending followed the gray day,--
All gray together, ruin and air and sky,-
And a lone wind of memory whispered by,
And told dark secrets on its wandering way.
Through the blank windows' space, like ghosts astray,
Sad crowds of black-winged jackdaws came and went.
Were they dead monks on some strange penance sent,
Who used within these walls to preach and pray?

Do they return, from the far, starry sphere,
To their old haunt within these ruins old,
To celebrate, perchance, some mystic rite,
Some yearning soul's outcry of pain to hear-
And, when the awful story has been told,

Will priest and sinner vanish on the night?

1 By permission of the author and of the publishers, Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

2 By permission of the author.

THE WASHERWOMEN.1

BY BLANCHE WILLIS HOWARD.

(From "Guenn.")

[BLANCHE WILLIS HOWARD: American author, was born in Bangor, Me., July 21, 1847. She now resides in Stuttgart, Germany, having in 1890 married Baron von Teuffel, a physician of that city. Among her popular novels are: "One Summer," "One Year Abroad," "Aunt Serena," "Guenn," "The Open Door."]

SOME days after the great sardine catch, Guenn Rodellec went to the river. Going to the river was an event which took place three or four times a week in Plouvenec, but its frequency made it none the less delightful to Guenn. How could she fail to enjoy it? All the women clustered on the bank, kneeling and washing their linen, and spreading it out to dry on the clean grass, reeds, brambles, and tufts of heather and brake; and everything, positively everything that had happened in Plouvenec since the last time, -with much, indeed, that had not, related in stirring style by practiced tongues.

Guenn had gone to the river earlier than most girls, and was rather proud of being one of the regular members of this great sisterhood, that bleached clothes diligently, but never by any chance whitened a reputation. Girls who had mothers rarely went to the river very young. Even here, where childhood was so unguarded, there was a tacit understanding that it was in a certain sense a decided step in a girl's life, a crisis, when she first went to the river. She was old enough now for anything. It was an event of as much importance as the first ball of a girl in the great world.

But Guenn, having no mother, began in her ninth year to represent her family in the washing conclave, and to look forward to its chronique scandaleuse with as much eagerness as a fashionable young lady awaits the next installment of a sensational novel. She could now hold her own, in racy anecdote and piquant repartee, with the most virulent old fishwife among them. It was always dull, or worse, at home. Nannic was never there; for all day long he was hanging about the wharves,

1 Copyright, 1883, by James R. Osgood & Co. Published by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

listening to the sailors' talk, or begging sous and lumps of sugar of strangers at the inns, trading cleverly upon their pity for his misshapen little person, or opposing his uncanny slyness to the brute force of the other boys.

Rodellec's house was on a lonely road, somewhat remote from the village. Guenn, this morning, arrived late at the assembly of her peers. The women were in full force, already hard at work,-kneeling in their boxes, which rested on smooth flat stones fairly in the water, soaping, dipping their linen, and pounding it on the stones with heavy little wooden paddles, all chattering at once, and exchanging volleys of what elsewhere would be termed insult and vituperation, but which, in Plouvenec, seemed to represent a certain form of the amenities of life.

Guenn came springing down the bank. She observed with delight that old Mother Nives and other veterans were present, a sure indication of a lively morning. Jeanne Ronan too, whom Guenn liked, was there.

"There's Guenn!" cried some of the younger girls.

"Oh, you're a nice lot, you are!" was Mademoiselle Rodellec's courteous morning salutation, her hands on her hips, a light smile of conscious power, like that of a famed gladiator entering the arena, playing about her mouth. "You couldn't any of you take a little more room, could you, or a few more of the best places at once? Modest, you are! Move your things over, Marie, and be quick about it too. I'm coming there by Jeanne."

Marie grumbled that people who came late better take what was left, upon which Guenn unceremoniously pushed the girl's basket aside, tossed her box and loose clothes in various directions, and coolly usurped the desired position.

Having made this triumphant entrance, she plunged into her work, saying in an undertone: "What's in the wind? Anything new?"

"Mother Nives' rheumatism has left her. She's got five weeks' cooped-up hatefulness to let out."

"I thought I smelt fire and brimstone," laughed Guenn. "Are you two little fools gabbling about me?" called an ugly old woman in a dark-red petticoat, from the opposite side of the pool.

"Oh, no, Madame Nives," Jeanne answered blandly, "I was only asking Guenn why she's so lazy to-day."