So much for theory; but in case of of the Montmartre rats, which were emergencies, Mère Galipaux's walls pitilessly hunted and destroyed by the were lined with a regiment of bottles inhabitants of the quarter; but of course of all shapes and sizes, containing cor- the appeal was set down as quixotic, dials, simples, and extracts of her own and the army of rodents continued to wonderful herbal infusions and decoc- die lingering deaths in gins, as if no tions. For distilling purposes she pos-measures had been taken by their prosessed a conical apparatus which resem-tectress for their deliverance. The steep little alley where Mère Galipaux lived was the happy huntingground for the whiskered fraternity of Montmartre. They grew and multiplied in the big sewer underneath the street level; they danced mazurkas on the uneven cobbles, and darted between bled the alembics used in the Middle Ages by alchemists and other votaries of the black art. Above this triple row of flasks hung bundles of dried aromatic plants which once were fragrant and feathery on the lower slopes of the Puy-de-Dôme, and which even still, though dead, contrived to impregnate the sabots of the working folk when the atmosphere with a piquant and not they returned from shop and factory at unpleasant odor. Surgical books and twilight; they climbed through the pamphlets lay upon the stained deal partitions of the old houses which had table, showing that the doctoresse, as been built in the reign of Henri IV., much as her daily occupations permit- and made the usual havoc in loaves and ted, took an interest in the progress of cheeses; their weird, shrill cries awoke that science 'neath whose bauner she the soundest sleepers at night-time, marched, though she had no preten- and even Bishop Hatto in his castle sions to be anything but a medical free- was not more surrounded by them than lance. And the worthy dame, when were the inhabitants of the Rue de la not engaged in binding Mère Perrin's ferronnerie, Montmartre. And Mère mutou's left ear, which had been almost Galipaux alone, of all her fellows, toltorn off by rival Toms on his last noc-erated and cared for the strange, deturnal promenade, or in setting the structive little creatures. She waged a broken leg of Petit Poucet, the baker's silent war on her neighbors anent the errand boy's poodle, or in squirting rats, for, through close vigilance, she soothing mixture into the inflamed orb knew the whereabouts of every gutterof some Paris street gamin, or in dis- trap and poison-dish, and after dark tilling and experimenting, would always would light her lantern, and, armed be seen with a book on her knee. with a few bandages and surgical apHer husband had left her in flourish-pliances, hie on her unsuspected errand ing circumstances, and since his death in the streets. Uninjured rodents she she continued to live on in the same set at liberty; those who were already old rooms she had occupied on coming in the convulsive throes she humanely to live in Paris forty years previously, despatched. She rinsed away the and nothing would induce her to re-death-conveying messes in the cracked place the old furniture by newer and dishes and flower-pots, and for these less threadbare chairs, tables, and cupboards. The carved oaken clock she had brought with her from Auvergne, ticked pompously from its corner, just as it had done when it was placed in her great-grandfather's kitchen one hundred and seventy years ago. Mère Galipaux was a member of the Paris branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and had even drawn up a petition requesting the president to interfere on behalf substituted harmless ingredients of a similar appearance. She then placed food remnants in the holes between the paving-stones, and rats that were slightly hurt she carried to her attic and saw to their wounds till they were cured. Not a living soul in the neighborhood knew of this remarkable crusade. Life had taught Mère Galipaux a lesson which some folks find so hard to learn, and that was to keep her own counsel; in plague-stricken places and fever haunts if, thereby, she could have lessened, by one iota, the distressing total of diseases and ills that menace her Perhaps on that account, when she died, the crowd of mourners who followed her to her tomb was so great that the traffic in the Boulevard Clichy was temporarily suspended, and the great deserted Montmartre Cemetery was she had forbidden the members of her occasions in the cause of humanity, so family to visit her of an evening; and la Mère Galipaux would have sojourned as, owing to her immense gifts and masculine strength of character, her authority was almost patriarchal, none dared to disobey her in the matter. The old medicine-woman was no re- fellow-creatures throughout the natural specter of persons, or rather, of the term of their lives. privileged among the animal species. She did not see why there should be one rule for the spirited race-horse, and another for the costermonger's donkey; nor why white mice should be tended and coddled by children in wicker cages, and their cousins the field-mice populous for the space of half an hour. cruelly exterminated. For her there were no grades in the divine order of life, whose dim beginnings in the creeping things and batrachia seem so repulsive to frivolous natures. She belonged to the race of healers in her humble way, as surely as Hippocrates, Claude Bernard, and Jenner did in theirs; and even as these great men would have imperilled their lives on all Had la Mère Galipaux been the dean of the Academy of Medicine, she could not have received a warmer tribute to her memory than this spontaneous popular testimony, more eloquent in its undemonstrative fervor than the most polished funeral sermon preached by a fashionable deacon, or a volley of guns fired over her grave. THE WORK OF DISINFECTION IN LONDON. From a return just prepared by the medical officer of health of the London Council, it appears that sixteen sanitary authorities have provided themselves with disinfecting apparatus, in which disinfection is effected by steam; fourteen authorities possess apparatus in which disinfection is effected by dry heat; and eleven authorities have arranged with a contractor by whom steam is used. It is hoped dry heat apparatus will soon be entirely superseded by steam apparatus. The arrangements with a contractor to disinfect are not quite satisfactory, on the ground that this duty should not be in other hands than those who are responsible for the prevention of disease. It would be a good thing and more economical, the medical officer shows, if districts were to combine in the manner provided by the Public Health (London) Act, and find suitable sites for the erection of disinfecting apparatus in central districts of London. Section 60 of the Public Health (London) Act requires a temporary shelter to be provided free of charge by every sanitary authority for housing those who are compelled to leave their homes whilst the process of disinfection is going on. So far this provision has not been carried out in every district; in fact, by only thirteen out of the forty sanitary authorities. What accommodation has been provided is open to improvement; in a few instances only is the accommodation provided for use by night as well as by day. Shelter by night, however, must be provided for in all cases, as the time occupied in the purification of the room-often the only room of the family-extends to many hours. Provision for baths to be used by those coming from infected houses should also be ensured. It is said that so far poor people are unwilling to use the accommodation thus provided, but when they find it really meets their convenience this is not likely to continue. But the shelters must be made reasonably attractive, or objections to them will never be overcome. British Medical Journal. London Quarterly Review, 515 522 National Review, 525 III. A GREY ROMANCE. By Lucy Clifford, 540 V. CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN ME MOIRS. Mrs. Kemble. By Anne Ritchie, Macmillan's Magazine, VI. MY FIRST BEAR - HUNT. By Fred. 549 Longman's Magazine, 555 For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. WORLEBURY. A PHILISTINE CONFESSION. FROM the rock-crown of a long woodland FAIN would I sing in minor key of woe, hill, In modern fashion, could I only banish We watched the grandeur of the sunset The sunshine from my heart 'tis quite blaze de trop; A passion of power in brain and blood, Belong to the dew and the still cool bright ness When day is a flower in bud. I have phloxes silver and phloxes rosy, MAUDE EGERTON KING. From The London Quarterly Review. the title-page, in striking contrast with her Paris-made costume, in the height of the hideous fashion of 1870, or thereabouts. "VERY soon after my arrival in Egypt," writes Miss Chennels, in her introduction to these volumes, "I had The story of this poor child's short occasion to observe that the opinion life reminds one often of the proverbial prevalent among Mohammedans was disadvantages of sewing new cloth on that it was a disgrace to any woman old garments. The instincts of freefor her face to be seen, or her name dom, energy, and self-improvement imto be heard beyond the walls of the parted by an English education were harem." It was in deference to this inevitably and hopelessly at strife with prejudice that the publication of her the harem life of seclusion, idleness, Recollections" was delayed till not mental and moral stagnation, to which only her royal pupil, but the children the customs of the East condemned her who shared her studies and pleasures, as soon as her childhood was over. were in their graves. Not that they The pathetic human interest which contain the faintest touch of scandal, thus attaches to the subject of Miss the slightest hint of indiscreet revela- Chennels's Recollections" is accention. The social life of the Khedive tuated by the fact that the narrator is Ismail and his family is painted in the obviously not writing for effect. She fairest colors, and the impression one sets down everything as it comes-picgains of him from these pages is that nics to the Pyramids and the humors of an amiable, somewhat over-indul- of Bairam, visits to the royal ladies, gent paterfamilias, scarcely to be rec-impertinences of the Arab servants, ognized as the "Oriental despot with a reflections on the slavery question, and Parisian veneer," 12 "whose strength notes on the Cairo bazaars, with small of will and perverse fertility of re- care for any order beyond the chronosource enabled him to maintain a pow- logical. But this only increases the erful despotism in spite of general impression of exactitude and good faith discredit and impending bankruptcy, that grows on one as one reads. The and to baffle all the efforts of European author's view of things is open to the diplomacy to make him govern on ra- reproach of being a little "set" and tional principles." conventional; the minor discomforts of Miss Chennels, in her notes and Eastern life' take up a somewhat disprocomments on what she saw, restricts portionate place in her narrative; but herself carefully to her role of govern- she is throughout clear-sighted, sensiess; and though her narrative affords ble, not without perception of the now and then a side-light, "significant humorous; and the very profusion of of much," on the character of Ismail and the nature of his administration, yet its principal value consists in the almost photographic clearness and accuracy of the picture it gives of the private life of Mohammedan ladies of high rank just beginning to experience the disturbing influence of Western ideas. It is a drama of the clash of two civilizations; and the protagonist is the little princess, whose sweet, wistful face, with the soft, Oriental features, looks out of the photograph facing detail in which she indulges on the subject of her privations, helps one to realize how difficult it must be to educate a set of people so undisciplined, so idle, so ignorant of the value of time or the force of a promise, as those with whom she had to do, into any adequate conception of order, rectitude, and public duty. Miss Chennels entered upon her duties in October, 1871. The educational staff of the Khedive Ismail's household then consisted of a Mr. Freeland, who acted as the tutor of Ismail's Miss Chennels. Two vols. W. Blackwood & Sons, fourth son, Ibrahim Pasha, Mr. Michel, the assistant tutor, and the Princess 1 Recollections of an Egyptian Princess. 2 England in Egypt, by Alfred Milner, By |