at least her floor and her window were clean; so was the table and chair, and everything else that could be washed.

It must be owned that there was a good deal of damp, but there was also a wholesome smell of soap and water; the close mustiness of the atmosphere had been banished, and the warm sun, streaming in through the open window, would, Marie hoped, soon remove the general sloppi

ness.

Then she looked ruefully at the long black cracks in the walls.

"If I could only get some paper and paste," she said, "I would hide away those gaping cracks. I am afraid I can't clean the walls."

She smoothed her hair, tidied herself, and then went out.

Madame Bobineau had told her to come to the Red Glove at half past seven, and she had still time for a walk. Going up the flight of steps, she found herself on a level with the rest of the town, and she knew that if she went straight on she should reach the big tower which Madame Bobineau had pointed out last night as a landmark. But she need not go yet to Madame Bobineau's.

Marie had never gone out alone till yesterday, and even then an old priest had conveyed her as far as Olten. There was a delicious sense of freedom in this ramble in the freshness of early morning. She turned round, and went along the street built on the top of the high wall which faced her lodging. There were pretty cottages here, with flowers in every window, making a glory of scarlet and orange in the sunshine. At the end of the street she came to a sort of circular terrace, with a tree in its centre; leaning against the parapet of this terrace were some working-men. Marie looked about her to see what they were gazing at.

The platform looked down the high steep bank on to the blue-green river; on each side through the trees were the houses of Berne, and across the river the green banks again rose steeply; but the men were not gazing at the river or the town, and Marie's eyes followed theirs upward to the horizon. She gave a little cry, and an old gray-headed workman turned and nodded at her with an approving smile.

"Aha!" he said; "you have luck; it is not often like this."

Before her in the distance was a long

line of glittering light-the peaks of the snow giants glistening in silver brilliance high up in the sky. No threatening clouds dimmed their grandeur; the sky was bright and clear; it seemed as if silver fire burned within the range of mountains.

Marie forgot all about her bedroom and her employer. She was entranced with the scene before her. Once more she felt at home again; for at St. Esprit she had called the snow mountains her friends. These were not the same, but they were more lovely, she thought. They sent a thrill through her. Ah, how she wished they did not look so far off! "Ahem!"

A discreet cough made her turn to see who stood next her. A hat was being raised in her honor, and a broad bronzed face was beaming with pleasure, till the small eyes in it narrowed. In a minute she recognized the stout gentleman who had spoken to her yesterday in the Spitalgasse, and she smiled in answer to his greeting.

"Good-morning, mademoiselle," said Loigerot. "I need not ask if you have slept well, for you look as fresh as the mountains do. I heard of your safe arrival at the Red Glove from my good friend Madame Bobineau."

"You know her?" said Marie, quickly. "I have that honor." He bowed again. "Mademoiselle, it is my good fortune to lodge in the house of Madame Bobineau." He held his head very stiffly, and made a pause between each sentence, as if he looked back at it, and made sure that no correction was needed. "Mademoiselle," he went on, finding that Marie's eyes were again fixed on the mountains, "is perhaps on her way to the Red Glove. May I have the honor"-he took off his hat and remained uncovered while he finished his sentence-"of walking so far with Mademoiselle?"

There was a certain military swagger about the captain, spite his humility, and he had taken up so much space in bowing to Marie, with his feet planted widely apart, that the working-men leaning against the parapet turned round to look, and were now smiling at the stout middleaged man's admiration for the young girl, who seemed so unconscious of it. captain only saw Marie, but the girl felt annoyed at the attention he had drawn on her.

The

"You are very kind, monsieur," she

said, "but I am late, and shall have to go much faster than you would care to go; so I will say good-morning. I thank you very much."

She bowed and turned away, while the captain stood with his mouth open, trying to form a new sentence.

"Confound it!" was the next sentence he produced; and he stood, with his stumpy legs wider apart than ever, staring after her. "Well," he said, philosophically, "it doesn't signify. I shall certainly see her again. Berne is not so large as all that, and when I determine to do a thing, usually I do it." Then he paused, and a sudden idea made his eyes twinkle. "I believe I want a pair of gloves," he said to himself. This was evidently such a huge joke that he went rolling along the

pavement, laughing, till his face looked like a copper full moon.

At the angle of the street, however, a big yellow dog, that had just been unfastened from a milk cart, flew at him. The captain grasped it by the collar, and shook it as if it had been a puppy. Then he turned to the owner, a stalwart young peasant, who stood bending over his tall flat wooden milk-pails, without an attempt to call off his dog.

"Ah, my friend," said Loigerot, "how is it your dog has slipped his muzzle? or do you forget that we are in August ? Attention, my friend."

And then he went smiling along the street. Berne had shaken off its dullness for him. It held within it the possibility of an adventure.

YHARLES LAMB devotes two of the essays of Elia to the new year. They are in very different keys, but both are charming. One is wholly meditative and sober; the other is one of the most delightful freaks of fancy. Lamb's "Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age" has but one companion-piece in the same vein, and that is Hawthorne's "A Select Party." They are both very characteristic. Hawthorne's has a certain sombre tone, with all its delicacy and grace of touch, while Lamb's trips along with a light and airy gayety. He marshals all the noted days in the year-the holidays, and occasional days, and ecclesiastical days and with infinite felicity of allusion and suggestion, he whirls them before the mind of the reader in rollicking confusion.

"April Fool took upon himself to marshal the guests, and wild work he made of it. Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor's days. Lord, how he laid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down with him, to the great greasing and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and tuck er." The quips and cranks of Elia are endless, and the whole essay crackles and flashes with puns and sly allusions. "All the while Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May, who sat beside him, slipping amorous billetsdoux under the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage exceedingly." And at last, "Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great-coats, and took their leaves. Lord Mayor's Day went off in a mist as usual, Shortest Day in a deep black fog that wrapped the little gentleman all round like a hedgehog. Two Vigils-so watchmen are

called in heaven-saw Christmas Day safe home-they had been used to the business before.... Longest Day set off westward in beautiful crimson and gold; the rest, some in one fashion, some in another. But Valentine and pretty May took their departure together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day could wish to set in."

Nothing could be more delicate than this pretty play of fancy. It was one of the last of the essays of Elia, and appeared in the London Magazine for January, 1823. The earlier and graver essay," New-Year's Eve," was one of the Elia papers which led Southey to deplore in the Quarterly the want of a sounder religious feeling in Elia. This essay also incited a poetic remonstrance from an anonymous author, whom Lamb supposed to be James Montgomery. But both Southey and the anonymous poet curiously misconceived the humoristic touch of Lamb. The passing bells of the dying year, he says, affect him painfully. Their sound is the most solemn and touching of all sounds. It is an "awful leave-taking." Then his peculiar genius begins to awaken. He is shy of novelties, he says-new books, new fancies, new years. He delights to revert. He lives over again old joys and griefs. He does not gladly anticipate, and the sweet familiar life of every day, and of so long a succession of days, is pleasanter to his mind than the unimaginable future. As time passes, time is more precious to him. Even as a child the ringing out of the old year filled his mind with pensive emotion. But as he grows older he begins ruefully to count the probability of his duration, and would fain lay his ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. "I am not con

tent to pass away like a weaver's shuttle. Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality."

He soberly urges the humorous plea. He would set up his tabernacle here. Can a ghost joke and laugh? Can he take with him his folios, his midnight darlings? Can he know the sweet society of friends? In winter he is conscious of an intolerable disinclination to dying. But in summer, in a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. "What satisfaction hath a man that he shall lie down with kings and emperors in death, who in his lifetime never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows?" The vein is unmistakable. It is a fond assertion of the joy of living among familiar scenes and sounds. It is the humoristic, rather than the humorous or comic, expression of a common feeling.

As the bells ring out the old year, marking and emphasizing another series of days that are no more, the mind falls readily into the mood which Elia expresses with pathetic humor and tender grace. Surely there is no season in which the familiar life seems more attractive and delightful than that of Christmas and the new year-the very time in the twelvemonth which is especially consecrated to home and the domestic affections, and to the celebration by outward signs of gifts and gayety of the happiness of this world. The lean anchorite is not surer of immortality than the healthful-hearted man who finds in the innocent happiness of the life that he knows, assurance of all beyond it that his heart craves and his mind anticipates.

Charles Lamb ends his essay with some Horatian verses by "hearty, cheerful Mr. Coteon." But of higher heartiness and of loftier cheer are the familiar lines of a greater poet, which, so long as the English language lasts, will be the refrain of the new year's bells:

"Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old;
Ring in the thousand years of peace;
"Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land;
Ring in the Christ that is to be."

WHEN John Evelyn went to Rome, two centuries ago, he found the Jews in that city living in a quarter by themselves, called the Ghetto. They were confined to the same quarter some years ago when the Easy Chair was in Rome. But the Ghetto is now gone. Two Jews sit in Rome in the Italian Senate, and eight in the House of Deputies. It is five centuries since the Jews were excluded from England, and it was the ancient law of the land that a Christian man or woman who married a Jew should be burned. But the last Prime Minister of England was Benjamin of Israel, or Benjamin the Jew, and a Jew whom the

Queen of England raised to a baronetcy has just received honors and gratitude in all countries upon the completion of his hundredth year.

It is a marvellous change in opinion. Isaac of York, in Scott's Ivanhoe, was the old Jew. The Rothschilds and Moses Montefiore are the new Jews. Indeed, one of the best signs of the changed opinion and of the self-respect of the race is the fact that the great-grandson of the English Jewish rabbi Moses Cohen, who was the first teacher of the Jewish law in South Carolina, and one of the first in America, does not hesitate in his address in Charleston on the birthday of Sir Moses Montefiore to say that he and his brethren meet as Jews. They are not afraid of the name. Like John Wesley, who caught the epithet of Methodist which was hurled at him and his friends in derision, and made it one of the most honored names in the Christian nomenclature, so Mr. J. Barrett Cohen quietly appropriates the name Jew, and it is he who speaks of Lord Beaconsfield as Benjamin the Jew.

Certainly the birthday of Sir Moses Montefiore was a day upon which his religious fraternity had the highest reason to congratulate themselves, and to recall with pride the glories of their race. Its achievements in every department of affairs and art are prodigious, except in the industrial arts. They have supplied the treasuries of nations; they have directed national affairs; they have enriched human life with philosophy and science and every form of art; they have extended the domain of commerce and of trade; they have lived in all lands and contributed to the prosperous activities of every people, but distinctively industrial they have not been; they have been in nations and among them, but not of them. The Roman Ghetto was symbolic of their separation from the very communities in which they lived.

This exclusiveness and separation Mr. Cohen attributes to the Jewish law of marriage and the Jewish dietetic laws. The general superiority which he claims for Israel he attributes to its long training in the law of Moses. The careful and hereditary discipline of the moral and the physical man has tended to make the Jew pure and good, and strong and healthy. If the generalization will hardly stand-and the claim is somewhat overweening-yet the condition and the position of Israel to-day plead strongly for his view. It is still a race of commanding power in the world, he holds, because it has not yet fulfilled its mission, which he declares to be to teach the absolute unity of God, perfect purity of human life, and perfect charity to all mankind.

If Israel is to remain exclusive and separate until it has accomplished this mission, it will have a long date. In Disraeli's Tancred the wise old Jew in Damascus writes upon the wall the mystic word Time. And indeed time alone can achieve the work of Israel, as

Mr. Cohen expounds it. If it is not to pass away and be swallowed up in some other people with a mission, as he intimates, until this inission is achieved—a mission which includes the assertion of a theological dogma-the ever-roaming and imperishable Wandering Jew becomes its type and personification. Its work would be more speedily and effectually accomplished not by segregation, but by identification. All that is distinctive in the Jew, his reverence for the moral law of soul and of body, may remain as a humanizing, elevating, and purifying influence without that race solitude in society which is now the phenomenon of Israel.

Indeed, it is that which delays the fulfillment of its mission. Its separation from other races and from all nations does not comport with the perfect charity which it teaches. The perception of the identity of humanity, the truth that God has made all nations of one blood, is indispensable to that charity. On the other hand, Christendom has but tardily shown the Christian spirit toward the Hebrew. The proud and austere separation of Israel may well be explained by the remorseless cruelty with which it has been treated. And the sentiment from which that treatment springs but slowly perishes. Oppressive laws are repealed. Abstract opinion slowly changes. Personal outrage, in more civilized lands at least, is infrequent. But the line of severance does not vanish.

That this is largely maintained by the invincible feeling that however peaceable and loyal the Jews in any country may be, they can not be patriots in the same sense with others, is unquestionable. Yet this feeling seems to involve something of the old fallacy that Roman Catholics can not be good Englishmen. They own, indeed, an ecclesiastical allegiance to a foreign bishop, but they would be among the first to resist any political designs of that foreign bishop upon England. The Jews likewise retain their ecclesiastical unity, but as Mr. Wolf, the recent biographer of Montefiore, remarks, "The Queen of this happy realm has no subject more loyal than the orthodox Jew Moses Montefiore"; and Sir Moses in his letter to the Jews of Morocco reminds them in the strongest manner that they are to be perfectly loyal subjects of the sovereign of the country, and to cultivate the goodwill and esteem of their fellow-countrymen.

It is a fortune without precedent to reach the hundredth year of a "useful and honorable" life, as Queen Victoria's message said upon the completion of its ninety-ninth year, and for the centenarian to receive from all the world the homage of friendly congratulation for goodness of character and ceaseless charities, and to return thanks in a clear voice and with unimpaired faculties to his immediate neighbors and friends.

THERE was another recent occasion of personal honor and congratulation which was

exceedingly interesting and significant. It was the hanging of a portrait of the good Quaker poet Whittier in the hall of the Friends' Boarding-School at Providence. The school is famous within that communion, and beyond it also, for the excellence of its instruction and the benign influence of its serene discipline. Providence, like an older city, is lovely for situation. The hill that rises suddenly from the eastern shore of the little river, the Blackstone or Moochausac, gives the city a singular picturesqueness of aspect. This hill falls toward the south to the head of Narragansett Bay, at the confluence of the Seekonk and Blackstone rivers, and its long eastward slope toward the Seekonk and the rock of What Cheer, where Roger Williams was greeted by the Indians, still retains in part something of its old rural character. It is one of the pleasant suburbs of the city, and in a spacious grove within the city limits stands, and has for many years stood, the Friends' Boarding-School.

The Friends have been always an important element of the population in Rhode Island, and the Newport Yearly Meeting is a kind of annual convocation or general assembly of that silent communion which is very familiar. In the older days, when the narrow streets of the town were filled with the plain garb of the brethren and sisters from all parts of the country, how true seemed the gracious words: "The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil, and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily, and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun conferences, whitening the eastern streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show the troops of the Shining Ones."

If the young Whittier was ever brought to the May meeting in old Newport, he would have thought it a soft diabolic enticement if some fancy had whispered to him that one day he would be held in reverence and honor as a writer of verses, and that his portrait would be cherished among the chief ornaments of a school of his unworldly fraternity. The Muses were but pagan goddesses to the older Quakers. James Naylor and George Fox would have put aside the sweet solicitations of color and of song, as St. Anthony avoided the blandishments of the lovely syren whom he knew to be the Devil. But gently the modern Quakers have been won over. That grim austerity, as of the Puritan, has yielded to kindly sympathies, and the wholesome gayeties and the refining graces of life are not disowned by the quietists. Nay, even in a severer day was there not a certain elegance of taste in Friends' raiment? If the bonnet were rigidly of the Quaker type, was it not of exquisite texture? Was not the fabric of the dress as delicate and soft as if woven in Persian looms? Was a sense of Quaker aristocracy unknown and has no Quaker equipage

been seen which rolled with an air as superior as that of a cardinal's carriage?

But what a delightful character the Quaker tradition imparted to everything that it touched! A certain grave and sweet simplicity, an air of candor and of plain rectitude, a frank and fraternal heartiness-these were all distinctively Quaker. They were imi tated to base ends, indeed, and no rogue so roguish as a counterfeited Quaker; no stories of such smug duplicity as those which were told of the smooth knaves in drab. But it was only the homage to virtue. Knaves wore the Quaker garb because the Quaker garb was justly identified with honesty. Those whose early youth was familiar with Friends, as with them and among them, but not of them, still delight in the recollection, and associate with them still a refined superiority.

That the rigid traditions have been relaxed is apparent from the very incident that we have mentioned. The Muses have penetrated the Friends' Boarding-School. There is a piano in the hall. There are busts and portraits of famous Friends. There were cloquence and poetry in commemoration of a Quaker poet. There were universal affection and gratitude for the singer and his song. Bernard Barton was a Quaker poct. But Whittier is the Quaker poet. It was a curious illustration of the happy fusing of differing creeds in a generous human sympathy and admiration that at the Puritan dinner in New York on Forefathers'day, some years ago, a Roman Catholic, James T. Brady, the famous advocate, said to the Easy Chair," My poet of poets is Whittier." John Bright has publicly testified his honor and regard. And who does not? That purity and simplicity and native dignity of life blending with the pure and tender and humane songthey are a national possession, they are ennobling and inspiring. That example in the sight of all American youth, that steady fidelity to plain living and high thinking, is inexpressibly valuable. It is not appropriated, and it can not be, by the tranquil religious community to which the poet belongs. It is a common benefit.

Yet as a Hampden or a Milton, a Washington or an Adams, lineally descended from the man who has made the family name illustrious, might cherish his peculiar and personal gratification in the renown of his ancestor, so the Friends may well feel an especial glowing of the heart as Friends that William Penn and Elizabeth Fry, and John Bright and Whittier, and others truly and humanely eminent, were of their own household of faith. The young Quakers are taught the vanity of worldly distinctions. But there is a lofty sense in which noblesse oblige, and as the pupils of the Providence school see the forms and faces of the famous Friends, and recall John Woolman and "the early Quakers," they may well feel and say with high resolve, "I too am a Quaker."

Mr. Whittier and Dr. Holmes are now our patriarchs of song. But it is in years only that

they are old. The later verses of Whittier have the same unchanged quality of graphic simplicity and deep and catholic feeling, the same penetrating pathos and New England vigor, which have been always his. For half a century he has been a bard arousing patriotic and humane emotion, a minstrel cheering and soothing and charming with tender ballad and romantic lyric. And here is the latest song of Holmes, the are of the beautiful illustrated volume, which happily reminds us how ever fresh and familiar are the strains which it preludes, and which will go on echoing and singing themselves along the coming years.

These are the singers who still happily connect us with the great group of which they are parts. But it is the especial glory of that group, which contains the various genius which first challenged the attention of the world, and satisfied it that at last the Muses had alighted upon this continent, that they are as illustrious as citizens as they are renowned as poets, philosophers, historians, novelists, essayists, masters in science, and scholars. There is perhaps no similar group whose members were of such lofty and blameless life, so free from the common faults of men of letters-of lives so regular, so well-ordered and diligent, so free from every reproach.

The young Quaker need not shake his head as he looks upon the portrait of the Quaker poet, and grieve that this habit must not be mentioned, and that that event is to be regretted. For him in that noble life nothing is to be regretted. The talent has not been wrapped in a napkin. The opportunity has been seized, and the blessing wrung from the beneficent angel. It is not the poet only who regards him from that grave canvas, it is the patriot, the friend of liberty, the modest and temperate citizen, the good man.

THE biographies of literary men with their letters and diaries have now become such photographic revelations of every detail of their lives that an author may well say of his possible biographer as the poor Lord Chancellor said of Brougham, that he adds a new terror to death. The old motto for a biography was nil nisi bonum. If a man's life were worth writing at all, it seemed to be thought that it must be because he was a model man, and the model was not permitted to suffer in the hands of the artist. Famous men were painted, as it were, in their coronation robes. But the more modern biography treats them, as Thackeray in one of his little vignettes treated Louis the Fourteenth, stripped of his fine plumage of clothes, and shrunken, bald, and puny, a ludicrous figure to behold. Teufelsdröckh's dogma that clothes make the man is half justified by much of our current biography.

The imagination requires that the poet and the hero shall be round and complete, and nothing is more shocking to young enthusiasm than the revelation of something incongruous in the hero. One of the most vivid recollec