More discontents I never had Then he describes girls bringing rushes in wicker-baskets to strew before the path of a bride, and the Lady of the May distributing her gifts a garland to one, a carved hook to another, a kiss to a third, a garter to a fourth; he pictures the ballad-monger on a market-day squeaking the sad choice of Tom the Miller "with as harsh a noise as ever cart-wheel made;" the ploughman unyoking his team; the dairy-maiden, who "draws at the udder" when The day is waxen old, And 'gins to shut in with the marigold; and afterwards "shortens the dew'd way" with a song newly learned; and the melancholy angler (evidently Browne knew nothing of his contemporary Walton, the "common father of anglers," and the happiest of men) standing on a green bank with " a wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook." We forget the dreary mythological rubbish which Browne inserts in his Pastorals, in the bright, accurate, and simple representations of English rural life with which his pages abound, and the hearty love he shows for the country, and especially for the beautiful county in which he was born, wins the sympathy of the reader. Here is a brief apostrophe to Devon, which, allowing for its quaintness, all Devonshire men will appreciate : – Hail thou, my native soil! Thou blessed plot, Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines; And if the earth can show the like agen, Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men; Time never can produce men to o'ertake The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake, Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more, That by their power made the Devonian shore Herrick, who lived for nineteen years in a Devonshire village, as vicar of Dean Prior, did not reciprocate Browne's feelings, but would seem, if some of his expressions may be trusted, to have found the country dull. He calls London his home, and the blest place of his nativity, and laments that a hard fate had condemned him to a long and irksome banishment. He describes the people as "currish," and "churlish as the seas," and sings in a sort of Joggerel, Since I was born, than here; Where I have been, and still am sad, In this dull Devonshire. The lyrical sweetness of some of Herrick's verse is unmatched by any poet of his age. He sings, bird-like, without a care, and with a freedom that seems to owe more to nature than to art. But it is the perfection of lyric art to appear artless, and in this respect he has, we think, scarcely a rival. Many of his love-poems have a musical charm, a playful fancy, and at times a tenderness of feeling which take the reader captive. He will be alternately allured and repelled, won by dainty thoughts daintily expressed, and disgusted by a sensuality and coarseness which must have appeared strange even in Herrick's days as coming from the pen of a clergyman. In his "Noble Numbers,” however, the poet redeems to some extent the folly of what he calls his "unbaptized rhymes." His felicity of description as a rural poet seems to show that his dislike of rural life was more feigned than real. We cannot, indeed, agree with Mr. Robert Buchanan, that "Herrick's best things are his poems in praise of the country life," because we hold that the lyric beauty of many of his love-poems- "The Night Piece, ""To Julia,” “ To Anthea," "Gather ye Rosebuds while ye May," for example-is of the rarest order, but doubtless many of his rural pictures are very charmingly colored. And they are true to the life. Herrick never produces fancy landscapes. He described what he saw, and it is evident that his knowledge of rural life was not gained through "the spectacles of books." In a pleasant piece called "The Country Life," he dwells upon its felicities with a feeling that could scarcely have been feigned, and observes - which is not quite true, by the way that the farmer's lot is the happiest, because the freest from care. The festivities of the country, many of them no longer known, are thus pithily enumerated: 66 For sports, for pageantry and plays, On which the young men and maids meet, In another piece he describes the "Harvest Home" as if many a time he had joined in the merriment; and in another, there is an invitation to his Corinna to go a-maying, which, although written two hundred years since, has the fresh dew of youth and beauty about it still. There's not a budding boy or girl this day And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted troth, Many a kiss, both odd and even; and then he adds, with an epicurean conviction, that since the future will bring sorrow, and life is short, and our days "once lost can ne'er be found again," the present should be seized for enjoyment. was the fa Come, let us go while we are in our prime, And take the harmless folly of the time. Strange that Herrick — whose "Hesperides vorite volume of country-gentlemen in the days of Charles II., whose songs were set to music by Henry Lawes and other musicians of the day, and who, with all his faults, literary and moral, was a true poet- should have been allowed no place in our anthologia, while such mean rhymsters as Smith, Duke, Halifax and Harte- men who never wrote a line betokening genius - have had their miserable productions mummified among the works of British poets. Both Herrick and Browne are included in the list of poets "sealed of the tribe of Ben," whom Jonson, in his mature age, and in the plenitude of his power, collected round him in the Apollo Club. The famous dramatist affirmed that Browne's worth was good "upon the exchange of letters." Browne returned the praise with interest, and Herrick, upon the death of Jonson, whom he terms "the rare arch-poet," pronounced that the glory of the stage had departed. Ben Jonson, it will be remembered, walked to Scotland to see his friend Drummond of Hawthornden -a poet who lived, as he himself describes it, in a "sweet, solitary place," and who might have known much of nature from direct intercourse; but his knowledge is bookish, and his sonnets, graceful though many of them be, are the fruits of culture, and exhibit a second-hand acquaintance with natural objects. Probably, the most lovely piece of rural description produced by any of Drummond's contemporaries is the Complete Angler" of Izaak Walton a perfect prose pastoral, full of simplicity and tenderness and natural feeling, and of an intense enjoyment of Nature in her simplest forms. Beautifully does Wordsworth say that "fairer than life itself is this sweet book" of Walton's. Walton, who has left such valuable records of Hooker and Donne, of Sanderson, Wotton and George Herbert, appears to have known nothing of Milton, who was born fifteen years after him, and died nine years before him, nor of Marvel, who died four years after his friend, the great epic poet. It is probable that men were separated more widely in those days by theological and political differences than they were united by a common love of literature and learning. Milton, the iconoclast, the priest-hater, the friend of Cromwell, makes no allusion to the most eloquent writer of his, or, perhaps, of any age-Jeremy Taylor; nor does Taylor, the royal chaplain, betray the slightest acquaintance with the greatest of his contemporaries, and one of the greatest of English poets. Marvel made himself chiefly famous as a politician; but he claims our attention as having written a few beautiful poems, which are impregnated with a fine rural flavor. One of these,-"Thoughts in a Garden,”— in which he speaks of the mind withdrawing into its happiness, and, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade, 66 and we may be regarded, according to Mr. Palgrave, think he is right,as a test of any reader's insight into the most poetical aspects of poetry.' It is possible, as we have seen, to discover many gems of rural verse hidden amidst the works of our earlier poets; but just as landscape-painting in England may be said to have commenced with Gainsborough and Reynolds, although English landscape-painters existed before their day, so, speaking broadly, may Thomson and Cowper be accounted the genuine fathers of English rural poetry. Their descriptions of nature are fuller, and, if we except the incidental touches of our greatest poets, more truthful, than those produced at an earlier period, and they led to the more profound, and even more accurate study of nature exhibited by Wordsworth, Shelley, Scott and Tennyson. Thomson's artificial diction, and his frequent conventionality of thought, have greatly lessened the popularity he once enjoyed. At the beginning of this century every schoolgirl possessed a copy of the "Seasons," and could recite long passages from the poem. It is a pretty safe prediction to affirm that, at the close of it, if the "Seasons " are still found upon the shelf, they will be dust-covered, and unknown to all but students of poetry; yet Thomson did a great work in his time, for he brought nature nearer to us, and proved, what ought never to have needed proof, but seemed to have been long forgotten, that poetic thought can gain some of its richest nutriment from natural objects. Pope, who could not describe nature, spoke sneeringly of descriptive poetry; but no poet since Thomson's day has adopted Pope's view. Between the publication of the "Seasons" and of the "Task" lived two lyric poets, whose united verse can be compressed within a tiny volume. "A great wit," said Cowley," is no more tied to live in a vast volume than in a gigantic body: on the contrary, it is commonly more vigorous the less space it animates." This remark may be fittingly applied to Gray and Collins. They wrote very little, but what they did write is exquisite. Probably the two best descriptive poems in the language are the "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" of Milton; but Gray's "Elegy" contains something more than description. The rural imagery of the piece is very lovely; but its pathetic sentiment touches every heart. So perfect is the poem, that there is not a line-scarcely, indeed, a word that one could wish to see altered; yet it is difficult to believe that Gray's taste was not a little finical when it led him to omit this lovely stanza as beautiful, surely, as any one that is retained: Hark! how the sacred calm that breathes around In Gray s" Odes," by the way, noble though they be, there is not a little of what may fairly be called the jargon of poetry, - -a jargon that was not only admissible but even appreciated when Gray wrote. In these "Odes," for instance, a cat is called a "hapless nymph," and a boy trundling a hoop is said "to chase the rolling circle's speed;" and these are but ordinary examples of the artificial style of composition in which Gray sometimes indulged. There is, perhaps, less of it in Collins, who, in two of the loveliest of his lyrics,the "Ode to the Brave," and the " Ode to Evening," - is wholly free from this vice. Poor Collins died in a madhouse in 1756, just a year before his contemporary, John Dyer, published "The Fleece," a poem which, as the title implies, is specifically rural in character. It is a queer medley, for the writer not only aims at poetical description, but endeavors also in heavy blank verse to give a minute account of agricultural and manufacturing operations, which no man, however highly endowed, could treat poetically. The poem exhibits more of knowledge than of fancy, more of invention than imagination; but Dyer's "Grongar Hill" and his "Country Walk" are marked by an airiness of versification and a vividness of description which remind us of Thomas Warton. Both Warton and Dyer caught their best notes from "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso; " and Dyer, although he cannot flood his landscape with poetic light, has, at least, the power of bringing its separate features clearly before the eye. With two signal exceptions, the poetry of the latter half of the last century bears few marks of high inspiration or of any special intercourse with nature. Then Dr. Johnson produced his "London," and "Vanity of Human Wishes," -weighty poems, both of them, but more remarkable for manly thought than for poetical imagination. Then Hayley sung his platitudes, and Darwin his "Botanic Garden," and Bloomfield, a small rural poet, chirped feebly of the country, and Churchill (" the great Churchill," Cowper called him) wrote his scurrilous satires, and Goldsmith (of whom we shall have a word or two to say presently), whose exquisite felicity of style has secured to him a permanent place in literature, produced two beautiful poems, one of which deserves notice for its sweet pastoral passages. Then Falconer, who was destined to perish at sea, published "The Shipwreck," and Grainger "The Sugar-cane," and Armstrong, according to Churchill's verdict, "taking leave of sense," read in verse Musty lectures on "Benevolencé," and Kit Smart, the mad poet, whose dislike of clean linen was shared by Dr. Johnson, and who, before his confinement in a madhouse, used to walk for exercise to the alehouse, but was carried back again, published very indifferent odes, which his biographer mistook for fine poems. Smart also produced a Georgic called "The Hop Garden," composed in an artificial, pretentious style, which may, however, have done some service as showing how rural poetry ought not to be written. Imagine a man deliberately writing a long poem in blank verse, the average quality of which may be judged from the following passage: Select the choicest hop t'insert The noblest species is by Kentish wights Or Phoebus; ev'n in youth his verdant blood Is arid, fetid, infecund, and gross, No one who has not made it his painful task to turn over such lumber, can imagine what a mass of similar rubbish is to be found in the closely-printed volumes which are said upon their title-pages to contain the works of the British poets. Of rural poetry,— which, if the bull may be excused, is not poetry, the last century produced a load large enough, if a man were doomed to read it all, to make him loathe the very thought of verse. Pastorals, Bucolics, Georgics, follow one another in dreary succession and in the futile effort of bad rhymesters to imitate good poets. Nature, which is supposed to form the subject of the verse, is left out of it altogether. The latter half of the century displays on a wider scale than the preceding half the vices of these arid versifiers, but it produced, also, a Cowper and a Burns, two poets who, in conjunction with, but in a larger degree than Thomson, may be said to have commenced a new era in English poetry. "What true and pretty pastoral images has Goldsmith in his Deserted Village!"" said Burke. They beat all; Pope, and Philips, and Spenser too, in my opinion." Goldsmith's pastoral images are pretty, and they are true, indeed, fitter epithets could not be applied to them. We may also readily admit that they beat Pope, who was the poet of society, and knew little of nature. Neither is it much to say that they beat Philips, too,-"namby-pamby" Philips, whose pastorals were ridiculed so cleverly by Pope in the "Guardian; but to compare Goldsmith's rural pictures with the broad and splendid landscape of Spenser, is to confound things that essentially differ, unless, indeed, Burke had the "Shepherd's Calendar" in mind, and not the "Faerie Queene." Mr. Goldsmith's" Deserted Village" was published in 1770, the year in which Wordsworth was born; Cowper's "Task " appeared in 1785, and the influence of that poem on our poetical literature can scarcely be over-estimated. Lowell, whose critical judgment is almost always sound, has said that, in his opinion, " Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear," and in these words he does justice to his homely and sterling qualities. Cowper frequently takes false views of politics and society: he has strong prejudices, great weaknesses, and for some of his mistakes we can only find an excuse in the malady that consumed him; but in his love and knowledge of nature he is always sympathetic, always veracious, and it is not difficult to credit his assertion, that he took nothing at second hand. A critic has said recently, "It is utterly idle to contend that Cowper came within leagues of Pope as a poet;" but, in spite of this decision, it is a question that from one point of view may be not unreasonably discussed. The influence of poets upon poets is, perhaps, the most striking proof of their genius. Spenser's power over his successors has been well-nigh limitless, and it may be safely said that the poetical sway of Cowper has not only been more beneficial, but also more extended than that of Pope, whose school, as Southey remarked, has produced no poet. Moreover, the genius of these poets lies in such different directions that they cannot fairly be compared. Cowper had not the delicate fancy displayed by Pope in the "Rape of the Lock," nor had he the trenchant wit which entitles Pope to be ranked as our greatest satirist in verse; but, on the other hand, he had rare gifts scarcely known to his predecessor, a pathos surpassingly tender, a humor of which Pope had no trace, and, above all, the poet's gift, yet a gift denied to Pope, of describing and interpreting nature. Of Crabbe, who followed Cowper, and who holds a distinct position among our descriptive poets, it has been well said that he handles life so as to take the bloom off it. His descriptions of scenery, like his descriptions of charac ter, are wonderfully truthful, but, having no sense of beauty, he sees little that is not repulsive in either. Like Cowper, he is a matter-of-fact poet, but Cowper's humor saved him from the pit-falls into which Crabbe sometimes stumbled. Moreover, Cowper loved the scenery he described so accurately; Crabbe, with equal accuracy, is wanting in the love and enthusiasm which warmed the poet of "The Task." Crabbe did not die until 1832, but he must be numbered with Cowper among the poets of the last century; for, although his "Borough "appeared in 1810, twenty-seven years after the publication of " The Village," he had no share in the great poetical revolution which distinguished the earlier years of this century. It was a wonderful period in English literature, and if it lacked some qualities of sterling value, it gave us much of which the eighteenth century was comparatively barren splendor of imagination, a passionate force which imparted new life to language, an ardent love of nature that produced as profound an influence in poetry as Turner exercised in plastic art, a width and freedom of range that would have dismayed the correct poetasters who followed in the wake of Pope. The great poets of the age lived in the eye of Nature. Wordsworth, the greatest of them all, studied his art out of doors. "Nine-tenths of my verses," he said, "have been murmured in the open air." Scott's poetry, like his prose, carries with it the scent of the heather. No one ever enjoyed scenery more, and few have described it with more accuracy and brightness of color. Coleridge, when he wrote his loveliest verse, was a country-liver. Shelley, who caught with unerring precision every aspect of nature, was a wanderer through the best portion of his brief life, and found his grave at last in the ocean that he loved so well. Keats, London born and bred, adored Nature as a lover worships his mistress, and sings of her as though he had been cradled on her bosom; and Byron found his chief joy and his noblest inspiration from intercourse with the mighty mother. The spirit awakened by these illustrious men has been at work ever since, and the poets of our own day are remarkable beyond all, save the greatest poets that have preceded them, for a profound study of nature. It is not to men who are essentially rural poets that we must look for the best rural poetry; not to a Clare, truthful as his descriptions are, so much as to a Wordsworth; not to a Barnes, though his "Poems of Rural Life" display a freshness of thought and a fidelity of description worthy of high praise, so much as to a Mrs. Browning or a Mr. Tennyson. A great master of the greatest of all arts deals in the first place with human emotion, and to this his affection for nature must ever be subordinate. The scenery he sees around him suggests thoughts and gives a rich coloring to language, but to de scribe it can never be his highest object, any more than it is the single aim of the artist to be a superb colorist. Word worth never forgets man in his intercourse with Nature, and, indeed, the exquisite charm of his most exquisite descriptions consists in the way in which he blends the deepest feelings of the heart with the sights and sounds and hues of nature. Always with him there is, to use his own words, Some happy tone Of meditation, slipping in between The beauty coming and the beauty gone. And even when, in the ardor of his love, he prefers the knowledge to be gained from natural objects to that derived from books, it is because it will best teach him about man, the highest study of the poet. 66 One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil, and of good, Than all the sages can. It is scarcely needful to point out how the same feeling pervades the idyllic poetry of Mr. Tennyson. In some of those almost faultless poems which, like Wordsworth's "Brothers," may, in the best sense of the word, be called pastorals, The Gardener's Daughter," "The Miller's Daughter," and "The Brook," for example, it is interesting to know how closely linked is the human sympathy and the sympathy with nature; how the one love blends with and purifies the other. Can there be a more perfect rural picture than the following? Yet, lovely as it is, as a simple description, its beauty is enhanced a thousand-fold when we remember how this outward joy and serenity is in harmony with the exultant bliss of the lover on that bright May morning : The steer forgot to graze, His happy home, the ground. To left and right Both Wordsworth and Tennyson are able by a line, almost by a word, to transport the city dweller into the open country, so that he hears the lowing of cattle, the music of birds and streams, scents the fragrance of flowers, and sees with the "inward eye" the forest glade and mountain valley. Indeed, so thoroughly have these poets, if the phrase may be allowed, taken possession of nature, that a lover of her and of them finds himself continually haunted by their music, or using their words, as he loiters leisurely through the country. If he sees a row of pigeons deep in contemplation upon a cottage roof, he remembers how these birds have been described as 66 sunning their milky bosoms on the thatch;" in the solitude of forests he recalls Wordsworth's injunction to touch with gentle hand, "for there is a spirit in the woods;" the shrill crowing of the cock, returned as it so often is from adjoining farmsteads, suggests the couplet,— On tiptoe rear'd he strains his clarion throat, Threatened by faintly answering farms remote. A stream that moves quietly along, "glideth at his own sweet will;" wayside flowers, the daisy, the celandine, or the primrose, have each an appropriate line of commemoration, which the sight of them brings back to the memory; and who is there that, while listening to the sounds heard upon a warm day of summer in a lovely English park, has not echoed Mr. Tennyson's most musical couplet, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, If Keats had lived out a full life, instead of gaining in early manhood "a grave among the eternal," it is probable of that so dear a lover of nature would have enriched our Soar, but never roam, FRENCH PEDLERS. THOSE who judge things superficially will say that a pedler is a pedler and nothing else; but the man who looks beyond the surface knows that the pedler is a great educator of the rural population, and, as such, an object of interest. In France they call the man "colporteur;" he is subject to regulations, and walks in fear of the gendarmerie. Who has not met him on a winter afternoon him and an attendant boy with a pack-trudging along one of those desperately straight departmental roads that seem to have been traced on purpose to disprove the proverb about every lane having a turning? He is dressed in a blue blouse, girt closely to him by a broad belt full of sheaths and compartments like a Circassian brigand's. There is cutlery in this belt, and shagreen holsters with briar-root pipes. Behind his waist the colporteur wears a thing that looks like a cartridge-box, and often is one; it is full of scent-bottles: on his shoulders rests a knapsack, replete with books and tracts that form his ambulating library; from either of his hands dangles a bundle generally stocked with crockery, so that if the pedler has a boy to totter along with his pack instead of bearing it himself it is not from laziness. There is usually a certain amount of mystery enshrouding the relations between the pedler and his boy. The youth is not his acknowledged son; public inquisitiveness inclines to the belief that the pedler found him in a ditch, and took him in "out of charity"- though what charity there 'can be in forcing upon a growing lad the weight of a fullsized mule is one of those problems which pass understanding. The probable truth is that the boy was bought with money of his parents, just like any other merchandise, and that his master prides himself upon making of him a model pedler like himself, when he shall have arrived at years of discretion. Meanwhile, the boy, compelled to taciturnity by the head-downward nature of his functions, takes life as easily as he can. When he has walked enough, according to his notions, he halts without asking leave, and shunts his pack on to one of those indigo mile-stones, or rather mile-irons, for in France they are made of iron, which tell one the road in white letters; and the pedler, submitting patiently to these interruptions, enlivens the repose by practical counsels destined to bring up the boy in the way he should go. Kindly he teaches him how in selling sham jewelry one should rub the setting with one's sleeve and hold up the stone in a ray of light, not with the glare of the whole window on it; how every prudent pedler carries about with him a bottle of genuine scent in order to perfume the village girls' handkerchiefs, so that they may come back by and by and purchase bottles out of the cartridge-box which are not genuine; how, again, it behooves the man of sense to wrap his inferior textures in pieces of good quality, so that when the pack is opened these good pieces may be handed up as samples, and entice even the cautious into buying more of the stuff than they want — all those charming hints, in short, which lend an impetus to trade and form the decalogue of the business man. Then the pedler teaches the boy songs; for life is not made up of buying and selling, and when bad scent has been palmed off upon one, bad calico upon a second, and bad pinchbeck upon a third, what more proper than that the honest vendor should sit down with the customers he has fleeced, and troll them melodies to gladden their hearts withal? soon as the boy has rested enough, and the pair have resumed their march, "Listen to me," says the pedler, giving his shoulders a hitch to make the knapsack sit lighter; "yesterday I taught you 'Les Trois Canards'. sung by whom?" "Mam'selle Thérésa," sniffles the boy. "Yes, that's it by Mam'selle Thérésa; now pay attention, and I'll sing you another;" and considerately attuning his voice to the lad's comprehension, as if he were teaching a promising blackbird, the good pedler warbles the last new thing from Paris, "Muselons, muselons," from "Boule de Neige,' or "Quel Gouvernement!" from "Le Roi Carotte," lyrics that will light up many a peaceful rustic hearth this sloppy winter. In this way is the burden of the journey alleviated; kilomètre succeeds to kilomètre, mile-post to milepost; the everlasting road reveals a turn at length, and a village is reached. So as Here the arrival of the pedler does not come unawares; it has been signalled this half-hour or more. From the crest of a hillock, where he was doing nothing under pretence of minding pigs, young Pierre the ne'er-do-weel has perceived the pedler, and scampered down to the village with the news as fast as his tattered legs could carry him. The pedler's advent is an event to young Pierre, who got a top for nothing last time his friend visited the district; and so it is to the other villagers, who are soon on their door-steps on. clattering like excited poultry. All this is due to the pedler's coming but once in three months, like quarter-day. Now and then, to be sure, other and inferior pedlers will put in an appearance between the intervals of his periodical rounds, but these are objects of suspicion to the community; if you are to be cheated, it tends greatly to happiness to be always cheated by the same pedler. Not the least excited persons in the village are the five gendarmes at the police-station. To be five gendarmes in one village is anomalous enough; but to be five gendarmes and to have nothing to do is the climax of irony-yet this is pretty much what the gendarmes' work amounts to in the majority of rural cantons. So at the first mention of the pedler's name every one of the five is up and stirring. Baldrics are adjusted, cocked hats are donned, swords are buckled If the pedler were a man of imagination, he might fancy this was a guard of honor turned out to do him homage. But he knows better. All that the gendarmes want is to see his "papiers" (license and passport); not that they have any doubt as to its being all right, but asking for his papers will be an excuse for overhauling his pack, and overhauling his pack will give them at least a twentyminutes' chat with him, at the most moderate computation. This, now, is the time to see the pedler. Muddy and cheerful, he strides by the first house of the village, lifts his hat with a breezy "Good-day, mesdames," in answer to the cackling chorus of "Bonjour, M. Tricheson," and slants straight up to the police-station with the instinct of habit. In another five minutes his papers have been inspected and found in order (it would be strange if they had not, considering they are examined ten times in a day), and the stored wealth of pack, crockery bundles, and cartridgebox litter the flooring. What a show! Half the village children, hoisted on each others' shoulders, are gazing with eyes intent through the window; one or two village girls, on affable terms with the gendarmerie, are standing timidly in the doorway only waiting for the word to walk in. This is the moment for trying some perfume. With a furtive movement the pedler unscrews the top of one of those flexible scent-squirts in which schoolboys delight, and whish in the midst of the squeaking group goes a fragrant jet of new-mown hay." There is screaming, laughing, loud guffawing on the part of the gendarmerie, but from that minute the ice is broken. Even the "brigadier" (corporal) deigns to smiles, and is not averse to accepting a two-sou cigar which the pedler offers him. Maître Rougetrogne, the innkeeper from over the way, thrusts his shining face through the door, and asks if there is any drink wanted. "Yes," cries the pedler generously, "I stand treat all round; fetch us a jug of your best." This piece of magnanimity brings the good understanding to a crisis. The corporal with an indulgent nod, says, "You need not unpack any more of your things unless you please, M. Trichesou;" the second gendarme offers him a seat, the third volunteers to hang his hat up, the fourth ventures upon the observation that it is a cold day. But the pedler, who is scrupulously desiroushonest pedler!of proving that there is nothing wrong about him, that he fears the inspection of no one, that he is a man with a quiet conscience, and so on, exclaims, "Oh, but you have not yet looked at my books, M. le Brigadier," and so saying unbuckles his knapsack. The brigadier gives a slight start, takes the cigar from his mouth, and draws nearer; he had forgotten the books. However, these, of course, prove to be in good order like every thing else. There is a Commission du Colportage which sits in Paris, and examines every book that is published, with a view to granting or refusing it the official stamp. If unstamped the book may be sold by booksellers, but not retailed at railway stalls nor hawked about the country. Men like M. Trichesou are too good citizens to disobey the Government. From out the knapsack come speeches by M. Thiers (the sale of these is sure, for village mayors buy them from fear of being thought oppositionists); speeches by M. Jules Simon (sale equally ready among schoolmasters); books of fortune-telling; almanacks by "Mathieu Laensberg" and "Mathieu de la Drôme," which predict, the one rain all the year round, the other sunshine; serials of cheap sensation sto 66 |