charge, “because the expressions of St. Augustine are peculiarly profound, and liable to misunderstanding." No less express is his will, dictated half an hour before his death: "Sentio aliquid difficulter mutari. Si tamen Romana sedes aliquid mutari velit sum obediens filius, et illius ecclesiæ, in qua semper vixi usque ad hunc lectum mortis, obediens sum. Ita postrema voluntas mea est. Actum sext. Maii, 1638." And he talks loosely about "the true and infallible light before which all false glare disappears," just in the style which has been so useful to the recent asserters of the dogma. His executors suppressed this letter, which was not discovered till the taking of Ypres by Louis XIV., when Condé got hold of it; and they published the work simultaneously at Amsterdam and Rouen within two years after its author's death.

Better had Jansen confined himself to St. Augustine's earlier writings, instead of choosing those which were written under the excitement of the Pelagian controversy. He was soon called an heresiarch: his tomb in Ypres Cathedral was rifled and demolished. A second monument raised to him fared no better; and Father Cornet drew up his five well-known propositions, which the Sorbonne pronounced heretical, and of which Innocent X.'s bull required every churchman to register his condemnation. To the surprise of their enemies, the Port-Royalists signed unanimously, adding a few words to show that the propositions, framed with such careful malice, were really quite different from Jansen's theses. The remedy for this was to get another bull from Alexander VII. requiring everybody, not only to condemn the propositions, but to assert that they were fairly extracted from Jansen's book, and were not found in St. Augustine: of course, the PortRoyalists could not sign this. The Church, they said, did not claim infallibility as to matters of fact: why should she? they are things of sense, not of faith. The falsehood of the propositions was a matter of faith_as to which they at once submitted; but their being in Jansen's book was a question of fact. This was at the end of 1656. The result was a sharp persecution, the nuns being drafted off to other convents, and the recluses put into the Bastille. Madame de Longueville, however, an unexpected convert, used her influence, even writing a long letter to Clement IX., a kinder man than his predecessors; and a peace was patched up which lasted till her death.

But for its connection with Jansen, the obedience of PortRoyal might have taken rank with the work of Ste. Therese, of St. Vincent de Paul, and many more which Rome wisely assimilated instead of rejecting. The connection was brought about through the Abbé of St. Cyran, Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, Jansen's fellow-student at Louvain. The Fleming's health suffered much from the damp climate; so, being ordered by his doctors to try change of air, he accepted an invitation to stay with Du Vergier at Bayonne. They worked hard at the Bible together, reading the Bible was always a strong point with the Port-Royalists; and after six years Jansen went back to Louvain, and his friend came to Paris, where he soon became famous. Eight times they tell us he had occasion to say nolo episcopari; and Richelieu introduced him at court as the most learned man in Europe. At Paris he and Zanet, Bi-hop of Langres, set up a convent in honor of the Blessed Sacrament, over which they wished the Mère Angélique, already famous as a reforming abbess, to preside. The plan failed; but De St. Cyran had been introduced to Arnauld d'Andilly, the mère's eldest brother, and by him was taken to see Port-Royal. He soon became its director; and things went on well enough till he offended the allpowerful Cardinal Richelieu, when Bishop of Luçon; had published a catechism, teaching that abstinence from outward sin is enough, and that that strong love of God which causes deep sorrow for sin is superfluous. This brought him and the Jesuits, who held the same view, into direct collision with the new "heresy;" but this was not all. Richelieu wanted to annul the marriage between Gaston of Orleans and Margaret of Lorraine. The pope and all the foreign universities pronounced the marriage valid; so a Gallican synod was summoned, which decided according to

the cardinal's wish: nay, several clergy volunteered to write justifications of the divorce. But De St. Cyran would not give his assent; and the assent of the father of the PortRoyal school was worth securing. Nicole, Arnauld, Saci, Lancelot, had followed his lead so well, that c'est marqué au coin de Por-Royal began to be said of any work remarkable for elegance of style. Port-Royal, too, had, to the great mortification of the Jesuits, who aimed at being the only schoolmasters in Europe, become a school, in the literal sense of the word. Its grammars, its logic, its mathematics, were famous throughout Europe; and M. de St. Cyran's friends sent their boys to the teachers over whom he presided. Port-Royal was a power,- -a power of which the Jesuits, as literary men and schoolmasters, were naturally most jealous, and against which they were delighted to sharpen the cardinal's anger. De St. Cyran refusing to acquiesce in the divorce, was seized, and put into a dungeon in Vincennes. He was kept there, in a miserable plight, till Richelieu's death; and the hardships which he had undergone so told on him that he died not many months after his release (October, 1643). The account of his captivity- "Mémoire touchant la Vie de M. St. Cyran, par Dom Claude Lancelot, pour servir d'eclaircissement à l'histoire de Port-Royal - is one of the most interesting works

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His

in the voluminous Port-Royal literature. When first impris oned, he lost faith, and was for a fortnight in a desponding state, till the words "Princes have persecuted me without a cause," &c., were borne in on him to his comfort. charity to his fellow-prisoners was wonderful: noticing, as winter set in, that several of them were thinly clad, he sent most of his books up to Paris, begging a lauy friend to sell them, and buy clothing, among it a suit for the Baron and Baroness of Beausoleil. Let it be fine, such as suits their rank, . . . . that, in looking at each other, they may, for a few minutes at least, forget that they are captives." The baron and his wife, and the rest, got their winter clothing, never suspecting whence the supply came; but seeing M. de St. Cyran alone was left out in the distribution, they thought his having been forgotten was a judgment on him for his heresy. No wonder such a man impressed (or, if you like the word, converted) his guards and his jailer. How John de Wert, prisoner of war, heard of him, I do not know; but the story goes, that, being present at one of Richelieu's grand ballets, he was asked by the cardinal, "What's the most marvellous sight you've ever seen?" Honest de Wert, instead of humoring the cardinal's vanity by praising the spectacle before him, said, "Nothing is to me so marvellous as to see here, in the realm of his most Christian Majesty, saints languishing in prison while bishops dangle at theatres." During his imprisonment, De St. Cyran kept up his connection with the Port-Royalists, and with a great circle of correspondents, among them ladies like the Princess of Guimenée (de Rohan), and Louisa of Gonzaga, afterwards Queen of Poland. His letters were passed from one to the other; and his style is said to have done as much towards forming French prose as his earnestness did in strengthening the protest against Jesuit corruption. If he seems weak compared with those who followed him, let us remember that his "Petrus Aurelius" was so highly esteemed in its day that the French clergy published an edition of it at their own expense in 1642.

Thus mixed up with Jansen's heresies, the Port-Royalists, nuns as well as recluses, were always sure to be persecuted when any one grew zealous enough to be persecuting. But their final overthrow was the work of the same hand which ruined France by driving out the Huguenots. The blow came when the bigoted court of Versalles had been made desperate by continued ill-successes. Malplaquet was fought in September, 1709 : in October the nuns were expelled by royal mandate. "For the good of the State, all the nuns are to be immediately separated, and dispersed in different religious houses out of the diocese of Paris," was Cardinal de Noailles' order, read by D'Argenson before the affrighted chapter. "Un demi-quart d'heure" was all the time this model gendarme would allow for preparation; and when the nuns hoped they might be left two and two together in their new homes, seeing they were mostly

old and infirm, "No," he said: "you must all be separated. Here is everybody's journey-money, and here's the pay for her first quarter's board." One nun fainted; another, who had been bled the day before, felt the wound in her arm re-open; another wanted the prioress to protest, and threaten a legal appeal. "What use is that against a lettre de cachet, my daughter?" was the reply. It was noted (for the weakness of the Port-Royalists was for omens and quasi-miracles) that the two dormitory-lamps, which had burned on ever since the convent was set up, both went out on this sorrowful morning. But you should read in Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's "Select Memoirs of Port-Royal" — if you can't get hold of such books as "Histoire générale de PortRoial depuis la réforme de l'abbaie jusqu'à son entière destruction" (à Amsterdam, chez J. Vanduren, 1756) — the story of their dispersion: how carriage after carriage moved off through lines of sobbing poor, who cried in frantic grief, Mercy! mercy! you will ruin us if you take away our only friends."

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The greatest grief of the sisters was, that they were not allowed to make any provision for their old servants, people like Fai aforesaid: they recommended them to D'Argenson, who coarsely told them not to make vexatious delays, -"All that will be looked to when you are gone." It was looked to: one very old man, who had served the convent gratuitously for fifty years, got fifty sols for his pains. It was a very cold season: some of the nuns were sent as far as Mont-Cénis; others to Amiens, &c. No wonder that old ladies, locked up in the inns where they staid at night, and bullied by harsh guards, suffered so much that many of them died soon after reaching their destination: one of those who was sent to Chartres was almost dead when she was lifted out of the carriage. We know what roads were like in those days: no wonder we read of carriages overturned, nuns thrown out, and bruised and bemired" so as to have to strip off their dress, and put on secular clothes." At Amiens, Sister Anne de Ste. Cécile arrives, much bruised and worn, at eleven at night at the convent to which she is assigned: she lives four days longer, literally worried to death by the nuns about her. In several places the Port-Royalists were refused admission, and had to wait for hours until special orders about them came from the neighboring bishop. At Bellefond, near Rouen, the abbess, Mademoiselle St. Pierre, being at last obliged to receive Julie de Ste. Synclétique, a lady of the house of De Rémicourt, locked her up in a little tool-house, where she was kept without books, writing materials, or fire, through the coldest winter that France had had for two centuries. She saw no one but a lay sister, who soon began to pity her, and persuaded the scholars to save her some of their allowance of charcoal before it was quite burned. This they did, thinking she meant to give it to the poor; but she was found out before long, and had to do penance for her humanity. By and by the abbess began talking to her scholars about the delights of a convent-life. "I shall never be one of you," said a brave girl of fifteen (I wish her name had been put on record): "there's not a grain of Christian charity among you all."- "What does the girl mean?”—“Why, look at that chimney. Not once, all this hard winter, have we seen smoke come from it; yet there you keep a saint, whom her sanctity alone preserves from despair." As the rest of the scholars sided with their spokeswoman, the abbess gave way, and next day allowed the imprisoned ex-sister a fire, and a short walk, and a seat in chapel (far away from the rest) during service. It was of this nun that the Archbishop of Rouen had said to the persecuting abbess, "You may persecute her, but you'll never alter her: she has a square head; and square-headed people are always obstinate." The sisters got much the same everywhere, hard treatment, and that petty tyranny which (as the Saurin case showed) none are cleverer in practising than members of Christian sisterhoods. One of the nuns was paralytic, and nearly ninety years old, ond childhood, perhaps. Her fellows hoped that she was happily unconscious; but just as they were all being put into their carriages, she rose, and, addressing D'Argenson, said, "Monsieur, aujourd'hui c'est l'heure de l'homme;

-

in sec

mais le jugement de Dieu est sûr, et ne tardera pas d'arriver." She then relapsed into stupor, and died a few weeks after reaching the place of her imprisonment.

The servants, as I said, fared as badly as the sisters: they were locked up all day, and turned out houseless at night; and when they came back next morning to look after their property. they found the archers du roi had robbed them of every thing, and threatened to take them up as thieves when they ventured to claim their own. Several of them were past work, and having outlived their relations, had nothing for it but to try to get into the Hôtel Dier.

Meanwhile D'Argenson sent a courier to tell Madame de Maintenon that the work was done; and a priest, the Bishop of Bellay's brother, ransacked the house, breaking open the cupboard-doors to save the trouble of fitting the keys to them. Soon after, Madame de Château-Rénaud, whom Madame de Maintenon had made abbess of Port-Royal of Paris, came to plunder what was left, and brought away a hundred cartloads of provisions, church-furniture, &c. Early next year the monastery was demolished; and even the copper-plates on which Mademoiselle Horthmels, daughter to a Paris bookseller, had engraved a series of plates representing the church-cloisters, &c., were seized and destroyed: "his Majesty" (i.e. Madame de Maintenon, revoker of the Edict of Nantes) "wished no record of the place to be preserved." Nearly two years later came the final desecration of the burying-ground. Noailles appointed Le Doux, a priest, to superintend the work: this man gath ered all the losels of the neighborhood, and so primed them with drink that the place soon became a scene of revolting brutality. Are the French under such circumstances worse than other people? Or is it in all human nature to act as these grave-diggers then did, and as the Versailles friends of order were so lately doing? We are reminded of the horrors of May, 1871, when we read that Le Doux's men, coming on the body of Laisné, an old convent-servant who had often relieved them as well as the rest of the neighboring poor, shouted, "Ah, ah, Laisné, te voilà donc encore!" and hacked him to pieces as they rammed him into an old packing-case along with a heap of other bodies, much as the drunken braves of Marquis Gallifet, and the sbirri of the chief of the executive power rammed their victims into the slaughter-pits at Satory.

You can see on the edge of the valley some of the houses of St. Lambert, the viilage to which the remains were carried, and thrown into a large pit. "The way was strewn with fragments of bodies dropped from the carts by the drunken drivers." When (as was natural) St. Lambert became a pilgrimage place for the poor of the district, the church was locked, and no one admitted except during service.

Of course, the Port-Royalists have pointed out the "judg‐ ments with which their enemies were visited. Madame de Château-Renaud died so suddenly, before she had completed her work of pillage, that there was no time to give her extreme unction: three successive heirs to the throne

the dauphin, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy, and the Duke of Brittany - — were cut off in a strange and startling way; and Marlborough's victories destroyed even the empty prestige which might have cloaked the misery to which the great king had reduced France. But there is no need to look for special judgments: Louis's acts bore their natural fruit. By revoking the Edict of Nantes, he flung away the bone and sinew of the nation; by crushing down Jansenism, he destroyed the last hope that popery might reform itself. I don't know whether or not his death-bed speech is really authentic; but we can well fancy him overwhelmed with doubt, and bitterly exclaiming to the priests about him, "I hope it was all right: you told me it was, and I believed you, and did it in all sincerity; but, if it was wrong, it was a horrible mistake." Feudalism must have been very bad indeed if it was worse than the system on which absolutism, " invoked," we are told, “as a bulwark against it," managed France. The king and people, sworn friends to the confusion of the nobles, seem to have made a very one-sided bargain. Robber-knights, pouncing down from their German eyries, were in this

ficient_vocation. She then wanted back her money; and, by selling and borrowing and begging, they managed to repay her. Two sisters, one an heiress, the other penniless, came in after the usual probation, the heiress was chosen, the other rejected; but they gave up the whole of the heiress's fortune to her less pious sister. One of Madame de Bernard's daughters became a nun, contrary to her mother's earnest wish. For years the girl had begged to leave off parures, and had devoted herself to nursing the servants and poor sick neighbors: her mother, "to turn her thoughts into a right channel," would let her read nothing but novels; so she gave up reading altogether. Her confessor, a Jesuit, temporized; but a Jansenist priest, whom she met with, told her to obey God rather than man; and so she ran away to Port-Royal. Her sister followed not long after; and the mother, vowing never to see them again, naturally stirred up all whom she could influence against the wicked sisterhood.

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The Jesuits, of course, hated the place of which it was said, “Il y a là quarante ecclésiastiques, dont quarante étudiants, et enfin quarante belles plumes taillées de la main d'un même maître," and where so many boys of high birth were educated; and, no doubt, both the school of La Grange and the convent of Port-Royal des Champs would have fallen before, but for the miracle by which Pascal was interested in their defence.

Vanduren gives the account of the cure of Mademoiselle le Perrier's eye by the touch of the holy thorn, after he has been detailing the piety of Madame de Langues and "ses lumières sur la science du salut." It is very hard to judge about this wonderful story. The girl, a niece of Pascal, was suffering from caries of the cheek-bone, accompanied by a constant offensive discharge, and the sight of one eye was almost wholly gone. This was not a case like those which Paicy so easily refers to enthusiasm. There is a feeling among the sisters that the time is come when God will do sometuing to stop the persecution which is begun; Mère Augélique prays for thirty consecutive hours; the Psalms for the day contain the words, "Fac mihi signum in bonum;" and, as uney kneel, the mistress of the novices wispers to la petite Perrier," Recommandez-vous à Dieu, ma fille, et touchez votre ceil avec la sainte épine." It is Friday, and the thorn, lent by a friendly priest, is being passed round in chapel: the girl puts it to her eye, and is cured. The cure is attested by half a dozen doctors, amongst them Felix, first surgeon to the king, specially appointed by the queen to investigate the matter. It is used by Pascal as an argument against the Jesuits; and he is understood to have said that an enemy had before twitted him with the total want of miracles to support the new faith. There is plenty about Pascal in the book: about his conversion by his sister; his vision (in 1654), the detailed record of which, with the words "Joie, joie, pleurs de joie," was found stitched into his waistcoat. Whether he was a man likely to be deceived in a plain case like that of his niece, those who know his "Peusées" better than I do must decide. At any rate, there is the date of the cure, March 24, 1656, just when a decree had been passed, that scholars, nuns, and all should be turned out; and to it was due the partial respite, and probably also the conversion of Madame de Longueville, which brought the society her protection.

I should like to tell you a great deal about Racine, and his history of Port-Royal, and his first poetical essays made in its woods; but we had better glance at the garden, where the fruit still keeps up its character, and to which water is supplied from a reservoir in an old tower dating from the Fronde war. This war, by the way, was the only occasion on which Mère Angélique lost heart. She and her nuns retired to Paris till M. de Saci encouraged them to come back, and put their trust in God, and not in the human defences which the "recluses" had contrived to protect their property. After seeing the tunnel that takes off the water which used to fill the two fish-ponds (now drained, and growing excellent wheat and oats), and having a good lesson in French gardening from our hosts, we set off across the rich valley, and then up glorious woodpaths, to the old tower of the Madeleine, linked with the

name of one of the heroes of the Tour de Nesle; and, after wandering about, and admiring the bowl-shaped valley of La Chevreuse lying below us, we descended, and pushed on to the Duke of Luynes' Château of Dampierre. This we could not see. Madame was still in mourning for the head of the house, who fell at Beaugency. Her brother, wounded there, was limping about the terrace. So about Ingrès' pictures (of which the house contains many) I cannot tell you any thing; but the park we were, as a special favor, allowed to walk in; and it was as cool and lovely as Versailles would have been hot and full of un-Sunday-like noise.

Dampierre should be seen by all who want to enjoy a quiet summer day near Paris; and let no one who goes to Dampierre fail to see what is left of Port-Royal. A good walker could easily make his way thence across country to Versailles, instead of going by way of La Verrière and the railroad. We English are too content with the French highroads by going along byways, you not only get that strategic knowledge which the Prussians found so useful, but you get to know the people; and no amount of travelling in a country will make up for the want of this bona fide acquaintance. If your experience is like mine, the more you see of the French people, the more you will like them and pity them. Is all that happens to a nation really to be charged to that nation's character? Can we ever conceive England in such a state as France was in in 1685 ? When our kings did despotic deeds, we always say they were able to do them because the people went along with them; but that is just what the vast majority of the French did with Louis XIV. against the Huguenots. Yet we always recovered from our despotic fits: France never recovered that mad act of despotism urged on by bigotry. And how did the Port-Royal sisters treat the Huguenots? Not a word about them in any of the books that I have read: yet we ought to be able to trace expressions of sympathy and so forth; for as it was the same hand which crushed both, so the destruction of each was alike deeply injurious to France.

FOREIGN NOTES.

"WILLING to Die " is the shivery title of a serial novel just begun in All the Year Round.

SASOUMI SATOU, son of the Japanese mikado's chief physician, has graduated as an M.D. at Berlin.

THE Rev. Stephen Gladstone, son of the British premier, is rector of Hawarden, with an income of fifteen thousand dollars.

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA says that he has proposed the toast, "The Ladies," in sixteen different languages, and in nineteen different countries. Mr. Sala has proposed toasts a great deal too often.

SAYS the London Telegraph: "The American government must be congratulated on the ease with which it placed its hand on lawyers of such eminence as Mr. Evarts and Mr. Caleb Cushing."

MORE than three hundred and twenty-eight million persons, exclusive of season-ticket holders, travelled upon the railways of England and Wales in 1871. Out of this immense number, incredible as it may seem, only six people were killed by causes beyond their own control.

As a wash for the complexion, BURNETT'S KALLISTON has no equal. It is distinguished for its cooling and soothing proper ties, and is admirably adapted to all unnatural conditions of the skin, removing tan, sunburn, freckles, redness and roughness of the skin, curing chapped hands, and allaying the irritation caused by the bites of mosquitoes and other annoying insects.

Loss of appetite, heartburn, palpitation of the heart, dizziness, sleeplessness, constipation, flatulence, mental and physical debility, and melancholy, are caused by a di-arrangement of the digestive organs. To thoroughly master these symptoms, WHITE'S SPECIALTY FOR DYSPEPSIA is the only prompt, efficient, and safe remedy. H. G. WHITE, Proprietor, 107 Washington Street, Boston. Price $1.00 per bottle.

VOL. II.]

""NOBODY'S FOR

"BLACK SHEEP," TUNE," ETC., ETC.

CHAP. XII. -ROSE COTTAGE TO LET.

T was probably not without a certain amount of consideration and circumspection that John Calverley had fixed upon Hendon as the place in which to establish his second home, to which to take the pretty, trusting girl who believed herself to be his wife. It was a locality in which he could live retired, and in which there was very little chance of his being recognized. It offered no advantages to gentlemen engaged in the city: it was not accessible by either boat, bus, or rail: the ponycarriages of the inhabitants were for the most part confined to a radius of four miles in their journeys; and Davis's coach and the carrier's wagon were the sole means of communication with the metropolis.

Also, in his quiet, undemonstrative way, Mr. Calverley had taken occasion to make himself acquainted with the names, social position, and antecedents of all the inhabitants, and to ascertain the chances of their ever having seen or heard of him, which he found, on inquiry, were very remote. They were, for the most part, Hendon born and bred; and the few settlers amongst them were retired tradesmen, who had some connection with the place, and who were not likely, from the nature of the business they had pursued while engaged in commerce, to have become acquainted with the person, or even to have heard the name, of the head of the firm in Mincing Lane. About the doctor and the clergyman, as being the persons with whom he would most likely be brought into contact, he was specially curious; but his anxiety was appeased on learning that Mr. Broadbent was of a Devonshire family, and had practised in the neighborhood of Tavistock previous to his purchase of old Dr. Fleeme's practice; while the vicar, Mr. Tomlinson, after leaving Oxford, had gone to a curacy near Durham, whence he had been transferred to Hendon.

So, when he had decided upon the house, and Alice had taken possession of it, John Calverley congratulated himself on having settled her down

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1872.

in a place where not merely he was unknown, but where the spirit of inquisitiveness was unknown also. He heard of no gossiping, no inquiries as to who they were, or where they had come from. Comments, indeed, upon the disparity of years between the married couple reached his ears; but that he was prepared for, and did not mind, so long as Alice was loving and true to him. What cared he how often the world called him old, and wondered at her choice?

[No. 17.

had not been very warmly reciprocated; and the consequence was, that Mi s M'Craw devoted a large portion of her time to espionage over the Rose-Cottage establishment, and to commenting upon what she gleaned in a very vicious spirit. Early in the year in which the village was startled by the news of Mr. Claxton's death, Miss M'Craw was entertaining two or three of her special friends at tea in her little parlor, from the window of which she could command a distant view of the Rose-Cottage garden-gate, when the conversation, which had been somewhat flagging, hajpened to turn upon Alice, and thenceforth was carried on briskly.

Now, my dear," said Miss M'Craw, in pursuance of an observation she had previously made, "we shall see whether he comes back again to-day. This is Wednesday, is it not? Well, he has been here for the last three Wednesdays, always just about the same time, between six and seven o'clock, and always doing the same thing."

It must be confessed, that, concerning the amount of gossip talked about him and his household, John Calverley was very much deceived. The people of Hendon were not different from the people of any other place; and, though they lived remote from the world, they were just as fond of talking about the affairs of their neighbors as fashionable women round the tea-table in their boudoirs, or fashionable men in the smoking-room of their clubs. They discussed Mrs. A.'s tantrums and Mrs. B.'s stinginess; the doctor's wife's jeal"Who is he? and what is it all about, ousy, and the parson's wife's airs: all Martha?" asked Mrs. Gannup, who had each other's short-comings were regu- only just arrived, and who had been larly gone through with; and it was not going through the ceremony known as likely that the household at Rose Cot-taking off her things" in the little tage would be suffered to escape. On back-parlor, while the previous converthe contrary, it was a standing topic, sation had been carried on. and a theme for infinite discussion. "Oh! you were not here, Mrs. GanNot that there was the smallest doubt nup, and didn't hear what I said," said amongst the neighbors as to the pro- Miss M'Craw. "I was mentioning to priety of Alice's conduct, or the least these ladies, that, for the last three question about her being the old gentle- Wednesdays, there has come a strange man's wife; but the mere fact of Mr. gentleman to our village, — quite a Claxton's being an old gentleman, and gentleman too, riding on horseback, having such a young and pretty wife, and with a groom behind him, wellexcited a vast amount of talk; and dressed, and really," added Miss when it was found that Mr. Claxton's M'Craw with a simper, "quite goodbusiness caused him to be constantly looking!" absent from home, there was no end to the speculation as to what that absence might not give rise. There seemed to be some sort of notion among the inhabitants that Alice would some day be carried bodily away; and many an innocent artist, with his sketch-book in his breast-pocket, looking about him in search of a subject, has been put down by Miss M'Craw and her friends as a dangerous character, full of desperate designs upon Mr. Claxton's domestic happiness.

Miss M'Craw was a lady who took great interest in her neighbors' affairs, having but few of her own to attend to; and, being naturally of an excitable and inquiring disposition, she had made many advances towards Alice, which

She was the youngest of the party, being not more than forty-three years old; and, in virtue of her youth, was occasionally given to giggling and blushing in an innocent and playful manner.

"Never mind his good looks, Martha," said one of the ladies, in an admonitory tone: "tell Mrs. Gannup what you saw him do."

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Always the same," said Miss M'Craw. "He always leaves the groom at some distance behind him, and rides up by the side of the Claxtons' hedge, and sits on his horse, staring over into their garden. If you wind up that old music-stool to the top of its screw," continued the innocent damsel, "and put it into that corner of