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She is out of doors-where, she does not picture; for all her sight is concentrated on her companion. He is tall, and his face is dark, but the large hat he wears shadows it. He is quite unlike any one she has ever seen. He looks more like an inhabitant of a city than a countryman, and his speech is like music. There is no Norman harshness in it. Again she closes her eyes, and she feels the stranger's arm steal softly round her waist.

Eugénie could sit all day dreaming out her dreams. It frightens her, and yet there is a delight mingled with her fear; but a stir in the house below rouses her. She goes again to the window and looks out. She sees the gray spire, and with this comes a sudden thought of the garden it overlooks, and of Monsieur Furet.

Eugénie turns away with sick loathing, and then she remembers her prayer last night at the altar.

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I prayed to be shown what was right to do, for it seemed like self-will to disobey; and now I know,-oh! I know what to do!" For she felt in that glimpse of vision-love how impossible it would be to marry without it, and her repulsion for Monsieur Furet told her also it never could come for him. She went down stairs, and saw her father coming into breakfast.

"Tiens, thou art late, my little one. Why, thou art red as a rose, my Eugénie." And, indeed, Eugénie had grown crimson. The dream which, in her own room, had been so real and vivid, seemed to dwindle into childishness at the sight of her father, but she resolved to speak.

"Father, do not be angry, but I cannot marry Monsieur Furet. I prayed last night to our Lady for help and guidance. I went on praying, father, till the sacristan came to lock the church, and this morning my answer has come. I cannot marry a man unless I love him, and I could never love Monsieur Furet."

The shrinking dislike in her face was more powerful than her words. Jacques sighed, remonstrated a little, and finally gave in; and when, an hour afterward, he found his wife in full tide of reproach, he imposed silence angrily, and told her that Eugénie was to be let alone, and that he should give Monsieur Furet his congé.

VI.

A YEAR has passed away, and has brought changes with it. Twice since his first re

fusal by Eugénie, Monsieur Furet has proposed himself as her husband, and each time she has been conscious that the refusal she perseveres in giving irritates her mother and disappoints her father's hopes. Madame Roussel had a severe fall down the ladder staircase about six months ago, and since that time she has been a somewhat restless prisoner.

On this bright autumn afternoon Jacques is his daughter's companion to the fête at La Mailleraye. It is a gay scene. From Candebec itself, from Vatteville, Véron, and all the neighboring villages, the prettiest girls and the most likely-looking youths have assembled. The elders sit on long benches under the shade of the elm trees, but the young folks are waltzing away on the green hard by, to the music of a fiddle, two cornets, and a flute.

The couples seem all well matched, except Eugénie and her partner. She has fallen to the lot of Monsieur Alphonse Poiret, the rich jeweler of Candebec, and although he has a handsome Jewish face, and is gorgeous in a scarlet scarf, with a pin in which shines a real diamond, yet he cannot dance! He only flounders like a playful elephant, while Eugénie flits round him like a fairy. But she does not look quite happy. It is not pleasant, when she has the reputation of being the best dancer in Véron and Candebec, to see Rosine Leroux sniggering with Victor Delpierre everytime she whirls past, and now, as she stands panting for breath, and longing to be rid of her awkward partner, to hear Francine, the baker's daughter, say to Jules Barrière, "Do you see Beauty and the Beast? I would rather sit still all day long than make such an exhibition of myself!"

Francine smiles while she speaks, but the biting sarcasm in her tone brings tears into Eugénie's eyes.

"I am tired, Monsieur," she says, and courtesies to Alphonse Poiret. "If Monsieur will excuse me, I will sit down and rest.'

66

'Pardon, Mademoiselle, there is a chair close by the bench under the trees."

Eugénie starts; she is looking vainly for a chair, and the voice seems to come from just behind her. Its tone thrills through her heart. Where has she heard that strange musical utterance? She looks round quickly, but she can only see the plump person of Madame Houlard, with her tall daughter on her arm.

"Leaving the dancing already, Eugénie Roussel!" Madame Houlard's voice has always a slight accent of reproof in it when she addresses young people. “I thought you never gave in!"

Eugénie is ready to cry. She draws a deep sigh of relief, when at last she reaches an empty chair near the bench, on which her father sits smoking.

"Mademoiselle sighs, and yet dancing makes the heart gay. Is it not so?"

This time Eugénie looks up quickly, and then her eyes fall again, and a deep blush spreads over her face. A tall man stands beside her; his face is dark and shadowed by a broad felt hat, but there can be no mistake in his likeness to the stranger of her dream. It is he himself the idol she had secretly worshiped since the night of her vigil before the altar.

"I-I am a little out of breath," she stammers, and then she plays with her bonnet-strings. She is terribly agitated. She longs to look up again, but she has no courage. She feels that the stranger's dark eyes are fixed on her face.

"That is not to be wondered at," he says. How the sweet soft music of his voice steals into her very soul. "Mademoiselle has been sacrificed to an incapable partner."

Jacques

After this there comes silence. Roussel rouses up after a bit, and looks round for Eugénie. Seeing her so near he goes and fetches her a glass of sirup, and then he scans her companions with his alert, half-closed eyes-Norman eyes.

"Monsieur is apparently a stranger," he

says.

The stranger bows. "Yes, Monsieur, I am from Paris, and my name is Hippolyte Laborde; at your service," and then the two men take off their hats and bow, as only Frenchmen can bow in similar circumstances. "I am a writer, Monsieur, and have come into your charming country for fresh air and fresh ideas, and I shall be sorry to leave it. I have been wishing to dance," he looks as innocently as possible into the face of the Miller, divining that he is the father of Eugénie, "but there is no chance, all the young people seem old acquaintances, and a new-comer is left in the lurch."

The Miller laughs at the stranger's rueful expression.

"Come, cheer up, Monsieur; it is the first time I ever knew a Parisian modest. Why, friend, the gods help those who help

themselves. Here is my daughter. Eugénie will give you a chance, though how she comes to be sitting down I don't understand. Art thou tired, little one?"

Eugénie's heart throbbed with delight, but still she wishes the stranger to ask her for himself.

"I am afraid I must not dance," she said, calmly. "I told Monsieur Poiret I was tired, and it is the same waltz."

"But Monsieur is dancing again," the stranger speaks eagerly. "I was waiting. till Mademoiselle had reposed herself to have the honor of claiming her hand."

Is she dreaming again, or is this reality, and has the life that she has passed through since that delicious vision been the dream? Eugénie only knows that she could waltz on for ever, and then, at each pause in the dance, as she stands with her partner a little apart from the rest, and listens to the words so like those she listened to in her dream,-words which gradually grow more and more full of fervent meaning, it seems to her that till now life has been empty, and that the joy of this afternoon is too intense to last.

Presently they are standing still near her father again, and she.hears him ask her partner if he is staying at La Mailleraye.

"I am not staying anywhere. I reached Candebec yesterday, heard of the fête here to-day, and came over in mere idleness."

"Then you must come and see my mill to-morrow," Jacques slaps him on the shoulder, "and our château, too;—we at Véron are visited by all travelers. There is no such mill as the mill of Véron," he says in a low voice, "in the North of France."

Ir is two Mailleraye.

VII

months since the fête at La The little village of Véron is all astir, and a crowd of idlers is waiting round the church porch.

Outside the crowd, just beyond Monsieur Furet's garden-gate, Margot stands, looking eager and restless. Her black eyes glitter with a fierce triumphant light. She is safe, for at this moment Eugénie is being wedded to Monsieur Hippolyte Laborde, and there is no fear that she will ever reign over the ménage of Monsieur Furet.

"Little credulous fool! She believed the tale I told, and so she gave up my poor besotted master. He'll hanker after her,

though, to the day of his death. See him now!"

She shrugs her shoulders in disdain, and shelters herself behind a huge countryman, who is hanging on the skirts of the crowd. Monsieur Furet has just come out of church. He is the first of the bridal party who has appeared in the porch; most of the others are busy signing names in the vestry.

Monsieur Furet is smiling, and he holds a large bouquet in his hand.

There is a buzz of voices, and the children cry la voilà, and out comes Eugénie, veiled from head to foot, and leaning on her husband's arm.

He is looking so fondly at the blushing face under the veil that he does not see Monsieur Furet. But the ex-avocat places himself in Eugénie's path.

"Madame,' he says, with much dignity, "I wish you all happiness. Monsieur," he looks at Hippolyte, "you have a wife who is wise, as well as lovely. Yes, wiser than heads much older than her own."

He bows and stands aside to let them pass, offering the bouquet gallantly to Eugénie.

"There is no fool like an old fool," said Margot. "I should not wonder if he leaves her his money, after all."

Literary Hinderances.

TOPICS OF THE TIME.

THERE was something very impressive and suggestive in what Mr. Stedman recently printed in these pages on the embarrassments of Hood's literary life. The brave, cheerful, mirth-provoking man, spreading innocent pleasure all over a realm from his bed of pain, coining his wasting blood into pence with which to buy bread for himself and his family, presents to the imagination an object at once pitiful and inspiring. Yet the literary world is full of spectacles only less touching. Three-quarters of the literary men and women of the present time are loaded down with cares that seem to forbid the free development of their genius, and deny to them the power to do their best possible work. The painter, with the greatest ambition and the noblest genius, is obliged to come down to what he calls his “ "potboilers;" and most literary men and women do the same. They do work in which they take no pleasure, simply because it is necessary to win them bread and clothing. Even this work they do under a pressure that is sometimes degrading, and some of them are obliged to do so much of it that, after a time, the spontaneous, creative impulse dies out of them, and they become disheartened and demoralized literary hacks.

for literature? It is an open question, which it
would be well for all repiners to examine. Would
Byron have been a better or a worse writer with
poverty? Would not Tennyson have had more for
the great world of struggling and sorrowing life with
smaller possibilities of self-seclusion? Were not
Dickens' wide-mouthed wants, natural and artificial,
among the productive motives which have given to
the world the most remarkable series of novels that
the English language holds among its treasures?

If the truth must be confessed, the literary men
and women of the world can hardly be trusted with
wealth, when we remember that literature has no
uses save as it ministers to the comfort, the pure
pleasure, the strength, the elevation and the spiritual
culture of the race. To be placed beyond the com-
mon needs and the common struggles of men, is to
be placed beyond their sympathies,—is to be placed
outside of a realm of knowledge which all must
possess whose function is that of artistic ministry.

That the operation of this law brings individual
hardship may not be questioned, but we cannot af-
ford to lose it because of this. Tennyson could never
have sung "The Song of the Shirt," or
"The Bridge
of Sighs." It took a man to do those things who
had lived close to London life, and who, in his own
person and fortunes, had shared in the trials and
tragedies of its struggling multitudes. Cowper is
dearest to those whose lives have been clouded, and
sings to them by a divine commission. We should
have lost our Burns if he had been born in a palace,
and reared in luxury. Mrs. Browning, like the lark,
would have sung all her songs in the sky, beyond the
Sup-hearing of the common ear, if she had not been

But suppose the case were as we would like to have it. Suppose that when genius should be discovered in any man, or woman, a competent pension were provided at once for his or her maintenance, so that all common cares could be forever set aside, and the song be sung, and the story be told in perfect freedom, and at perfect leisure. pose every writer could have Byron's wealth, or Tennyson's competence, or Dickens' literary income, would it be better for the world thus, or even better

bound to the earth by the chain of pain. Even
Shakespeare, in his most wonderful plays, "meant
business." How true, and sweet, and pure remains

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the spirit that still shines under the Quaker brown, and waits for translation within the consecrated cottage of Amesbury! God made Whittier poor, that every son of want, and every victim of wrong should have a sympathizing and ministering brother. Uncounted and inestimable literary successes have been founded upon a knowledge of, and sympathy with, the world, only won and only attainable by sharing that world's homely needs and homely work.

Sometimes, however, the conviction comes to the literary worker that he is having something too much of drudgery. There are undoubtedly cases of this kind, but, after all, we cannot afford to lose the test which work for bread furnishes in deciding upon the genuineness of a literary man's mission. He who becomes soured by toil shows that he is not fit for prosperity, and cannot be trusted with it. He who makes the best of his conditions, and bends them all to the service of his art; who keeps a good conscience in all his work, and makes men better and happier in winning the bread for himself and his dependents; who learns to love his kind while sharing their toils, and to serve his God in serving them, is the man whose name is safe in the keeping of his country. The man, on the contrary, who takes his lot with discontent; who ceases to do good work because he must work or starve, and becomes willing at last to do any work that offers, writing on any required side of any prescribed question, shows himself made of poor material-unworthy, under any circumstances, to hold a high place in the regard of his countrymen. If the ideal, literary life of freedom and leisure were best for the mass of literary workers, they would, doubtless, have it. If the pet notion of the modern dilettanti, that beauty is its own excuse for being, and that the artist has no mission which does not end in his art, were sound, we should find literary conditions adjusted to it. But the artist is a minister-a servant; and, that he may learn his duty to his race, he must mingle with it, work with it, weep with it. Only thus can he know how to charm it with story, and inspire it with song.

The Delusions of Drink.

KING Solomon has the credit of being the wisest man that ever lived; and he declared that he who is deceived by wine, the mocker, and strong drink, the raging, is not wise. The delusions of drink are as old as drink itself, and are as prevalent now as in Solomon's time. There are men who honestly believe that alcoholic drink is good for them; yet there is not one of them who would touch it except as a prescribed medicine if it were not for its pleasant taste. The delusion touching its healthfulness grows out of the desire to justify an appetite which may either be natural or acquired. If a man likes whisky or wine, he likes to think that it is good for him, and he will take some pains to prove that it is so, both to himself and others.

VOL. VII.-40

Now, alcohol is a pure stimulant. There is not so much nutriment in it as there is in a chip. It never added anything to the permanent forces of life, and never can add anything. Its momentary | intensification of force is a permanent abstraction of force from the drinker's capital stock. All artificial excitants bring exhaustion. The physicians know this, and the simplest man's reason is quite capable of comprehending it. If any man supposes that daily drink, even in small quantities, is conducive to his health, he is deluded. If he possess a sluggish temperament, he may be able to carry his burden without much apparent harm, but burden it is, and burden it will always be.

After a man has continued moderate drinking long enough, then comes a change-a demand for more drink. The old quantity does not suffice. The powers which have been insensibly undermined, clamor, under the pressure of business, for increased stimulation. It is applied, and the machine starts off grandly; the man feels strong, his form grows portly, and he works under constant pressure. Now he is in a condition of great danger, but the delusion is upon him that he is in no danger at all. At last, however, drink begins to take the place of food. His appetite grows feeble and fitful. He lives on his drink, and, of course, there is but one end to this-viz.: death! It may come suddenly, through the collapse of all his powers, or through paralysis, or it may come slowly through atrophy and emaciation. His friends see that he is killing himself, but he cannot see it at all. He walks in a delusion from his early manhood to his death.

A few weeks ago one of our city physicians publicly read a paper on the drinking habits of women. It was a thoughtful paper, based on a competent knowledge of facts. It ought to have been of great use to those women of the city who are exposed to the dangers it portrayed, and especially to those who have acquired the habits it condemned. Soon afterward there appeared in the columns of a daily paper a protest from a writer who ought to be a good deal more intelligent than he is, against the doctor's conclusions. The health and physique of the beerdrinking Englishwoman were placed over against the health and physique of the water-drinking American women, to the disadvantage of the latter. The man is deluded. It is not a year since Sir Henry Thompson, one of the most eminent medical men in England,—a man notoriously beyond the reach of any purely Christian considerations,-declared against the beer-drinking of England on strictly sanitary grounds. Our litterateur declares that the Englishwoman can outwalk her American sister. That depends entirely upon the period of life when the task is undertaken. The typical Englishwoman who has stood by the beer diet until she is more than forty years old, is too fat to walk anywhere easily out of doors, or gracefully within.

During our late civil war this matter of drinking

for health's sake was thoroughly tried. A stock of experience and observation was acquired that ought to have lasted for a century. Again and again, thousands and thousands of times, was it proved that the man who drank nothing was the better man. He endured more, he fought better, he came out of the war healthier than the man who drank. Nothing is more easily demonstrable than that the liquor used by the two armies, among officers and men alike, was an unmitigated curse to them. It disturbed the brains and vitiated the councils of the officers, and debilitated and demoralized the men. Yet all the time the delusion among officers and men was, that there were both comfort and help in whisky.

upon the body social, and stenches in the nostrils of the world.

The habits, neither of Great Britain nor America, will be improved until men of influence in every walk of life are willing to dispense with their drinking customs. Hundreds of thousands of Englishspeaking men go to a drunkard's grave every year. There is nothing in sanitary considerations as they relate to the moderate drinker, and surely nothing in the pleasures of the moderate drinker, to mitigate this curse. It is all a delusion. The water-drinker is the healthy man, and the happy man. Spirits, wine, beer, alcoholic beverages of all sorts are a bur den and a bane, and there is no place where a good man can stand unshadowed by a fatal delusion, except upon the safe ground of total abstinence. Until that ground is taken, and held, by good men everywhere, there can be no temperance reform. The wine-drinkers of England and America have the whisky-drinkers in their keeping. What do they propose to do with them?

The Press and the Publishers.

THE power of the daily press to centralize trade, especially those branches of trade which are not dependent upon facilities, natural or artificial, for shipping and carriage, has hardly been appreciated by the public. The grain produced by the Western States will naturally seek the quickest and cheapest transport to the best shipping-point, irrespective of all other considerations. Great commercial centers are fixed by good harbors, easily accessible from land and sea. But there are multitudes of manufactures which may be, and are, carried on anywhere, without reference to the circumstances that fix the centers of commerce, and, other things being equal, they seek centers of influence and advertising facilities. A bright, enterprising, influential daily press, in any town, is a centralizing power for all these interests. The press advertises the locality,

The delusions of drink are numberless, but there is one of them which stands in the way of reform so decidedly that it calls for decided treatment. We allude to the notion that it is a nice thing to drink nice liquors or wines at one's home, to offer them to one's friends, and to make them minister to good fellowship at every social gathering, while it is a very different thing to drink bad liquor, in bad places, and in large quantities. A man full of good wine feels that he has a right to look with contempt upon the Irishman who is full of bad whisky. It is not a long time since the election of a professor in a British university was opposed solely on the ground that he neither drank wine nor offered it to his friends; and when, by a small majority, his election was effected, the other professors decided not to recognize him socially. There are thus two men whom these sticklers for wine despise-viz.: the man who gets drunk on bad liquor, and the man who drinks no liquor at all. Indeed, they regard the latter with a hatred or contempt which they do not feel for the poor drunkard. The absolute animosity with which many men in society regard one who is conscientiously opposed to wine-drinking, could only spring from a delusion in regard to the real nature of their own habits. The sensitiveness of these people on this subject, however, shows that they—is the exponent of its life and spirit,—is the censuspect the delusion of which they are the victims. They claim to be on the side of temperance. They deprecate drunkenness, and really don't see what is to be done about it. They wish that men would be more rational in their enjoyment of the good things of the world, etc., etc.; but their eyes seem blinded to the fact that they stand in the way of all reform. The horrible drunkenness of the larger cities of Great Britain, with which no hell that America holds can compare for a moment, can never be reformed until the drinking habits of the English clergy and the English gentry are reformed. With eleven-twelfths of the British clergy wine-drinkers, and water-drinkers tabooed in society, and social drinking the fashion in all the high life of the realm, the workman will stand by his gin, brutality will reign in its own chosen centers undisturbed, and those centers will increasingly become what, to a frightful extent, they already are-festering sores

ter of its moral, political, and social influence, and does more, perhaps, than any other agency to attract the organized industry of its near and remote neighborhood.

The city of Springfield, in Massachusetts, is, perhaps, as good an illustration of the power of a daily press to centralize trade and manufactures as any that the country offers. We wonder whether the residents of that city know how much they owe to their daily press for their constantly increasing numbers and their constantly growing prosperity, For twenty-five years they have had a daily press whose enterprise, industry, intelligence and influence are believed to have been without precedent or parallel in the history of provincial newspapers throughout the world. We think, indeed, that this is but a just statement of the fact; and there is nothing in the location of the town and its relations to the country to justify the supposition

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