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crease of her business energy her revenues diminished. Hence the cellar offered her rich opportunity for meditations upon tempi passati. She uttered no complaint, but kept her unswerving determination to return to her beloved garret.

ily, and Nick-Nack nodded. Presently and puffy when she ran. With the dethe child wrote business was bad and they were going to Lucerne. Silence followed-dead silence, and she had been gone but six months. Käthe was growing older fast; Nick - Nack coughed more and laughed less. They both tried to steer Granny Schanz as well as they could, but without Mà-le she was in a sorry plight, and benevolent relatives finally gathered her up and put her away in the country.

In Lucerne, after long resistance, Màle began at last to do the hated work. Few stoics of nine years could have held out so long, and blows day after day are a forcible argument. Then some gay children driving along the Axenstrasse stopped their carriage to ask her funny questions, which amused them greatly, and tossed her some chocolate. It was long since she had tasted sweets. So she hung about the hotels and the Lion, and chased carriages along the lake-shore with animation only when she spied children.

When she began to beg she ceased to write to her old friends. She never attained real proficiency in the art, never loved it for its own sake; but she could not fail utterly in anything she undertook. For the most part she merely stood, a squalid, listless, little figure on the high road, and took what fell to her lot. When she got sweets she sat down on the ground and promptly made sure of them. Every penny she brought to her mother.

Now Frau Rupp was unquestionably of a social temperament, nor should she be judged conclusively by her inordinate activity cellarwards, which occurred without rancune and in but one species of her shifting, irresponsible, incoherent moods. She forgot the circumstance in a twinkling, and would wonder where Mà-le was. But Mà-le forgot nothing, and inscribed her memories in hard, set lines about her mouth. The vaunted voice of nature never spoke in her heart. She was remote, taciturn, and a poor stick" financially, as Frau Rupp, not without reason, asserted. In a phenomenal access of lucidity she entered into a sort of co-partnership with, and took under her roof, an enterprising young vagabond, a girl of fourteen, but past master in mendicancy, who knew all fat prospects in the canton, and had even exploited the Engadine. Great, too, was her convivial receptivity.

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The letter which Käthe received had no curly headed capitals, no vestige of margin, was soiled, ambitionless, and said only this :

Dear Käthe,

If Nick-Nack comes quick, he can get

me.

Your loving

Nick-Nack came quick.

Mà-le.

More than two years passed and Mà-le was still on the road. She had become hardened to harshness, abuse, and to the dreary routine of begging. She saw Mà-le's keenness had recognized and ignominious phases of life, associated used the psychological moment, while with vice and squalor, and comprehended the moment before or after might have them deplorably well. Her eyes were proved fatal. Her eyes were proved fatal. Frau Rupp happened not not always mournful now. Watching to mind. Nick-Nack, hollow-eyed and for pennies had made them stolid-happy emaciated, but gay, debonair, and attired travellers sometimes called them brazen with the old, airy elegance, sat on a bench -the constant sight of her mother turned at the station and waited for the next them haggard and hopeless. Fatigue, train. Fatigue, train. Beside him a dirty, unkempt child, exposure to all weathers, poor and scanty all eyes, clung to his hand and would food, and more especially her breathless not speak, had peremptorily refused to and involuntary excursions into the cellar take time enough to buy a clean frock, were giving her a singularly yellow and breathed too short, shuddered, and cast witchy aspect and a whole gamut of furtive glances behind her. pains. Something inside her felt queer

When Käthe's close arms once re

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Nick-Nack sat gayly by Mà-le's bed, and laughed and gleamed with hope.-Page 593.

leased the trembling little form, Mà-le, with one slow, gloating look, verified her reminiscences, satisfied herself that her long-lost heaven was all there the plants, the cat, the cleanness, and the veranda under the sky-smiled a beatific smile of repossession and went to bed for six weeks.

The unkempt hair grew soft again, the beatific smile, as she lay still and saw Käthe and Nick-Nack near, veiled the hard lines about the mouth, but the doctor could not mend her heart. It seemed incredible that, appertaining to Mà-le, it refused to listen to reason. It had, however, become large, startlingly large, for its narrow accommodations, and obstinate. This was its way of expressing radical disapproval of certain episodes in her history. It disturbed Mà-le's serenity in nowise. Indeed she sometimes told peo

ple how large it was, with mild pride, as if it were a mammoth vegetable in a garden, and would add, affably, that the doctor said she could not possibly live very long.

Her ways of wise, still happiness returned. Her deep sense of the blessedness of comradeship had never indeed deserted her. Periods of bed alternated with intervals of semi-convalescence. Käthe never grasped the fact that a bedridden child, not of one's own blood, could be an inconvenience, but was always extolling Mà-le's usefulness and narrating the wonders that child accomplished the instant she was on her feether quick, silent, thorough ways, "more help than any two grown women." Käthe gradually discovered that her genteel Government appointment, which paid her as much as two shillings a day when

Yet

she worked steadily, grew less lucrative if she was continually leaving her machine. This would have mattered less had not Nick-Nack been persuaded by a sanguine and enterprising colleague to speculate a bit. Nick-Nack laughed and said he could easily enough make more than he had lost as soon as his cold got better.

With the advice of the doctor, and others who were showing some interest in the little group in the garret-which was kind of them, for there was nothing at all extraordinary in Mà-le, or Nick-Nack, or Käthe-such as they grow all round us as thick as blackberries- Käthe consented to apply to the town for a certain provision for the little girl. For the practical realization of this project Frau Rupp's cognizance and signature were required. Whereupon she declared that if money were forthcoming from any source, her daughter's place was with her mother. This unexpected logic and decision would seem to imply the robust influence of the new girl, whose hand undeniably wrote the letters which caused Mà-le to shiver and cower in her bed, and turn, speechless, to the wall. Then up rose Käthe and repudiated all alien aid. The city fathers, nothing loth, withdrew. Frau Rupp receded, grumbling, and peace again descended upon Mà-le.

It may perhaps be claimed without exaggeration that this garret child unconsciously possessed some spiritual gifts for the mere shadow of which most of us have to struggle hard; the graces of wise reticence, dignity, patience, forbearance, steadfast affection, fortitude, and, rarest of all, pure gratitude. But the impartial observer will concede these may be pagan as well as Christian virtues, and Mà-le's religious notions, it must be confessed, were baroques in the extreme. Her ecclesiastical refuges had proved as unpermanent as her local habitations. The mother who bore and forgot her was Catholic, but had reeled far from the fold. The child's first baby-prayer was lisped at Lotte's knee in Lutheran form. Granny Schanz was a Methodist inclined to Spiritualism. All that she could impart of these topics Mà-le had imbibed and assimilated. In Switzerland she had occasionally strayed into a Catholic church VOL. XXII.-62

and regarded the lights and incense approvingly. But her devotions, in the true sense of the word, took place without priest or bell, and, after the fashion of the early Christians, in a species of catacomb.

Käthe, ostensibly Catholic, was not over-occupied with the next world. But, being of a practical turn of mind, it seemed to her, in view of what in all probability would be Mà-le's next journey, no more than orderly to have her properly equipped. She was therefore christened and instructed, fixing her penetrating eyes on the priest's face, and seeming to read his soul and that of all the wise people who approached. They were many, for she had become popular -an occasional but not usual penalty of greatness. Nothing could be more satisfactory, intelligent, and docile than her spiritual attitude, but she would have embraced with the same sweetness the faith of Timbuctoo had Käthe and Nick-Nack proposed it. Still, the wan little pilgrim had at last booked her seat in the kingdom of heaven, and her gentle spirit was what is termed "reconciled with its Creator," which was naturally gratifying to all parties concerned.

Her days out of bed grew fewer and fewer. In the spring came a brief revival of strength, but soon the unreasonable heart declined to let her take slow walks with Nick-Nack and climb stairs. Portions of his mechanism were playing him the same trick about this time. Although he did not suspect it, in the breakneck race he had undertaken the rider on the pale horse had long ago won.

So Nick-Nack sat gayly by Mà-le's bed, and laughed and gleamed with hope, and, whenever he could get grip enough on his voice, told whimsical, brave tales of what they would do next year, and the next, and other years. And Mà-le had a graduated row of dolls standing on her bed and leaning against the wall, and she munched sweets and basked in the gentleness of the world; while Käthe stitched like mad, and for the rest took things as they came, having found they usually came quite soon enough. All three were cheerful and content; but, then, you see, they were common persons, and very matter-of-fact.

SAINTE-BEUVE

By George McLean Harper

HERE is nothing particularly inspiring in Sainte-Beuve's life considered apart from his work as the author of a minute, comprehensive, and sympathetic history of French literature. His literary criticism alone is his title to fame. Here is something solid and heroic; here is beauty, consistency, virtue. Of the importance of this work too much cannot be said. It is, perhaps, the most complete reconstitution of the past ever achieved. With respect to the realities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France it is what Balzac deemed that the fiction of the Comédie humaine was for the first fifty years of the nineteenth. Sainte-Beuve must be accounted really great as a discoverer, an appreciator, a defender of good literature. There have been critics in whom the passionate love of truth burned whiter and beat more effectually. We think at once of Lessing. There have been others who embraced the round of human action with more comprehensive sympathy, and whose dicta possess the sanity of perfect intellectual freedom. Goethe is thus universally sound. leaps of lightning ratiocination Shelley penetrated to the sources of light as no other spirit ever has. Matthew Arnold, who discovered Sainte-Beuve to the English public, had a more earnest spirit, a more general range, and a nobler style than his French contemporary. It is to Sainte-Beuve's honor if he is named at all in such company, when quality alone is considered. But in the matter of quantity and completeness he has his place as

By

unassailable and unshared as their several places are. His work, too, is more specific, and makes just claims of being wrought out of original and often recondite material. Even those who with Zola object to the spirit which informs his critical writings regard them nevertheless as having great" documentary" value. And persons who prefer the synthetic method of Taine, based on philosophical assumptions, must concede the advantages of facility and directness which Sainte-Beuve's untrammelled process affords. When a man begins to read Sainte-Beuve from inclination, relishing him keenly; when curiosity to learn about the characters of Sainte-Beuve's world is united with appreciation of his critical virtue, and his ceaseless and varied charm of speech, the gates fly open which lead into a hundred high-walled gardens of the past, and the initiation into French literature is accomplished.

Sainte-Beuve began his work in this sort at a time when criticism was more needed than it had been since Voltaire. After the Restoration, from 1815 to 1830, it was felt that an unusual opportunity for national usefulness lay before any writer of genius who could advance a new and attractive theory of life, or, better still, breathe a fresh spirit into old forms and clothe the maxims of a venerable faith with the authority of reason. France was intellectually disorganized. Any prophet who raised his voice could gather followers. Society was shattered from top to bottom. The educational views of conflicting parties were irreconcilable. Politically it was felt that the Restoration would only afford time for eruptive forces to gather strength. The Church had lost much power since 1789,

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