"Lads," said the Irishman. "Fill yer dlasses. Here's to the Café des Exilés, God bless her!"

And the meeting slowly adjourned.

Two days later, signs and rumors of sickness began to find place about the Café des Réfugiés, and the Mexican physician made three calls in one day. It was said by the people around that the tall Cuban gentleman named Benito was very sick in one of the back rooms. A similar frequency of the same physician's calls was noticed about the Café des Exilés.

"The man with one eyebrow," said the neighbors, "is sick. Pauline left the house yesterday to make room for him."

"Ah! is it possible?"

"Yes, it is really true; she and her husband. She took her mocking-bird with her; he carried it; he came back alone."

On the next afternoon the children about the Café des Réfugiés enjoyed the spectacle of the invalid Cuban moved on a trestle to the Café des Exilés, although he did not look so deathly sick as they could have liked to see him, and on the fourth morning the doors of the Café des Exilés remained closed. A black-bordered funeral notice, veiled with crape, announced that the great Caller-home of exiles had served his summons upon Don Pedro Hernandez (surname borrowed for the occasion), and Don Carlos Mendez y Benito.

The hour for the funeral was fixed at four P. M. It never took place. Down at the Picayune Tier on the river bank there was, about two o'clock, a slight commotion, and those who stood aimlessly about a small, neat schooner, said she was "seized." At four there suddenly appeared before the Café des Exilés a squad of men with silver crescents on their breasts-police officers. The old cottage sat silent with closed doors, the crape hanging heavily over the funeral notice like a widow's veil, the little unseen garden sending up odors from its hidden censers, and the old weeping-willow bending over all.

"Nobody here?" asks the leader.

The crowd which has gathered stares without answering.

As quietly and peaceably as possible the officers pry open the door. They enter, and the crowd pushes in after. There are the two coffins, looking very heavy and solid, lying in state, but unguarded.

The crowd draws a breath of astonishment. "Are they going to wrench the tops off with hatchet and chisel?"

Rap, rap, rap; wrench, rap, wrench. Ah! the cases come open.

"Well kept?" asks the leader flippantly. "Oh, yes," is the reply. And then all laugh.

One of the lookers-on pushes up and gets a glimpse within.

"What is it ?" ask the other idlers.
He tells one quietly.

"What did he say ?" ask the rest, one of another.

"He says they are not dead men, but new muskets-"

"Here, clear out!" cries an officer, and the loiterers go.

The exiles? What became of them, do you ask? Why, nothing; they were not troubled. Said a Chief-of-Police to Major Shaughnessy years afterward:

"Major, there was only one thing that kept your expedition from succeeding-you were too sly about it. Had you come out flat and said what you were doing, we'd never a-said a word to you. But that little fellow gave us the wink, and then we had to stop you."

And was no one punished? Alas! there was one. Poor, pretty, curly-headed, traitorous Mazaro! He was drawn out of Carondelet Canal-cold, dead! And when his wounds were counted-they were just the number of the Café des Exilés' children, less Galahad. But the mother-that is, the old café-did not see it; she had gone up the night before in a chariot of fire.

In the files of the old " Picayune" and "Price-Current" of 1837 may be seen the mention of Galahad Shaughnessy among the merchants-"our enterprising and accomplished fellow-townsman," and all that. But old M. D'Hemecourt's name is cut in marble, and his citizenship is in "a city whose maker and builder is God."

Only yesterday I dined with the Shaughnessys-fine old couple, and handsome. Their children sat about them and entertained me most pleasantly. But there isn't one can tell a tale as their father can— 'twas he told me this one. He knows the history of every old house in the French Quarter; or, if he happens not to know a true one, he can make one up as he goes along.

Literary Virility.

ONE of the most notable characteristics of such writers as Shakespeare, Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, is what may be called, for lack of a better word, virility. They write like men. There is no dandyism or dilettanteism about them. If they deal with the passion of love, they deal with it heartily; but it is not the only passion which enters into their work. Hate, revenge, avarice, ambition, all play their part. Love is not the only passion that inspires them. It is not regarded as the begin-all, and the end-all, of life. They deal with great questions and large affairs. They find themselves in a world where there is something to be done besides dawdling around petticoats and watching the light that dances in a curl. They do not exhaust themselves on flirtations or intrigues. They enter into sympathy with all the motives that stir society, all the interests that absorb or concern it, and by this sympathy they touch the universal human heart. Their poems and novels are pictures of life in all its phases; and the homely joys of a cottager's fire-side, the humble cares and ambitions of the simple hind, the disgusting "tricks and manners " of social shams, as well as the greedy ambitions of the miser or the politician, are depicted with the same fidelity to fact as the loves and relations of the sexes.

We expect, of course, that a man will write of that which fills him. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A young man will naturally write of love, because that is the master passion with him.

Life has only gone to that extent with him. It would be unnatural for him to write of much else, because nothing so powerful as love has thus far entered into his life. It is the most virile thing that he can do. But youth passes away, and, with it, the absorbing character of the passion of love, so far as it concerns him. Then come to him the great affairs, the great questions, the great pursuits of life. For him to revert to, and try to live in, this first period,— to heat over the old broth, to thrash over the old straw, to simulate transports he no longer feels, and to pretend to be absorbed by the petty details of boyish courtship and girlish ways and fancies,-is to compromise, or sacrifice, his manhood. He descends in this to the work of a school-girl, who strives to anticipate what he tries to remember. He turns his back upon the acting, suffering world in which he lives, with all its hopes and despairs, its trials and triumphs, its desires and disappointments, its questions of life and death, its aspirations and temptations, its social, political and religious tendencies and movements, and tries to amuse himself and the world by puerilities of which he ought to be ashamed, and labors strenuously to convict himself of the lack of literary virility.

He is something less than a man who can live in such a world as this, and in this age, and find nothing better to engage his pen than descriptions of rib

bons, pouting lips, and divine eyes; who dwells upon the manner in which a woman disposes of her skirts, or complements the color upon her cheek by some deft way of wearing her scarf, and makes up his entire work of the stuff that is to be found among the dreams and dalliances of the sexes. There is quite as much of effeminacy in the choice of literary material as there is in the mode of treating it when chosen. Of course, the man who chooses small topics and small material is the very man to treat them in a small way. He will pet a phrase as he will the memory of a pretty hand. He will toy with words as if they were tresses. In short, he will be a literary dandy, which is quite a different thing from being a literary man.

It is the theory of the literary dandy that love is the only available material for the novel and the poem; but if he will go back to the works of those who are named at the beginning of this article, he will recognize the fact that the characters of most importance, and the incidents of most significance and interest in them, are those with which the passion of love has very little to do. If it existed at all, it was incidental to something greater and more important. Indeed we should say that the least interesting material in any of the novels of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, is that which relates specially to the sexual relations. Mr. Pickwick and Captain Cuttle are worth all the women Dickens ever painted; and the women of Scott are more interesting in themselves than in any of their tender relations. It was the literary virility of these mentheir solid, sincere, and consistent manhood-that made them great, and made them universally popular. Where would they be to-day if they had ignored the various life with which they held immediate relations, and confined their pens to the depiction of creations and relations which, in experience, they had forever left behind?

If any reader will compare the scenes of the Last Judgment, as conceived and represented by Michael Angelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or the magnificent pictures of Titian in Venice, or the masterly, but coarse, and often offensive, productions of Rubens everywhere, with the petty prettinesses and dainty perfections of Meissonnier, he will understand what we mean by literary virility. The latter painter is, in art, exactly what the dandy is in literature. Even if the things he does are well done, the question whether they are worth doing remains to be answered. Virility in art is more easily to be detected-more easily demonstrable-than in literature, because a grand result can be brought at once under the eye in a picture, but the element is as truly essential and masterful in one as the other. The difference between undertaking to paint the Godhead and the minute delineation of a chasseurto the very sparkle of his spur-is the difference between the work of a man and that of a dandy.

We expect young men, young women, and old Frenchmen, to write mostly about love; but this everlasting "harping on my daughter" on the part of mature fathers of families in England and America is simple effeminacy. A man who comes into contact with the world as it is,―with all its great, social, religious, and political questions, its saints and its scamps, its grand realities and shams, its needs and its strifes, and still can find nothing of interest to write about but petty things and pretty things, and the relations of young life from which he is forever removed,―may conclude that the element of virility is seriously lacking in his constitution, and that the best thing he can do is to wipe his pen, put the stopper in his inkstand, lay away his paper, and go into the millinery business.

The Common Schools.

It seems rather late in our history as a nation to be discussing the question whether the State is transcending its legitimate functions in educating its children; yet, by the letters which we read in the newspapers, it appears that there are people who entertain the question in its affirmative phase, and who declare that the duty of education attaches only to the parent. In what interest these men write we do not know,-whether in the interest of their pockets or their religious party. It is exceedingly hard to give them credit for either intelligence or candor. The lessons of history are so plain, the results of universal education have been so beneficent, the ignorance that dwells everywhere where education has been left to the parent and the church is so patent, and so lamentable in every aspect and result, that it seems as if no man could rationally and candidly come to a conclusion adverse to the American policy in this matter. The simple fact that we are obliged to pass laws to keep young children out of factories and bring them to the free schools, shows how utterly indifferent multitudes of parents are concerning the education of their children, and how soon the American nation would sink back into the popular apathy and ignorance which characterize some of the older peoples of the world.

A State is a great, vital organization, endowed by the popular mind with a reason for being, and by the popular will with a policy for self-preservation. This policy takes in a great variety of details. It protects commerce by the establishment of lighthouses, the deepening of channels, the establishment of storm-signals, etc. It ministers in many ways to the development of the country's internal resources. It fosters agriculture. It is careful of all its prosperities and sources of prosperity. It establishes a currency. It organizes and superintends an elaborate postal service. It carries on all the processes of a grand organic life. Our own nation governs itself, and one of the conditions of all good government is intelligence at the basis of its policy. An ignorant people cannot, of course, govern themselves intelligently; and the State, endowed with its instinct, or its policy, of self-preservation, is, and ought to be, more sensitive at this point than at any other.

In the minds of the people, the State has the sources of its life; and to those sources, by unerring instinct, our own country has, from the first, looked for its perpetuity.

There is no organization of life, individual and simple, or associated and complex, in which the instinct, impulse, or principle of self-preservation is not the predominant one. We fought the war of the Revolution to establish our nationality, and the war of the Rebellion to maintain it. We have spent, first and last, incalculable blood and treasure to establish and keep our national life intact, and the national policy with relation to public schools is part and parcel of that all-subordinating determination to secure the perpetuity of the State. Men make better citizens for being educated. The higher the popular intellect is raised, the more intelligent and independent will be its vote. The stronger the sources of government, the stronger the government. If the "bayonets that think" are the most potent, the ballots that think are the most beneficent.

The question, then, which has been raised, touching the duty of the State in the matter of popular education, is a question which concerns the life and perpetuity of the State, and is a question, not for a church, not for a parent, or for any subordinate combination of parents, to decide. It is a question for the State to decide,-not, of course, from any humanitarian point of view, but from its own point of view. To put the question into form, that question would read something like this: "Can I, the American State, afford to intrust to heedless or mercenary parents, or to any church organization, which either makes or does not make me subordinate to itself, the education of the children of the nation, when my own existence and best prosperity depend upon the universality and liberality of that education?" There are many other vital questions which the State might ask in this connection,-for patriotism, as a sentiment, grows with the beneficence of the institutions under which it lives. Every victory which our nation has ever won has been a victory of the common school. This has been the nursery, not only of our patriots, but of our soldiers. In the FrancoPrussian war, the universally educated crossed swords with the partially educated, and the latter went to the wall.

This matter of leaving education to parents and to churches is, to use the familiar but expressive slang of the street, "played out." If the advocates of this policy could point to a single well-educated nation on the face of the globe, whose popular intelligence is the result of that policy, they might have some claim to be heard; but no such nation exists. Where priests and parents have had it all their own way for generations and centuries, there is to be found the greatest degree of popular ignorance, and the men whose votes most seriously menace the health and permanence of American institutions and American life are the very men we have imported from those regions. They are the men whom designing demagogues can buy and bribe, and lead whithersoever they will,--men who cannot read the ballots they deposit, and are as ignorant of

We have not taken up this subject because we consider the common schools in danger. They are not in danger. The State will never relinquish its policy in this matter. The common school, as an American institution, will live while America lives. Not only this, but the signs are unmistakable that it is to be more far-reaching in its efforts and results than it ever has been. Popular education is one of the primary functions of the State's life. No democratic government can long exist without it, and our best people are thoroughly confirmed in this conviction. We have taken up the subject simply to show that the State cannot "go back on " its record without the surrender of the policy which grows out of the instinct of all living organizations for self-protection and self-preservation. To surrender this policy would be, not only foolish, but criminal; and there is not one American institution that American people would sooner fight for and die for, than that which secures an educated and intelligent nationality.

Public Halls.

WHEN Jenny Lind came to America twenty-five years ago, more or less, the resources of the country were taxed to their utmost to find places for her to sing in. None of the assembly rooms and auditoriums of New York city, in which concerts and lectures are now given, were in existence then. She sang at Castle Garden and in Tripler Hall, the latter new at the time, but now forgotten, save by the old residents. In the country towns and smaller cities she often sang in churches. Since that day public halls have been built by the thousand. The old, dirty, dingy places in which the low comedian and the negro minstrel held forth have made room for music halls, little theaters, and large assembly rooms, until there is hardly a town containing twenty-five hundred people that does not possess a good hall, well lighted and well seated. This revolution really marks an era in our civilization, It has altered the character of American entertainments and amusements, effected great changes in our social life, and developed social agencies and institutions which materially modify the character of the people. The public hall is common ground for social cliques, political parties, and religious sects, and they have so learned to respect each other by coming into contact within its walls, that the nation is much more sympathetic and homogeneous than it was before the revolution we have noted took place.

It is now possible for any town to receive the visits of the best lecturers and the best public artists of every class. A great singer appears in New York, and the lover of music in the country has only to wait, and the rail will bring her, and the beautiful hall will receive her, near his own door. Mr. Proctor is as much at home in Cleveland, Utica, Troy, Worcester, and Andover, as he is in the metropolis. A brilliant company of actors, after exhausting a play at Booth's, or any of the metropolitan theaters, will run for months among the little cities of the

abundant audiences to receive them. Whole communities are in this way brought into contact with new influences, and introduced to a new life. Intellect, imagination, taste, and social feeling receive development and culture. The marked advance in the musical taste of the country is very largely attributable to the public halls which have rendered first-class musical entertainments possible.

In view of the fact that a certain percentage of the great number of public halls that have been built have imperfect acoustic qualities, and the further fact that new halls are being put up in various parts of the country every year, it would seem desirable that some one who has had a good deal of experience with halls should tell what he has learned about them. The writer of this has probably spoken in five hundred different audience-rooms, and he has never spoken in one that had an echo, or was difficult to speak in, which was amphitheatrical in form, or semicircular in finish. The hard halls, the echoing halls, the halls with "bad places" in them, are always rectangular, so far as he has observed. A rectangular hall may be absolutely perfect, as the old Corinthian Hall in Rochester is remembered to have been; but there seems to be a law of proportion relating to rectangular halls which is not understood by builders. There may be bad halls with the semicircular finish opposite to the stage or rostrum, but we have never seen one.

A great many blunders are made in lighting halls. Especially is this the case when the stage of the theater is made to serve as the rostrum of the lecturer. No audience can sit comfortably and look at a light. Yet a lecturer's face should always be well lighted, and no lecturer can bear foot-lights blazing between him and his audience. A light on his stand is in his way, and in the way of the audience. The | lighting should always be from above and from the side. A central chandelier above, and just in front of the stage, and a bracket of lights at either wing, will light a lecturer's face sufficiently, and, if he reads, his manuscript. A hooded light, exactly in front of his manuscript, not more than five inches high, which neither he nor his audience can see, will do good service when other favorable conditions and provisions are wanting. The more diffused light there is in a hall the better. The angel Gabriel could not speak effectively where he could neither see his audience nor be distinctly seen by it. Light seems to be the medium of communication of magnetism and sympathy between the entertainer and the entertained. Too much vacant space should never be behind a speaker. A man is often heard very easily in front of the curtain, who finds it difficult to fill the hall when the curtain is up and the stage open fifteen or twenty feet behind him.

There were formerly halls which had the rostrum between the two doors of entrance. This mistake, for various reasons, is sometimes made at this day; but it is a fatal one. No man should enter a hall in the faces of an audience, especially in a place where "reserved seats are sold; for of all the unmitigated nuisances in society, he is the worst who