peep round the big tree on the Common, he is tripping over the crania of some Indian sachems. Goldsmith's seat, "for whispering lovers made," very likely rested on some venerable, departed Roman; and many a Maypole has gone plump through the thorax of some defunct Gaul. If the old story be true, that, when we shudder, somebody is walking over our grave, what a shaking race of beings our remote ancestors must have been!

My dear Madam, down in the green fields, the flowery meadows, the deep woods, the damp swamps of the balmy South, are there not spread, to-day, in grievous numbers, the bones of the noble, true-hearted heroes who went forth in their strength and manhood to meet a patriot's fate? Will not the future tread of those they ransomed be light and buoyant in the long days of freedom yet to come? What will they know of the hallowed remains over which they bound with glowing, happy hearts? Some little Peterkin may find a bleached remnant of their heroism, and the Caspar of that day will surely say, "It was a famous victory." Madam, you and I would be content to have the children of the future gambol above us, if we could know their blithesome hearts were emancipated from thraldom by such deposit of our poor bones under the verdant sod. The stateliest mausoleum of crowned kings, the Pyramids that mark the resting-place of Egypt's ancient rulers, are not so proud a monument as the rich, green herbage that springs from the remains of a fallen hero, and hides the little feet that trip over him, freed by his fall. Let us rejoice, then, Madam, that we belong to that nobler race, which no curious explorer of the far future will rank with Megatheria and Ichthyosauri, or any of the soulless creatures of past geologic ages.

Backbone is a most important article, Tommy. Professor Wyman will tell you that backbone is the distinctive characteristic of the highest order of animals on this earth. When your father used to pry into all sorts of books, years ago, he found out that

he belonged to the Vertebrata, which, Anglicized, meant backboned creatures. And yet do you know that there are crowds of men and women whose framework would puzzle the good Professor, with all his learning, people who are utterly destitute of that same essential article? Carry him the first old bone you may find, and, I warrant you, he will tell, in a jiffy, to what manner of creature it belonged. But would n't he look bewildered upon a cranium and a pelvis which perambulated the earth without any osseous connection? Backbone is the grand fulcrum on which human life moves its inertia. But would n't Professor Rogers, facile princeps in physics, rub his nose, and look in wonder, to see peripatetic motion induced without a sign of a fulcrum for the lever of life to rest upon? And yet these anomalies are plentiful. They are everywhere, in houses, in churches, in stores, in town, in country, on land, at sea, in public, in private, sub-orders of mammalian Invertebrata. They crouch and crawl through the world with pliant length. They wriggle through the knot-holes of fear and policy,when their stouter-boned brethren oppose them. They creep into corners and cracks when the giant, Progress, strides before them, and quake at the thunder of his tread. They cling, trembling, to the old mouldering scaffolding of the past, and look bewildered on the broad, rising arches of the new temple of thought. of thought. They stand quivering in the blast of opinion. And when Mrs. Grundy passes by, they back, like hermit-crabs, into the first time-worn old 'shell of precedent they can find, and hide there, shaking with dread.

extensive

My boy, strengthen well your backbone, that it may bear you upright and onward in your career. Walk erect in this world with the stature and aspect of a man. Tread forth alone with fearlessness and conscious power. Bear up your God-given intelligence with unbending pride, that it may look afar over the broad expanse of nature, and gaze with even eye upon the mountainheights of eternal truth. I am using

words too big for you? Well, one of these days you will understand them all, when your little backbone has gathered more lime.

Bone has done some remarkable things in this world. There was that little feat of Samson, in which he flourished the grinding apparatus of a defunct donkey. It has always seemed to me, Madam, that that same jaw-bone must have been either prodigiously strong and tough, or else the Philistine crania must have been of very chartaceous texture. There are the bones of the eleven thousand virgins, -the remains of ancient virtue, and loveliness, and faith. Though, if all the stories of travelled anatomists be true, there must have been some virgin heifers among them; for many of them are certainly of bovine, and not human, origin.

And then, Madam, do not the poor bones which have been strewn, for ages, over the rolling earth, play sometimes a nobler part in their decay than in their prime? The incrusted fragments, carefully treasured up in halls of science, reveal to the broadening intelligence of man the story of earth in its young days of mighty struggle, and tell of the sandy shores, the rolling waters, the waving woods of a primeval time. Turning back the stony tablets time has firmly bound, he views upon their wrinkled sides its nature-printed figures, - relics that have there remained, locked in the rocky sepulchre, built of crumbling mountains, washed and worn by tides that ebbed and flowed a million years ago. Now, opened to the eye of human thought, their crumbling forms bring tidings of a distant, wondrous past, when they were all in all of sentient life on earth. The thought

they could not know, their dead remains have wakened in the minds of a far nobler race, which was not born when they lay down and died.

When travellers over far-reaching deserts are lost in the great waste that shows no friendly, guiding sign, they sometimes find, half buried in the shifting sands, the bleaching bones of some poor creature which has fainted and fallen, left to its fate by the companions of its journey. Then, taking heart, they cheerier move along, secure in the forgotten path these silent relics show. Thus over life's drear desert do we move, seeking the path that leads us on direct, and often guided in our wandering way by the chance sight of lost and fallen ones, whose sad remains our errant footsteps cross. Not always clad in soft, warm, beating life do our bones perform their noblest purpose. Beauty may lure to ruin, but, the witching charm removed, decay may waken sober thought and high resolve. Poor Yorick might have set King Hamlet's table in a roar and been forgot, if, from his unknown grave, the sexton had not brought him forth, to teach an unborn age philosophy.

My dear Madam, I am really getting too serious, philosophic, and melancholic. I had no idea, when I asked you down to the Natural History Society rooms to see the great Megatherium, that I was either to bury or resuscitate you in imagination. But I must have my moral, if I draw it from such a lean text as crumbling bones. Let us hope that what we leave behind us, when our journey over the drear expanse of mortal life shall cease, may serve to guide some future wanderer in the devious way, and lead him to the bright oasis of eternal life and rest.

A

TOUR in Normandy is a very commonplace thing; and mine was not even a tour in Normandy. In the six weeks which I spent there, I did not see as many sights as an ordinary English tourist sees in ten days, or an American, perhaps, in five. Going abroad in need of rest, I rambled slowly about, sojourning at each place as long as I found it agreeable, then moving on to another, avoiding the railroads, the tyranny of the timetable, the flurry of packing up every morning. My time was divided between some seven or eight places; and I stayed longest where there was least, according to the guide-books, to be seen.

Travelling in this way, you at all events see something of the people; that is, if you will live among them and fall in with their ways.

Normandy - at least the sequestered part of it in which most of my time was passed is a good country for a traveller minded as I was. The scenery is not grand. It does not exact the highest admiration; but it is, perhaps, not on that account the less suitable for the purpose of those who seek repose. The country is very like the most rich and beautiful parts of England. Its lanes and hedge-rows are indeed so thoroughly English, as to suggest that it was laid out under influences similar to those which determined the aspect of the country in England, and unlike those which determined it in other parts of France. It is well wooded; and as the trees stand not in masses, but in lines along the hedge-rows, you see distinctly the form of each tree. This is one of its characteristic features. The number of poplars interspersed with the trees of rounder outline is another, and very grateful to the eye. The general greenness rivals that of England. The valleys are wide, and the views from the hill-tops very extensive. I am speaking chiefly of the

western part of Normandy: the parts about Caen approach more nearly to the flatness, monotony, and dreary treelessness of ordinary French and German scenery. The air is pure and bracing, especially in the little towns built on old castled heights. Why do we not always build our towns, when we can, on heights, in what Shakespeare calls nimble and sweet air?

The Norman towns are full of grand old churches, old castles, historic memories, shadows of the past. In these, where I spent most of my holiday, there are no garrisons, no Zouaves, no fanfares, no signs of the presence of the empire, except occasionally the abode of a sous-préfet. The province retains a good deal of its old character. In the great towns, such as Rouen and Caen, the people are French; but in the country they are Normans still. The French are sensible of the difference, and do the Normans the honor (as, if I were a Norman, I should think it) of acknowledging it by habitual flouts and sneers at the "heavy" race who inhabit "the land of cider."

ances,

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If you do not mind outward appearif you have the resolution to penetrate beyond a very dirty entrance, perhaps through the kitchen, into the rooms within, you may make yourself extremely comfortable in a little Norman inn. You have only to behave to your landlord and landlady as a guest, not as a customer, and you will find yourself treated with the utmost civility and kindness. You will get a large, airy room, not so tidy as an English room, but with a better bed, and excellent fare, beginning with a delicious cup of café au lait in the early morning, that is, if you choose to breakfast and dine at the table d'hôte; for, if, like many English travellers, you insist on living in English privacy, and taking your meals at English hours, all the resources of the little establishment being expended on the public

meals, you will probably pay the penalty of your patriotic and stoical adherence to the customs of your country.

In my passage from Weymouth to Normandy, I landed at Jersey. The little, secluded bays of that island are the most perfect poetry of the sea. They are types of the spot in which Horace, in his poetic mood of imaginary misanthropy, wished to end his days.

"Oblitusque meorum obliviscendus et illis

Neptunum procul e terra spectare furentem." I was told that the scenery of Guernsey was even more beautiful; but the rough passage between the two islands is rather a heavy price to pay for the enjoyment. The islands are curious from their old Norman character, laws, and customs; their Norman patois; their system of small proprietors, whose little holdings, divided from each other by high hedges, cut the island into a multitude of paddocks; and the miniature republicanism and universal suffrage which the inhabitants enjoy, though under the paternal eye of an English governor, who, if the insects grew too angry, would no doubt sprinkle a little dust. But all that is native and original is fast being overlaid by the influx of English residents, unhappy victims of genteel pauperism flying from the heavy taxes of England, which the Channel Islands escape; or, in not a few cases, persons whose reputation has suffered some damage in their own country. There are also a few exiles of a more honorable kind, - French liberals, who have taken refuge from imperial tyranny under the shield of English law, the most illustrious of whom is Victor Hugo. The Emperor would fain get hold on these men, and he is now trying to force upon us a modification of the extradition treaty for that purpose. But the sanctity of our asylum is a tradition dear to the English people, and one which they will not be induced to betray. An attempt to change the English law for the purposes of the French police was fatal to Palmerston, at the height of his popularity and power.

VOL. XVIII. - NO. 105.

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The French government employs agents to decoy the refugees into conspiracies, in order that it may obtain a pretext for criminal proceedings against them. The fact has fallen under my personal observation. To estimate the character of these practices, and of the present attempt to tamper with the extradition treaty, we must remember that Louis Napoleon himself long enjoyed, as a political refugee, the shelter of the asylum which he is now endeavoring to subvert.

Jersey is studded with fortifications. England and France frown at each other in arms from the neighboring coasts. I thought of poor Cobden, and of the day when his policy shall finally prevail, as it begins to prevail already, over these national divisions and jealousies ; and when there shall be at once a better and a cheaper security for the peace of nations than fortresses bristling with the instruments of mutual destruction. The Norman islands are of no use to England, while they involve us in a large military expenditure. In a maritime war, we should find it very difficult to defend dependencies so far from our coast and so close to that of the enemy. But the people are loyal to England, and very unwilling to be annexed to France.

Granville, where I landed in Normandy, is a hideous seaport; but its hideousness was almost turned to beauty, on that golden afternoon, by the bright French atmosphere, which can do for bad scenery what French cookery does for bad meat. The royal and imperial roads of France are as despotically straight as those of the Roman Empire. But it was a pleasant evening drive to Avranches, through the rich champaign,

- the active little Norman horses trotting the sixteen miles merrily to the jingling of their bells. The figure of the gendarme, in his cocked hat and imposing uniform, setting out upon his rounds, tells me that I am in France.

Avranches stands on the steep and towering extremity of a line of hills, commanding a most magnificent and varied view of land and sea, with Mont

St. Michel in the distance. Its cathedral must have occupied a site as striking as the temple of Poseidon, on the headland of Sunium. But of that cathedral nothing is now left but a heap of fragments, and a stone, on which, fabling tradition says, Henry II. was reconciled to the Church after the murder of Becket. It was pulled down in consequence of the injuries it received at the time of the Revolution; and the bare area where it stood is typical of that devastating tornado which swept feudal and Catholic France out of existence. Where once the learned Huetius lived and wrote, the house of the souspréfet now stands. The building of churches, however, is going on actively in Avranches, and attests the reviving influence of the priests. And one should be glad to see the revival of any form of religion, however different from one's own, in France, if it were not that this Church is so intensely political, and that it presents Christianity as the ally of atheist and sensualist despotism, and the enemy of morality, liberty, justice, and the hopes of man. The French Cæsars, Napoleon I. and Napoleon III., though themselves absolutely devoid of any faith but the self-idolatry which they call faith in their "star, find it politic, like the Roman Cæsars, to have their official creed and their augurs.

I went to the distribution of prizes at the school of the Christian Brothers. I had greatly admired the schools of the brotherhood in Ireland, and felt an interest in their system, notwithstanding their main object, like that of the famous Jesuit teachers of the sixteenth century, was rather to proselytize than to educate. The ceremony was thoroughly French, each boy being crowned with a tinsel wreath, and kissed by one of the company when he was presented with his prize. Everything, however, was arranged with the greatest taste and skill; and the recitations and dialogues, by which the endless distribution of prizes was relieved, were very cleverly and gracefully performed. Some of them were comic. The one which made us laugh most was a dialogue

I

between a barber and a young gentleman who had come into his shop to be shaved. The barber pausing with the razor in his hand, the young gentleman asked him, angrily, why he did not begin. "I am waiting," replied the barber, "for your beard to grow." Specimens of writing were handed round, which were good; drawings, which, strange to say, were detestable. praised the recitations and dialogues to the gentleman who sat next me. "Ah! oui," was his reply, "tout cela vient de Paris." So complete is the centralization of French intellect, even in such little matters as these! While I was in France, some leading politicians were attempting to set on foot a movement in favor of political decentralization. They must begin deeper, if they would hope to succeed.

In Ireland, the Christian Brothers maintain the most purely spiritual character, and the most complete independence of the state. But here, alas! a different tendency peeped out. The alliance of a Jesuit Church with the Empire, and the subserviency of education to their common objects, were typified by the presence of the souspréfet and the maire in their gold-laced coats of office, who arrived escorted by a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets. The harangue of the reverend head of the establishment was highly political, and amply merited by its recommendations of the duty of obedience to authority the eulogy of the sous-préfet on "the good direction" which the brotherhood were giving to the studies of youth. There is no garrison at Avranches. But all the soldiers in the place seemed to have been collected to give a military character to the scene. Other incentives of military aspiration were not wanting; and the boy who delivered the allocution told us, amidst loud applause, that he and his companions were being brought up to be, “not only good Christians, but, in case of need, good soldiers."

In France under the Empire a military character is studiously given to every act of public, and almost of social