the Duc de Magenta, the Marchesi di Casa Mombasa, the Conte di Piccolo Pochito, and others whose names I do not recollect. The stakes had been, as usual, very high, and there was a large pile of gold on the table. No one of us, however, paid any attention to it, so absorbed were we all in the thought of the momentous crises that were impending. At intervals the Emperor Napoleon III passed in and out of the room, and paused to say a word, with well-feigned éloignement, to the players, who replied with suchdégagement as they could. never known what it contained. My readers," concludes Baron Snorch, "may believe this or not, as they like, but I give them my word that it is true." I CANNOT resist appending to these anecdotes a charming little story from that well-known book, "Sorrows of a Queen." The writer, Lady de Weary, was an English gentlewoman who was for many years mistress of the robes at one of the bestknown German courts. Her affection for her royal mistress is evident on every page of her memoirs. Drawing by Birch "THE GOODNESS OF HER HEART BROKE FORTH'" pocket. We stared at him in amazement for a moment, and then the duke, with the wonderful ease of a trained diplomat, quietly resumed his play. "Two days afterward, meeting Count Cavour at a reception of the Empress Eugénie, I was able unobserved to whisper in his ear, 'What was in the telegram?' ""Nothing of consequence,' he answered. From that day to this I have TENDER- LADY DE WEARY writes: "My dear mistress, the late Queen of SaxeCovia-Slitzin - Mein, was of a most tender and sympathetic disposition. The goodness of her heart broke forth on all occasions. I well remember how one day, on seeing a cabman in the Poodel Platz kicking his horse in the stomach, she stopped in her walk and said: 'Oh, poor horse! If he goes on kicking it like that, he 'll hurt it.'" I MAY say in conclusion that I think, if people would only take a little more pains. to resuscitate anecdotes of this sort, there might be a lot more of them found. ONE OF OUR MORE PROVINCIAL CITIES IT sometimes seems as if the waves of One afternoon a visitor from Chicago was accompanied about the metropolis by one of these typical New-Yorkers. When they reached Chambers Street, they heard a rattle of horses' hoofs and a jingle of bells. The visitor looked up and beheld a horse-car passing under the new municipal building. It was on its way to the Grand Street ferry. The New Yorker failed to see the exquisite humor of it. A little later the visitor asked his friend where the children of the real, typical New-Yorkers played. He was directed to Gramercy Park. Arrived there early in the afternoon, he saw a park entirely surrounded by a high iron fence. The gates were locked. Outside the park two demure little children were patiently waiting until an old man came along and unlocked the gate of the park with his key. On the west side of the city the visitor was amazed to see, upon a populous avenue, a boy riding on a horse a little distance in front of a train of freight-cars. The boy waved a flag to warn pedestrians and vehicles of the approach of the cars. "What, is it always like this?" asked the visitor, amazed. "Oh, no," said the New-Yorker; "the boy does n't always wave a flag. At night he carries a lantern. For forty years they 've been talking of abolishing these trains." They went a little farther west. The visitor saw two elderly men making their way along a wharf to a Hudson River steamboat. One of the men said: "I always feel at home. on that boat. My father used to take me up the river on it when I was a boy." The visitor looked at the boat. It was the Mary Powell. The Chicagoan was studying a guidebook of the city. He was much perplexed. He turned to the New-Yorker. "Can you tell me about these places?" he asked. "It says here that they are all in New York City." "No," said the New-Yorker; "I never heard of one of them." Here are the names of the places: Foster's Meadows, Grassy Point, Ramblersville, Linoleumville, Goose Creek, Fresh Kills, Port Ivory, Tubby Hook, and 4 Throgg's Neck. The man went sadly wonderingly back to his hotel. Wrapped securely in his mantle of provincialism, serene, superior, and self-satisfied, the New-Yorker went hurrying on his way. THE SENIOR WRANGLER BRITISH WEEKLINESS I Do not deny that culture may exist outside the British weekly magazines, but I do maintain that nowhere outside their pages is culture so splendidly certain of itself. Take, for example, the matter of classical quotation. In our rude country, if a man has a bit of Latin left in him, it is wisest to keep it to himself, even though he burst with the guilty secret. It is not so in England. He can have it printed in a British weekly magazine. Any little keepsake from the ruins of a college education may there be displayed with joy and pride. Mr. Asquith's announcement on November 1 that the late Campbell-Bannerman had, at a cabinet meeting in 1892, been the only one to quote correctly a certain line from Juvenal moved a large number of cultivated persons. Gentlemen who had a scrap of Juvenal about them produced it at once. Gentlemen who had nothing of Juvenal produced a scrap of something else. Gentlemen with only a stray bit from the back part of the dictionary came forward with their little all. And they are still at it, though several months have slipped away, for I see in the very last issue of the London "Hortator" that some one in the West Riding of Yorkshire is being reminded of a line in Vergil, though unable to explain why. In view of the flippancy of American journalism, I feel it my duty to reproduce the spirit of this discussion, though I may not recall with complete accuracy the details. It began, I think, in the pages of the London "Bombardinian" with a letter from Sir Horton Bumpstead-Digg, who trusted it would not be out of place to remark here that several other lines of Juvenal were often misquoted. There was, for example, the glaring instance of pueris for puero. He had encountered this lamentable and vulgar error in quarters where one would least expect it. Then followed the Hon. G. HitcherlingBottomley in the London "Weekly Palladium," who, while not desiring to animadvert upon the scholarship of Sir Horton Bumpstead-Digg, for whom personally he had the highest esteem, felt constrained to disagree with him as to the source of the quotation. The signs all pointed, said he, not to the tenth satire, but to the sixth. Lines from the sixth satire, by the way, were shockingly misquoted. It seemed to him highly significant in this day of feminist agitation, with the subject of woman so much to the fore, that so few people could quote correctly Juvenal's famous tribute to early woman Sed potanda ferens infantibus ubera magnis Et saepe horridior glandem ructante marito lines so beautifully remembered in Wordsworth's familiar words— A perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort, and command. Meanwhile it had leaked out that the line quoted by Sir Campbell-Bannerman was a phrase almost as common as e pluribus unum, and that he had merely given the reading of one edition, and the rest of the cabinet of another, and that everybody was right, and nobody at all remarkable. But the writing of letters went straight on-letters from Classicus, Senex, Auditor Tantum, M.A. Oxon. and Verbum Sat, and others. Now, with the ins and outs of these deep matters I am not concerned, for in the decay of my Latin they are quite beyond me. That the affair has restored the confidence of well-bred Britons in their ruling class, whose prestige was shattered some months since, when the first lord of the admiralty accented Pyramus on the penult. I am concerned only with the manner of the participants. It is a mistake to suppose that these superb beings had any interest in the subject itself. Indeed, their Latin quotations usually applied to some quite different subject. It was, in fact, not a discussion at all. It was a demonstration in gentility. That is why I, as an American, was so much impressed. If there is to be found on this side of the ocean any such amount of classical information, it can never be imparted in quite this way. In America we have nothing in point of dignity to compare with the Englishmen who quote Latin in the British weeklies, except perhaps a few colored persons in high hats. |