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ents, tutors, and governesses of present and past generations, poor clergy from the towns, sisters of charity taking a summer holiday-nay, even guests of an humbler level still, respectable girls of the lower classes in need of rest and change who stayed free of all care under the charge of the "Mamselle." Every one was heartily welcome, each and all might take the part suited to them in the life of the Schloss, with its riding and driving, woodland picnics and tennis, and treats and entertainments for the benefit of the peasants of the estate.

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forests from which our forefathers Though the circle of the Von Steins and their friends and relations seemed simple and homely enough, it was a charmed ring, impossible for an outsider to penetrate. A certain Herr Krohn, a wealthy merchant, had bought a vacant castle in the neighborhood. Rumors of his wealth and the magnificent and luxurious manner he fitted up his new possession were heard with frank disapprobation by the old inhabitants, and his efforts to ingratiate himself entirely failed.

"One could see at a glance that he was not one of us," was the verdict. No more was required to condemn him utterly. No harsher words were applied to a certain authoress whose humorous comments on German manners and customs have amused many English readers.

"She is not one of us." That was enough.

As at Japenzin so it was at the other great country houses of the neighborhood, no less than eleven of which indeed belonged to Von Steins of varying degrees of relationship, and most of the others to their connections by marriage. Family feuds seemed unknown, and the most cordial intimacy prevailed as long as the state of the roads permitted. Ceremonious enter- It was noticeable that nearly all of tainments which began at five with a the Von Steins' circle spoke English heavy dinner and ended with supper excellently. It was fashionable to at eleven were few and far between; learn it and to express an admiration they only marked great occasions, such for English literature, not modern litas a birthday or a betrothal. But to erature, but for Carlyle, Tennyson, and drive many miles through the forest Scott, and, above all, for Shakespeare. to coffee and supper at some interest- With this admiration for many things ing old castle was far pleasanter-the English was joined a deep hatred of wild charm and exquisite beauty of England, a hatred well concealed at those forests grew upon one daily. first by courtesy, but which revealed The deep, lonely, winding tracks itself on closer knowledge and frank through the heart of the woods, and exchange of opinion. "Schlau" was then the sudden sight at a break in the best word they could apply to Engthe tree-trunks of some little tiny high- land's foreign policy-"schlau" which walled town set solitary in the wide means not only "sly," but gives the plain with tall picturesque brick gate- idea of a malicious slyness. The most ways curiously fortified-"to keep the astounding ignorance prevailed of EngVon Steins out" would say the Gräfin lish motives and of English national laughing-such a glimpse carried one character, and that with intelligent back to the middle ages in a moment. and well-educated people. The stupidEven pleasanter too than the simple, est calumnies were believed and rekindly cheerful hospitality of the peated-one heard them on every side neighboring houses was the drive back and struggled in vain to refute them. to Japenzin through the enchantment Yet with striking magnanimity, those of the moonlit forests at night-those who repeated these calumnies always

forebore to blame the individual for the nation's sins-an attitude which often exasperated me beyond measure. If even educated and cultivated people could credit such falsehoods there is no doubt that to the lower orders a conflict with England would bear something of the character of a holy war. In truth, in these "Junker" circles such a popular war would be very welcome."

The younger sons of each family enter the army as a matter of course, since a great "Landgut" may not be divided, but must pass intact to the eldest son; and small though their pay is from an English point of view, those outside the charmed circle are beginning to grumble at the cost of so many idle officers. The great Pomeranian landowners, the traditional and faithful adherents of the Emperor and his family, have hitherto escaped a heavy burden of taxation; but the Imperial Chancellor, at his wits' end for money, has made a step towards robbing their rich hen-roosts. For a moment the danger has been averted, but it remains a danger-and in a successful war the indemnity extracted from the conquered country might be sufficient to render such taxation needless for another half-century. Also the increase of German trade upon the destruction of British industries would pacify the heavily taxed commercial classes, who now regard the pampered landowners with greedy unfriendly eyes. The war, too, would prove once more that the loyalty and devotion of the "Junker" classes were indispensable to their Emperor and therefore to the Fatherland.

"In peace our Socialists make a stupid noise," said Graf Von Stein. "In war they would sing a different tune."

The National Review.

Undoubtedly the enthusiasm which the conquest of the air by Count Zeppelin's airship awoke in Pomeranian castles had this hatred of England lurking at its back. The Count, an old man who had labored for long years perfecting his invention in the teeth of disappointment and discouragement, at first met with general disbelief. Even the Emperor was reported to have said laughingly, when a young Von Zeppelin was presented to him: "Take care you do not try to build an airship."

With the successful flight of the Count's airship all this was changed, and its destruction after the first trip caused a passion of grief throughout Pomerania; even the little peasant children in the schools contributed their pennies, and the national fund for its reconstruction swelled to proportions in a few days. England, in spite of every effort, was still mistress of the waves, but now the fascinating project of an aerial invasion became within the bounds of possibility.

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"We are always learning how best to invade you," laughed Otto, a cadet of the house at a military college, "but till now we must wait, because we have not as many ships as you have. Now I hope that we shall soon fly over to attack you!" And though Otto's prediction was, perhaps, a little over-sanguine, there is no doubt it reflected truthfully the aspiration of every Pomeranian "Junker."

The unfortunate and ill-grounded prejudice against the English nation was the one blot upon the record of my Pomeranian summer. For the rest it remains with me an experience of unalloyed pleasure, a memory of hospitality and kindness.

Dorothy Amphlett.

BUTTERFLIES.

The ordinary person is not disposed to take the butterfly seriously. We do not even take the trouble to keep its name pure, for one day no doubt it was boffle or baffle or bother fly, a flyer that seems to have no definite aim, but is blown hither and thither, much as a dead leaf is baffled by the wind. If that is the origin of the name, it is so thoroughly lost that now no dictionary even mentions it. So much does the insect resemble a caterpillar with wings that the ancients decided that first came the butterfly, which then shed its wings and became a caterpillar. The ancients made ludicrous mistakes about other creatures, but none quite so contemptuous as this. There are, we know, butterflies with character-peacocks that will come again and again to the flower we would drive them from, emperors that guard the upper regions of air like eagles, Camberwell beauties that wrestle on high like gladiators, and sweep from point to point without a superfluous wing-stroke. But they always astonish us as abnormalities. They do not suffice to alter our opinion of the average butterfly as a senseless, meandering, scarcely self-conscious thing.

The painted butterfly! Far less often do we speak of the painted bird. The butterfly, we imagine, is thought to have "just growed" painted, as Topsy falsely alleged was the fact concerning herself. He is a bold man who will maintain that the beauty of the butterfly is the result of infinite selection on the part of the wooers and the wooed. On the other hand, except in a few, though well-known, instances their gaudy colors cannot be attributed to natural selection because they are not founded on utility. Natural selection has determined the shape and color of

many remarkably inconspicuous caterpillars and has taught the butterfly to keep its bright colors on one side of the wing, its neutral tints and leaf-like markings on the other. But has it made some butterflies bright blue, some yellow, some coppery red, some white, others black, and many brilliantly chequered?

A caterpillar common on stinging nettles just now is an indistinct mottle of yellowish brown and black, and is covered with make-believe prickles almost as deterrent as the stings of its food-plant. In a week, it will throw off its prickly armor and become a soft green, legless creature, no longer with the constitution of a caterpillar, every particle and atom, as well as every cell, in a state of flux resembling annihilation. Then the material of the disintegrated caterpillar re-crystallizes into a radically different being-no grub, but a flying rainbow, every grain of murky color changed for a radiant jewel, the soft trash of the skinned caterpillar moulded into new and more wonderful hairs, armor, a coiled trunk that is a marvel of construction, two great eyes, each composed of thousands of facets.

We all change, of course. Every cell in the human body will have been changed for another cell within a certain number of years. But that is nothing comparable with the changing of every cell simultaneously into something as widely different as the mandible of a caterpillar and the proboscis of a butterfly. Memory, as we conceive it, would be powerless to bridge such a revolution as that. Has the butterfly, then, forgotten that it was ever a caterpillar? Of course. Then how is it that, having sated its new-found appetite for nectar, the most delicate product of nature's alchemy, it repairs

to the nectarless, repellant nettle, and there lays the eggs that shall become other caterpillars of its kind? And how, if it happens to be of so slightly varied a coloring that none but a trained naturalist can formulate the difference, it takes its eggs not to the nettle but to the elm?

These and other biological problems are too heavy for the hot summer days when the butterflies are gambolling. In the wood the fritillaries tower upward, gyrating till three of them seem to be certainly four, while four fill the whole sky with revolving pearl and amber. On the hillside, where blueand-purple viper's bugloss is beginning to blossom, still bluer and still more purple butterflies open and tumble, then close and become triangles of silver exquisitely pencilled with tiny circles in many quiet colors. The meadow browns display rosy cheeks on their wings, with sparkling eyes set therein that we can never persuade ourselves cannot see us as we creep up to them. How many butterflies there are in our short British list whose color has run to eyes. The peacock that has them in the same brilliant design as the bird, his namesake, is perhaps the most remarkable, while his congeners, the tortoiseshells, the red admiral and others, seem to have been interrupted when they had no more than sketched out the same adornment. Then the wood argus, the wall, the large and small heaths, the yellows, the whites, the swallow-tail, some more and some less, are also marked with sham eyes. Perhaps this is the one useful marking that natural selection has fixed upon in the case of the butterflies. Nothing is more disconcerting to a bird, for example, than to see an eye suddenly glaring from an unexpected place. The boldest bird hesitates long before it will go to its nest under the stare of a photographic lens. Possibly the same bird would flee in dismay should

a contemplated morsel open two shining eyes, even at the corners of its wings. One or two of the moths have eyes also, but usually, like the eyed hawk, on the hind wings. Defenceless caterpillardom may sometimes be saved by the same device. Our favorite of all these grubs is that of the puss moth, and we think that nothing in its triple armory of terrifying appearance is so powerful as the two spots above its red-bordered face, that look just like very malignant eyes.

Their threat of unknown, unlimited hurt is well given in the painting of the species in Miss Janet Harvey Kelman's "Butterflies and Moths Shown to the Children," just issued by Messrs. Jack. We have seen very respectable rings of rustics and people of greater book learning drawn around a puss moth caterpillar that may have fallen in autumn from some poplar tree. The adventurous stranger who takes it up drops its hurriedly when it turns those sightless eyes towards him and shoots out from its twin tails long red threads that might hold all the poison of snakedom.

But the butterfly is entirely delightful. It has no need of safety other than its wings. The "eye" of a meadow brown has no terrors, at any rate for the child, and causes no anxiety but lest it should see the captor approaching and convey the prize out of reach. The chase of the butterfly is a rural pursuit that never palls, though its excitements are far outdone when some forlorn cabbage white strays from Covent Garden market into the dim courts of Drury Lane. Then is every small bonnet doffed, thin legs are agitated, feeble lungs raise the view halloo, and the hunt goes streaming down the street headed by the flapping, bothering fly that, seeming to be quite unaware of its danger, yet manages to top some wall just before the leading huntsman would grab it.

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THE GERMAN CHANCELLOR'S SHADE.

History is repeating itself in Germany. When Count Posadowsky was dismissed from the Ministry of the Interior through the Conservative objection to his Liberal tendencies, it was Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg who took his place; and now again Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg is chosen to succeed a Chancellor for whose retirement the Conservatives are primarily responsible. The German Constitution expressly denies the responsibility of Ministers to Parliament. A Chancellor remains in office so long as he retains the confidence of the Emperor. It was because of the withdrawal of the imperial confidence that Prince Bismarck laid down his office, and the same official explanation was given of the resignations of Count Caprivi and Prince Hohenlohe. But in the case of Prince Bülow there is not the least pretence of imperial dissatisfaction. On the contrary, it is common knowledge that the Emperor was extremely loth to part with him, and that the present change has been brought about by the majority in the Reichstag. The new Chancellor is a man whose past is sure evidence of his willingness to serve a party. He is in fact a constitutional Minister, and the whole course of his future conduct will be pro

foundly affected by the circumstances of his appointment. Never has Germany known so paradoxical a political situation. The Conservative Junkers. are notoriously of absolutist views. They are true to the traditions of Frederick the Great; they detest the new-fangled notions of parliamentarianism and democracy which the French Revolution brought into Germany; they grumbled at the constitutional position which Prince Bülow took up in the critical days of last November; and now they find themselves hailed by the less myopic organs of German Liberalism as the pioneers of constitutional progress! Times have indeed changed since Bismarck was dismissed not twenty years ago.

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Rapid as this development has been, it is in no way surprising. The GerConstitution is not yet forty years old, but for the first half of its short life it was worked by its author and meant exactly what he chose it to mean. During these important years Germany was acquiring a political selfconsciousness which was bound to assert itself when once the controlling hand was removed. Moreover, the new arrangement contained from the first elements of instability which are now becoming apparent. In making

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