days, and that's the fatal point. Courage, my poor nephew; you must make an assignment. As soon as your clerks are gone to bed, Popinot and I will set to work together, in order to spare you the affliction."

"Uncle!" said the perfumer, clasping his hands.

"César, would you prefer to wait and then make a disgraceful assignment, with nothing to assign? At present your interest in Popinot's house preserves your honor.”

(( César, enlightened by this last fatal flash of light, at length saw the frightful truth in its full extent; he fell back in his chair, then dropped upon his knees, his mind wandered and he became childish: his wife thought he was dying and stooped down to raise him up; but she united with him when she saw him join his hands, raise his eyes and repeat, with all the compunction of resignation, in presence of his uncle, his daughter and Popinot, the Lord's sublime prayer :

"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name : thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Amen."

Tears rose to the eyes of the stoical Pillerault, and Césarine, weeping and overwhelmed, leaned her head upon the shoulder of Popinot, who was as pale and stark as a

statue.

"Let us go down stairs," said the ironmonger to the young man, as he took his arm.

X. B. SAINTINE.

PICCIOLA has preserved the name of Saintine. It is a sentimental story of a noble Italian prisoner who was consoled by the growth of a flowering plant between the stones of the courtyard adjoining his cell. The story introduces other characters, and even Napoleon and Josephine, and ends happily in the release and marriage of the prisoner. Xavier Boniface Saintine was born in Paris in 1790, and died in 1845. He published dramas, poems and romances, which have fallen into oblivion, but his tale of prison-life, though

somewhat artificial in plot, and affected in style, has enough of natural feeling to deserve remembrance.

PICCIOLA.

IN the story of "Picciola" Count Charney, an Italian scientist, was charged with plotting against Napoleon's government, and was imprisoned at Fenestrella. He was allowed no books, pens or paper. But his solitude was relieved by the sprouting of a plant between the stones of the courtyard. He watched over it with great tenderness, and gave it the name Picciola, "the little one." In his day-dreams it seemed to assume a human personality.

One evening, while the Count was in the midst of a flight of fancy, Picciola for the first time dispelled the charm of happiness and serenity by the exercise of a sinister influence. At a later moment he recurred to the event as the effect of a fatal presentiment!

It was just as the fragrance of the plant indicated the sixth hour of evening, and Charney was musing at his accustomed post. Never had that aromatic vapor exercised its powers more potently; for more than thirty full-blown flowers were emitting the magnetic atmosphere, so influential over the senses of the Count. He fancied himself surrounded once more by the crowds of society; having drawn aside from which, towards an esplanade of verdure, his beloved Picciola deigned to follow his footsteps. The graceful phantom advanced smiling towards him, and Charney, in a musing attitude, stood admiring the supple grace of the young girl, around whose well-turned form the drapery of her snow-white dress played in harmonious folds, and her raven tresses, amid which bloomed the never-absent flower! On a sudden he saw her start, stagger, and extend her arms towards him. He tried to rush towards her; but an insurmountable obstacle seemed to separate him from her side. A cry of horror instantly escaped his lips, and lo! the vision disappears! He wakes, but it is to hear a second cry, respondent to his own; yes, the cry, the voice of a woman!

Nevertheless, the Count is still in his usual place—in the old court, and reclining on the rustic bench beside his Picciola! But at the grating of the little window appeared the

momentary glimpse of a female form! A soft and melancholy countenance, half hid in shade, seems gazing upon him; but when, rising from his seat, he hastens towards it, the vision vanishes, or rather the young girl hastens from the window. However swift her disappearance, Charney was able to distinguish her features, her hair, her form, the whiteness of her robe. He paused. Is he asleep or waking? Can it be that the insurmountable obstacle which divides him from Picciola is no other than the grating of a prison?

At that moment Ludovico hastens towards him with an air of consternation.

"Are you again indisposed, Signor Conte?" cried the gaoler. "Have you had another attack of your old disorder? Trondidio! If we are obliged, for form's sake, to send for the prison doctor, I'll take care, this time, that no one but Madame Picciola and myself have a hand in the cure!"

"I am perfectly well,” replied Charney, trying to recover his composure. "What put it into your head that I was indisposed?"

"The fly-catcher's daughter came in search of me. She saw you stagger, and hearing you cry aloud, fancied you were in need of assistance."

The Count relapsed into a fit of musing. It seemed to occur to him, for the first time, that a young girl occasionally inhabited that part of the prison.

"The resemblance I fancied I could discover between the stranger and Picciola is doubtless a new delusion!" said he to himself. And now he recalled to mind Teresa's interest in his favor, mentioned to him by the venerable Girardi. The young Piedmontese had compassionated his condition. during his illness. To her he is indebted for the possession of his microscope. His heart becomes suddenly touched with gratitude, and, in the first effusion, a sudden remark seems to sever the double image, the young girl of his dreams from the young girl of his waking hours; "Girardi's daughter wore no flower in her hair."

That moment, but not without hesitation, not without self-reproach, he plucked with a trembling hand from his plant a small branch covered with blossoms.

When facing the Blossomed bongh in the hands of the Kries, * Present these in my name to the tangiter of my venerable selgiben god Lederics.said be Thank her to the generons interest sie rondinsales me: and tell her that the Corat de Charney, poon, and a priscoen, has nothing to chea hea more wonky her acceptance."

Inforñion received the token with an air of stupefaction. He had begin to enter so completely into the passion of the captive for his plant, that he could not conjecture by what services the daughter of the fy-catcher had merited so distinquished a mark of munificence.

"No matter! Capo di San Pasquali!” exclaimed Ludovico, as he passed the postern. "They have long admired my god-daughter at a distance. Let us see what they will say to the brightness of her complexion, and sweetness of her breath, on a nearer acquaintance, Piccioletta mia, andiamo!"

THEOPHILE GAUTIER.

THE arch-apostle of art for art's sake is Théophile Gautier (1808-72). He deserted the artist's brush and easel for the poet's and romancer's pen, and he has painted more superb pictures and achieved more splendid artistic effects with the pen than he ever could have done with the brush. His aesthetic craving was a life passion: he thirsted for beauty, and he found it everywhere-in the little as well as the grand. "Emaux et Camées" (Enamels and Cameos) he entitled his first book of poems, and they are truly cold, polished gems of

art in miniature. But in his description of Cleopatra's banquet (in “One of Cleopatra's Nights") he bewilders us with the grandeur of his imaginative vision, with the breadth of his canvas. Like the twin spires of the Cologne Cathedral, his descriptions are grand in conception, yet finished in detail. Indeed, Gautier revelled too much in details: it is his artistic fault. He forgets himself in the presence of any object of artistic delight, and lingers elaborately over every incidental feature. His "Mademoiselle du Maupin," which Swinburne calls "The Golden Book of spirit and sense-the Holy Writ of Beauty," might seem to a less impassioned critic a prolix celebration of the sensual aspect of love and female loveliness. Still, when he sets out to tell a weird or a dramatic tale, his success is admirable. The wild, midnight ride on the dark steeds to Clarimonde's castle in "La Morte Amoureuse," is a striking example of his fervor; for cold though he is in his poems, Gautier is tropically warm in many of his shorter tales. And he has always a firm touch; as SainteBeuve said, he "carves in granite,”—he might have said, in marble and gold.

Gautier first became conspicuous by wearing a red waistcoat on the first night of Victor Hugo's "Hernani." A Gascon born, he was nothing if not flamboyant. But a secretaryship under Balzac tamed a little the fiery author of the "History of Romanticism," though he remained to the last the prince of pictorial and plastic poetry and prose. Sainte-Beuve called his prose "pure Lacrima-Christi.” "Mademoiselle du Maupin" is a licentious tale of a masquerading Rosalind without Rosalind's chastity, in which Gautier openly defied the conventionalities. His "Captain Fracasse" is a romantic varia tion on the theme of the strolling players of Scarron's coarse "Roman Comique;" it transports us by vivid art to the times of Louis XIII., and cloak and sword are concerned in it as well as mask and buskin. The great description of the book is that of the ruined Chateau de la Misère. Of his short tales the masterpiece is, no doubt, "La Morte Amoureuse" (The Dead Leman), in which the mediæval incubus legend is utilized in the dream-life of love which a young priest lives with a beautiful vampire. Phantom love is the theme of