"Oh," replies the sly hypocrite, "because you gwine hang me and not trow me

in de brier-bush."

"What for I mustn't trow you in de brier-bush?" inquires Mr. Simpleton

Wolf.

"Oh," prays Buh Rabbit with a doleful whimper, "please hang me: please trow

me in de water or trow me in de fire, where I die at once. But don't--oh

don't--trow me in de brier-bush to tear my poor flesh from off my bones."

"I gwine to do 'zactly wah you ax me not to do," returns Wolf in savage

tone. Then, going to a neighboring patch of thick, strong briers, he

pitches Buh Rabbit headlong in the midst, and says, "Now let's see de flesh

come off de bones."

No sooner, however, does the struggling and protesting Buh Rabbit find

himself among the briers than he slides gently to the ground, and peeping

at his would-be torturer from a safe place behind the stems, he says,

"Tankee, Buh Wolf--a tousand tankee--for _bring me home_! De brier-bush _de

berry place where I been born_."

Another favorite story is that of the "Foot-Race." Buh Rabbit and Buh Frog

are admirers of the beautiful Miss Dinah, and try their best to win her.

The lady likes them both, but not being permitted to marry both, she

resolves to make her choice depend upon the result of a foot-race. The

distance is to be ten miles--that is, five miles out and five miles

in--along a level road densely bordered with bushes. The day arrives. Miss

Dinah, seated at the starting-point, is to give the word to the rivals, who

stand one on either side, and the goal for the winner is to be a place _in

her lap_. By agreement, Buh Rabbit is to take the open road, and Buh Frog,

who prefers it, is allowed to leap through the bushes, and both are to

halloo to each other at the end of every mile. Buh Rabbit, however, with

all his cunning, has this time met his match; for Buh Frog has engaged five

of his kinsmen, so nearly like himself in appearance that they cannot be

distinguished from him, and has stationed one in concealment near each

mile-post, with instructions how to act, while he has provided for himself

a nice hiding-place in the bushes near Miss Dinah's seat. At the word Go!

the rivals start, Buh Frog leaping into the bushes, where he disappears,

and Buh Rabbit capering along the road and flaunting his white tail merrily

at the thought of distancing the other so far that he shall never see or

hear of him again till after Miss Dinah has been won. At the end of the

first mile Buh Rabbit turns his head back and tauntingly halloos, "I here,

Buh Frog! How you git 'long?"

To his dismay, however, he hears the voice of the other in the bushes ahead

of him singing out, "Boo-noo! I here too! I beat you here, I'll beat you

there: I'll beat you back to Miss Dinah's lap!"

On hearing this boast repeated ahead of him in the bushes at each

mile-post, Buh Rabbit becomes frantic, and rushes through the last mile as

he had never run before. But all in vain. Just as he comes within easy view

of the coveted goal he sees Buh Frog leap from the bushes plump into Miss

Dinah's lap, and hears him sing, with as good breath as though he had not

run a mile,

"Boo-noo! Before you!

I beat you there, I beat you here:

I've beat you back to Miss Dinah's lap!"

Another version makes the competitors Buh Deer and Buh Cooter (the negro

name for terrapin or land-tortoise), in which Buh Cooter wins the day by

collusion with some of his closely-resembling kin. Substantially the same

story is to be heard from the natives of each of the four continents, but

whether the African gained his idea of it from Europe or Asia, or whether

the European or Asian gained it from Africa, is perhaps past determining.

The writer can testify that the story as above narrated, or rather the

substance of it, was told him in childhood by negroes supposed to have

obtained it direct from Africa.

Some of these stories are mere laudations of Buh Rabbit's shrewdness and

common sense. Buh Wolf has long had a watering of the mouth for

rabbit-flesh, but has never been able to gratify it. He finally hits upon

the following expedient: He causes a report to be spread that he has

suddenly died, and all his neighbors, especially Buh Rabbit, are invited to

his funeral. He has no doubt that his plump, short-tailed neighbor, being

once enclosed within the walls of his house, will fall an easy prey to

himself and his attending cousins. Buh Rabbit, however, is not to be easily

ensnared. He goes demurely to the house of mourning, but does not enter. He

seats himself on the steps by the side of Buh Cat, who is enjoying the

sunshine in the doorway.

"Is Buh Wolf dead, for true and true?" he inquires.

"I suppose so. Eberybody say he dead," answers Buh Cat.

"How did he die, and when?" he continues to inquire.

Buh Cat gives the particulars as reported to him, and Buh Rabbit pretends

to receive them with all faith, expressing great sorrow for the loss

experienced by the neighborhood. But after a little musing he seems to be

struck with a new idea, and turning to Buh Cat he inquires in hopeful tone,

"But did he _grin_ or _whistle_ before he died? People who die _must_ do

one or t'other; and some, who die hard, do both. I'm a doctor, you know."

This is said in the doorway, near the stiff-looking corpse, and in a

whisper loud enough to be heard all through the room. Very soon Buh Wolf is

heard to whistle, and then his lips settle into a grin so broad as to show

his teeth.

"Buh Cat," says Buh Rabbit, putting his hand on his stomach and screwing up

his face as if seized with mortal sickness, "I mus' hurry home and take

some yarb tea, or mebbe I'll have to grin and whistle like our poor

neighbor. Good-bye, Buh Cat. Come to me, please, after Buh Wolf done berry

and tell me all about it. Good-bye."

To the surprise of all who are not in the secret, the corpse gives a loud

sneeze, then leaps from the table, throws off his "berryin' clothes," and

joins his friends in eating heartily of his own funeral dinner.

His hankering, however, for rabbit-mutton still continues, and he resolves,

notwithstanding his recent inglorious defeat, to attempt again to gratify

it. With this end in view he makes frequent visits to his neighbor and

talks with him across the fence, but is never invited beyond. One day, in

the course of conversation, he informs him that there is a fine pear tree

on the other side of a neighboring field, loaded with luscious fruit just

in condition to be gathered.

"I will go get some."

"When?"

"To-morrow, when the sun is about halfway up the sky."

"Go: I will join you there."

Buh Rabbit rises very early, goes to the tree soon after daybreak, finds

the pears uncommonly good, and is laughing to himself to think how he has

outwitted his enemy, when he hears a voice under the tree: "Ho, Mr. Rabbit!

in the tree a'ready?"

"Yes," replies Buh Rabbit, trembling at the sight of his dreaded foe: "I

wait for you, and tink you nebber gwine come. I tell you w'at," smacking

his lips, "dem here pear too good."

"Can't you trow me down some?" inquires Buh Wolf, so strongly impressed by

the sound of that eloquent smack that he longs to get a taste of the fruit.

Buh Rabbit selects some of the finest, which he throws far off in the soft

grass, in order, he says, to avoid bruising, and while Buh Wolf is engaged

in eating them, with his head buried in the grass, Buh Rabbit slides

quietly from the tree and hurries home.

A few days thereafter Buh Wolf makes still another attempt. He pays a visit

as before, and speaks of a great fair to be held next day in a neighboring

town. "I am going," says the rash Buh Rabbit; and he does go, although we

might suppose that he would have sense enough to keep out of harm's way. On

returning home, late in the day, he sees Buh Wolf sitting on a log by the

roadside, at the bottom of a hill, waiting for him. His preparations for

escape have already been made in the purchase of a quantity of hollow

tinware. Slipping quietly into the bushes, without being seen by the

waylayer, he puts a big tin mug on his head and a tin cup on each hand and

foot, and, hanging various tin articles around his body, he comes rolling

down the hill toward Buh Wolf, who is so frightened at the unearthly noise

that he runs off with his tail between his legs, and never troubles Buh

Rabbit again.

The struggle between them, however, does not cease even with this triumph

of the weaker party. There is a contest now of love and strategem. They

both pay their addresses to the same young lady, making their visits to her

on alternate evenings. In the progress of the courtship Buh Rabbit learns

that his rival has spoken of him contemptuously, saying that he is very

dressy and foppish, it is true, but that he has no manliness; adding that

he (Buh Wolf) could eat him up at a mouthful. To this Buh Rabbit retorts

the next evening by assuring Miss Dinah that Buh Wolf was nothing but his

grandfather's old _riding horse_; adding, "I ride him, and whip him too,

whenever I choose, and he obeys me like a dog." The next afternoon Buh

Rabbit tempts his unsuspecting rival to join him in the play of riding

horse, which consists in each in turn mounting the other's back and riding

for a while. Buh Rabbit, who has thought out the whole case beforehand,

offers to give the first ride, and so times it that the ride ends at his

own door about the time for the usual visit to Miss Dinah. He runs into the

house and puts on his dandy clothes, pleading that he cannot enjoy a ride

unless he is in full dress; and pleading, moreover, that he cannot ride

without saddle and bridle and all that belongs to a horseman, he persuades

Mr. Fool Wolf to allow a strong, rough bit to be put into his mouth and a

close-fitting saddle to be girded to his back, upon which Buh Rabbit

mounts, holding in his hand a terrible whip and having his heels armed with

a pair of long sharp spurs. Thus accoutred, he prevails upon Buh Wolf to

take the road toward Miss Dinah's house, on approaching which he so

vigorously applies both whip and spur as to compel his resisting steed to

trot up to the door, where Buh Rabbit bows politely to his lady-love,

saying, "I told you so: now you see for yourself." Of course he wins the

bride.

There is a class of stories approaching somewhat in character those related

of our own Jack the Giant-killer, leaving out the giants. The one given

below seems to have a common origin with the Anglo-Saxon story of the

"Three Blue Pigs." This is entitled "Tiny Pig."

A family of seven pigs leave home to seek their fortunes, and settle in a

neighborhood harassed by a mischievous fox. Each of these pigs builds

himself a house of dirt, except Tiny Pig, who, though the runt of the

litter, is a sensible little fellow and the hero of the tale. He builds his

house of stone, with good strong doors and a substantial chimney. In due

course of time, Fox, being hungry, comes to the house of one of the

brothers, and asks to be admitted, but is refused. The request and refusal,

as told by the negroes, is couched in language which is intended to be

poetical, and is certainly not without some pretension to the picturesque.

Fox's request in each case is--

"Mr. Pig, Mr. Pig, oh let me in:

I'll go away soon, and not touch a thing."

And the refusal is--

"No, no, Mr. Fox, by the beard on my chin!

You may say what you will, but I'll not let you in."

On being refused, Fox threatens to _blow down_ the house and eat up the

occupant. Pig continuing to refuse--as what pig would not?--the house is

blown down and the owner eaten up. This sad fate befalls in turn each of

the six who had been so foolish or so lazy as to build their houses of

dirt. Fox, having finished all six, and becoming again hungry, comes at

last to the stone house, where he makes the same hypocritical request, and

meets the same heroic refusal. He now threatens to blow down the house.

"Blow away and welcome!" retorts the little hero. Fox blows "until his wind

gives out," but cannot move the first stone. He then tries scratching and

tearing with his paws, but only succeeds in tearing off two of his own

toe-nails. "I will come down your chimney," he threatens, leaping as he

says so to the roof of the house. "Come soon as you please," sturdily

replies Tiny Pig, standing before his fireplace with a big armful of dry

straw ready to be thrown upon the fire. As soon as Fox has entered the

chimney, and come down too far to return quickly, Tiny Pig throws the dry

straw upon the fire, which creates such a blaze that Fox is scorched and

smoked to death, and Tiny Pig lives the rest of his life in peace, the hero

of his neighborhood.

This story certainly furnishes foundation for a moral which we will leave

the reader to construct for himself, remarking as we pass that, so far as

we know, no moral has ever been drawn. Several other stories may be

regarded as inculcating, though feebly, some moral precept.

One of these bears some features of American negro life, grafted probably

upon African stock: The denizens of a certain farmyard--ducks, geese,

turkeys, pea-fowls, guinea-fowls, hens, roosters and all--were invited by

those of another farmyard to a supper and a dance. They all went as a

matter of course, headed by the big farmyard rooster, who strutted and

crowed as he marched. They were a merry set, and such an amount of

quacking, cackling and gabbling as they made was seldom heard. After a few

rounds of dancing, just to give them a better appetite for supper and fit

them for a longer dance afterward, they were introduced to the supper-room.

There they saw on the table a pyramid of eatables high as the old gobbler's

head when stretched to its utmost; but, alas! it was, or seemed to be, a

pyramid of _corn bread_ only--pones upon pones of it, yet nothing but corn

bread.

On seeing this the rooster becomes very indignant, and struts out of the

house, declaring that he will have nothing to do with so mean a supper, for

he can get corn bread enough at home. As he is angrily going off, however,

the others, who are too hungry to disdain even the plainest fare, fall to

work; and no sooner has the outer layer of corn loaves been removed--for it

is only the outer layer--than they find within a huge pile of bacon and

greens, and at the bottom of the pile, covered and protected by large

dishes, any amount of pies and tarts and cakes and other good things.

Poor Rooster looks wistfully back, and is sorry that he had made that rash

speech. But it is too late now, for his word is out, and no one ever knew

Rooster take back his word if he had to die for it. He learned, however, a

valuable lesson that night, for from that time to this it has been observed

that Rooster always _scratches_ with his feet the place where he finds, or

expects to find, anything to eat, and that he never leaves off scratching

until he has searched to the bottom.

Our last story is more purely African, at least in its _dramatis personae_.

Buh Elephant and Buh Lion were one day chatting upon various subjects, when

the elephant took occasion to say that he was afraid of no being on earth

except man. On seeing the big boastful eyes of the lion stretching wider

and his mane bristling, as if in disdain, he added, "You know, Buh Lion,

that, although you are held as the most to be dreaded of all beasts, I am

not afraid of any of your tribe, for if any of them should attack me I

could receive him on my tusk, or strike him dead with my trunk, or even

shake him off from my body and then trample him to death under my feet. But

man--who can kill us from a distance with his guns and arrows, who can set

traps for us of which we have no suspicion, who can fight us from the backs

of horses so swift that we can neither overtake him nor escape from him--I

do fear, for neither strength nor courage can avail against his wisdom."

Buh Lion, on hearing this, shook himself, and said that he was no more

afraid of man than he was of any other creature which he was in the habit

of eating; and added that the only beings on earth he was afraid of were

_partridges_.

"Partridges!" exclaims Buh Elephant in wonder. "What do you mean?"

"Why this," says Buh Lion, "that when I am walking softly through the woods

I sometimes rouse a covey of partridges, and then they rise all around me

with such a whir as to make me start. I am afraid of nothing but

partridges."

Not long afterward Buh Elephant heard a gun fired near a neighboring

village, followed by a loud, prolonged roar. Going there to learn what was

the matter, he saw Buh Lion lying dead by the roadside with a great hole in

his body made by a musket-ball. "Ah, my poor friend," said he, "partridges

could never have treated you in this way."

WILLIAM OWENS.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] Of the terrible forms of superstition prevalent under the names of Obi,

Voodooism, Evil-eye or Tricking, in which a trick-doctor or witch-doctor

works against another person's life or health or plans, or seeks to

neutralize the influence of another doctor, our subject leads us to say

nothing.

SELIM.

Surrender your soul to the spell of enchantment,

And wander with me

Where, river of magical fancies, Euphrates

Flows down to the sea.

What city sleeps fair and mysterious by moonlight

Upon the dark shore?

Oh, those are the minarets gleaming of Basrah

That heavenward soar.

And bright are her flower-lit gardens, whose fountains

Unceasingly rise,

Where oft, when the locust grew shrill and the summer

Shone red in the skies,

The caliph would hasten from camp and from council

To rest and to dream.

To forge, in the workshop of silence, such weapons

As deadliest gleam.

And with him came Selim, the friend of his spirit--

Friend favored and true--

Whose palace of marble Euphrates encircled

With girdle of blue.

There oft by the murmuring waters the caliph

Would calmly recline,

And mark how the stars on that earth-sullied bosom

Seemed trembling to shine,

Until, as one evening the moon rose serenely,

Fair pearl of the sky,

And filled with her presence the palace and desert,

The far and the nigh,

A trouble which hung On the aspect of Selim

Fell dark on his king,

As clouds 'twixt the sun and the sand-billowed ocean

Their dusky shapes fling.

"O friend of my heart!" quoth the caliph, "what sorrow

Lies deep in thy breast?"

And Selim, replying, the source of his anguish

Thus humbly confessed:

"Great lord of my being! life trembles and quivers

With fulness of joy:

The rays of my hopes are as gold in my pathway,

Undimmed by alloy;

"Thy banners float far on the breezes of India,

Thy counsels are wise;

The thoughts of thy valor and strength to thy people

As light to their eyes;

"Yet still, in the midst of thy glory and power,

Thou deignest to rest

Thy soul on the soul of thy servant, whom daily

Thy favors have blest,

"Till he who once couched on his sheepskin reposes

On cushions of down,

And holds a fair wife in his arms who had only

A steed for his own.

"Thus over the heaven thy grace has illumined

No shadow appears,

Save one, at whose coming thy servant unworthy

Shrinks, falters and fears--

"The shadow of Azrael, angel of terror,

Surpassingly strong,

The roar of whose onrushing wings soundeth louder

Than laughter or song;

"Till I, even I, from the conflict of battle,

The scimitar's sweep,

Turn cowering, fearful of glory's last service

And manhood's best sleep.

"Behold! now the heart of thy servant is open,

And bare to thy view."

Then slowly the caliph replied, while his gaze sought

The firmament blue:

"Dread Prophet of Allah! thou knowest my spirit,

My heart and my life;

Thou knowest the desolate years of my manhood,

Their unended strife;

"Thou knowest that never a friend have I cherished

Save only this one,

And now I have lost him; but, Allah il Allah!

Thy will still be done!"

Then, turning, the caliph departed, and Selim,

Like one drunk with wine,

Arose all unconscious and turned to his dwelling,

His heart's inmost shrine,

And followed the gleam of his lamp to the chamber

Where, sheltered and calm,

She peacefully slumbered who faithfully loved him--

That wild heart's "sweet balm."

One arm half encircled her baby, who sturdily

Clenched his round fist,

And lay with his rosy lips parted and eager,

As though lately kissed;

While over them both her soft tresses, all fragrant,

Had rolled in their play:

How fair and how childish they looked in the moonlight,

Scarce purer than they!

One moment stood Selim, while over his being

Hell's bitterness passed:

The next, and his dagger flashed forth like the lightning,

And fell like its blast.

And Selim was wifeless and childless! In silence

He stood by the bed

Where still lay the wife and the child in the moonlight--

Not sleeping, but dead.

One moment he gazed at the faces, still peaceful,

Still tender, still fair,

Then fled to the desert, whose vastness could only

Give space to despair.

But when, in the red eastern morning, the caliph

Stood sternly alone,

And watched the proud river, now mournful for ever

For all that was gone,

Lo! Selim knelt calmly before him: "Great caliph!

Behold now thy slave,

For Azrael, angel of death, have I conquered

And bound in the grave."

ANNIE PORTER.

ENGLISH DOMESTICS AND THEIR WAYS.

An American lady, on coming to England and observing the workings of

domestic life, is apt to think English servants perfection, and to listen

to any complaints of them which she may hear with an ill-concealed smile.

"What! complain of these excellent, admirable, respectful, hard-working

servants!" she exclaims to her English friends. "If you could only see what

we have to endure from these women in our American households, then indeed

you would appreciate the quiet and efficient hand-maids whose services you

can command here in the mother-country." And, to make good her case against

the "help" which hinder our happiness so much in America, she will speak of

the high wages given them, the kind treatment they receive, the ingratitude

with which they take all favors, their inefficiency, and so on.

But after a short sojourn in England our American lady will see many things

in respect to the duties and demands of English servants which were not

quite apparent to her at first; and by dint of observation she will soon

become aware that an English servant has privileges and requirements which

would be thought excessive in our country. In the first place, no English

servant will do any washing and ironing, not even for herself. Everything,

down to the smallest towel, must be done up by the laundress. Some servants

go so far as to stipulate what amount of linen, etc. they may have

laundried each week; and in the case of "nice young persons," who like to

keep themselves neat and fresh with light calico dresses and tiny white

caps and spotless collars and large white aprons, the bill for the

servants' washing is apt to swell into quite an item. Again, all English

servants exact either beer or beer-money. (How surprised an American

housekeeper would be if a new aspirant for the situation of cook or

chambermaid should say, "Do you supply me with lager, or give me money to

buy it myself?"!) After various struggles with the difficulties presented

by this beer question, the generality of English housekeepers have come to

the conclusion that it is better to give beer-money than to furnish beer to

their servants. When money is given it is likely not to be spent for beer

at all, which is quite as well; whereas if there is a servants' cask of

beer on tap in the kitchen, there are constant disputes as to how much has

been drunk, given away or wasted. The usual allowance for beer when money

is given is a shilling a week--a sum which in theory means twenty-five

cents of our money, but in actual practice, as prices now range, we may

calculate as representing about fifty cents. Thus, fifty cents for beer,

and certainly fifty cents more for personal laundry-work, add a dollar a

week to the wages of each servant. It is impossible to calculate the cost

of the family washing and ironing, but whatever it be, it must come out of

the housekeeper's pocket; for, as I have said, no servant will do it. Five

dollars a week is not a large calculation for the laundry-bill of a family,

especially if there are children. In America this money is generally saved,

but at what a price!--the house in disorder with wash-tub and ironing-board

during the beginning of every week, grumbling from all servants, anxiety on

the part of the members of the family about overcrowding the soiled-linen

basket, and often the clean clothes sent up "not fit to be seen."

Another privilege which I find English servants possess, and which I

confess surprises me, is that of inviting friends to tea at the mistress's

expense. Every Sunday evening one or another servant holds a symposium of

choice spirits below stairs, for whom flows the infusion of the costly leaf

from far Cathay. No meat is allowed at these repasts, but tea, milk, sugar

and bread and butter are permitted to be offered. There is going on now an

earnest effort to put a stop to this practice. Economical housekeepers

very justifiably object to paying for treats to their servants' company.

But the custom has been handed down from the feudal days, when drinking and

eating were the only amusements within the scope of even the very rich, and

when every soul who in a friendly spirit passed the castle-walls was

welcome to all he could gorge or swill, or carry away in his two arms for

those he had left behind in his poor cottage. In what is known now as

"noble houses" the practice is still in force to a great extent. Does

master or mistress receive a call? Then wine and sweet biscuits are at once

to be carried into the drawing-room to beguile the caller's tedium in

waiting. Has a tradesman brought a package? Give the good man a mug of

beer. Have you come in a cab, and kept it standing outside? Here, quickly

take out some beer in a pewter tankard to comfort Cabby, which he tosses

off as he sits perched on the high seat of his hansom. In houses as lavish

as this a veritable banquet is served each day in the servants' hall, to

which the upper servants have the privilege of inviting their friends. And

so the custom goes on, dwindling in costliness until it reaches the homes

of people in fairly comfortable circumstances, who are struggling, but

almost in vain, to crush it. The trouble is, that when an English servant

enters a house where giving tea to her friends is not allowed, she is apt

to receive such pressure from her mother, who has been probably a servant

in the "good old days," and other conservative domestics of the lavish

school, that she will make the matter square by slyly appropriating that

which she believes should have been legitimately given; and once in this

path her peculations are apt to extend to things more valuable than bread

and tea. This is a great pity, for as a rule English servants are as honest

as the sun. There is not one drop of that Chinese blood which sets the

almond-eyed John to pilfering everything he can lay hands on flowing in

these honest Saxon veins. Of course there are always exceptions to any

rule, but for these exceptions there exists in England that inflexible

system of punishment by law whose motto most emphatically is, "It is a sin

to steal a pin." To be a thief in England is as poor a business as one

would wish to follow.

In engaging a cook in England you find that she makes many demands you

never heard of in America. I have alluded to the refusal of all such

servants to have any hand in the laundry-work. In rich households

(especially in the country) a laundress and laundry-maid are regularly

employed, who have no work of any kind to do outside the laundry: they wash

and iron for the household, including the servants. In cities, however, and

in small families even in the country, the washing is generally done by a

laundress outside. No cook would tolerate washing and ironing anywhere

about the kitchen.

The next imperative demand your cook will make will probably be to ask you

if you keep a scullery-maid or an "under-servant." If your purse will not

permit this luxury, what "assistance" is your cook to be furnished with?

This means, is she to have a "charwoman" once a week or oftener for the day

to clean pots and pans, scrub steps and passage-ways, and scour, dust and

rub up generally in the kitchen and rooms adjoining? In England this

cleaning business is far more formidable than with us. We lay down so much

oilcloth on our stairways and passage-ways, paint or cover with carpeting,

matting or oilcloth so many floors, that it is rather an infrequent

experience to see our servants down on their hands and knees scrubbing away

for dear life. Even in neat Philadelphia, where there is so much of brick

sidewalk and of marble doorstep to be cleaned, the use of hose and broom

has to a great extent superseded the scrubbing-brush oiled with

elbow-grease. But in England there are so many stone floors and steps to be

scrubbed, so much brass-work to be cleaned and polished, so many steel

grates, with tongs, poker and shovel, to be brightened till you can see

your face in them, that it is no wonder your cook would like to have

assistance in these heavy manual exertions.

Ladies in England have found that when the work in their houses is such

that assistance must be had, it is better to keep an "under-servant" for

the cook (a position even less exalted than the "scullery-maid" in this

complex system of domestic gradations) than to have a charwoman come

occasionally. We have no special name for the "charwoman" in America,

unless it be simply the generic term, "a woman," or, to be Victor Hugoish,

the woman who cleans. Char (pronounced _chair_) is simply the old-fashioned

word still popular in New England, _chore_, and the charwoman is merely the

woman who does chores. English ladies say she does other and more

objectionable things. She drinks, for instance, and finds it necessary to

bring a basket with her, which, they think, would be found to be more

weighty on leaving (if the matter were tested) than it is when she arrives.

Another favorite plan for lightening labor, even with families who are in

moderate circumstances, is to keep a "Buttons," a useful little urchin, who

is forced to make himself respectable in appearance by wearing a livery

provided for him, the distinguishing feature of which is its lavishness in

the way of buttons. This boy is expected to do anything and everything--to

clean boots, fetch coal, run errands, open the door, assist in waiting at

table, rub up knives and silver; in short, to be at the beck and call of

everybody in the house for each and any duty. He may be called a sort of

light brigade or sharpshooter on the outposts between the heavy cavalry in

the kitchen in the shape of cook and the solid infantry which moves with

regular step through the housemaid's set round of duties. And whenever the

wheels of a household in England are found to creak, additional help in the

shape of under-servants is engaged, the matter of the efficiency of the

upper-servants being of course first satisfactorily settled. Here is the

very kernel of the nut of the question: this it is which makes "all the

difference" between the management of a house say in New York and a similar

one in London. A family without children, occupying a brown-stone front in

New York, will consider that two servants should do all the work of the

household, and do it well. I am not speaking of people who live on the

"swell" avenues and keep carriages or give frequent balls and parties: I

mean unpretending people who own or rent a nice three- or four-story house,

and want to live with entire comfort and freedom from rows or disputes with

servants, and expect to be well waited on. They engage cook and

chambermaid--the chambermaid to act also as waitress, both to act as

laundresses. High wages are given, and when the work is done

unsatisfactorily more money is offered as a bribe, or else there are

disagreeable scenes, ending with the lady saying hotly, "Well, if you can't

do my work, I'll find some one else who can." But she is mistaken. She will

never find two women who can cook, wash, iron, clean, dust, wait at table

and do the work generally of a three- or four-story house as it should be

done. In a household of that importance in England there would be hired, at

the least, cook and under-servant, housemaid and Buttons, and all the

laundry-work put out.

And oh how smoothly life passes in such an English home! How brightly every

inch of brass shines! how well dusted is every article you touch! how clear

is the crystal for table use! how spotless the napery! how noiselessly your

servants move about! how respectfully each addresses the heads of the

household whenever required to do so, not otherwise! It is the very

perfection of service, and a luxurious satisfaction which we in America

rarely get a chance to enjoy. But the times are changing now. It may be

possible that in the future the demand-and-supply market for domestic

service may have so settled itself that for the money we have hitherto paid

as yearly wages to two only tolerable servants we shall obtain the services

of as many efficient ones as are needful to make our American homes the

equal of those in England for the quiet perfection of their interior

management.

OLIVE LOGAN.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

FERNAN CABALLERO.

About thirty years ago there appeared in the _Heraldo_ of Madrid a novel

called _La Gaviota_ ("The Sea-gull"). Spanish literature at the present day

is poor in novels, and thirty years ago it was much poorer. _La Gaviota_

was like a tall tiger-lily suddenly appearing among low-growing exotics.

The book was what the French call a _roman de moeurs_: it was signed with

an unknown name--Fernan Caballero. Nobody knew Fernan Caballero. Madrid

concluded that it must be one of those great living writers whose names

could be counted on the first five sticks of a lady's fan. Seville ascribed

it to an author of local fame, and Cadiz was amazed by the fact that

anything so good could come out of Spain. The novel was eagerly read, even

by the Gallicanized element in society, and pronounced a success in all

things, except that it was not French. Following _La Gaviota_, _La Espana_

published _Elia_ in its columns: then followed _La Familia Alvareda_, _Una

en Otra_, _Pobre Dolores_, _Lucas Garcia_ and others. It became evident

that the masked writer was a woman, but not one of those _femmes auteurs_

of whom Louis Veuillot says, with more force than elegance, "Il me semble

que si ma femme signait tels livres, j'aurais scrupule a signer ses

enfants." Her thoughts were pure and high, and every detail was gifted with

life.

The Spanish public was not particularly pleased to discover that its

admired Fernan was a woman. If Cervantes had been a woman, there would have

been a precedent for it; but Cervantes was a man. Fernan Caballero's

readers would have wavered in their allegiance had her stories not become a

part of themselves. It was unfortunate that a woman should write such

things. "A blue-stocking!" cries Don Judas Tadeo Barbo, representative of

this feeling, in _Una en Otra_. "Ave Maria! A woman who writes and rushes

into print! It is a mortal sin! A woman has as much business to write a

book as a man would to have a baby. And a pretty woman, too! Who would have

believed it? A woman who writes should be old, ugly and decrepit."

In spite of the attention excited by her stories, she was still tenacious

of her mask. In a letter to Germonde de Lavigne, one of the French

translators of her works, she said: "It was cruel of you to tear away my

pseudonym. You know how much I value it. You perhaps wished me to make a

buckler of my fan; but, believe me, the beautiful things I have gathered do

not need it. I have not tried to put into my stories studies of the heart

or the world: there is neither art nor invention nor inspiration, only the

exact painting of our actual society. Spanish types of all classes, the

manners, the feelings, the witty and poetical language, I have painted from

the life. My personality and my name are things outside of these. All that

I have written is true. I cannot invent: I possess only the talent of

dovetailing facts and placing them in relief. I have passed my life in

collecting those treasures of tradition, poetry, stories, legends, pious

and poetic beliefs which make an atmosphere of picturesque purity--proverbs

like Sancho's, maxims as beautiful as Don Quixote, couched in the forcible

and flowery language of the people. I am as proud as an artist of the

beauty of my model. The story of _Lucas Garcia_ is true; I have known Simon

Verde; an old woman told me the story of the lottery in _La Estrella_; in

_Una en Otra_ everything is true. I have caught nearly all my dialogues

from the lips of the people who spoke them. I have gleaned the last grain

from a beautiful field, already growing desolate. I have made a sheaf,

despised perhaps to-day, although the world has gathered some corn-flowers

which fell from it, but which some day will be appreciated."

"Like Sir Walter Scott," says M. de Mazade in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_,

"Fernan Caballero has a lively feeling for the traditional and local in

regions of which she writes. Her first and only inspiration is Spain. She

loves even its miseries, which are not without their grandeur. Her

creations, her characters, her combinations, have no reflection of

imitation: they are taken from the heart of the national life. They proceed

from an observation of the reality and a feeling of the poetry of

things--two sentiments which, balancing each other and uniting, form true

and original invention.

"Another trait in this rare talent," continues M. de Mazade--"a trait in

which the imagination of the woman is shown--is the absence of complication

in her tales: they have none of those hard knots that bind up action.

Fernan Caballero has a genius for details. She makes everything live. She

has an intuition of a thousand shades, often imperceptible to ordinary

eyes, which give each mood of Nature a distinct physiognomy. Like Sir

Walter--more than Sir Walter Scott--she enjoys digressions, sinuous

conversations; she abandons herself to them with delight; she draws

pictures and portraits, full of freshness, one after the other; she is

prodigal of all that can throw light on manners or character. She passes

with graceful ease from the refinements of the aristocratic world to the

most humble scenes of popular life."

An author, it seems, is never _sui generis_ in the estimation of the

critics. Fernan Caballero, compared by M. Merimee to Sterne and by others

to Scott, imagined that if her talent was similar to anybody's it was like

Emile Souvestre's; but her models and method were as much like Souvestre's

as Spain is like France. Fernan Caballero--or, as she was known in real

life, Dona Caecilia de Baer, marquesa de Arco-Hermosa--may be compared,

reservedly, to Miss Mitford. It is true that fiery thoughts and violent

passion are not to be found in Miss Mitford's beautifully-enamelled

miniatures; but fire and passion were not apparent in the English life she

painted, while in the works of the Spanish artist passion glows under the

simplest forms, as the red of an orange among its leaves and blossoms. It

has been truly said of Madame de Baer that she gave a new world to Castile

and Leon--an Andalusian world--almost Arcadian in its newness and

simplicity. She showed to the world that the Spain of thirty years ago was

still the Spain of Don Quixote. "What was true yesterday," she quotes from

Calderon, "is true to-day." Our Don Quixote is not the Spanish Don Quixote.

"Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Charles Grandison and Don Quixote," said

Colonel Newcome, "are the finest gentlemen in the world." The Spaniards see

in Don Quixote something higher. "In Cervantes," says Madame de Baer, "the

mind stifled the heart. It was not his heart that made of Don Quixote a

thing for laughter. Neither the casque of Mambrino nor the love of

Maritornes makes me laugh: it makes me weep."

Progress--as the word is generally understood--also makes her sad. The

Andalusian, surrounded by a world of poetry and beauty, is happy in his

ignorance. He reads sermons in the lives of animals, poems in the trees,

maxims and proverbs everywhere. Why should he read them in books? In _La

Gaviota_, Frederick Stein, a German surgeon who has been thrown upon the

charity of some Spanish peasants, hears a shepherd mention an infallible

cure for pain in the eyes. Stein asks where this remedy is to be found.

"I cannot tell you," answered the shepherd: "I know that there is such a

thing."

"Who can find it, then?" asked Stein.

"The swallows," said Jose.

"The swallows!"

"Yes, sir. It is an herb called _pito real_, which nobody knows or sees

except the swallows. When their little ones lose their sight they rub the

little eyes with the _pito real_, and cure them. This herb has also the

virtue of cutting iron and everything it touches."

"What absurdities this Jose swallows like a real shark!" cried Manuel,

laughing.--"Don Frederico, he actually believes that snakes never die."

"No, they never die," said the shepherd gravely: "when they see death

coming they escape from their skin and run away. When old they become

serpents: little by little scales and wings appear. They become dragons,

and return to the desert.--But you, Manuel--you do not wish to believe

anything. Do you also deny that the lizard is the friend of man? If you do

not believe it, ask Miguel."

"Does he know it?"

"Without doubt. He was sleeping in a field; a snake glided near him; a

lizard, which lay in the furrow, saw the snake, and presented itself to

defend Miguel. The lizard was large, and it fought with the snake; but

Miguel not awaking, the lizard pressed its tail against his nose, and ran

off as if its paws were on fire. The lizard is a good little beast: it

never sleeps in the sun without descending the wall to kiss the earth."

Imagination in the Andalusian supplies the place of knowledge. He has a

precedent for everything. Tradition is the light that guides his feet. Let

him alone, says Fernan Caballero. Would he be happier if his wants were

greater--if his life were less simple? Would he be happier if he believed

less? If he thinks, with the good Maria in _La Gaviota_, that the Jews

formerly had caudal appendages, and that they are only now prevented from

wearing them by the ring that governs in place of the queen, _qu' importe_

so long as a sick Jew will be treated as tenderly as a sick Christian? If

you could alter their ardent natures, if you could cut out the firm love

that often changes to fierce jealousy and deadly hate, you would improve

them and lessen crime; but that you cannot change until you can change the

climate. Change Spain to England, and you can have schools, trades-unions,

and all the modern improvements; but while Spain is Spain you of the North

can neither understand nor reform her.

And strange it is that this author, who has identified herself with Spain,

is not Spanish. Her father was John Nicolas Boehl de Fabre, who migrated

from Hamburg to Cadiz: to him Spain owes a collection of ancient poetry,

_Floresta de Rimas Antiquas Castellanas_. His daughter Caecilia was born in

1797 at Morges in Switzerland. The publication of her first work was due to

the advice and encouragement of Washington Irving. She first wrote an

exquisite idyl of Andalusian life, _The Alvareda Family_, in German, and

then translated it into Spanish. Irving admired it in manuscript, and

induced her to go to work on another, which appeared under the title of _La

Gaviota_--a title borrowed from its wild and untamable heroine, Marisalada

Santalo. This second story at once made her reputation in Europe. It stands

at the head of her numerous works. The character of the uncontrollable

heroine is developed as by a master-hand, and the handling of the story

until it culminates in Marisalada's passion for Pepe Vera and the despair

of her husband, Stein, is graphic and almost too pitiless. Don Modesto,

commandant of Fort San Cristobal, is worthy of the hand of Cervantes. The

author has received the greatest compliment that unliterary Spain could pay

her: a complete edition of her works was issued--_not_ at the expense of

the queen--by Don Francesco de Mallado at Madrid.

Madame de Baer was married three times; so, besides her three cognomens, it

is well that she has one that will always be remembered--Fernan Caballero.

During the reign of Isabella she occupied apartments in the Alcazar of

Seville, but after the revolution she removed to the Calle de Burgos, where

she lived quietly among those lifelong friends, her flowers and books.

During her last illness the ex-queen and the duke and duchess de

Montpensier were her frequent visitors. She died on the seventh of April of

this year.

M. F. E.

THE OCTROI.

Those travellers who, after an excursion to the suburbs of Paris, see their

carriage stopped by an official in a green tunic with silver buttons, who

asks solemnly, "Have you anything to declare?" are usually far from

imagining that they are witnessing a manifestation of one of the most

important of the Parisian financial functions. For such undoubtedly must

the _octroi_ be considered. It is the tax that supports Paris--that pays

for her improvements, her cleansing, her lighting, her poor-fund--that

supports the hospitals, keeps her pavements and sewers in repair, and, in a

word, pays all her necessary expenses. It encircles Paris as with an iron

hand; it watches at every gate, at every quay, at every entrance-point to

the city; it is for ever on the alert to discover fraud. One hundred and

twenty-five officers and three thousand subordinates are employed in

collecting this colossal tax and in guarding against its being evaded. The

revenue thus produced has amounted during the last few years to over

twenty-five millions of dollars annually. No wonder that Paris can afford

to beautify herself with new adornments continually. She is a millionaire

among cities, and can pay for new decorations at will.

The octroi, in its present form, is a comparatively modern institution. It

dates from the 18th of October, 1798. Before the law was passed Paris had

fallen into a piteous plight. The contractors threatened to cease all

operations; nobody had been paid for a long time; the city was not even

able to pay the pitiful sum of sixteen thousand francs which was owing to

the street-sweepers. Out of this municipal poverty arose the octroi, and

during the first year of its functions it produced over a million and a

half of dollars. Yet it was far from bringing in at that time all that it

should have done, owing to the insufficient force of agents employed and

the gigantic frauds that were perpetrated on all sides. As soon as night

came the smugglers set to work at all the unprotected points--and they were

many--of the fortifications. Ladders were planted against the walls, and

barrels of wine, bottles of brandy, packets of butcher's meat, etc. were

lowered into the city by means of cords. Subterranean passages were dug,

establishing a communication between the interior and the exterior of the

city. It was not till the reign of the First Napoleon that these abuses

were definitely suppressed.

Nearly every article of daily consumption that enters Paris is taxed by

the octroi--meat, wine, spirits, fruits, vegetables, ice, wood, coal,

etc.--and also all building materials. It has been estimated that the

octroi-tax on an edifice in Paris that costs twenty thousand dollars

amounts to one thousand dollars. The largest part of the revenue is

acquired from wines and spirits. Wine pays about twenty-three francs on the

hectolitre: it is taxed by quantity, and not _ad valorem_; which is an act

of crying injustice to the poor man, whose cup of _petit bleu_ must pay as

much as does the goblet of old Burgundy of the millionaire. One of the

heaviest taxed of all articles is absinthe, owing to the desire of the

authorities to suppress the use of it as much as possible. After all claims

upon it are acquitted a bottle of absinthe will be found to have been

charged nearly four hundred per cent. on its original value.

This law, which strikes not only absinthe, but all other kinds of liqueurs

and of spirits, with excessive duties, was passed in 1871, and the effects

were immediately manifest, only sixty thousand hectolitres of alcohol being

brought into Paris in 1872, against one hundred and sixty-nine thousand in

1871. The immense consumption of absinthe, which just before the war was so

marked a feature of the cafe-life of Paris, has now greatly decreased. But

to make this temperance movement on the part of the French authorities

fully effectual, the tax on _vin ordinaire_ should have been taken off

altogether.

These heavy duties have naturally called into being among the quick-witted

French an active system of frauds against the octroi; and that is not the

least interesting part of the question to study. Against these petty

smugglers a band of picked officials, selected for their probity and

intelligence from among the whole force of the service of the octroi, has

been organized. Eighteen among these act as detectives. They wear no

uniform, assume various disguises, and are well acquainted with all the

mysterious nooks of Paris and with all the holes and corners of the

suburbs. They seem to scent out a fraud as a hunting-dog does game. Thus,

a few years ago two huge blocks of Swiss granite passed the barriers

unquestioned. Some keen-witted detective immediately asked himself why and

for what purpose had those great masses of stone been brought from such a

distance. He prowled about them for a little while, observed a curious

depression in one end of the largest block, and ended by discovering that

both were hollow and were packed full of contraband goods.

The custom-house authorities have formed a museum of the most curious of

the objects that have been captured whilst passing the barriers, and that

were constructed for the purposes of fraud. The list is an interesting one,

and reflects great credit upon the ingenuity of the smugglers, if not upon

their honesty. False busts worn by make-believe wet nurses, false abdomens,

hats with double crowns, hollow horse-collars, footstools lined with tin,

carriage-seats concealing tin boxes, etc., etc., abound. There, too, may be

seen a pile of pieces of linen fastened together with a cord, each of which

is simply a box of zinc covered with linen. This trick was really

ingenious, and was detected in a very odd way. The wagon that conveyed this

merchandise into Paris was marked on the side "Toiles et Nouveautes," and

the letters struck the custom-house agents as being a great deal too large

and conspicuous. Hence arose suspicion and a thorough examination.

The museum also preserves among its curiosities an ordinary-looking cab,

which is a hollow structure made of painted tin. There, too, are to be seen

piles of common plates, as innocent-looking as it is possible for crockery

to be. The first half dozen plates are all right: the rest are perforated

and conceal a tube of tin. It will be seen that all these contrivances are

directed toward the smuggling of one article--namely, spirits.

The product of the octroi averages about sixty francs per annum for every

inhabitant of Paris. It is an indirect income-tax which is exacted from

every dweller in the city. Unfortunately, its operations weigh heavily only

on the very poorest classes. The banker of the Faubourg St. Honore or the

noble of the Faubourg St. Germain troubles himself very little about the

extra price that he is thus forced to pay for his salmon or his chambertin.

But among the very poor, those whose daily expenditure is counted not by

sous, but by centimes, this tax is very severely felt. It is argued,

however, that the poor man profits even more by the product of this tax

than does the rich one, the hospitals, for instance, being chiefly

maintained by its means.

L. H. H.

FOREIGN LEADERS IN RUSSIA AND TURKEY.

There is an old regimental tradition, which meets the Eastern traveller at

times in Egyptian hotels and Indian mess-rooms, that an English interpreter

in the Turkish service, being present at a conference between his pasha and

a Russian general, was just commending the two as "admirable specimens of

their respective races," when suddenly General Kormiloff and Selim Pasha,

after staring at each other for a moment, broke out simultaneously, "Eh,

Donald Campbell, are _ye_ here?"--"Gude keep us, Sandy Robertson! can this

be _you_?"

This is merely a grotesque version of an actual and very significant

fact--viz. that both the Russian and his hereditary enemy have achieved

many of their greatest triumphs under the command of foreigners. The

prominence of the latter in the military history of both nations is of

considerable antiquity. As early as 1397, Sultan Bajazet formed the

Christian captives of Nikopolis into the formidable brigade whose title of

_Yengi Scheri_ ("new soldiers") gave rise to the terrible name of

_Janissary_; while several of the earlier czars in like manner surrounded

themselves with a foreign body-guard. Coming down to later times, we find

the Tartar Skuratoff acting as the right-hand man of Ivan the Terrible

(1531-84). In the ensuing century the Russian centre at Smolensk was

commanded by the terrible Sir Thomas Dalziel of Binns, afterward the

fiercest persecutor of the Scottish Covenanters. Peter the Great's best

officer was General Gordon, a cadet of the Huntley family, and his best

engineer was M. Lefort, a native of Geneva. The Turkish service, too,

contained at this time several Swiss and Frenchmen (mostly refugees from

the religious persecutions of Louis XIV.), some of whom attained high rank.

In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the fame of the new military

system established by Frederick William of Prussia and his son, Frederick

the Great, led the sovereigns of Russia to give the most liberal

encouragement to any German officers who could be persuaded to undertake

the training of their ill-disciplined levies. Among these imported

generals[D] the most distinguished was the celebrated Marshal Muennich,

commander-in-chief of the Russian army under the empresses Anne and

Elizabeth, the latter of whom at length banished him to Siberia, whence he

was not recalled till the accession of Peter III. in 1762. His Russian

successor, Apraxin, was speedily superseded by an Englishman named William

Fermor, a distant relation of the beautiful heroine of Pope's _Rape of the

Lock_; but the total defeat of this new leader by Frederick the Great at

Zorndorf in 1758 ousted _him_ in his turn, and the imperial troops were

commanded by native Russians up to the end of the Seven Years' War. But

under the far-sighted rule of Catherine II., who ascended the throne in

1763, the German element began to predominate once more, and speedily

attained such prominence that toward the middle of her reign, before

Suvaroff's formidable renown had raised the prestige of the native stock,

the proportion of foreign officers (chiefly Germans) in the Russian service

was estimated at not less than eighty-five per cent. It was in allusion to

this circumstance that the grim old marshal, himself a Russian _pur sang_,

answered Catherine's gracious inquiry how she could best reward his

services by saying, with characteristic bluntness, "Mother Katrina, make me

a German!"

About the same period several Irish soldiers of fortune, driven from home

by political troubles, appeared in the Turkish ranks, as well as not a few

Poles, dispossessed by the "second partition" of their country, and longing

for a chance of avenging the wrong. Several of these adventurers adopted

the Mohammedan faith, and, gaining the entire confidence of their adopted

countrymen, were enabled to inflict considerable injury upon the invading

armies of Russia. But the greatest service rendered to the Crescent by a

foreigner at that time (we might almost say the greatest which it ever

received) was achieved in 1802 by the French envoy, Colonel (afterward

General) Sebastiani. When a British squadron lay off Prinkipos Island,

within easy reach of Constantinople, threatening it with instant

bombardment, the undaunted ambassador, defying alike the hostile guns and

the fury of the fanatical mob, calmly set himself to achieve the same task

which General Todleben accomplished in the Crimea half a century later.

Under his vigorous superintendence the city was impregnably fortified by

the incessant labor of a single week, while a show of negotiation diverted

the attention of the English admiral; and the hostile squadron, suddenly

confronted by twelve hundred heavy guns, was forced to retire with

considerable loss.

The enlightened rule of Alexander I., whose zeal for the improvement of

Russia quickened instead of keeping down his appreciation of foreign

talent, filled the Russian camp with officers from Western Europe.

Benningsen, the most formidable antagonist of Napoleon in 1807; Pfuhl, who

constructed the fortified camp of Drissa in 1812; Barclay de Tolly, the

Russian commander-in-chief in the early part of that memorable campaign;

Wittgenstein, who bore the palm of valor during the invasion of France in

1814; the great strategist Jomini, who was Alexander's aide-de-camp; and

Langeron, whose storming of Montmartre sealed the fate of Paris,--were all

men of foreign blood. Even after the accession of the Russomaniac Nicholas

in 1825, the "over-the-frontier men," as the natives emphatically call

them, continued to hold the same prominent place. The Russian navy, indeed,

which in the time of Catherine II. owed to Western Europe the only three

competent seamen whom it possessed--Greig, Elphinstone and Dugdale--was by

this time officered chiefly by native Russians, though still manned by

Finns, Greeks and Livonians; but in the army Count Diebitsch himself, the

hero of 1828-29, and his two principal subordinates, Generals Roth and

Ruediger, were of German descent. In the Crimean war the array of foreign

names on either side was still more striking. Omar Pasha, perhaps the

greatest general whom Turkey has ever possessed, was a Hungarian deserter

from the Austrian army, his true name being Theodore Lattos. The defence of

Silistria was the work of two English subalterns, Lieutenant Nasmyth and

Captain Butler. Ibrahim Aga, the veteran of Sultan Mahmoud's Egyptian wars,

was originally Thomas Keith, a gunsmith from the "Old Town" of Edinburgh.

Omar Pasha's best cavalry officer in 1853, Iskander Bey, was a Polish

refugee, by name Michael Tchaikovski, whose stirring war-songs are still

affectionately preserved by his countrymen. Bairam Pasha was merely the

Turkish alias of General Cannon. Among the Russians, again, General

Todleben, incomparably the greatest name of the war on their side, was a

Courlander from Mitau. Prince Paskievitch, the conqueror of Erivan and

besieger of Silistria, sprang from a Slavonian family in Transylvania.

Generals von Schilders, Aurep and von Lueders, though Russian subjects, were

all of foreign extraction, as were also Count Osten-Sacken and General

Dannenberg.

But it is in the present war that the foreign element has asserted itself

most conspicuously. Whether on the Russian or the Turkish side, almost

every leader of note is a foreigner. The Turkish fleet is commanded by an

Englishman, who still retains his own name of Augustus Hobart. Another

Englishman--the notorious Colonel Valentine Baker, called, like his

brother, Sir Samuel, "Baker Pasha"--heads the cavalry of the army of the

Danube. The sultan's two best engineers, under whose guidance Shumla has

been refortified, though now known to fame as Reschid Pasha and Blum Pasha,

were serving not many years since in the German army as Captains Strecker

and Blume. Mehemet Ali Pasha himself, the late commander-in-chief, is a

Prussian, born in Berlin. Suleiman Pasha's chief of staff is Bielowski, a

Pole, known in the Turkish army as General Nihad, and General Mina,

recently appointed to the command of a cavalry division at Rasgrad, is a

Belgian. On the Russian side, again, Generals Loris-Melikoff and

Tergukassoff are Armenians, the former having made his first step to renown

by attracting Count Mouravieff's notice as an active young dragoon officer

in the Kars campaign of 1855. General Oklobschio, who commanded before

Batoum last summer, though for many years in the Russian service, is by

birth a Montenegrin, and has the rashness as well as the valor of his

warlike countrymen. Baron Krudener, of Plevna notoriety, comes of a German

family which settled in Russia toward the close of the last century. The

gallant Scobeleff is said to belong to the Ayrshire family of Scobie.

General Nepokoitchitski is a Pole. Prince Tcherkasski has a tinge of

Tartar, Prince Mirski of Polish, blood. General Gourko springs from a

Cossack family of formidable renown in the Turkish and Polish wars of the

seventeenth century; and the family name of General Zimmermann, the leader

of the Dobrudscha army, speaks for itself.

Nor is all this to be wondered at. The Turk and the Russian, closely alike

in many points, are more especially so in this--that both can follow and

neither can lead. In steadfast obedience and endurance of every extreme of

hardship they have no superior on the face of the earth, but the prompt

energy of the man who is accustomed to think and act for himself in every

emergency is wanting to both. Under the command of a skilful general both

Russian and Turkish troops will advance unflinchingly against the strongest

position, or hold their ground with that stubborn tenacity which Frederick

the Great aptly illustrated by saying that "when you fight with a Russian

you must kill him first and knock him down afterward." But let them once be

deprived of their leader or lose their solid formation, and their

helplessness becomes instantly manifest.

D. K.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARDS.

Moscow, Sept. 11 (Aug. 30, Russian style), 1877.

Excitement here is now a veritable epidemic. Go where you will,

charity-boxes, designating the purpose for which alms are solicited, and

each boasting the bright crimson cross stamped on a pure white surface,

meet your eye. They are affixed to the walls of the various _ooclitzas_ (or

roads) traversing this mighty city; they greet you at the entrance of every

church and cathedral, the charming little English church occupying a site

in the Tchernetchefsky Perculok forming no exception to the rule; do you

happen to enter "Gurin's," the well-known Muscovitish restaurant, the

probability is that your charity "on behalf of the sick and wounded" is

instantly demanded by a lady, who, duly escorted by some member of the

"nobler sex," has taken upon herself the duty of "begging" in this

particular district. The topic of--as also endless incidents attendant

upon--this deplorable war meets one at every point--in the lowest

_peeteny-dom_ (drinking-house); in every shop; in the very _droshky_ which

one hires, the driver (_eezvostchik_) being invariably well versed in the

latest phases of the combat.

To-day a fresh impetus has been given by the departure from Moscow, after a

two days' stay here, of a portion of the Imperial Guards from St.

Petersburg _en route_ for the field--were it not better to say many

fields?--of battle. This body, numbering about thirty-six hundred officers

and soldiers, was despatched from the modern capital in instalments of six

hundred men. The Guards, it must be remembered, constitute the flower and

pride of the Russian army, and it is impossible that they could be regarded

in any other light. A veritable set of giants, so to speak, they one and

all appeared, clad in their rough brown winter gear, with heavy top-boots,

and carrying heavy knapsacks with superfluous pairs of nailed high boots

strapped thereon.

The organization of the Imperial Guard dates from the reign of the most

autocratic of the czars. Peter the Great, left fatherless at an early age,

spent his childhood in the village of Preobragensky, situated not many

versts from Moscow, where his greatest delight, as he grew in years, was to

assemble the youths of the village and train them into a fighting corps,

constituting himself their captain. But the youthful hero was not content

with this venture. He also made friends with the boys of the neighboring

village--Semenovsky by name--and assembled them in like fashion. Hence the

names attached to the first and second regiments of the _Infanterie de la

Garde_--Preobragensky and Semenovsky. In after-life Peter retained the rank

in early days thus self assumed, remaining captain of his favorite

Preobragensky regiment.

The Infanterie de la Garde consists of three divisions, each comprising

four regiments. The first division, besides the two already named, includes

the regiments designated as Ismailovsky and the Chasseurs de la Garde. The

regiments of the second division are named, respectively, Pavlovsky, Les

Grenadiers de la Garde, Moscovsky, and De Finlande. The third division

embraces the Volensky and Letovsky regiments, as also those dubbed

L'Empereur d'Autriche and L'Empereur de Prusse. The cavalry has also three

divisions, the first comprising the four regiments named Les Chevalier

Gardes, Les Gardes a Cheval, Les Cuirassiers de l'Empereur and Les

Cuirassiers de I'Imperatrice; the second, Les Hussards de l'Empereur, Les

Lanciers du Grand Duc Nicolas, Les Grenadiers a Cheval, and Les Dragons de

l'Empereur; and the third, two regiments, Les Lanciers de l'Empereur and

Les Hussards de Grodno.

Soon after six o'clock A. M., on a bleak and rainy morning, I found my way

in a horribly shaky and shabby droshky to the railway terminus, where the

soldiers were gathered, many of them accompanied by friends and near

relations, principally, however, women--mothers, wives and children.

Nearly all were seated on the wide platforms stretching in various

directions. They sat in clusters, some drinking the inevitable _chipeet_

(tea), but perhaps quite as many _votky_ (a kind of brandy). The majority

were talking fast and gesticulating vigorously in true Russian style. Many,

however, were singing and shouting, out of sheer bravado, as it seemed.

"Yes, they would meet their fate thus. It were better far than weeping; and

there were but two alternatives: why choose the last named?" One

bronze-featured Muscovite specially attracted my notice. A burst of noisy

song--little short of a scream in fact--came from his lips ever and anon,

alternating with a stormy burst of laughter or a sudden flow of tears. I

watched him with considerable interest. This, I reflected, was a type of

the wellnigh universal Russian temperament--sad to-day, gay to-morrow: in

the very depths of despair one moment, brimming over with joy the next. But

there were other groups; and herein lay another characteristic feature in

the picture. Here and there a soldier was endeavoring to drown not only his

own feelings, but also those of the surrounding circle, by plunging into

all the wild vagaries of the Russian dance; and furiously his arms as well

as his legs worked to do full justice to the famous national jig. "Hurrah!

hurrah!" rang cheerily from the lips of many around, still struggling hard

with their tears. "Apait! apait!" ("Again! again!"). Knapsacks lay

scattered all around. The troops were all ready to be summoned at a word

and packed into the various carriages, or rather vans, holding an average

number of thirty-five. Alongside the station stood a regiment newly

arrived, and waiting to take the place of that which was about to leave.

We passed slowly along the line, glancing at the many heavily-laden wagons,

and then at compartment after compartment filled with fine-looking but

highly-disconcerted horses, rebelling at the restrictions as regarded space

imposed upon them.

"I declare I am as utterly sorry for the horses as for the men," exclaimed

a soft-hearted Russian lady. "To think of the poor dumb brutes all going

thus helplessly to their fate!"

A tent erected for the officers and their friends stood on our left, and,

forming part of a privileged party, we entered it. A long table, supplied

with the daintiest of viands, provided by the citizens, extended through

its entire length. Many ladies were present, some weeping bitterly. Few

waited for a formal introduction before exchanging words. "Your son,

madame? it is from him you are about to part?"--"And my husband, madame.

All my other sons are there already. May God help and protect

them!"--"Amen!" is the involuntary answer.

The officers--most of them chatting, and many of them even laughing

gayly--are drinking wine, exchanging felicitations and good-wishes, and

touching glasses across the table. In the midst of all I spied a mouse--a

tame one, surely--careering about at pleasure.

But in another minute the aspect of affairs had changed. The word of

command had suddenly been given, the officers marched out, the troops

crouched in such numbers on the platforms rose promptly to their feet,

grasping their knapsacks; and then the women's arms were bound fast around

the necks of those stepping, now fast, according to orders, into the

carriages immediately facing them. The notes of the Russian hymn rose and

fell from time to time: many of the voices were more than half choked.

In flocked all, the sobbing women left behind, with heads wrapped up in the

thick woollen Russian shawl or extemporized _bashlik_, "crossing" their

departing friends three times in earnest and true Russian fashion, praying

Heaven to bless them. And then all waited, all was ready: the long line of

carriages was already moving off.

"Preicheit!" ("Good-bye!") rose from the lips of those around, but

the word was quickly supplemented by another more suggestive of

pleasantness--"Dussvedinia!" ("Au revoir!"), which was echoed again and

again. The train moved now more quickly. The soldiers shouted, cried and

laughed alternately, waving their caps in signal of adieu. "What matters

it?" shouted one: "we must all die once." The officers grasped firmly the

hands of those yet marching bareheaded by their side along the platform:

the lonely women left behind, many of them gray-headed, fell, some of them,

senseless on the ground.

E. S.

A MISSING ITEM.

Among the long and varied list of reasons assigned for the financial

reverses of the past five years, we do not recollect to have discovered the

falling off of European immigration. This would appear one of the most

obvious and controlling of them all. About a million less have been added

from abroad to the population of the Union within that time than the

figures of a like number of years immediately preceding caused to be

expected. If, according to the prevailing estimate, each individual thus

acquired is worth a thousand dollars to the country, its aggregate loss in

this way far exceeds the sum sunk in superfluous railways, to which

extravagance almost exclusively the custom is to ascribe the revulsion.

Eight hundred or a thousand millions of money which the country had under

its hands as it were, reckoned among its available assets and used in

gauging the immediate future of its industry, suddenly vanished. The direct

abstraction from its resources of so large an item could not fail to be

seriously felt. It amounts to the reduction of an average State to a desert

condition--to the loss of twice as many pairs of stout hands as were

sacrificed in the four years of civil war. The homes marked out for them

are desolate, the waste places they would have made to bloom given to the

weeds, the industries which craved them paralyzed, and the wealth they were

to create cancelled.

Such is undoubtedly the economic aspect of this check to the movement of

human freight upon the Atlantic. Viewed from the politico-social side, its

effects will not be deemed so unfortunate even by those whose confidence in

the assimilative power of our institutions is most unqualified. A million

and a half or two millions of matriculates at the great modern political

school is quite a liberal allowance for one decade. Twice the number might

press heavily on the provision made for adequate tuition. The results of

the course upon those who have already graduated, born at home or abroad,

are not at all too flattering. In the West, where our European guests most

do congregate, notions are discoverable of a very helter-skelter

description upon divorce, the "rights of labor," and religion in the public

schools--notions which, whether sound or the reverse, clearly need settling

rather than additional disturbance. The case is similar in cities and

densely-peopled districts at the East, where the same element has especial

weight. At the same time, it is difficult to say how far this association

of facts is accidental or necessary and significant. The proportion of

crotchety agitators among the population of foreign birth we believe to be

actually less than among the natives. Certainly, our most mischievous

"ringmasters" in partisan politics have been Americans. Immigrants do not

usually bring that class of men with them. As to the masses, it can rarely

be said that the European peasant, as he reaches our shores, is calculated

to demoralize his new neighbors in personal and social habits. He is never

intemperate, unless he come from the British Isles, and his tastes and

amusements are simple and often refined. We are in the habit of supposing

that what inferiority the Briton of the lower classes may labor under in

these respects is made up by his superior political information and

training to free institutions.

The arrivals on our shores represent so many different nationalities that

the faults of each may be balanced by the better traits of others, and that

the chances of good qualities overpowering bad in the resultant compound is

inferable from the exceptionally favorable conditions of life which draw

them so far from home. They are so many convergent threads of different

strength and fineness, twisted into one on the Cisatlantic spindle, to be

then woven into the broad and ever-widening web. The weaving process may

possibly be too much hurried; and that is about the only compensation we

have for the loss of so many hundreds of thousands of allies in our contest

with the wilderness.

A CRYING EVIL.

Is there no grand jury for the train-boy? Can he not be presented and

abated as a nuisance? He runs every day the gauntlet of hundreds of these

inquests, strung along the thousands of miles he makes hateful to the

traveller. Yet he still treads unchecked and unabashed his endless round of

evil-doing. To realize the enormity of the wrong let us fancy him

abandoning his stronghold in the railway carriage and adventuring his raids

on terra firma. How long would the most patient of publics endure his

promenading the sidewalk three times an hour each way, and every time

thrusting upon the occupants of every house, at work, at amusement or at

meals, a package of candy, a semi-rancid orange, or a wholly rancid novel?

He would be clapped into quod and permanently extinguished before

completing his third tour of the square.

The railways have no police to do us this good turn. If they have any, this

youth of the period has purchased their silence. The passenger is handed

over to him like a sheep, his helpless victim, bought with a price. No

means of escape are left open. Frowns and cold shoulders are thrown away on

him. A calm ignoring of his existence is but a spur to his determination to

conquer you. He sets you down as a foeman worthy of his steel. "Ah, old

fellow!" he soliloquizes as he takes your measure, "I'll have you yet. If

you are not politician enough to want yesterday morning's triple sheet

_Tomahawk_, you will want to bury yourself from my reach in the mazy tables

of last year's _Railway Guide_, or, if not that, you'll be glad, after a

while, to let me soothe you with a willow-leaf Havana." Revolving these

thoughts, he strolls imperturbably on, for he understands you perfectly, as

he does all the rest of his various victims.

Discouragement is a word he has no use for. He does not seem to sell

anything. Sometimes you will listlessly yet curiously observe his career,

and settle back into your seat in luxurious satisfaction as he emerges

through the rear door without having effected a solitary transaction.

Better still, he caught his basket in the doorway, and spilled some of his

oranges under the feet of yon slumbering rustic: no, he recovered himself

too soon. He never drops anything except of set purpose--a circular or the

book it recommends. A passenger will occasionally do it, or be made to seem

to do it, and then have of course to purchase the article under foot; but

that is a trick of trade, and one the average train-boy is not master of,

the leaders of the craft only being adepts in it.

On some lines the train-boy was formerly utilized in summer by handing

round ice-water to the thirsty at stated intervals. But the thirsty were a

minority: the cans would splash on the sufficiently moist majority, and

that device for contriving a _raison d'etre_ for the train-boy was

abandoned. He is now more inexcusable and more ubiquitous than ever. He and

cinders are twin evils born of fast schedules. To add four or five miles an

hour to the old rate, station refreshment-booths and platform-peddlers and

spark-catchers have been abolished. The local peanut interest has been

ruthlessly immolated on the altar of Hurry, and the incense of the same

rite poured in, thick and black, at every car-window and ventilator. Let us

hope for an early change in the mode of worship. This acolyte is unknown in

Europe. Travellers there manage to lunch, read and smoke very comfortably

without him; and they can do it here with perfect ease if similar methods

are adopted for supplying their real wants.

E. B.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] These adventurers are easily distinguished from their native comrades

by the fact of all purely _Russian_ names terminating either in "-off" or

"-in."

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The Life of Count Cavour. Translated from the French of

Charles de Mazade. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

In this substantial volume M. Charles de Mazade has related in a very

interesting manner the history of an extraordinarily interesting career.

Cavour's career was a short one--the space of eleven years covers the whole

of it, and the shorter space of six years witnessed its most striking

achievements--but it was nevertheless one of the most remarkable and most

active in the annals of statesmanship. Clearly and harmoniously unfolded as

it is in these pages, it reads indeed like a romance or a fairy-tale: there

seems almost an element of magic in Cavour's inveterate successes. M. de

Mazade is a passionate admirer of his hero, and the story loses in his

hands none of its brilliancy of coloring. But it needs no retouching: the

naked facts themselves are a drama, with all the necessary requisites--the

large and moving argument, the skilful performers, the thickening plot, the

moment of suspense, the happy denouement, the attentive auditory. The work

accomplished by Cavour had a peculiar completeness and unity: it was a

single, consistent task cut out for him by circumstances. It is sometimes

said of him that circumstances had more part in the result than the man

himself, and that if they had not happened to combine themselves again and

again in a peculiarly favorable manner the liberator of Italy would not

have been known beyond the limits of the quiet little kingdom of Piedmont.

But M. de Mazade points out that Cavour's greatness was precisely in his

marvellous talent for making his occasion--for knowing just the way in

which to take hold of circumstances. From the day on which, of his own

moment and as the first step in a far-seeing plan, he sent, in the face of

domestic opposition, a Piedmontese contingent to the Crimean war, he

pursued this vigilant culture of opportunity without faltering or going

astray. M. de Mazade characterizes him as an extraordinary mixture of

prudence and boldness; and these qualities with him always went hand in

hand. He knew equally well how to wait and when to act. But it is the

element of discretion, the art of sailing with the current of events, that

enabled him to effect a great revolution by means that were, after all, in

relation to the end in view, not violent--by measures that were never

reckless, high-handed or of a character to force from circumstances more

than they could naturally yield. For M. de Mazade, Cavour is the model of

the moderate and conservative liberal. Liberal he was, as a friend said of

him, "as he was fair-complexioned, lively and witty--by birth." But M. de

Mazade constantly emphasizes the fact that his liberalism was untinged by

the radical leaven, and that if he was a liberator, he had nothing in

common with some of the gentry who aspire to this title. All this is very

obvious. Cavour was not only the champion of his country: he was also the

servant of his king, and his dream was to see Italy not only united, but

brought under the sway of the old Piedmontese crown. He often said,

according to M. de Mazade, that no republic can give as much liberty, and

as real liberty, as a constitutional monarchy that operates regularly. It

is noticeable that, keeping in view his hero's conservative side, M. de

Mazade relates in considerable detail the story of the liberation of Italy,

with no allusion to Mazzini beyond speaking of him two or three times as a

vulgar and truculent conspirator, and with a regrettable tendency to stint

the mixture of praise to the erratic but certainly, during a most important

period, efficient Garibaldi. But Cavour's nature was a wonderfully rich and

powerful one; and there is something very striking in such religious

devotion to an idea when it is unaccompanied with fanaticism or narrowness

of view, and tempered with good sense and wit and the art of taking things

easily.

Cavour had had his idea from the first: he cherished it for a long time

very quietly: he was awaiting his opportunity. "We will do something," he

said one day in 1850, rubbing his hands--his legendary gesture--as he

looked across Lago Maggiore to the Austrian shore. It was not till 1855

that the first serious opportunity came, but he attached himself to this

with the quiet zeal and obstinacy of a man who feels that he is driving in

the narrow end of the wedge. There were all sorts of telling objections to

be made to the co-operation of Piedmont in the Crimean war, and Cavour was

at the disadvantage, for a man who was rigidly and supremely practical, of

having to defend his course on ideal and far-fetched grounds. But his

idealism proved to be plain good sense: it brought little Piedmont to the

notice of Europe, and gave her the right to call attention to her affairs.

The young Italian officer spoke the truth who said to a poor soldier

struggling with the mud in the Crimean trenches, "Never mind--make the best

of it: with this mud we are making Italy!" As Piedmont had had a hand in

the war, so she had a seat at the Congress of Paris which followed it; and

here Cavour, finding his auditory ready made to his hand, introduced--a

little perhaps by the shoulders--the then comparatively novel "Italian

question." This was his second opportunity. The emperor Napoleon had asked

him, from an impulse of imperial civility, "If there was any thing he could

do for Italy?" and Cavour, taking him at his word, and more than his word,

had instantly drawn up a list of _desiderata_. M. de Mazade gives a

detailed and very interesting account of the gradual adoption by the

emperor of his Italian policy--of the various phases through which it

passed, of its complications and interruptions, and of Napoleon's curiously

fitful, illusive and at times evasive attitudes. Cavour's relations with

Napoleon III. may serve as the best example of his disposition to use the

best instruments and opportunities that offered themselves, and not quarrel

with them because they were not ideally perfect. This was what the Italian

"patriots" of the mere romantic type could never forgive: that Italy should

appeal for liberation to the oppressor of France was to them a displeasing

and monstrous anomaly. But Cavour had a lively sense of reality in human

affairs, and for him the best thing was the best possible thing. It was

enough that--for reasons best known to himself--the "Man of December" had

taken a fancy to this idea of lending a hand to the oppressed Peninsula:

his own duty was to fan the flame. The emperor's sympathy with Italian

independence is certainly the most interesting and honorable feature in his

career, and its mingled motives and mysterious fluctuations present a very

curious study. The desire to do something for Italy was, however,

steadfast, and had been an early dream; and the reader of M. de Mazade's

pages can easily believe that Cavour's personal influence and magnetism

had something--had even a good deal--to do with bringing it to a climax.

Napoleon appreciated the Piedmontese statesman, and felt his superiority.

From a certain ideal point of view there is something displeasing in seeing

the advocate of so noble a cause dancing attendance upon an unscrupulous

adventurer, and hanging as it were upon his lips; but we know not what

other ways there may have been: we only know that, in fact, a great deal of

generous French blood was shed upon the plains of Lombardy.

After the Congress of Paris, Cavour spent two years of eager, anxious

waiting and of the most active private agitation. It was by the aid of

England and France combined that he proposed to compass his aim, but he

had, in the case of England, to content himself with a strictly Platonic

sympathy. His mingled ardor and tact during this period, his tension of

purpose, and yet his self-restraint, his inveterate skill in turning events

to his advantage, are vividly narrated by M. de Mazade. At last, in the

summer of 1858, Napoleon sent for him to Plombieres, drove him out in a

dog-cart, and during the drive told him that he was now ready to "do

something" for Italy. Then and there the outline of the war of 1859 was

resolved upon. The abrupt conclusion of the war was, at least momentarily,

a profound disappointment to Cavour: the Peace of Villafranca, which left

half its fruits ungathered, seemed to the Italian party almost an act of

treachery on the part of the French emperor. Napoleon was, in fact, alarmed

at his work: he had been almost too successful, and he determined to throw

up the game. Cavour, in irritation, disgust and despair, immediately

withdrew from the ministry, his place being taken by Urbano Rattazzi. The

new minister presided at that great breaking-up throughout the rest of

Italy for which the expulsion of the Austrians from Lombardy had given the

signal, and which took place under the direct patronage of Piedmont. The

attitude of the latter state was a very difficult one, and Rattazzi proved

but half master of the situation: at the end of six months Cavour was

recalled to power. From this point in his work one step succeeds another

with a sort of dramatic effectiveness. He was confronted with the constant

necessity of presenting an unflinching front to Austria; the necessity,

equally imperious, of checking reactionary excesses in Parma and Modena,

Bologna and Tuscany; the need of keeping what had been gained, and at the

same time reaching forth for more; of keeping on good terms with France,

who had drawn back almost as far as she first advanced; of remaining free,

especially, from the reproach of meddling with the papacy--an enterprise

for which the occasion was not ripe; of stimulating England, who had

advanced in proportion as France withdrew; and of being supremely careful,

generally, to commit no faults. The cession of Savoy and Nice brought down

upon Cavour a storm of denunciation, but he had counted the cost, and the

resolution with which he paid the price of Napoleon's assistance was

extremely characteristic of him. It was apparently equally characteristic

of Garibaldi, born at Nice and her most illustrious son, that he felt it a

mortal affront that by this diplomatic bargain he should have been

"deprived of a country." M. de Mazade characterizes very happily Cavour's

attitude during Garibaldi's invasion of the Two Sicilies--his silent

complicity, his skill in giving his terrible associate rope, as it were,

and yet keeping him in hand. Cavour did not live to see the last two acts

of his great drama--the occupation of Venetia and of Rome--but they were

only, as it were, the epilogue: they were implied in what had gone before.

He died of overwork--broke down in the midst of his labors. Great innovator

as he had been, he was remarkable for the moderation of his attitude toward

the Church; and the last words he uttered to the good friar who attended

his deathbed were a repetition of his famous formula--"Libera chiesa in

libero stato."

Egypt as it Is. By J. C. McCoan. New York: Henry Holt &

Co.

During the three quarters of a century which have elapsed since the French

invasion a voluminous Egyptian library has been built up, but it is almost

wholly scientific, sentimental or "entertaining." Of the antiquities and

the natural history of the country, the temples, mummies and crocodiles,

and the humors of Fellah-life, we have been told a great deal. An account

of the condition and prospects of the country from an economic point of

view has remained a desideratum. This seems the less remarkable when we

recall the fluctuations through which the industry, commerce and politics

of Egypt have passed since Mehemet Ali seized and commenced repolishing

the sceptre of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. He and his four successors

stood forth as the absolute lords of the land; but it was subject not only

to the accidents of their character and policy, but to the capricious and

almost always mischievous interference of their suzerain the Porte, and the

often beneficial, but never quite disinterested, control of the great

Christian powers.

The progress of the past fourteen years has been more palpable than that of

the preceding half century. The khedive Ismaal succeeded the

reactionary Abbas, who stopped, and, as far as in him lay, nullified, the

work of Mehemet in 1865. Since that year 971 out of 1126 miles of railway

have been built; three or four hundred miles of telegraph have grown to

fifty-five hundred; 112 miles of canal have been dug, and a great part of

the old system deepened or restored; the great Suez Canal, additional to

that, has been undertaken and completed at a net cost to Egypt of

sixty-seven millions of dollars; the barrage, or damming for irrigation

purposes, of the Lower Nile has been pushed at a cost of five millions; ten

millions have been spent on the harbor of Alexandria, one upon lighthouses,

which make the coast as safe as that of any European power, and half a

million on the bridge at Cairo; schools have been multiplied, remodelled

and endowed in like proportion; the judiciary has been recast with the best

results, so far as time has permitted them to be shown; and the exports,

excluding the transit-trade, which the opening of the Isthmus Canal has

diverted from Alexandria, raised from twenty-four millions in 1866 to

sixty-three millions in 1875. The cotton production, created about the

beginning of the present reign by the civil war in the United States, shows

a recovery and re-advance since the loss of that stimulus, shipments from

Alexandria having grown from 1,288,797 quintals in 1866 to 2,615,120 in

1875. The blow dealt the commerce of that city by the transfer of the

Indian trade to Port Said has similarly been "discounted," the mercantile

sagacity of Alexander the Great continuing to assert itself in a movement

of business and population which cannot fail to be largely aided by the

extension of the arable area of Egypt proper and the railway development of

Nubia and the Soudan. The population of the first of these three districts

has grown to five and a half millions, or 484 to the square mile--a

density exceeding that of Belgium. Its multiplication, and the more

wonderful advance in the products of its industry, go to support Mr.

McCoan's assertions of its general well-being. In this regard he maintains

that the Egyptian peasantry compare favorably with those of any Eastern

country. Their mode of life, rude enough in the eyes of Western tourists,

is, he holds, the same as under the builders of Thebes, and much the same

with what the climate and other local conditions will always make it. Their

oppression by the old system of tax-collecting and military conscription

has been greatly relieved. We cannot see, indeed, why an army nominally of

thirty, but actually of less than twenty thousand, and recruited in great

measure from Nubia, should be burdensome. The navy has almost disappeared,

a veto from Constantinople having made iron-clads a prohibited luxury, so

that impressment for the fleet is unfelt.

Mr. McCoan, though generally fair and practical in his statements, tends to

the rose-colored side of things Egyptian. Thus it fares with slavery.

Slaves, white and black, are very numerous in Egypt, "nearly all the indoor

work of every family above the poorest" being done by slaves. In the town

of Mansourah in 1873 an English consular agent, "in rank not even a

vice-consul," used his power under a then existing privilege to liberate

"seventeen hundred in a single month." Mansourah has but sixteen thousand

of population, so that the slave-element must be great. But Mr. McCoan says

the institution is strictly patriarchal, and no way comparable to the

extinct Western form. This does not seem to be borne out by his other

statement, that "few black slaves (the most numerous by far) reach middle

age, ten or a dozen years generally sufficing to sweep away a generation,

at the end of which the whole have to be replaced." And how are they

replaced? By Arab raids among the negro tribes, costing the death, in

battle or on the march, of four or five for one that reaches the Nile or

the Red Sea. The Circassian supply has been brought pretty well to an end

by the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, and is kept up only in a feeble

way by the continued habit of selling their daughters yet prevalent among

the emigrants from that region who have sought refuge among their

coreligionists in the interior of Turkey.

The fortunes of Egypt must be affected by the Turko-Russian war; although,

as England is quite able, and seemingly quite determined, to cork up the

Dardanelles, it is not likely that the ships of the czar can threaten Port

Said for generations to come. The interest of the money-changers, too, is

to keep her quiet and the hands of her Fellaheen occupied only with the

implements of peace--the shovel and the hoe. She is far from warlike, is

indisposed in the extreme to quarrelling with Europe or any part of it, and

should the Turkish empire go to wreck, will be content to drift out of the

wreck as noiselessly as possible. She will, if allowed a chance, be able

ere long to set a shining and valuable example of thrift and liberality to

the rest of the Moslem world. She has already shown that its crust of

bigotry and case-hardened conservatism may be broken, and nobody of any

faith be one whit the worse. Her capacity for improvement will not be

questioned by any reader of this volume, which is the result of a thorough

study of her condition and recent progress.

HOLIDAY BOOKS.

The season for holiday publications has not yet fairly opened, but we

notice a few of those which have already reached us, hoping to present a

tolerably complete list in our next number.

_Californian Pictures in Prose and Verse_, by Benjamin Parke Avery (New

York: Hurd & Houghton), is not a record of travel, but a description of

scenes visited by the author, whose observations extend over a large

portion of California, from Mount Shasta to the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is

written in a clear and fluent style, but "word-painting" is a form of

writing requiring exceptional nicety of execution, and Mr. Avery has not

the power or delicacy of language which would be needed to sustain the

interest of a volume of this size with little or no aid from incident.

There is no _sauce piquante_ to set forth attractively the real merits

which the volume possesses. A sincere feeling for Nature appears to have

been turned by Mr. Avery into the special channel of enthusiasm for the

Sierra scenery, which he has studied with loving and minute care. He

explored no new region, but he went beyond the beaten track, and has sought

to avoid a repetition of the most worn Californian themes. Yet it is to

Californians and to those who have visited the State that the book must

chiefly appeal; and to these it may safely be recommended as a memorial

volume, agreeably written, handsomely got up, and embellished with

illustrations by various artists and engravers, some of Mr. Thomas Moran's

familiar light-bathed distances being perhaps the most noticeable.

Three volumes, bearing the imprint of G. P. Putnam's Sons, are suitable for

children of almost any age. Of these, _Six Sinners; or, School-Days in

Bantam Valley_, by Campbell Wheaton, is a pleasantly-written story, the

warm-hearted, clever, impulsive little heroine being very naturally and

sympathetically drawn. There is a good deal of reality in the delineation

of the other characters, and the school in which the sensitive Dora was so

miserable is no doubt a faithful picture of some boarding-school in New

England of twenty years ago. The miseries, though pathetic, are not of long

duration: we take leave in the last chapter of a very happy little girl,

with friends reconciled and circumstances adjusted in the most delightful

way. The story is nicely constructed, and the interest well sustained, but

the title seems to have no special fitness beyond that of alliteration.

_Patsy_ (by Leora B. Robinson) goes through all the stages of girlhood,

from pinafores and paper dolls to long dresses and young ladyhood, with

bewildering celerity. We find her on one page learning the Primer along

with the elements of flirtation, and on the next she is finishing her

education with all the philosophies and -ologies. There is no lack of funny

incidents in the book, but they are too crowded, and the characters are too

numerous. This, however, may be no obstacle to children, who have often a

faculty for unravelling genealogical problems, and like to have their fun

spread thick. They will not even have to skip the moral, which, such as it

is, is aimed entirely at parents and guardians.

_The Wings of Courage_, adapted from the French by Marie E. Field, with

illustrations by Lucy G. Morse, contains three rather long stories. But why

"adapted"? and why is not George Sand acknowledged as the author? There

ought to be an authentic translation of Madame Sand's fairy-tales, which

are full of fancy, earnestness and charm. These stories appeal to a more

imaginative and cultured audience of boys and girls than that to which the

realistic tales of American writers are addressed. The beauty and

simplicity of the antique will, we fear, appear dull when compared with the

adventures of hoydens and newsboys, and Young America is not partial to the

young naturalist unless he justifies the singularity of his pursuit by an

abundance of slaughter.

_Books Received._

Tales from Foreign Tongues, 3 volumes--"Memories," from the German of Max

Mueller; "Graziella," from the French of Lamartine; "Marie," from the

Russian of Pushkin. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co.

Money and its Laws: Embracing a History of Monetary Theories and a History

of the Currencies of the United States. By Henry V. Poor. New York: H. V.

and H. W. Poor.

China-Painting: A Practical Manual for the Use of Amateurs in the

Decoration of Hard Porcelain. By M. Louise McLaughlin. Cincinnati: Robert

Clarke & Co.

History of the Ottoman Turks: From the Beginning of their Empire to the

Present Time. By Sir Edward S. Creasy, M.A. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Through Rome On: A Memoir of Christian and Extra-Christian Experience. By

Nathaniel Ramsay Waters. New York: Charles P. Somerby.

The Enchanted Moccasins, and Other Legends of the American Indians. By

Cornelius Matthews. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The Biography of Alfred de Musset. From the French of Paul de Musset, by

Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Last Series of Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty: Discourses by John

James Tayler. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Surly Tim, and Other Stories. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. New York:

Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

History of French Literature. By Henri Van Laun. Vol. III. New York: G. P.

Putnam's Sons.

Music in the House. By John Hullah, LL.D. (Art-at-Home Series.)

Philadelphia: Porter & Coates.

Will Denbigh, Nobleman. (No-Name Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Pauline. By L. B. Walford. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Diana. By Susan Warner. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.