revolt, if he inflicts on me to-morrow the insult which he threatens, it is you whom I shall hold responsible, my fine fellow.

In sheer dread of the consequences for his young tutor, Désiré consents to attend the fête. But the attacks on his religion are too much for his selfcontrol: he dares to hiss the orator.

The crowd rose like the sea when a cyclone passes over it. The committee, men, women, children, stood up, pushed and pressed against each other. Frümsel looked over the crowd in the direction indicated by the movement of all the heads; and it was as though he had received a heavy blow right in his chest: his son was standing up, arms crossed, in the midst of clenched fists and furious faces. Valentin held him by the waist to sustain or defend him. Louise, standing bravely to his side. A surging movement of the crowd carried them all three away.

up also, pressed

After this, M. Frümsel again attacks Valentin as the instigator of his son's revolt.

"How can I help it," asks the tutor, "if you have revolted the conscience of your son by your tyranny?"

They defied one another by their looks: the one small, slight, with his nervous face drawn and paled by revolt, the other, strong, imperious, red in the face, with the veins on his forehead swollen as if they would burst. Louise, terrified, took the hand of Mme. Oberglatt, and drew her forward as if to throw herself with her between the two men. But Frümsel controlled himself; turning his back on his opponent, he went out without looking at any one and slammed the door. There was a moment of stupor; then Désiré, deeply moved, came and took the hand of Valentin.

"Can you doubt it?" cried Valentin, still tingling with excitement.

"Mr. Frümsel is a hasty man," said Mme. Oberglatt, "but he is kind. He will be sorry to-morrow for what he has said to you."

"Too late. I cannot expose myself to hear it twice."

Louise came forward in her turn, with shining eyes, almost pretty in her emotion, and trembling with her hands clasped against her breast, she begged -"My brother would be so sorry if you went. And I too, M. Délémont."

At the sight of her trouble, Valentin understood the meaning of those looks, those words, that voice. It was a return of the temptation that had assailed him already. . . . The peace of his life, comfort, security, fortune, prospects, were there. . . . He had only to hold out his hand to gather all these good things as one gathers a flower. All the mirages of luxury and grandeur which can attract the heart of a poor man passed before him. But his pride was on the watch, and replying rather to the thought than to the words of the girl, he answered with firm and sad gentleness, "No, Mademoiselle, I should despise myself."

He returns to Paris and is received by the great Romanèche as might be expected. His friend Lourtier has been taken on to the staff of the Egalite, but there is no place for Valentin. They want a man of convictions, as Romanèche reminds him, not one who, for a whim, turns against his own side.

In the matter of his little love-affair, also, disappointment awaits him. Paule-Andrée's parents have married her to Lourtier, who can offer her a good position. When Valentin protests, she reminds him that he has not even succeeded in passing his examination.

What has he accomplished in fact, the poor young man? Simply the demonstration of the impossibility of fitting himself, his obstinate, difficult individuality, into any of the holes that offers itself, round or square. He is too hon

est for a spy, too proud for a tool, too clear-sighted to be a dupe of the big words that Romanèche and his like manipulate so cleverly. He sympathizes with the Catholics in the persecution they are enduring at the hands of the narrow and ferocious bigotry that calls itself, comically enough, Free Thought. Yet the dogmas and assumptions of the Roman Church are not for him; he can have nothing to say to a system which postulates as its first condition an absolute submission to authority.

"Their programmes are always magnificent," he says of the socialist leaders. "However, when they have supplanted the bourgeoisie, they will commit the same errors and the same crimes; they have the same instincts, they are worth no more. Oppression will change its direction and there will be a fresh set of tyrants; that is all the difference there will be."

so great a misfortune? It would be simply a return to the law of force. And is not this the supreme law, of which all others are but the parody,when they do not cloak it hypocriteally. In reality anarchy has never ceased to reign. It governs us to-day as formerly, disguised by our falsehoods but not less terrible. It gives everything to him who has, and from the others it takes away even their most humble hopes. It is just as well to proclaim it and to confess it.

man

Here we recognize the dissolvent that is already at work in our modern world, sapping all belief in the schemes of the most ardent of Socialists. The Anarchist, the who pursues the dream of an absolutely untrammelled individual liberty, is the great antagonist which the constructors of the Socialist Utopia will have to meet in the near future. And in France, now, as always, the workshop of ideas for all Europe, where people still fight one another for an ideal or a belief with rancor and consistency unapproached elsewhere, we see foreshadowed what may turn out to be the coming Armageddon, that clash of irreconcilable ideals in which the whole fabric of existing society will finally go under.

A new work by Dr. J. P. Mahaffy is announced, under the title "The Silver Age of the Greek World." It is a study of the period during which the Greeks, after their subjugation by Rome, went into all parts of the world as pioneers of Hellenic culture.

The Methuens have just published a book by Edgcumbe Stakey on "The Guilds of Florence." Full details of her twenty-one Guilds-historical, industrial and political-are given, together with

chapters on her commerce, markets, charities, etc. The illustrations, mostly from old manuscripts, are reproduced for the first time.

A paragraph in The Academy, recording the fact that Mr. Gerald Massey has just entered his seventy-ninth year, will be to many the first reminder that Mr. Massey is still living. It is long since he has done any important literary work, yet, fifty years ago Walter Savage Landor hailed him as "a new

Keats," and Matthew Arnold did not consider Tennyson, "except for the first moment of publication, a serious rival" to him.

Mr. A. B. Todd, of Cumnock, Ayrshire, whose journalistic experience covers a period of over sixty years, who is one of the closest surviving links with Robert Burns, and the annalist as well as life-long champion of the Covenanters, has just seen the proof-sheets of his autobiography through the press. At intervals throughout his long life-he is now in his eighty-fifth year-Mr. Todd has written a good deal of verse, and his "Circling Years and other Poems" was widely noticed on its publication thirty odd years ago. Mr. Todd's father was only nine years younger than Burns, and the autobiography will contain reminiscences of the Scottish bard as he appeared to a contemporary. Mr. Todd is naturally a Burns enthusiast; and he had the honor of presiding at centenary celebrations both of the birth and death of Robert Burns.

Rarely does one take up a book of such delightful quality and temper as "The House of Quiet," whose seventh edition now reaches American readers through E. P. Dutton & Co. Purport

ing to be fragments of an autobiography, "edited by J. P.," and bearing one of those explanatory notes which make the shrewdest doubt whether they preface fact or fiction, it is a succession of leisurely essays on art, philosophy, conduct and religion, varied by character studies of unusual delicacy, with a slender thread of narrative uniting them all in intense and poignant interest. The prevailing tone is serioussad, even-and there are flashes of keen sarcasm, but the view of human nature

is kindly rather than cynical, and the final impression is of cheer and hope. Written in a style of uncommon grace and dignity, these fascinating chapters reveal the personality of an eager, thoughtful, sensitive man, thwarted by ill health at the very outset of his career, and solving for himself the riddle of disappointed ambition with faith and serenity.

The Academy remarks that lovers of medieval England will be glad to hear that the necessary repairs have been taken in hand at Croyland Abbey, and of the Abbey as it now stands, The Academy says:

Croyland Abbey is no longer as Kingsley described it in "Hereward the Wake": "a vast range of high-peaked buildings, founded on piles of oak and alder driven into the fen, itself built almost of timber from the Bruneswold, barns, granaries, stables, workshops, strangers' hall fit for the boundless hospitality of Croyland . . . with the great minster towering up, a steep pile, half wood half stone, with narrow-headed windows and leaden roofs, and above all the great wooden tower from which on high days chimed out the melody of the seven famous bells which had not their like in English land." To-day there is a ruined nave, a part of the central tower and of the magnificent west front, as well as the north aisle, which has been turned into a church. Tennyson has immortalized the beauties of the Wolds, but "Holland" lacks a sacred bard. And yet Tennyson, as a Cambridge man, was in debt to the Abbey. At the beginning of the twelfth century poverty made the Abbot send out begging monks, who began to lecture with such success to the people of Cambridge that in a short time there was not a barn or even a church in the town large enough to hold the hearers. This is supposed, not without reason, to have been the origin of Cambridge University.