I will sell you the picture for ten thousand lire."

He replaced the panel in its wrappings. Sanderson watched him as he did so, wondering where he was to raise a sum equivalent to his whole year's income. Jubb, of course, was rich, but Jubb could hardly be invited to subscribe to the purchase of a picture which he had never seen. Sanderson was greatly astonished that the old man had offered to sell it. Affairs, however, were now in the plane of business, and in that plane the procedure in an Italian picture-shop is common form.

"I am only an artist," he said; "I Icould not offer more than five thousand." The old man looked intensely sympathetic, but shook his head.

"Impossible, Signore," he answered. He tied the string of the package, and then said, "Eight thousand, and the picture is yours."

"I'll think it over," said Sanderson. He began to realize that the old man had meant to sell him the picture from the moment that he unwrapped it.

"It will afford me great pleasure if I may come to talk with you again," he said.

"The pleasure will be wholly mine," replied the old man with a magnificent bow.

Sanderson walked to his rooms in the Via Margutta, put a chair on the Blackwood's Magazine.

balcony, lit a cigar, and sat down to meditate on the great event of the afternoon. That lovely face, with its aureole of yellow hair, seemed to live again before his eyes, and he felt that though bankruptcy and bare feet were the result of the purchase, the picture should be his. It was strange that the mysterious old man should have reiterated his belief that it was a modern work; to an expert the traces of the Turkish oil and white-of-egg process were finally convincing. But, after all, the history of the work didn't matter any more; Sanderson was in love with a type of girlhood more beautiful than any dream of his artist soul. She had been lovely as the Madonna, she was more lovely as Venus, with her hair stirred by the spring wind, her sunwarmed limbs and her little feet that rested like faint pink shells on the edge of the sea. Even if Jubb turned renegade to the great doctrine of Turkish oil he would not care.

In the evening he wrote to the critic, guardedly, hinting that he had found something which might help to reveal the secret of the Madonna. Jubb, in answer, announced that he was about to return to Rome, and that his offer to re-label the pictures in the Pitti Palace had been foolishly refused by the guardians of that shrine of art.

St. John Lucas.

Upon Sterne, I fancy, who is responsible for so many kinds of sentimentality, may be fathered the general belief that Paris is the gayest of capitals. Anglo-Saxons, in particular, seek it as a sort of Alsatia in the absence of a corresponding region at home. The trail of respectability that is over

us all ends in Paris in a mere squirrel track, and runs up a tree somewhere in the Boulevard des Capucines. Everyone, I suppose, wishes to have a glimpse of the mauvais sujet among cities: perhaps the sight of the drunken helot was not wholly disagreeable to the Spartans. And just as every man

likes to be considered something of a rogue with women, so everybody will speak with a somewhat similar complacency of a visit to Paris.

Yet, of all that, Paris is to me one of the most melancholy of the world's great cities. Sterne himself told the Count de B- that the French were too serious. Whether this was jest or earnest then, it is certainly deadly earnest now. Scratch the glittering surface of the Rue de la Paix, of the Boulevards, of the Avenue de l'Opéra, and you find the sombre base of Parisian melancholy. Anyone in Paris will tell you that the fault of London is its excess of "spleen." If it were nothing worse than spleen in Paris! There it is liver, at the very least. After living in Paris the best part of a year endeavoring to catch some of its celebrated gaiety, I have become convinced that it is non-existent. My choice of Paris, be it said, was wholly voluntary, and I began my residence there with no prejudice, except perhaps one in the city's favor.

To the visitor on a week's or a fortnight's holiday Paris may seem a very carnival of gaiety, and most English books upon it are, I fancy, no more than holiday, fair-weather perform ances, or else the products of that artificial enthusiasm known to voluminous writers of travel. For a few days, however, I have myself found Paris enjoyable. But once I settled as a resident the case completely altered. Just as no one living in London goes to see the Tower, or nightly haunts the Strand or Piccadilly Circus, so no one dwelling in Paris is for ever on the Boulevards or at the Café de la Paix. And who would care to spy often upon the nakedness of the danse macabre in the halls and cafés of Montmartre? began of necessity to delve a little deeper beneath the frothy outside, and was appalled by the gloom of the interior.

I

I shall not here dwell upon the beautiful melancholy that emanates from such spots as the Luxembourg Gardens or the Tuileries. That is peculiar to many old cities. It proceeds from the decay of ancient grandeur, but it has a redeeming charm that no one can quarrel with. The dead Faubourg S. Germain has a similar, though less apparent, sadness about it. It is rather of the population that I am speaking.

The dominant type of face is not a happy one. It may be animated, but it is scarcely ever joyful. How can it be when its owner generally lives without a ray of hope? If ultra-cynicism, based on the flattest and dullest of materialism, is the hallmark of a high civilization, all of us, one fancies, will pray for a staying element of barbarism. Where there is no sincerity, one might paraphrase, the people are Parisians. It is amazing how honest folk from the provinces will hastily disclaim Parisian origin, lest they should be confounded-or worse-with the others. Breton and Norman servants even, I have found again and again, will claim kinship with England rather than with Paris.

For this latter-day Parisian cynicism has really culminated in the literal nihilism that believes in absolutely nothing. The French have been called a nation of sou-keepers. That was before the agitation of the high cost of living. The Parisians now are a nation of franc-keepers; even the franc, however, is no longer a divinity, but spent as quickly as it is mede-as though the Day of Judgment were at hand. The stranger who was welcomed in the city for his spending and wasting has finally, by an inevitable law, turned the citizens into spenders and wasters. Now, neither visitor nor Parisian can be happy in Paris without a great deal of money.

Everyone has been struck upon entering a Parisian apartment house by the

gloom that seems to emanate from the porter's lodge. This loge of the concierge is responsible for much. My own concierge and his wife, my neighbors assured me, were of the better sort. From what I saw of others, I could well believe it, and made it a point to deal with them liberally. Yet the hypocritical greetings that we tenants bestowed upon the watch-dogs were the true index to our feelings. Our goings and our comings were coldly and mercilessly surveyed day and night, our letters were scrutinized, our postcards read, and our visitors weighed in the peculiar balance of the concierge. Our servants in all that block were, with one exception, uniformly dishonest. The pearl of price,

the unique honest one, was a Breton woman of sixty who was hoping to end her days in the same employment. All of them were furtively pumped for gossip at the loge, and a ceaseless toll was being levied upon the tenants, who responded with a proportionate sentiment of grim hatred and distrust. My fellow-tenants, moreover, were painfully obsessed by the mounting in the prices of food, by the fear of a war and the dread of Apaches. The recent development of bold crime has actually cast a gloom on the population of Paris, and even in my respectable quarter, near the Luxembourg, I was repeatedly cautioned by neighbors against coming home alone, late, from the theatre.

The feeling of distrust extends in every direction. During many and long sessions in cafés on both sides of the river, I could not help observing that the waiters distrust their patrons, who not infrequently attempt to pass off base coin, and that the patrons distrust the waiters, who are even more frequently guilty in the same respect. Small tradesmen are continual offenders in that; and the politeness of shopkeepers of the Rue de la Paix is no

toriously absent from the less gilded quarters. Indeed, the rudeness of the modern Parisian in all the daily commerce of life, except perhaps in a drawing-room, leads me to think that the proverbial French politeness never prospered beyond the Faubourg S. Germain. Neither in the tubes of the Metro, nor on any of the tram or omnibus lines, have I ever seen a man give up a seat to a woman.

Who has not observed the good nature of a London crowd, and been shocked and angered by the savage lack of the slightest consideration in a Parisian? The tense, livid faces scowl as their owners jostle you, and they seem to breathe hatred, bitterness and resentment. The spirit of the devil take the bindmost is nowhere so visible as in Paris to-day, and once you leave the region dedicated to foreigners you look in vain among the sullen, preoccupied faces for any of that charm and cheerfulness that second-hand sentimentalists rhapsodize over. And that,

you say to yourself, is the upshot of a century and a quarter of "liberté, égalité," and particularly, "fraternité."

The cause of all this I cannot attempt to determine. The late Vicomte Melchoir de Vogüé, an admirable critic, holds the recent literature of France to be largely responsible. His cry was for more sincerity and optimism, and he even endeavored to import these qualities from Russia, by means of his book, "Le Roman Russe." From the French materialism, he declares, pessimism has come forth like the worm from fruit decayed. Flaubert once said of his own nihilistic performance, "Bouvard et Pécuchet": "I wish to produce such an impression of lassitude and ennui, that in reading the book one might conclude it to have been written by a crétin." The modern literature, deeply influenced by Flaubert, maintains the Vicomte de Vogüé, has failed in a part of its task-that is, to console

the humble, to bring us nearer to them; it has given us instead a world cramped and deformed, "without any large perspectives." To put upon literature the burden of the French gloom of to-day, and especially the profound melancholy that underlies the life of Paris, is to give it, one fancies, a larger place than literature occupies with us.

But who can say whether this may not be at least partly true? We know The Saturday Review.

how thickly peppered with book-shops is Paris, how much reading is done, and how near allied are the makers of books with the newspapers, which cover Paris even more broadcast than they do London or New York. Perhaps Flaubert's ambition with respect to "Bouvard et Pécuchet" has been fulfilled, and perhaps he has avenged himself on his hated enemy, the bourgeois, in a manner more terrible than even he had hoped?

Henry James Forman.

Rather precipitately judging him by his clothes-as at first I did-I assumed him to be a middle-aged antiquarian, but, as he approached and each detail of his negligé whiskers stood out more clearly, I perceived that he was either a tramp or a philosopher, or perhaps both.

As though he had divined my thought he stopped at the gate and proceeded to introduce himself. He had the air of a rather incompetent sort of person.

"Sir," he said, "I am a spreader." "Indeed," I replied mildly. "A moderately strenuous profession, I imagine."

He looked at me rather sharply. "On the contrary, Sir, I find it so complex and colossal a task that for some time past in my more poignant moments of despair I have contemplated giving it up entirely. May I lean against your railings?"

He leaned.

that I should have been the one to think of it. For my whole soul is bound up in it. The Idea is Me-I am

the Idea. Honesty, Sir-simple hon'esty. Honesty is the key which unlocks the door to happiness-I am the bearer of the key.

"Let us look at this question for a moment, Sir, and see how it works out. Let us assume that everyone in the world is honest. What happens?"

He took off his little, pinched-up, exbrown soft hat and hung it on the railings, and I was astonished at his extraordinary resemblance to one of our leading statesmen.

"Why, a few sweeps with a razor,” I reflected, "and-"

"What happens, Sir? Take, for instance, an ordinary occurrence-a daily, hourly occurrence one of the commonest and yet, I think you will agree with me, not the least noble and beautiful of the customs of civilized finance -the lending of money. Now, Sir, assuming that everyone is honest, let us suppose one Jackson wishes to borrow five hundred pounds. He is temporarily

Jack

which our greatest men not infrequently have found themselves. son says, 'I need five hundred pounds; I will go to Parker. I like Parker

he is a fine fellow in many ways. Yes, it shall be Parker-certainly Parker.' So he calls upon Parker. He says, 'My dear Parker, lend me five hundred pounds.'

"Parker replies, 'Why, certainly, Jackson. For how long do you require it? Jackson considers. Then he answers, 'I shall repay you on the 21st of May next at eleven o'clock.'

'Help

"'Excellent,' says Parker. yourself from the crate in the hall as you go out.'

""Thank you,' answers Jackson, takes five hundred pounds from the crate or hamper or basket or whatever Parker keeps his money in, and goes home.

"On the 21st of May he puts it back. Merely that-puts it back. He happens to be passing Parker's, the money's due, Jackson is honest, and so he pops into the hall and puts it back. Do you see, Sir? It is only just the merest honesty-nothing more. And what could be simpler or less expensive? No deeds, mortgages, I.O.U.'s, promissory notes, and all the complicated paraphernalia of the law. No worry on Jackson's part and less on Parker's. No expensive safe to buy. Why buy a safe? Everybody is honest, nobody would steal the money. Parker knows that and puts his savings in a crate or in the wheelbarrow out in the potting-shed-anywhere."

The spreader looked into my face, smiling.

"Isn't it simple?" he said.

I confessed that, while it was a little confusing at first, it certainly sounded very ingenuous.

I

tion. For instance"-he produced a small booklet which resembled a tract, folded it and presented it to me. am always helpless with these gentlemen, so I took it. "For instance, let us imagine that you have been playing a little croquet in your garden, and while your opponent is engaged in doing the full course in one you come to the gate and lean over it for a little recreation. I chance to be passing, and, getting into conversation with you, I sell you a copy of my book for threepence. By the way, you-er-the threepence, please to illustrate my point-thanks"-for he had collected the threepence off me. "And naturally you say to yourself, 'Now, have I been defrauded? Is this volume, for which I have paid threepence, honestly worth it?'

"Bearing in mind that everyone is honest, you turn to me and say, 'Friend, is this book worth threepence?' Instantly I answer, 'Sir, it is not. Two-pence represents its total value, and therefore I return you one penny."

He gravely tendered me the penny, which I took. "And so," he concluded, "you see the exquisite simplicity of it all, my dear Sir, do you not? You are delighted-I am delighted. And all wholly due to the most elementary honesty."

He took up his little hat, exactly as a person takes a pinch of salt in some of our lesser restaurants, and placed it on his head, beaming at