grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat." The chaffinch singing in the thorn-tree, with its shapely head towards the west wind, which is ruffling its gay feathers; the chiff-chaff with its two monotonous but beloved notes so redolent of spring; the willow wren's whistled imitation of the chaffinch's song; thrush, wildest of little poets, singing its very heart away in melody; blackbird, perhaps the dearest of all, with its "boxwood flute" and quiet meditation on life, and love, and all things around him; and the most wholly joyous of all songs-that of the lark, a quivering speck against a quivering blue sky. Who can tell what ecstasy of happiness is in that soaring little heart as it sings as near to heaven as its wings can reach?

These are, I think, the commonest of our songsters; but even as I say this, I remember so many more who all have their part in the great chorus-yellow hammers, linnets, pipits, tits of many kinds, and, not far off them, goldencrested wrens, with their sharp tee-tee ringing from among the many yewtrees which are a feature of this country. But why go on? This is mere cataloguing. Every hedge, every field, every yard of earth or of air is instinct with life and sound, if only insect life. Sound, sound, multiplied field after field; endless music on every side and "soft eye-music" too; melodies, unheard but not the less sweet, which every fresh summer day brings with it; the glory of the grass, the glory of the mountain, the glory of the great wide sky, decked now with light as with a garment; glories of which the heart can never tire. And the very night, too, is eloquent. Before the thrushes and blackbirds have finished their evensong, their last liquid notes that close the eye of day, the owlet is already chanting his dim part-long may he escape the pole trap at the edge of the wood! For, of all the sad sights in a sad world, there are few more sad than to see some beautiful wild thing hanging for long hours in patient misery, unrelieved by any hope but of death from a keeper, whose hereditary ignorance of the amount of mischief done by hawks and

owls would be laughable if its effects were less sad. England is to become a waste wilderness for the sake of a few mere pheasants in the coverts. But non ragionam di lor. . . The note of the brown owl is a very musical one and is heard perpetually around here, sometimes beginning as early as four or five o'clock on a March afternoon. It does not at all resemble Shakespeare's "Tuwit, to-whoo," which the other poets have copied. Rather it is a long and somewhat tremulous "whoo-oo." After the owl comes on the night-jar, whirring his wheel under the oak-tree; and the corncrake, wandering, wandering, in the sweet dewy grass, and all night long repeating that harsh call of which we never weary and which is never harsh to us. And its enemy, the mowing machine, does not come into this hilly land. Perhaps if we are out "when light on dark is growing," we shall hear almost under our feet a sound which has been described as resembling the quacking of a hoarse duck, and after it a snuffing sound such as a dog might make. This is a hedgehog out for his evening walk, accompanied, most likely, by Mrs. Hedgehog. I do not know if his vocabulary is limited to these two sounds. The witch in "Macbeth" says, indeed, that "thrice the hedgepig whined," but I never heard of its doing

So.

Have I so far only mentioned common birds and beasts? They are not the less loved because common.

The meanest things below,
As with a seraph's robe of fire
Invested, burn and glow-

in there is a real love of nature in his heart who sees and hears them. But this neighborhood can boast of some creatures which are really rare in many parts of England. For a tract of country in which there is a river, a portion of real uncultivated mountain heath, a portion too of cultivated land, makes a happy hunting-ground for a naturalist; and such a happy hunting-ground is tais. About three hundred and fifty acres of the low hill opposite the mountain, of which I have already spoken,

are surrounded by a ring fence, and consist of sheep pasture, dingles running down to the brook below, the site (hardly the ruins) of a little alien priory, forsaken as long ago as the reign of Edward IV., much brushwood, as well as better pasture fields. Here is a haunt-one of the few English haunts -of black game; not numerous enough for a drive, and yet sufficiently numerous for their call-that sound as if they were clearing their throats-to be familiar. It gives a pleasant wildness, a far-away character, to their surroundings. They roost in trees at night, and are more at home on their feet than on the wing; but when once put up, they fly straight and strong and rather high. The stream is loved by dippers; but kingfishers are rare. I think the banks are too rocky, and perhaps the stream too rapid, for their mode of fishing. On the mountain there are ring-ousels in plenty. You can hear their sweet, wild song there any spring day, and perhaps find one of their nests hidden away among the heather. And, best of all, here are curlews-we lay the accent on the last syllable in this part of the world. Your first experience of them will perhaps be when you are out on the mountain in spring or autumn. If you hear the sound of a far-off whistle, like that of no other bird you ever heard, then look up, and high, high over your head you will see the beautiful creatures flying most probably in a wedge, and with a straight but rather slow flight. They are on their way to the sea if it is autumn; on their way from it if it is spring. They arrive here in March, and when they are settled in their summer haunts you will often hear their sweet tremulous whistle as they fly low over the mountain, and perhaps their other startled cry, which has been likened to that of the rare black woodpecker. The curlew is a handsome bird, varying very much ir size, but some of them stand quite eighteen inches high. They lay their eggs on the ground and on hardly any nest; and like those of the pewit, they are arranged in a quatre-foil. Pewits are rare here. They prefer tillage to

pasture land, but a few miles away their beautiful lonely cry is heard over every field. Woodcock and snipe abound, and not long ago I heard that one of the rarer solitary snipe had been seen. Some woodcock are said to remain here to nest.

As for four-footed beasts, "the little red fox from his hole in the rocks" on the mountain, where hounds so rarely come, prowls down to the farms, and the men tell strange stories of his cunning and his depredations. But the silent badger, which is comparatively common here too, is a far more difficult beast for a terrier to tackle in his hold. Good Bewick, whose sympathy with all wild things was so far in advance of his time, never said a truer word than when he told us that the badger is harmless and inoffensive, and unless attacked it employs its formidable weapons of defence only for its support. "As grey as a badger" is a proverb; and lately two white ones were, I am told, seen about here. I confess to a hopeless inability to tell a weasel from a stoat; one, or both, abound, and the cats often catch them and bring them into the houses. There is a good woman here who is proud of the exploits of her cats in catching "honts (moles) or any vermin moving in the ground." This same old body has the rare art of attracting birds and beasts to her, and last winter she had as many as five robins roosting in

her little room at once. Her three cats,

sleeping happily in front of the fire, did not molest the little visitors who came in under a flag of truce.

H. C. T.

From The España Moderna. CASTELAR ON DE GONCOURT.

"I did not know de Goncourt, but in his last book he says that he met me one day at the house of Jules Simon. I do not remember it. He adds that when leaving he changed hats. I do not remember that either. I do not even know what his hat looked like, but I have read his work

so much that I know what kind of a head he had. As a general thing, style and language are well handled in France. French writers seem like Florentine artists of the fifteenth century, unequal in genius, but equal in taste. All breathe an air of the City of the Uluses, and this is their glory. Then the French are masters of the art of constructing a book. Neither the Germans, the Saxons nor our brethren of Italy know how to put a book together like our neighbors beyond the Pyrenees. De Goncourt wrote books adorned by a style as finished as that of other Frenchmen; but notwithstanding the national evenness of fine work, he committed many extravagances. He has a great and extraordinary preference for a Japanese sort of art; he is none the less subject to a ritual like that of the ancient hieratic art; he is dazzling on account of the brilliancy of his lacquer, but like Oriental art produces better things inanimate than animate, precious as gems but without real inspiration, or true and genuine life. The Japanese style of art speaks to the sense and pleases the eye, therefore only those authors should toy with it who wish to express sensations rather than ideas.

What a love those Goncourt twins had for details!-the one who died ten years ago as well as the one who has just died. They represent in letters the Siamese twins. Neither one nor the other painted with broad sweeping strokes, both painted daintily, as in the making of miniatures or water colors. Within reach in my study I have the History of Antoinette, and the volume on French society during the Revolutionary period. Nobody can surpass in minutiæ and detail those two writers, but they did not see the infinite heaven, much less the fixed stars which are called eternal ideas. It seems impossible that a writer should treat of affairs like the reign of terror yet make one laugh on every page. It seems impossible to glance at a period like that of the Revolution and not even see those lofty thoughts which, true or not, glowed for the mind

of man. If by chance the Goncourts have a glimpse of such a thought 'tis gone like a meteor. Renan said that the de Goncourt brothers could never rise to the contemplation of a superior ideal; they saw everything with a microscope, and by searching found out many defects hidden from the serene and natural light of the understanding; these souls never penetrated the reign of the ideal. Be this as it may, an originality almost extravagant, a gallant style, a rich ornateness of language characterized these two brothers, truly exceptional even in the genius of France.

Translated for THE LIVING AGE by Minna C.

Smith.

From Macmillan's Magazine. FRENCH AND ENGLISH. Once upon a time three Frenchmen, augurs all and members of the Academy, sat them down to condemn the island, whose name is vaguely familiar and whose inhabitants hey imagine aboriginal savages. "The English," declared the first, in that gaily confident tone which is assured by ignorance, "the English are all drunkards." "Yes," murmured the second, complacently nodding his head like a Chinese toy, "the country of fog." The third flashed a smile of approval upon his colleagues, and for his share of the controversy demanded the assent of an Englishman. "Yes, we are all drunkards," agreed the Englishman, with a stout gravity, unwilling to shake their child-like credulity; and instantly the question was brushed aside, as though it had received a final, irrevocable

answer.

Such is the temper wherein we are considered by our next-door neighbors, and we shall have a right to resent the heresy when our own judgment of France is clarified. The untravelled Englishman appears to believe that Paris is inhabited by a mob of ruffians, who cultivate loose morals upon a diet of snails; at any rate he persists in re

garding his traditional enemy with an unreasoning contempt which the slightest knowledge of the truth would dispel.

Insular prejudice on the one hand, continental obstinacy on the other, are ceaseless hindrances to an amicable approach, and, remembering our own misjudgment, we contemplate the fallacies of France in a spirit rather of curiosity than of indignation. In truth the two countries are separated by something else than the winds and the waves of the Channel. The Straits of Dover are the very begetters of mystery, and though they may be traversed in a brief two hours the voyage from either shore seems enough to obscure the keenest vision and to tangle the freest intelligence in the meshes of superstition. And if he who sets out upon the enterprise commonly returns with a trunk full of falsehoods what shall be his fate who warms his hatreds at his own fireside? His lack of adventure shall prove a constant stumbling-block to peaceful amenity; he shall sit and mumble in impenetrable ignorance; in age he shall repeat the tales wherewith the old wives beguiled his childhood. And since it is upon our side that the greater number embarks, it is upon theirs that the misunderstanding is the more wilful and desperate.

Paris, then, is suffering most acutely from Anglophobia, and one knows not to what indiscretion the madness will hurry her. The disease, old as history itself, has changed with the centuries, and so long as it sprang from an acknowledged enmity it was neither virulent nor incurable. The hatred which incites two combatants of tried courage yields easily to honorable treatment; and even when Joan of Arc died a martyr's death at Rouen, when Calais was scored on Mary's heart, when Marlborough routed the forces of the Great King, the malady was less violent than at this present day, when you must seek its causes prejudice and catchwords. For how much folly has Albion's imagined perfidy been responsible? And it is the phrase, not the reality, that sows the

in

Indeed, the disease

seeds of poison. grew as the infection declined, and it was already dangerous when Napoleon the Third held court at the Tuileries, and the masterpieces of Offenbach were whistled upon the Boulevards. Ridicule was then the rampant symptom, and the keenest sufferers were the authors of vaudeville and comic opera. They, in their hallucination, invented a monster such as never was seen, and dubbed him an Englishman. He was portentous indeed, this sorry child of darkness and fog. No sunshine sparkled on his dusky youth, and stern vulgarity wrapped round his middle age as with a mist. Meanwhile, as if to atone for the sourness of his temper, his fancy was loudly expressed in whiskers, red waistcoats, box-coats, and buttons big as saucers. He was an impossible mixture of Pecksniff and little Mr. Bouncer. Not the most grimly hag-ridden country in the world could have produced him; yet he appeared like as life to a generation of sight-seers and since less than a year ago. he walked the stage disguised in the trappings of a mediæval herald, it is plain that he still serves to void the spleen of the belated Parisian.

But the last victims of Anglophobia are at once more dangerous and less amicable. It is the journalists of Paris that are now most bitterly infected with the hatred of England. In their loudly expressed loathing of the unknown country across the Channel they forget their legitimate revenge; and they would pretend to fold the German to their breast, as they long since welcomed his beer, if by the pretence they could put another insult upon the loathed island. For them the Englishman is a veritable bogey, a composite monster with the maw of the ostrich, the beak of a hawk, the claws of a tiger, the manner of a clergyman, and the cunning of an ape. This terrific creature, says the French journalist, roams up and down the world, impelled only by the lust of plunder and of blood; but he is happiest when he is robbing the honest

Frenchman of his due or cajoling the mild-mannered Belgiau (on the Congo) into the forfeiture of his ivory. Above all, this shameless hybrid is alert; if the sun never sets on his empire his eye never closes in sleep; and ever from beneath his drooping lid he espies some fresh occasion for ruin and outrage. To his impious ingenuity no limit is set. He is capable of organizing the manufacture of dynamite, and of betraying his own plot, that France may tremble for the safety of her Not long since a halfpenny print, in search of a headline, nounced the murder of the sultan, and (declared the Parisian journals) the falsehood was plainly invented by England, that monster personified, with the deliberate intent to shake the peace of Europe. Thus the Briton walks abroad, hungry in ill-doing, still cutting throats and poisoning wells with a ferocious energy unrivalled since the heroic days of giants and demi-gods.

czar.

an

Modern history, we are told, is but a catalogue of England's crimes, and it is pleasant to recall some more recent achievements which have cast a lustre upon our national fame. The most brilliant opportunity arrived something more than a year ago, when France was persuaded to undertake a campaign in Madagascar. The sportsmen of England, tired of the Andes and big game, saw a chance not only of gratifying their secular enmity, but of finding an excellent quarry for their bullets. Instantly a club was formed, and the members, chartering a yacht, set sail for Madagascar. They spared neither malice nor expense; their rifles were of the newest pattern; in the pocket of each lurked a revolver, and there was none who did not carry a dagger at his hip that his victim might leave the world happy in a coup de grâce. The danger of the road added a zest to the enterprise, and though any other than a stout-hearted, unscrupulous Briton might quail before the risk of taking pot-shots at an army on the march, this gang of ruffians found comfort in the thought that a

vast bag of Frenchmen would be its reward. How our countrymen fared in their perilous adventure has never been revealed; a greater enormity soon drove this masterpiece of brutality from affrighted memory of France, and even the Figaro, whose ingenuity invented the novel sport, was too indolent to follow the career of its own puppets.

To insist that so fantastic a charge was deliberately brought against England seems like explaining a joke. Yet to be unversed in this extravagance of Anglophobia is to be wofully incredulous, and it is necessary at this point to declare that no fancy herein set forth is without its warrant. Now, the press, having solemnly urged a diplomatic intervention, having even protested with circumstance that the same plan of murder had been followed in Tonkin and Dahomey, was not slow in discovering another piece of wickedness which put the wanton sportsmen into obscurity. The resources of France were inadequate to transport her impediments from Marseilles to Madagascar, and the failure was obviously due to the devilish contrivance of Perfidious Albion. Nor was Albion on this occasion disinterested in her perfidy; by some fiendish machination she had arranged the shortcoming of France that she might twist it to profitable account. Where, indeed, could France turn in her extremity if not to that England which existed only for her discomfiture and ruin? Thus the Brinkburn was chartered and fitted out; her English captain (suspect from his blood) undertook to carry the French stores to Madagascar; and he had got no further than Malta when his ship broke down, and a miserable delay was enforced upon France's legitimate ambition. That the accident was deliberately brought about by a malicious Briton no self-respecting journalist doubted for a moment. And in truth not a link was lacking in the chain of indictment. All the world knows that France had no sufficient transport of her own, and all the world knows