alone. In the convent she had had no one | fall. A sudden terror shot through her, to wait upon her, but here her father in- as the maid passed her fingers through the sisted on her having a maid to undress loosened hair; she fancied that she already heard the clipping of the scissors.

her.

The woman praised her beautiful black hair as she let it down.

At last Manna was alone. After devoting herself for some time to meditation and prayer, she began a letter to the Superior.

66

We have celebrated to-day my birthday and my return to my parents' house; but I long for my own birthday, which shall be my entrance into the home of my Eternal Father—”

THE Story of a Trooper* relates th eexperi Ir is a melancholy fact, but it is a fact, that ences of a cavalry soldier in the army of the people are often as much attached to things as Potomac under the command of M'Clellan, and to persons. We may doubt whether there have bears emphatic testimony to the corruption, rot-been many broken hearts from disappointments tenness, and mismanagement which pervaded in love; but there is very little doubt that there the organization of that branch of the service. have been many broken hearts from loss of forThe North was at the outset subject to great dis-tune. What it has cost ruined men to part from advantage in regard to this arm, from the fact the homes of their ancestors, or from the homes that the youth of the North-eastern States are which they have created or beautified, can altogether unaccustomed to horseback exercise, hardly be estimated too highly. The reason of while nearly every Southerner is an accomplished all this is as follows: -The loss of a love is horseman. But for Germans and Irishmen, the something tender, touching, elevated: the loss material for cavalry would hardly have existed. of these material things is degradation. And It required all that strict discipline, good officers, then, again, men do not see that the loss of love and conscientious organization could do to pro- is in any way their own fault. It is a decree of vide a cavalry capable of meeting the South-fate. It is inevitable; and, though with many erners in the field. Yet, while the horsemen of pangs, we always make up our minds to the inthe Virginian army were led by one of the most evitable. But the loss of material things is gendistinguished cavalry officers in history, sup-erally accompanied by the loss of self-esteem; ported by some of the best men in the South, the and no man is utterly lost, except by the loss Federal Government is alleged to have given of that self-esteem. commissions to colonels who had never mounted on horseback, and to captains who had never held a sabre, and to have winked at the grossest waste, disorganization, and peculation in this branch of the service. It is not strange that such troops were utterly unable to check the daring raids of Stuart, or the dashing guerilla exploits of Mosby; or that, as the author avers, M'Clellan should have been afraid to trust his cavalry in action, lest it should be "gobbled up by the regiments of Wade Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee. The Trooper does not bring his narrative further down than the final defeat of M'Clellan on the Chickahominy; and fails, therefore, to do full justice to a force which, under Sheridan, distinguished itself by the terrible havoc it inflicted on the enemy, and came off not discreditably in more than one actual engagement.

Saturday Review.

*The Story of à Trooper. With much of Interest concerning the Campaign on the Peninsula, not be fore written. By F. Cobburn Adams, Author of "Chronicles of the Bastile," "Our World," "The Outcast," "Adventures of Major Roger Sherman Potter," &c. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald. 1869.

Author of Friends in Council.

THE enterprise of newspaper reporters at Washington has always been famous. The following story was told lately in the "Correspondents' Club," which has been formed in that city: At the funeral of the late General Baker, which was held in the White House, the. correspondent of a New York journal, unable to get a ticket of admission, got down through a coal-hole, and after grouping his way reached at last the East Room, directly in the rear of the officiating clergyman. While the clergyman was engaged in prayer, the reporter observed a roll of paper in his hat. To seize it and fly was the work of a moment. When the clergyman turned to find his sermon he found it not. He attempted to dever his remarks from memory, but made a wretched failure of it, much to the astonishment of the dignitaries who were present. The next morning he had the satisfaction of reading his discourse in the New York Herald. Pall Mall Gazette.

From The Edinburgh Review. MEMOIR OF MADAME DE LAFAYETTE.*

passed away; to them the things of the spirit had become the only realities. For the daughter to record the history of a life so holy as that of Madame d'Ayen was a sacred task which brought with it strength to endure the pain of loss and separation, in contemplating the triumphs of a faith such as hers, and in looking forward to a glorious reunion. And the book is one that we can heartily recommend mothers, who usually shun French literature with only too good reason, to put into their children's hands, for it is simple and unaffected, and free from the unhealthy religious sentimentalism that attaches, as we venture to think, to that much over-praised work, Le Récit d'une Sœur.'

|fervent, yet wise affection. We hear little of what goes on in the world, though that WHEN on the 10th Thermidor 1794, the world was convulsed to its very foundations, news of Robespierre's fall reached the pris- and the framework of the society in which oners in the various dungeons of Paris, they lived was cracking beneath them. The where hundreds yet waited for the death births of children, their first communion, which they had seen overtake so many of their marriages, their separations, when war their companions, the first impulse of the and at last prison and the scaffold divide wife of the celebrated Lafayette, who for them, are the only events related. Politics seven weeks had endured all the horrors of are never alluded to; but then we must rethat awful captivity at La Force with un-member that both for her who wrote, and flagging heroism, was to send an emissary for those of whom she was writing, the to the Luxembourg to learn the fate of her world and the fashion thereof had truly nearest relatives. The answer of the jailer there was fearfully concise. Six days before, her mother the Duchesse d'Ayen, her grandmother the aged Maréchale de Noailles, and her sister Louise Viscomtesse de Noailles, had all been guillotined together. The blow was a crushing one; and for the time her own fate became a matter of indifference to Madame de Lafayette. She was not set at liberty for many months, during which she wept for her dead, and found her only consolation in the visits of the faithful priest M. Carrichon, who had at his own imminent risk accompanied that fatal procession to the scaffold, to receive the last words of the victims and give them absolution. When she was released from surveillance in Paris, and had obtained permission from the Emperor at Vienna to share her husband's prison at Olmütz, Madame de Lafayette employed herself in writing with a toothpick and a carefully hoarded fragment of Indian ink on the margins of the few books which they were allowed to retain, the memoir of her mother which fills the first hundred and fifty pages of the volume before us; pages which disarm all literary criticism when we remember how and by whom they were written. They give us a picture of a family in the most aristocratic circle in France, in which religion, love, and duty reign supreme. The corruption of one of the worst periods of French society had brought no taint on them. Father, Noailles with the old maréchal and his wife, mother, brothers and sisters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law seem to live together in unity. Behold Thy servant and the children whom Thou hast given me,' seems ever the attitude of Madame d'Ayen, as one by one, for death or for life, she offers up her children to God. She educates them with the tenderest care, chooses husbands for her daughters at a very early age, and speedily gives to a second generation of grandsons and daughters the same pious,

The Duchesse d'Ayen, Anna-Louise-Henriette d'Aguesseau, was granddaughter of the celebrated Chancellor d'Aguesseau, and was born under his roof at Freshne, in 1737. Her mother, Anne Duprès, was a Norman heiress, and from her, Madame d'Ayen (her only child) inherited a large fortune. At eighteen she married Jean Paul François de Noailles duc d'Ayen, eldest son of the second Maréchal de Noailles, then two years younger than herself. Notwithstanding this disparity in age, and some in tastes, for he was a man of courts and camps, while she was grave and devout, their daughter bears witness to the attachment and happiness of her parents. They inhabited the Hotel de

who had long ceased to go into the world, so that even in the heart of Paris the bride led a very retired life. Her first child, a son, lived but a year, to the inexpressible grief of its mother, who afterwards gave birth to five daughters in succession. They were, Louise, who married her cousin the Viscomte de Noailles, and died on the same scaffold as her mother; Adrienne, Madame de Lafayette; Pauline, Madame de Montagu, whose name is affixed to a memoir of somewhat doubtful authenticity published three years ago; and two others, Madame de Thesan and Madame de Grammont. Last of all, and at a great risk to her own

To the care and education of her daughters, in the highest sense of the word, she devoted herself unceasingly. She read with them and talked with them as their minds ripened, and accustomed them to such perfect sympathy, that to the tie of mother and daughter between them was added that of the closest and rarest friendship:

Her mind and heart,' says Madame de Lafayette, were alike upright, and the idea of regulating our life by the principles of virtue and duty apart from all considerations of interest became so habitual to us, not only from our mother's lessons but from her example, and that of our father in the too rare occasions in which we had the opportunity of seeing him, that the first examples which we met with of a contrary conduct in many of those who are commonly called honest people, caused us a painful impression of surprise which it required many years

of contact with the world to weaken in us.'

life, came the long-wished-for son, received | perceive the course of action which should by the father and grand-parents with ex- at once secure the Liberty which he worultation, with fear and trembling by the shipped, stem the rising anarchy, and save mother, who after a few months of languish- a falling monarch, whose friend and couning saw his feeble life expire, with a resig- sellor he, the republican at heart, had benation to the will of the Divine Giver not come; or were any such course indeed posthe less perfect that in her breast maternal sible to mortal man at such a moment, he affection had the strength of a passion. most certainly lacked decision to pursue it. So the hero of two worlds drifted away into failure; laurels were no longer twined round his bust; soon even his name did not suffice to protect from arrest and insult those dearest to him. But through all the vicissitudes of fortune one faithful heart gave him for thirty-four years the most devoted and passionate affection, for from the hour that boy and girl they stood together at the altar, Adrienne de Noailles loved and reverenced her husband with a love passing the love of women, and proved it in the most critical moments of his career. They began life together so early under the sheltering care of her mother, who had adopted him as a son with all her heart, and who, much as she afterwards differed from him in matters of opinion, always recognized the nobility of his character and the purity of his aims; and at the Hotel de Noailles, when the Marquis went to join his regiment, Madame de Lafayette was left; her head and heart alike troubled, for then, and to the end of her life, as she confessed on her deathbed, her passion for her husband was such that she did all she could to hide it, lest the expression of it should become wearisome to him; and while her noble nature forbade her the indulgence of a single jealous or exacting thought, she suffered acutely from his absences and the many cares and distractions of his position. At fifteen, too, her soul was agitated by doubts on religion. It is hard to account for the malady in the daughter of the saintly Madame d'Ayen, but her eager reasoning mind had wandered into the regions of speculative doubt and difficulty even at twelve years old, and she was unable to share the first communion of her sister. The struggle was a long one, during which she prayed for light; and when some little time after her marriage she emIt is not our business here to review either braced fervently the faith of a Christian, we the life or character of the well-known La- think it was not altogether because either fayette, except so far as they bear on those maternal or priestly influence prevailed over of the remarkable women whose biography | her doubts, but because a nature so paslies before us. He has long since been sionately loving as hers craves absolutely to judged at the bar of history. Disinterested rest in the highest Love, and in intimate and pure in aim, but a man of one idea, neither his temperament nor his talents were of the kind which could command success in such a chaos of madly conflicting forces as France had become in the tremendous year of '92. He lacked clearness of vision to

Madame d'Ayen began to prepare her elder daughters at the age of eleven for that great epoch in a young girl's life, her first communion, and before they were thirteen propositions of marriage for them were already under discussion. The Vicomte de Noailles, eldest son of the Maréchal de Mouchy, and consequently head of the younger branch of the Noailles family, was offered to Louise the eldest, and the young Marquis de Lafayette, an orphan of fifteen, was spoken of for Adrienne the second. Both were accepted by the Duc d'Ayen, on condition that a year or eighteen months should elapse before the subject was mentioned to the young brides elect; but opportunities of meeting were arranged. Madame de Noailles married in the autumn of 1773, and six months later Adrienne, then only fourteen and a half, was united to M. de Lafayette, aged sixteen.

and personal communion with Him, to find a guide through the storms and torments of this life. The decision laid upon her, however, the burden which so many pious and tender souls have to bear through life sorrowing the pain of separation from

their husbands in matters of faith: few sup- the war, which was brought to a termination port it with her exquisite tact and courage. by the defeat and capture of Lord CornwalLafayette's testimony in writing to a friend lis, and January 1782 saw him arrive in after her death on this point is worth trans-Paris the bearer of fresh laurels and of the eribing:

welcome news of peace. Two more children were born to him in the succeeding years — It has been said that she preached to me a George Washington, as the parents were great deal. That was not her way. Her de- proud to name their only son, and a daughvoutness was something quite peculiar; during ter, the author of the simple and unaffected thirty-four years I may say that it never caused memoir from which we quote. Sharing in me one moment's annoyance. All her acts of all her husband's political interests, his efpiety were, without affectation, kept in the back-forts to obtain the abolition of the slave ground where my conscience was concerned. Also I had the satisfaction of seeing my friends, who were professed unbelievers, received by her with the same courtesy, as much esteemed, as much loved, their virtues as completely recognized as if no difference in religion had existed.'

trade enlisted her warmest sympathies, and the same enlightened charity made her in 1787 heartily coincide with him in his earnest desire to see the civil disabilities of the Protestants removed. The Revolution meantime was approaching with great Madame de Lafayette had been married strides. Lafayette in '89 received the onerthree years, had given birth to a first child, ous post of commandment of the National and was expecting soon again to become a Guard, which in fact placed him at the head mother, when in April 1777 Lafayette's pro- of a movement which was every day gatherject of sailing for America to join the hero ing fresh and more dangerous impetus, and of his youthful dreams, General Washing-of which it was impossible to foresee the reton, in freeing the British North American sults. His liberal opinions were so conColonies from the authority of the parent scientiously hers, that she could bear the country, startled and shocked his family. He had brooded on the idea for many months, and had taken secret measures in concert with Silas Deane, the American envoy in Paris, for purchasing and arming a vessel. A first attempt to sail from Bordeaux was prevented by the authoritative command of Louis XVI., accompanied by some very violent letters from his father-inlaw. He was enjoined to repair to Marseilles, and there wait for further orders from the Court. But after setting out for Marseilles, he retraced his steps in disguise to Bordeaux, and effected his escape. The grief and anger at home may be conceived, but Adrienne, feeling that the more she showed her misery the more her parents' indignation would deepen against the cause of it, bore up courageously and would not allow him to be blamed. She, too, became enthusiastic in the cause of American freedom.

dislike and reproaches of aristocratic friends and kindred with comparative equnaimity; but her anguish of mind at the sight of acts of arbitrary violence, mob-rule, and cruelty was intense. Her only source of consolation was in Lafayette's integrity, and in the power which he more than once exerted, at the sacrifice of his personal popularity, to quell and avert such violence. Once only! did she take a different line from his, and here her religious scruples were paramount. She sided with the clergy who for conscience' sake refused to take the Constitutional oath, and when the new Bishop of Paris dined in state with the Commander of the National Guard, Madame de Lafayette marked her feeling by not doing the honours of her husband's table on the occasion.

After the Easter émeute in 1791, when Louis XVI. was foiled in the attempt to quit the Tuileries for St. Cloud, where he had hoped to pass the Holy Week, and Her second daughter, Anastasie, was born avail himself of the services of some of before letters reached them from the Far the proscribed clergy, Layfayette, having West; presently news came of battles, in pledged his word that he should do so, the one of which her hero was badly wounded; General in deep disgust resolved to resign these things tried her, and before the good the command of a body which had so ill ship Alliance' had landed him safe at obeyed him. To avoid the solicitations that Brest, in February 1779, she had buried her he knew would be made to him to continue firstborn. Lafayette had left France diso- in his post, he secretly left his house, debedient to his sovereign's wishes, and there- puting his wife to receive the Municipality fore a disgraced man; he returned covered and the sixty battalions, who were sure to with glory to find French sympathy with come and entreat him to remain. Gladly America at its highest pitch, and to be re- she did so, replying to each with the fine ceived at Court with marked favour. In a tact that was natural to her, suiting her few months he started again to peosecute tone to the different chiefs of battalions,