into poetry " at the whistle of the first bird, or the breath of the first south wind. Piteous rhymsters! one heart at least beats with and for you, and longs to shout from the housetops that spring is coming, and the doors of our prison-house creak on their slow hinges at last.

- What traveler has failed to stand aghast at some spectacle of unprotected girlhood abroad, and always American girlhood? We encountered such a one, far better born than Daisy Miller. She had crossed the water with friends resident in Paris, and I cannot believe that her parents had contemplated the possibility of her leaving their shelter. But, as she naively told us, "it seems a shame not to see all I can now I am over," and accordingly she had joined a family of barest acquaintances who were going to Nice for the winter. When this vivacious young person became cloyed with that sweet resort, she confidently attached herself to a party of Southern tourists whom she met at table d'hôte, and with them and two or three succeeding parties flitted hither and yon, till we made her acquaintance at a reception in Rome, and were so far honored by her approval that she assured us nothing would please her better than to return to Paris under our wing. Ingrates that we were, we eluded the pretty parasite, and went our selfish way, marveling at American maids and their fathers and mothers.

Is it brutish ignorance and neglect, or superhuman faith, which risks priceless treasure in such daredevil fashion? A man who would not lend five dollars without security will coolly ship his daughter off to Europe alone, or worse, bespeaking the protection of some mere business correspondent! And marvel of marvels! a woman will suffer her young daughter (to whom she has never vent. ured to leave the purchase of the least detail of her own wardrobe) to open communication with a stranger advertising for "traveling pupils," make her own terms with him, and depart jocundly for a year's "study," under what soever skies and influences he may elect.

If to any chance reader it may seem a breach of charity toward dead or living to give the outlines of what might easily be wrought into a voluminous sensational novel, I can only say that to me it seems that the largest charity demands that the true tale be simply told and pondered. Some time ago a party of thirteen or fourteen unmarried girls, from various States, sailed from New York in a foreign steamer. Their escort, young as he was, had more than once piloted similar craft, and the previous voyage had resulted in his marriage to one of his charges; but she had remained in Europe while he returned for fresh supplies. Two days before the vessel's arrival in port, this gentleman died, after a brief illness. The bereft girls, strangers for the most part to each other, and more ignorant of the language and mode of life current in their European destination than of that of the New Jerusalem, looked about the ship for a foster-father; and having deliberately selected him from all the stranger passengers, they sent a committee to him with the simple request that he would conduct them to the capital which had been appointed for their halting-place. That he was about their own age and a bachelor, and on his own first tour, were luckily not considered by them, since had he been Methuselah and Solomon and Noah combined, he could not have been the trustworthy guide, philosopher, and friend he was.

However, figure to yourself, you who know their ways of thinking and acting over there, this youth ushering into railway carriages and strange inns his round dozen of blooming girls, and meditate, calmly if you can, on the panorama of wild speculation, stretching from Turkey to Utah, which this novel spectacle must have unrolled to admiring Europeans.

Only slight hints, however, came to me of what befell these babes in the woods-brave, sensible, self-respecting, and respect-commanding women as they proved themselves after their chance protector had been obliged to leave them to their fate; but these are enough to

make a mother's heart ache. The misunderstandings and complications inseparable from travel and sojourn among aliens in speech, custom, and almost in natural instincts, pecuniary embarrassments, and sicknesses were among their acquisitions; and if direr and irreparable woes were averted from them, praised be the gods! The Daisy Miller type seems to have been missing here, but who dare run his chances with another dozen of young Americans taken at haphazard? If any such there be, or any who regards my terror over America's reckless exposure of her young maidenhood as exaggerated, I can only leave him to ruminate the bonmot of a friend. French of the French, she had married an American and lived much with us, and has now recently returned after several years at home. We had been discussing Daisy Miller at dinner with all possible gravity, while the distractingly pretty and vivacious daughter of the house was continually scintillating about us, when the hostess related this incident, which must lose much from the absence of illustration and of her accenting glance and gesture: "Madame B- said to me when we were in Paris, Why do your daughters dress their hair after that style?' Ah, my friend,' I said, 'they prefer it.' Yes, but you?' 'Oh, as for me, I have to use my will with them in grave matters, so that in trivial things it is wise to let them choose.' It was droll to see Madame B- -'s perplexity, and I said to her, Ah, my friend, you do not understand! Perhaps you have never been the mother of an American girl!'"

6

-I think there is no character so little known in literature as the average Southern woman. If, indeed, we except the stereotyped brunette, it is seldom that she is introduced at all. Now, there is

my friend Mrs. Darby, whom I regard as almost a typical Southerner, and yet she is the veriest opposite of the conventional type. She is neither slender nor languid, but has a periphery something near three fourths of her low stature, and ejaculates between little cackles of laughter the least amusing common

now,

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places. Her gesticulation is as nervous and frequent as is consistent with obesity and rheumatism. She has a high, rapid, and monotonous voice, which creates a surprised uneasiness in the minds of her hearers, perhaps because they expect its volume to correspond with her bodily dimensions, a voice, in fact, as far as possible removed from the low modulations of the daguerreotyped brunette. She introduces even her strongest negative speeches with a confident yes, ," and these, her favorite and everrecurring expletives, are accompanied with a nod, half-deprecating half-insinuating. She is shrewd, loquacious, selfsatisfied, and prejudiced. Her disposition is an odd mixture of generosity, selfishness, and the leaven of the Pharisee. The one absorbing theme with her is the Gracchi, not Cornelia's jewels, but her own offspring, and her conversation much abounds in disparaging comparisons between the Gracchi and other less favored mortals. She is very much given to using as an irrefutable argument in all her disputations, from the final perseverance of the saints to the proper way to prepare an eggnog, the fact that she has brought up two sons, -an unwarrantable stretch of logic, so accounted by the inimical. It is understood that Mrs. Darby has her own opinion" (never flattering) concerning most things, not excepting a belief in the general depravity of the human race above Mason and Dixon's line.

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Yes, now, dear," I can even now hear, in her jerking little voice, “there's Dan, my elder — Tiberius Gracchus, my preacher; he married a Yankee. Some pretend the Yankees are good in their way; but I have my own opinion of Yankees, my own opinion, dear, — and I shall always believe Dan's wife flew into the face of Providence. Yes, now, but I try to bear it. We must all have our thorn in the flesh, dear, and to the day of my death I shall believe it a visitation of Providence, -a visitation of Providence, dear, for sending Dan to a Yankee school. But the Lord has n't smiled on Dan's wife-four of them, dear - yes, now, all girls. Dan says it

is his ministerial prerogative, a houseful of girls. Yes, now, but I'd prefer fewer of the prerogatives, and take a boy now and then." Being the mother of only two, both of the desirable gender, Mrs. Darby is apt to think and speak a little contemptuously of those of the sisterhood who are the unfortunate possessors of a large and especially feminine progeny. She has a good-natured contempt for her husband, regarding him as a useful, but not altogether indispensable, article of domestic economy. She reads little, but, between her absorption of all she hears and her supreme assumption, she has won the reputation of being rather intelligent. In short, the practical "mother of the Gracchi" is anything but the haughty, aristocratic picture of Southern womanhood which is presented to us so often.

In reading Miss Braddon's Vixen, I find the authoress saying that after the marriage of Captain Carmichael and Mrs. Tempest, and the departure of the bridal party for the Scotch Highlands, Violet Tempest (daughter of the bride and heroine of the story) rushed to her room, in the second story of her home, and threw herself, in great distress of mind, "upon the ground." This peculiarity of expression I have observed in Dickens, Thackeray, Black, and other English authors; but it has never, so far as I know, been adopted in America. Can any member of the Club explain why English writers persist in designating a floor as "the ground," when referring to acts done within the four walls of a house?

-To Harvey, by universal consent, is attributed the discovery of the circulation of the blood. He first gave public, authoritative utterance to his views in 1620; and yet we find that as early as 1607 another, and a greater than he, outlined the same fact:

tributor who gave us the excellent notice of Jean Têterol's Idea in the February Atlantic, with extracts from the same in the French. The novel has been widely read in this country, but chiefly in Appleton's translation, which would have served up those extracts far more satisfactorily to the general reader. "There are good people who cannot read French;" and to the cultivated minority of The Atlantic readers who translate with ease was given the plum of the pudding, in this case, when the rest of us, the great majority, might have been served just as well. Only think of the army of Atlantic readers scattered over this great country (for did you ever fail to find an Atlantic somewhere in the loneliest Western villages? I did n't) who will never know in this world what "that elegant noble replied, with an enchanting smile"! Perhaps somebody-our English cousins, possibly-may be deluded into believing that Americans as a rule read French; all of the Atlantic readers, any way! It. makes me think of a certain church bell that rings at an inconvenient hour every Friday morning, the year round. How that bell proclaims the devotion and zeal of St.'s large congregation! Why, I have known "dissenters" rebuked by its triumphant pealing into more faithful attendance at prayer-meeting, etc. But they never happened to look into St.-'s, some morning, to find the clergyman reading the psalter with the sexton. Do you see the point of my illustration? Then here is another. We in the provinces are told that when the great wise man of Concord was asked if he always read the Greek poets in the original he replied, "I should as soon think of swimming the Charles River whenever I go to town."

-That charming story of Rosamond and the Conductor, otherwise possible and quite natural, calls for one criticism: Rosamond escapes too easily from the snare of her fancy, from the very obvious risk of its pursuit.

Imaginative girls are encompassed by a thousand lives beside the external and apparent. Their acts are guided or re

pressed by influences curiously powerful, since often they are very transient. Many a quiet woman will recognize in this episode, deftly sketched, something akin to one or a dozen in her own past. An attractive man is always a possible hero; if not a lover, at least an admirer,

some one to figure in those dramas which rarely come to the test of a tangible stage.

No one class or condition of society claims him about whose person a girl's ingenious sentiment may weave its drapery. The most exclusive will admit to herself that an expressman may possess magnificent shoulders, or her father's coachman charm by his long eyelashes. With these externals character is not concerned; and precisely here, O little Dolly or Rosamond, is the evil of allowing your thoughts to cling to an unknown hero! You are sure that the heart has nothing to do with a fascination indulged in long and ardently; but the heart is the disturbing element in most dreaming girls, and, absurd as it might appear, real suffering has ensued from the sway of a feeling no better grounded. The balm of a New York season came to Rosamond, but in common life we seldom are helped out of ourselves, rather being forced to fight the troublesome yearning on the spot where it was born.

-I do not know whether your contributors look for an answer. But as an American who has lived several years in England, often in lodgings in country towns, I thought I could throw some light on the beefsteak question.

First, "Do the English have beefsteak?" Yes, most decidedly. It is rump-steak, or, in the south of England, pin-bone steak, owing to the small round bone in the centre of it. If you get it tender (and you mostly can), there is no better beefsteak anywhere.

Second, "There is no beefsteak in England like ours." No, not if the sirloin steak is meant, as it is called in the United States. An average English butcher would think it the greatest waste and extravagance to cut into steaks the sirloin which represents the roast beef of Old England.

I had not the good fortune to be born in Boston, or even in New England. It was therefore with an exaggerated feeling of reverence, perhaps, that I stood with a friend in the old Plymouth cemetery, beside the grave of her ancestor, the last of the Plymouth residents, as the quaint inscription told us, who came over in the Mayflower. I felt humble, obscure. The glory of such an inheritance, it seemed to me, was the only thing worth being born for, and the sexton evidently agreed with me. We searched old records for an account of the personal history of each one of the little band. It was like the Garden of Eden over again, only there were several Adams and Eves. At length, the resources of the place being somewhat exhausted, a supplementary visit to Duxbury was suggested. But the train brought us first to South Duxbury.

"Perhaps this is where we ought to stop," said my friend.

I sat serene. "We are going to Duxbury," I replied.

As the cars were moving away, however, we beheld through the open window one of those box-like carry-alls provided by country hotels for the reception of their guests, with "Standish House" in unmistakable characters over the door.

"Why, the Standish House is where we are going! we both exclaimed. For one supreme moment I rejoiced in not having a Mayflower ancestor. "What barrenness, what absolute poverty of intellect!" I cried. "To be unable to invent names for your towns,

or only one for every three or four of them, so that we are lost in a maze with your Duxburys and South Duxburys, your Plymouths and your North, South, East, and West"

I stopped, breathless; but the list was by no means exhausted. For Massachusetts alone has thus suspended on the points of the compass over two hundred of her towns.

-I am glad to discover why the sunflower is so much in fashion with modern artists and decorators. Hamerton,