Mistigri, Mistigri!' said her companion, surveying her, 'who could doubt your human-affinity who once had seen you pilfer? Monkey stows away her stolen goods in a visible pouch unblushingly; man smuggles his away unknown in the guise of 66 profit or "percentage,' commerce or "annexation"the natural advancement of civilisation on the simple and normal thieving. Increased cranium, increased caution; that's all the difference, eh, Mistigri ? '

39 66

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Mistigri cocked her head on one side, but would not waste time in replying: her little shiny black mouth was full of good kernels.

Why talk when you can take?' she would have asked.

Her owner did not press for an answer, but sung, carelessly, snatches of Goethe's Millsong and of Müller's Whisper, his voice chiming in with the bubble of the stream while he took at intervals his noontide meal, classic and uncostly, of Chasselas grapes and a big brown roll.

He was a man of some forty years, dressed in a linen blouse, with a knapsack as worn as an African soldier's lying at his feet unstrapped, in company with a flask of good wine and a Straduarius fiddle. He himself was seated on a fallen tree, with the sun breaking through the foliage above, in manifold gleams and glories, that touched the turning leaves bright red as fire, and fell on his own head when he tossed it up to fling a word to Mistigri, or to catch the last summer-song of a blackbird. It was a beautiful Homeric head; bold, kingly, careless, noble. with the royalty of the lion in its gallant poise, aud the challenge of the eagle in its upward gesture-the head which an artist would have given to his Hector, or his Phoebus, or his god Lyceus. The features were beautiful too in their varied mobile eloquent meanings, with their poet's brows, their reveller's laugh, their soldier's daring, their student's thought, their many and conflicting utterances, whose contradictions made one unity-the unity of genius.

At this moment there was only the enjoyment of a rich and sunny nature in an idle moment written on them as he ate his grapes and threw fragments of wit up at Mistigri, where she was perched among the nut-boughs. But the brilliant eyes, so blue in some lights, so black in others, had the lustre and the depths of infinite meditation in them; and the curling lips, that were hidden under the fulness of their beard, had the delicate fine mockery of the satirist, blent with the brighter, franker mirth of genial sympathies. And his face changed as he cast the crumbs of his finished meal to some ducks that pad

dled lower down in the stream, where it grew stiller round the old tower, and took up his Straduarius from the ground with the touch of a man who loves the thing that he touches. The song of the water, that had made the melody to his banquet, was in his brain-sweet, mild, entangled sounds, that he must needs reproduce, with the self-same fancy that a painter must catch the fleeting hues of fair scenes that would haunt him for ever unless exorcised thus.

Quiet, Mistigri!' he said softly; and the monkey sat still on her hazel bough, eating, indeed, but noiselessly. He listened one moment more to the stream, then drew the bowacross the strings. The music thrilled out upon the silence, catching the song of the brook in harmony as Goethe caught it in verse-all its fresh delicious babble, all its rush of silvery sound, all its cool and soothing murmur, all its pauses of deep rest-all of which the woodland torrent told: of the winds that had tossed the boughs into its foam; of the women-faces its tranquil pools had mirrored; of the blue burden of forget-me-nots, and the snowy weight of lilies it had borne so lovingly; of the sweet familiar idyls it had seen where it had wound its way below quaint mill-house walls choked up with ivy-growth, where the children and the pigeons paddled with rosy feet upon the resting wheel; of the weary sighs that had been breathed over it, beneath the gray old convents, where it heard the Miserere steal in with its own ripple, and looked itself a thing so full of leaping joy and dancing life to the sad eyes of girl-recluses-all these of which it told, the music told again. The strings were touched by an artist's hand, and all that duller ears heard but dimly in the splash and surge of the brown fern-covered stream he heard in marvellous poems, and translated into clearer tongue-the universal tongue, which has no country and no limit, and in which the musician speaks alike to sovereign and to savage.

There was not a creature there to hear save the yellowwinged lorioles and Mistigri, who was absorbed in nuts; but he played on to himself an hour or more for love of the theme and the art; and an old peasant woman, going through the trees at some yards' distance, and seeing nothing of the player for the screen of leaves, laughed, and stroked the hair of a grandchild who clung to her, afraid of the magical woodland melodies. The wood-elves, little one? Bah! that is only Tricotrin.'

Her feet, brushing the fallen leaves with pleasant sound, soon passed away. He played on and on, such poetry as

Bamboche drew from his violin, whereat Poussin bowed his head, weeping with the passion of women, as through his tears he beheld as in a vision, the Et in Arcadia Ego.'

Then, as sudddenly as he had begun, Tricotrin dropped the bow and ceased, and struck a light and smoked—a great Arab pipe of some carved wood, black and polished by long use. On the silence that succeeded there came a low laugh of delight-the laugh of a very young child. He looked up and down and among the ferns at his feet. The laughter was close beside him, yet he could see nothing. He smoked on indifferently, watching the bright eyes of the birds glancing out from the shadow. Then the laugh came again, close at his side, as it sounded. He rose and pushed aside some branches and looked over a broken rail behind him, beyond a tangled growth of reeds and rushes.

There he saw what had aroused him from his smoke silence. More than half hidden under the moss and the broad tufted grasses, stretching her hands out at the gorgeous butterflies that fluttered above her head, and covered with the wide yellow leaves of gourds and the white fragrant abundance of traveller's-joy, was the child whose laughter he had heard. A child between two and three years old, her face warm with the flush of past sleep, her eyes smiling against the light, her hair lying like gold-dust on the moss, her small fair limbs struggling uncovered out of a rough red cloak that alone was folded about her. The scarlet of the mantle, the whiteness of the clematis, the yellow hues of the wild gourds, the colour of the winged insects, the head of the child rising out of the mosses, and the young face that looked like a moss-rosebud just unclosing, made a picture in their own way; and he who passed no picture by, but had pictures in his memory surpassing all the collected art of galleries, paused to survey it with his arms folded on the rail.

He

Its solitude, its strangeness did not occur to him. looked at it as at some painting of his French_brethren's easels, that was all. But the child, seeing a human eye regard her, forgot her butterflies and remembered human wants. She stretched her hands to him instead of to her playmates of the air. J'ai faim!" she cried with a plaintive self-pity. Bread would be better than the butterflies.

Hungry?' he answered, addressing her as he was wont to do Mistigri. 'I have nothing for you. Who brought you there, you Waif and Stray? Put down there and left, to get rid of the trouble of you aparently. Well, D'Alembert was

dropped down in the streets, and found a foster-mother in a milk-woman, and he did pretty well afterwards. Perhaps some dainty De Tencin brought you likewise into the world, and has hidden you like a bit of smuggled lace, only thinking you nothing so valuable. Is it so, eh?"

J'ai faim!' cried the child afresh. All her history was comprised to her in the one fact that she wanted bread-as it is comprised to a mob.

Catch, then he replied to the cry, dropping into her hands from where he leant a bunch of the Chasselas grapes that still remained in his pocket. It sufficed. The child was not so much pained by hunger as by thirst, though she scarcely knew the difference between her own sensations. Her throat was dry, and the grapes were all she wanted. He, leaning over the lichen-covered rail, watched her while sho enjoyed them one by one. She was a very pretty child, the prettier for that rough moss covering, out of which her delicate fair shoulders and chest rose uncovered, while the breeze blew about her yellow glossy curls.

'Left there to be got rid of, clearly,' he murmured to her. Any one who picks you up will do you the greatest injury possible. Die now in the sunshine among the flowers. You will never have such another chance of a poetical and picturesque exit. Who was ingenious enough to hide you there? The poor shirt-stitcher who was at her last sou, or Madame la Marquise who was at her last scandal? Was it Magdalene, who has to wear sackcloth for having dared to sin without money to buy absolution, or Messalina, who covers ten thousand poisonous passions with a silver-embroidered robe, and is only discreetly careful of "consequences"? Which was your progenitrix, little one, eh ?'

To this question so closely concerning her, the Waif could give no answer, being gifted with only imperfect speech; but, happy in the grapes, she laughed up in his eyes her unspoken thanks, shaking a cluster of clematis above her head, as happy in her couch of flowers and moss as she could have been in any silver cradle. The question concerned her in nothing yet. The bar sinister could not stretch across the sunny blue skies, the butterflies flew above her as familiarly as above the brow of a child-queen, and the white flowers did not wither sooner in bastard than in legitimate hands.

'How the sun shines on you, as if you were a princess!' he soliloquised to her. Ah, Nature is a terrible socialist! What republicans she would make of men if they listened to

her! But there is no fear for them; they are not fond enough of her school. You look very comfortably settled here, and how soon you will get life over! You are very fortunate. You will suffer a little bit. Paf! what of that? Everybody suffers that little bit sooner or later, and it grows sharper the longer it is put off. Suppose you were picked up by somebody, and lived, it would be very bad for you. You would be a lovely woman, and lovely women are the devil's aides-de-camp. You would snare men by your yellow hair, and steal their substance with the breath of your lips, and dress-up lying avarice as love, and make a miser's greed wear the smile of a cherub. Ah, that you would. And then would come age-a worse thing for women like you than crime or death and you would suffer an agony with every wrinkle, and a martyrdom with every whitening lock; and you would grow hard, and haggard, and painted, and hideous even to the vilest among men, and yon would be hissed off the stage in hatred by the mouths that once shouted your triumphs, while you would hear the fresh comers laugh as they rushed on, to be crowned with the roses that once wreathed your own forehead. And then would come the end-the hospital and the wooden shell, and the grave trampled flat to the dust as soon almost as made, while the world danced on in the sunlight unheeding. Ah, be wise. Die while you can, among your butterflies and flowers!'

The child, lying below there in her nest, looked up in his eyes again and laughed. Viva!' she cried, while she clasped her grapes in her two small hands.

'Viva! what do you mean by that? Do you mean imperfectly to ask to live in Italian ? Fie then! That is unphilosophic. Take the advice of two philosophers: Bolingbroke says there is so much trouble in coming into the world and in going out of it, that it is barely worth while to be here at all; and I tell you the same. He had the cakes and ale too, but the one got stale and the other bitter. What will it be for you who start with neither cakes nor ale? Life's not worth much to a man; it is worth just nothing at all to a woman. It is a mistake altogether, and lasts just long enough for all to find that out, but not long enough for any to remedy it. We always live the time required to get thoroughly uncomfortable, and as soon as we are in the track to sift the problem-paf! out we go like a rushlight the very moment we begin to burn brightly. Be persuaded by me and don't think of living; you have a golden opportunity of getting quittance of the whole affair. Don't throw it away.'