very first one that had belonged to her, the same one that she had brought to Peuples. She looked at this one a long time, with the dates marked off by her the morning of her departure from Rouen, the day after her going away from the convent. She wept over it. Sadly and slowly the tears fell; the bitter tears of an old woman whose life was spread out before her on that table.

With the calendars came to her an idea that soon became a sort of obsession; terrible, incessant, inexorable. She would try to remember just whatever she had done from day to day during all her life. She pinned the calendars against the walls and on the carpet one after the other those faded pieces of cardboard; and so she came to pass hours face to face with them, continually asking herself, "Now let me see, what was it happened to me that month?"

She had checked certain memorable days in the course of her life, hence now and then she was able to recall the episodes of an entire month, bringing them up one by one, grouping them together, connecting one by another all those little matters which had preceded or followed some important event. She succeeded by sheer force of attention, by force of memory and of concentrated will, in bringing back to mind almost completely her two first years at Peuples. Far-away souvenirs of her life returned to her with a singular facility, and with a kind of relief in them; but the later years gradually seemed to lose themselves in a mist, to become mixed one with another: and so Jeanne would remain now and then an indefinite time, her head bowed toward one of the calendars, her mind spellbound by the past, without being able to remember whether it was in this or that calendar that such or such a remembrance ought to be decided. She ranged them around the room like the religious pictures that point out the Way of the Cross in a church, these tableaux of days that were no more. Then she would abruptly set down her chair before one of them; and there she would sit until night came, immobile, staring at it, buried in her vague researches. All at once, when the sap began to awaken in the boughs beneath the warmth of the sun; when the crops began to spring up in the fields, the trees to become verdant; when the appletrees in the orchard swelled out roundly like rosy balls, and perfumed the plain, then a great counter-agitation came over her; she could not seem to stay still. She went and came; she left the house and returned to it twenty times a day, and even took

now and then a stroll the length of the farming tracts, excited to a sort of fever of regret. The sight of a daisy blossoming in a tuft of grass, the flash of a ray of sun slipping down between the leaves, the glittering of a strip of water in which the blue sky was mirrored, all moved her; awakened a tenderness in her; gave her sensations very far away, like an echo of her emotions as a young girl, when she went dreaming about the country-side.

One morning the faithful Rosalie came later than usual into her room, and said, setting down upon the table the bowl of coffee: "Come now, drink this. Denis is downstairs waiting for us at the door. We will go over to Peuples to-day: I've got business to attend to over there."

Jeanne thought that she was going to faint, so deep was her emotion at the sound of that name, at the thought of going to the home of her girlhood. She dressed herself, trembling with emotion, frightened and tremulous at the mere idea of seeing again that dear house.

A radiant sky spread out above over all the world; the horse, in fits and starts of liveliness, sometimes went almost at a gallop. When they entered into the commune of Etouvent, Jeanne could hardly breathe, so much did her heart beat; and when she saw from a distance the brick pillars of the boundary-line of her old home, she exclaimed in a low voice two or three times, and as if in spite of herself, "Oh ! -oh! -oh!" as if before things that threatened to revolutionize all her heart.

They left the wagon with the Couillard family: then, while Rosalie and her son went off to attend to their business, the caretakers offered Jeanne the chance of taking a little turn around the château, the present owners of it being absent; so they gave her the keys.

Alone she set out; and when she was fairly before the old manor-house by the seaside, she stopped to look at its outside once again. It had changed in nothing outside. The large, grayish building that day showed upon its old walls the smile of the sunshine. All the shutters were closed.

A bit of a dead branch fell from above upon her dress. She raised her eyes. It came from the plane-tree. She drew near the big tree with its smooth, pale bark; she caressed it with her hand almost as if it had been an animal. Her foot struck something in the grass, a fragment of rotten wood; lo! it was the last fragment of the very bench on which she had sat so often

with those of her own family about her, so many years ago; the very bench which had been set in place on the same day that Julien had made his first visit.

She turned then to the double doors of the vestibule of the house, and she had great trouble to open them; for the heavy key, grown rusty, refused to turn in the lock. At length the lock yielded with a heavy grinding of its springs; and the door, a little obstinate itself, gave her entrance with a cloud of dust.

At once, and almost running, she went upstairs to find what had been her own room. She could hardly recognize it, hung as it was with a light new paper: but throwing open a window, she looked out and stood motionless, stirred even to the depth of her being at the sight of all that landscape so much beloved; the thicket, the elm-trees, the flat reaches, and the sea dotted with brown sails, seeming motionless in the distance.

She began prowling about the great empty, lonely dwelling. She even stopped to look at the discolorations on the walls; spots familiar to her eyes. Once she stood before a little hole crushed in the plaster by her father himself, who had often amused himself with making passages at arms, cane in hand, against the partition wall, when he would happen to be passing this spot.

Her mother's room-in it she found, stuck behind the door in a dark corner near the bed, a fine gold hairpin; one which she herself had stuck there so long ago, and which she had often tried to find during the past years. Nobody had ever come across it. She drew it out as a relic beyond all price, and kissed it, and carried it away with her. Everywhere about the house she walked, recognizing almost invisible marks in the hangings of the rooms that had not been changed; she made out once more those curious faces that a childish imagination gives often to the patterns and stuffs, to marbles, and to shadings of the ceilings, grown dingy with time. On she walked with soundless footsteps, wholly alone in the immense, silent house, as one who crosses a cemetery. All her life was buried in it.

She went downstairs to the drawing-room. It was sombre behind the closed shutters: for some time she could not distinguish anything; then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. She recognized, little by little, the tall hangings with their patterns of birds flitting about. Two arm-chairs were set before the chimney, as if people had just quitted them; and even the odor of the room, an odor which it had always kept, that old vague, sweet odor belonging to some old houses, entered Jeanne's very

being, enwrapt her in souvenirs, intoxicated her memory. She remained gasping, breathing in that breath of the past, and with her eyes fixed upon those two chairs; for suddenly, in a sort of hallucination which gave place to a positive idea, she saw — as she had often seen them-her father and her mother, sitting there warming their feet by the fire. She drew back terrified, struck her back against the edge of the door, caught at it to keep herself from falling, but with her eyes still fixed upon the

chairs.

The vision disappeared. She remained forgetful of everything during some moments; then slowly she recovered her self-possession, and would have fled from the room, fearful of losing her very senses. By chance, her glance fell against the door-post on which she chanced to be leaning; and lo! before her eyes were the marks that had been made to keep track of Poulet's height as he was growing up!

The little marks climbed the painted wood with unequal intervals; figures traced with the penknife noted down the different ages and growths during the boy's life. Sometimes the jottings were in the handwriting of her father, a large hand; sometimes they were in her own smaller hand; sometimes in that of Aunt Lison, a little tremulous. It seemed to her that the child of other days was actually there, standing before her with his blond hair, pressing his little forehead against the wall so that his height could be measured; and the Baron was crying, "Why, Jeanne! he has grown a whole centimetre since six weeks ago!" She kissed the piece of wood in a frenzy of love and desolate

ness.

But some one was calling her from outside. It was Rosalie's voice: "Madame Jeanne, Madame Jeanne! We are waiting for you, to have luncheon." She hurried away from the room half out of her senses. She hardly understood anything that the others said to her at luncheon. She ate the things that they put on her plate; she listened without knowing what she heard, talking mechanically with the farming-women, who inquired about her health: she let them embrace her, and herself saluted the cheeks that were held out to her; and then got into the wagon again.

When the high roof of the château was lost to her sight across the trees, she felt in her very heart a direful wrench. It seemed to her in her innermost spirit that now she had said farewell forever to her old home!

JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

MCCARTHY, JUSTIN, a noted Irish journalist, politician, historian, novelist, and miscellaneous writer; born at Cork, November 22, 1830. He has been a Home Rule Member of Parliament since 1879, and since the fall of Parnell, chairman of the Irish Parliamentary party. He spent three years (1868-70) in the United States, travelling, lecturing, and engaged in literary work, being (amongst other things) connected editorially with the New York Independent. He revisited this country in 1886. Among his chief works are "A History of Our Own Times" (5 vols., 1879-97); "History of the Four Georges " (4 vols., 1889); the novels "Lady Judith" (1871); "A Fair Saxon" (1873); "Dear Lady Disdain" (1875); "The Right Honorable" (1886, with Mrs. CampbellPræd); etc. "Modern Leaders," a collection of biographical sketches, appeared in 1872. His latest work is "The Story of Gladstone's Life" (1897).

THE KING IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE QUEEN.

(From "A History of Our Own Times.")

BEFORE half-past two o'clock on the morning of June 20th, 1837, William IV. was lying dead in Windsor Castle, while the messengers were already hurrying off to Kensington Palace to bear to his successor her summons to the throne. The illness of the King had been but short, and at one time, even after it had been pronounced alarming, it seemed to take so hopeful a turn that the physicians began to think it would pass harmlessly away. But the King was an old man was an old man even when he came to the throne; and when the dangerous symptoms again exhibited themselves, their warning was very soon followed by fulfillment. The death of King William may be fairly regarded as having closed an era of our history. With him, we may believe, ended the reign of personal government in England. William was indeed a constitutional king in more than mere name. He was to the best of his lights a faithful