Her lips turned white, as if in bodily pain, her eyes closed, and she shivered as with great cold.

He pressed her against his heart; great drops of suffering stood upon his brow. It was an agony greater than death to him to see the misery on her young, radiant face, and to know that he had brought it therehe who would have sheltered her from every chill breath, guarded her from every touch of the sorrow common to all human kind.

"Would to Heaven I had died before my selfish passions brought the shadow of my curse on your young head," he muttered, as he bent over her. Alma, you forgive me-but you cannot love me after I have deceived you. You cannot love me, false as I have been to my own idol of truth and honour. God knows I meant no deliberate wrong. I went on and on from day to day, till what had been at first merely distasteful to tell, became at last impossible! Answer me; can your affection survive the bitter wrong I have done it? Can you love me though I fall from your ideal, though I have sunk so low?"

Breathless he waited for her answer-breathless and trembling, his face white as hers, his firm and haughty lips quivering with suspense, his head bent and humbled, as he made one of the hardest, yet one of the noblest confessions a proud man can ever make-" I was wrong!"

She lifted her face to his, so true to the generous and faithful and unswerving love that, two years before, she had promised him, that even in the first bitterness of her grief her thought was of him and not of herself.

"Love you? I must love you while my life lasts. Nothing could change me to you; if you were to err, to alter, to fall as low as man can fall, you would but be the dearer to me; and if all the world stoned and hooted you, I would cling the closer to you, and we would defy it, or endure it-together!"

She spoke again, with her old vehemence, her arms twining close about his neck, her lips soft and warm against his cheek, her eyes gazing up into his, dark and brilliant with the impassioned love that was the life of her life; then the passion faded from her eyes, the glow from her face; with a convulsive sob her head drooped upon her breast, and she fell forward on his arm, weeping hopelessly, wearily, agonisedly, as I saw a woman in the Crimea weep over her husband's grave.

"God help me! I do not know what I say. If I am wrong, tell me; if I sin, slay me-but cease to love you I cannot!"

LONDON PHOTOGRAPHED BY A FRENCHMAN.*

AMONG the most recent of the French Anglophobists who devote their abilities to collecting the worst features of the worst prejudices which have for so many ages tended to separate-far more effectually than fifty Channels-the two most civilised nations of the world, is M. Hector Malot, the author of "La Vie Moderne en Angleterre," as good a hater as any of his predecessors, and a still more amusingly ferocious denouncer of English institutions, manners, and habits.

"To criticise the English," says this modern Hector, "is no difficult task, for with them strength and weakness, reason and insignificance, grandeur and ridicule, keep so closely pace with one another, as to be constantly stumbling. And in a country in which royalty has the honours but not the power; in which the greatest amount of liberty in political, is united to the most narrow intolerance in private life; in which a profound interest in religious speculations is allied to the pitiless pursuit of material gratifications; in which right belongs to every one, but its abuse to a few privileged persons; in a society in which respectability is synonymous with fortune, and misery with infamy; in which falsehood is a virtue, and candour disgraceful; where egotism constitutes the social, and hypocrisy the moral law; in a city where the hearth is a school of honour, and the street a school of prostitution; contrasts force themselves upon the eyes of the stranger, even when he does not profess to be an observer, and they are naturally rendered by mild or cruel critics, in accordance with his disposition, or by bitter or pleasant ridicule, in accordance with his temper."

Arrived in England, our hero threw down his gauntlet in Leicestersquare. It was "de rigueur" that it should be so. The habitués of his café, he says, had a withered, faded appearance; their clothes were dirty or ragged, and their linen told plainly that they had not spent the night in bed. Seated at empty tables, they talked politics, for they wished to be considered as political victims. These gentlemen played at dominoes for breakfast, for the master had that day positively refused accepting any more bad half-crowns. It was therefore banyan-day in Leicester-square. Our traveller was, however, relieved from the fraternity of Leicestersquare nationalities by discovering that the English have not the jealous love for the interior which the French possess, and hence they let apartments and bedrooms-an act that appeared to our visitor as utterly incompatible with "the religion of the hearth." The "comfortable" of which the English boast so much of is, he also declares, unknown in these lodgings. The carpet is the only furniture.

A carpeted home obtained, then, with, we will suppose, a bed, although declared to be non-existent, as well as chair and table, the next thing is to visit London. But here a new difficulty confronts the stranger. London is "immensity in uniformity" (a Frenchman will sacrifice meaning, common

* La Vie Moderne en Angleterre. Hector Malot.

sense, anything, for the sake of what he deems to be an epigram); to explore it, one must walk for ever, and there are no resting-places-no cafés or Boulevard chairs. True, there are public-houses and gin-palaces-the latter admirable places for studying the "characteristic types of London" -but they have no seat; people stand up at a bar, and the monotony of the place is only relieved by "scènes de boxe." Some taverns have, however, parlours and boxes, and if the stranger "has a good pronunciation, and does not displease the publican, he may sometimes succeed in getting himself served." The proof of this is endorsed by the history of some Frenchmen who were maltreated at a public-house by a brute of a Francophobist, more practical and little less hostile than some of the most inveterate of Anglophobists. There are cigar-divans where a man can sit and read a paper, but they are few in number, and difficult to find.

To a Frenchman accustomed "to the luxuries and liberties of restaurants," the greatest of all annoyances are the English eating-houses. Little is to be obtained save roast beef and mutton, and it is boiled after it is roasted, as is the case also with the fish. Every one seasons for himself; salad, or rather certain herbs that are qualified as such, is devoured with a sauce that burns like vitriol, and is kept in a serpent-like flask. Oil is not used; it is not adapted to English "throats" (not to English palates); and this said herbage is eaten with the fingers, forks being reserved for cheese and oranges! There is also rhubarb pastry, the crust of which is "as heavy as lead and as sticky as a bit of soap.' Then these insulars have no confidence; they require the money for beer before they will procure it for their customers. There are dining-rooms where tablecloths and napkins are provided, but they are rare. At night the oyster-rooms light up, and pleasure and debauchery that have been seeking for one another all day long at length meet, and the liveliest hours of the saddest of cities are inaugurated.

The stranger's difficulties in exploring London are increased by the great length of the streets, which are only named at the extremities, even when a mile or two in length, and by the frequent repetition of the same name. The cab-horses are admittedly superior to those of Paris, but the cabmen are more extortionate, and the distances more puzzling. The omnibus-conductors hail strangers by calling out "Hop! hop!" and if they are not so insolent as their brethren of Paris, it is not from considerateness, but simply from competition. They also seldom give strangers their proper change. The only way is "to be stern with the conductors, and even a little insolent. It is quite the thing to be insolent in London; to be so, indeed, is to be thoroughly English."

The steam-boats are the cheapest and most pleasant conveyances, and their penny fares soothed even Hector's irritation.

"Only embark at London-bridge upon a penny steam-boat, ascend the river to Chelsea, passing beneath those bridges, marvellous in their strength and boldness, which unite the two cities, in the midst of ships, that cross one another [above bridges!] between banks with lofty cranes and forests of smoking chimneys; or embark at London-bridge and descend the arm of the sea, in the midst of ships arriving from all the countries in the world, pass the docks, enlivened by the flags of all

nations, go as far as Gravesend-pretty town embosomed in meadowsand he who has a grudge against the English, or feels himself unjust against England, will come back in a different disposition, and he will understand a part of the strength and grandeur of the country. The Thames will have accomplished that miracle."

The daily papers come next under review. The superiority of the French daily papers over the English, we are told, consists in the former being literary, and in the circumstance that "moral and artistic interests" are represented in them by the side of political and material interests. The only superiority that the English papers can lay claim to is that they have no romances. Magnitude, foreign and home correspondence, free discussion, the telegraphic wire, the most varied and extensive organisation in the world, are passed over for the sake of a misrepresentation, for it is perfectly needless to dwell upon the fact that the moral and artistic interests of the public are most carefully watched over by the English press. Without saying a word in disparagement of the ability shown by the French press, we may be permitted to assert that the particular claim to superiority here laid down has no foundation whatever. In fact, there is not a daily paper issued in Great Britain that has any claims as such, that does not contain discussions relative to moral and educational, and artistic and industrial interests, or reports of discussions relating to such.

There is a better foundation for the assertion that England has no modern dramatic literature, and that it is the French theatre that has killed the English. But this is only true to a certain extent; and M. Hector Malot himself admits that French manners sincerely expressed are not English manners. We are, besides, emancipating ourselves from the French theatre to a great extent. "The Colleen Bawn,' roon," "Our American Cousin," "Peep o' Day," "Black Sheep," and other recent productions, have, we hope, inaugurated a new order of things.

""The Octo

The English, according to the same authority, never amuse themselves, never relax their marble faces or thaw their icy hearts save at a hanging match, and even then, according to Ingoldsby, they go to sleep. But there is an exception, and that is the Derby-day-" the true national feast and the carnival of England." The English are for once enthusiastic; but the spectacle is not a fine one," for all these men, who have for object the amelioration of the chevaline race, think little of ameliorating themselves, and most assuredly are they much less handsome, and especially much less 'distingués,' than the animals they busy themselves about!"

Hector is mounted. Not on one of those animals so much superior to the specimens of English humanity seen at Tattersall's-he might, perchance, have been a little disconcerted-but on the box of a chariot. At the Elephant and Castle a hole was opened into the back panels. It was but a small hole, but somebody in the rear betted that, small as it was, he could touch it. He did so, and succeeded at the same time in enlarging it. By the time the carriage arrived at Epsom it had no longer any body-nothing but the box remained. "The vehicle had become a target, and the target was soon carried away." The playful charioteers

on the high road must surely have known whom the chariot was conveying to the Downs. With all these drawbacks, the road, we are told, is preferable to the rail, and if handfuls of flour are thrown in your face, the young ladies cast flowers at you from the wayside gardens, wishing you a pleasant journey. Sentimental and Arcadian young ladies! had we been a romancer, we might, perchance, have seen you too. At last comes the race itself. "The soil, dry and hard, resounds beneath the hoofs. Marquis is ahead. No, it is Buckstone. No, it is 'Caractatus!' Then a real frenzy bursts forth, the joy of savages! These faces are no longer of marble, these hearts are no longer of ice. Madness reigns supreme. They dance, they stamp. The mingled gladness and cupidity are horrible. The stranger stands ashamed, terrified!" The race over, and "the women, their hair dishevelled, drink toasts to their friends in the distance," wooden dolls are thrown at one another's heads, and the return, more savage and bacchanalian than even the journey thither, commences. The race-course is left to the night tramps, who pick up the crusts of pastry, empty bottles, and ends of cigars. "It is the festival of misery."

The impressions produced by most things depend mainly upon the mental condition of the individual. The most beautiful scenery would have no charms to a seared heart; the most noble work of art would be lost upon a clodhopper. So the enthusiasm of a vast English multitude would touch no chord in the heart of an uncompromising Anglophobist. He would see nothing in it but cupidity, folly, and savagery, and he would stand ashamed and terrified at feeling that he was in the world and not of it a thing wrapped up in venom, where all around was genial warmth and expansive gaiety.

After the passion for horses comes, we are told, that for cricket and for pedestrianism. "As soon as the British flag floats in a country, cricket is introduced there." The game had its origin, we are also informed, in the "jeu de paume," as played in France two hundred years ago. Pugilism, we should no doubt likewise be assured, was introduced five hundred years ago with French pug-dogs. Pedestrianism has, we are also told, its "glory and its fanatics." But racing "is a mere pretext for speculation;" cricket is "an exercise which consists in fatiguing oneself, and obtaining so much the more pleasure as perspiration is most abundant." 66 Regattas are a carnival, at which the object sought for is the most outrageous costume" (true, at all events, at Asnières); and "the boxe" is "the ignoble massacre of those who are frightened at swords and pistols." There is, however, one little recommendation to all these national imbecilities. They are admitted to develop physical force, to stay off illness, and to combat idleness. "To a people who have come to neglect all corporeal exercises to only over-excite the brain, these results," says the Hector of the Intellect, "deserve, it appears to me, the trouble of being signalised. To do is not the perfection of success, there is also to resist and to endure. Physical force is of use for this, and we should do well to give it some consideration in France."

The scene presented from the windows of a railway carriage on the arches of the Blackwall Railway, or even on that portion of the Eastern Counties Railway which passes through the old homes of the expatriated French Protestant silk-weavers, is not one in which an Englishman can