a stage-coach office around a bare little Place constitute the centre and nucleus of affairs. For my part, I should prefer Saint-Remy; but there is a great deal in being born in a place, if everything has always gone well with one there. Mistral was born in Maillane.

His house is a good large one of stone, in a garden,-quite a villa. Daudet did not do it justice, in the article he wrote in the Century a few years ago, in representing it as so much of a farm-house. Over the low wall at the back of the garden is a view of a wide stretch of fertile plain and the mountains, in which some strange shapes are made out, as the Lion of Arles, to which he has written a poem. Within, the house was all stone and brick, a little chilly to my taste. There was a bust of Lamartine, who was among the first to recognize Mistral's epic of "Mireille" as a work of genius, and a bust of Verdi, who wrote music to " Mireille" and made it an opera. The bill-boards of the handsome theatre at Avignon, by the way, showed that they had but lately been playing this opera there.

Nor did the engraved portrait in the Century do Mistral justice. It was a large, handsome, manly-looking man, with hair touched with gray, that came forward to meet us. He has a fine, open, frank expression of good-fellowship, and is distinguished, too,-decidedly distinguished: you would ask who he was in almost any gathering. There is nothing of the peasant about him. Mistral, in fact, is a man of education; he was the son of a rich farmer, he took his degree of bachelor at Montpellier and studied law at Aix, and is not the mere untutored rustic genius some would have us suppose. He has supplemented his famous poetical work with the preparation of a dictionary, a very careful, important linguistic enterprise, of great value to the student of the Provençal tongue. And yet for a good part of the year his life is very nearly that of the peasants. He goes to the café in the evening and plays his game of whist or billiards with them, and has no other associates. Mariéton, livelier if possible even than the men of the South, noted for vivacity, the superlative, the lyrical temperament, was with him. In June he would go to visit Mariéton at Paris. He has been much honored in France, and, like Victor Hugo, he takes himself and his mission seriously. The sense of these honors, without spoiling his affability, has given him a fine proud look: he is apart from the rest of men. Madame Mistral, much younger than her husband, is handsome, dark, Italian-looking,-a face for some painter to depict as his ideal of pensive revery. They have no children.

Mistral gave us some beer of Avignon. Beer at Avignon ! it does not sound sentimental, and we cannot think of Petrarch taking it when writing those ethereal love-songs to Laura; but it was excellent, nevertheless. The talk was of realism in fiction and poetry. I could see that Mistral's opinions favored the wildly unusual, the romantic, perhaps even the bizarre. The same thing is seen in his work, the striking incidents kept in check, however, by a strong feeling for probability and the limitations of consistency in character, time, and space. In "Mireille," or "Mirèio," he has epitomized Provence of the plain, in "Calendau" Provence of the mountains, and in "Nerto" the Provence of the Middle Ages at the picturesque court of Avignon: in all there is

exaltation, the grandiose, and at the same time a strong feeling for nature and the simpler expression of the human affections. He said he did not care for Longfellow, who struck him as rather tame and conventional. He liked Cooper. One of Cooper's sea-romances had especially commended itself to him because it contained a Provençal captain who was very well done, and he had remembered it ever since.

He proposed that we should go and see the house where he was born, now occupied by his nephew. Ten minutes' drive, nearer to the hills, brought us there. It was a real farm-house this time, solid and prosperous-looking, with barns, wine-house, and stable all joined in one with it. There was a table outside, consisting of a heavy slab of stone mounted in four stone posts like an altar of the Druids, where they used to dine in summer. In the stable there were beds for the farmhands but a little distance from where the animals also lie down. "I used to listen to their tales and gossip in the winter evenings," said Mistral; and here no doubt he picked up much of his homely, intimate knowledge of his own district. He took us up to see the room that had been his, a plain chamber with a single window facing east. He was boy and man here till the age of twenty-five, and in this chamber wrote the first part of "Mireille," the simple story of two lovers who adored each other till one of them died. The principal bedroom was a large, pleasant room, two windows facing south, towards the mountain view, and a bed curtained with old-fashioned chintz.

"Well, then," said the poet, who had made his great mark, made all his family and his country proud of him, addressing us half humorously, half pensively, "there, for better or for worse, your friend was born."

Next day I met him again, large, bright, fresh, rosy, amiable of aspect and hearty of hand-grasp and greeting. He wore the Germanlooking slouch hat which he affects, for somebody has said that the high hat is odious in a poet,-and the red rosette of the Legion of Honor in his button-hole. It was in the railway-station at Tarascon,— Tarascon which Daudet's "Tartarin" has made famous. Mariéton was with him, and they were off for Nismes, beginning the little tour above referred to.

I came away from Avignon with some of the portraits of these emulators of the old troubadours, and some of their books. In his dedication of one of the books I found that Roumanille had inscribed me also as among the fraternity of the Félibres. I do not know but I should have more faith than I have expressed before claiming this distinguished honor. But meantime, as a Félibre by courtesy, let me try my hand, if not at making yet at translating a bit of Provençal verse. try to give in English, because it is brief and because it is typical of a vast series of minor productions from the eleventh century down to the troubadour revival of the present day, the little poem of Folco de Baroncelli-Javon:

A SWALLOW FROM AFAR.

Upon my window-sill,

This morn, a swallow stayed;
Left hand,-'twas omen ill:
At once I grew afraid.

Let me

OME, close your eyes and let us dream together
That June-time's glow is here,

See not the coming of the snow's first feather,
Hear not the wind's voice drear.

Oh, let's float back to where the roses tremble
And breezes lift your hair;

And these pink asters,-do they not resemble
The climbing roses there?

You will not dream? How, then, can you remember
The month that bore our love,

Or taste its sweetness in this dark December,
All gloom the mistress of?

The asters faint are but the ghosts of roses
(Hold, see them not, I meant),

And no fern-frond in all the land uncloses;
The summer's gold is spent.

How can we keep the past and drink its sweetness,
How walk in love's dear ways,

If in this winter-cold and incompleteness

We dream not of June days?

Love is, you say, no child of change and season,—
He is our hearts' desire;

Dreams will not keep him: take a woman's reason,
And make a warmer fire.

Maurice Francis Egan.

THR

AGAINST HIS JUDGMENT.

HREE days had passed, and the excitement in the neighborhood was nearly at an end. The apothecary's shop at the corner into which John Baker's body and the living four-year-old child had been carried together immediately after the catastrophe had lost most of its interest for the curious, although the noses of a few idlers were still pressed against the large pane in apparent search of something beyond the brilliant colored bottles or the soda-water fountains. Now that the funeral was over, the women-kind whose windows commanded a view of the house where the dead man had been lying had taken their heads in and resumed their sweeping and washing, and knots of their husbands and fathers no longer stood in gaping conclave close to the very doorsill, rehearsing again and again the details of the distressing incident. Even the little child that had been so miraculously saved from the jaws of death, although still decked in the dirty finery which its mother deemed appropriate to its having suddenly become a public character, was beginning to fall into obscurity and to cease to be the recipient of the dimes of the tender-hearted. Curiously enough, such is the capriciousness of the human temperament at times of emotional excitement, the plan of a subscription for the victim's family had not been mooted until what was to its parents a small fortune had been bestowed on the rescued child; but the scale of justice had gradually righted itself, and contributions were now pouring in, especially since it was known that the mayor and several other well-known persons had headed the list with subscriptions of fifty dollars each; and there was reason to believe that a lump sum of from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars would be collected for the benefit of the widow and seven children before the public generosity was exhausted.

Local interest was on the wane; but, thanks to the telegraph and the press, the facts were being disseminated through the country, and every leading newspaper in the land was chronicling, with more or less periphrasis according to the character of its patrons, the item that John Baker, the gate-keeper at a railroad-crossing in a Pennsylvania city, had snatched a toddling child from the pathway of a swiftly-moving locomotive and been crushed to death.

A few days later a dinner-company of eight was gathered at a country-house several hundred miles distant from the scene of the calamity. The host and hostess were people of wealth and leisure, who enjoyed inviting congenial parties from their social acquaintance in the neighboring city to share with them for two or three days at a time the charms of nature. The dinner was appetizing and the wine good, and all present were engaged in that gracious unbending of self which ordinarily follows the action of refreshment and light on minds under the influence of pleasant impressions.

In a tavern the best result is joviality; at the dinner-table of intelligent gentlefolk-and of such we are speaking-the texture of

the most agreeable conversation, though smooth as the choicest Lafitte and sparkling as champagne, has ever a thread of seriousness in the woof.

They had talked on a variety of topics: of the climate and landscape of Florida, where two of the party had sojourned during the winter months; of amateur photography, in which the hostess was proficient; of the very general use in common parlance of "don't" for "doesn't" and "but what" for " but that;" of Mrs. Langtry's beauty before she became an actress, concerning which one of the gentlemen who had met her in London was very eloquent; of some recent pictures and publications; of the impropriety and the increasing custom of feeing employees to do their duty; and of certain breaches of trust by bank officers and treasurers that happening within a short time of one another had startled the sensibilities of the community. This last subject begot a somewhat doleful train of commentary from two or three of the company, complaints of a too easy-going standard of morality, of a willingness not to be severe on anybody and to pass over lightly faults that our forefathers never would have condoned, of the decay of ideal considerations, and of the lack of enthusiasm for all but money-spinning among the rank and file of the people.

"The gist is here," reiterated in substance one of the speakers: we insist upon tangible proof of everything, of being able to see and feel it, to get our dollar's worth, in short. We weigh and measure and scrutinize, and discard as fusty and outworn, conduct and guides to conduct that do not promise six per cent. per annum in full sight."

"What have you to say to John Baker ?" said mine host, breaking the pause that followed these remarks. "I take it for granted that you are all familiar with his story: the newspapers have been full of it. There was a man who did not stop to measure or scrutinize."

A murmur of approbation followed, which was interrupted by Mrs. Caspar Green, a stout and rather languid lady, inquiring to whom he referred. "You know I never read the newspapers," she added, with a decidedly superior air, putting up her eye-glass.

"Except the deaths and marriages," exclaimed her husband, a lynxeyed little stock-broker, who was perpetually poking what he called fun at his more ponderous half.

"Well, this was a death: so there was no excuse for her not seeing it," said Henry Lawford, the host. "No, seriously, Mrs. Green, it was a splendid instance of personal heroism: a gate-keeper at a railway-crossing in Pennsylvania, perceiving a child of four on the track just in front of the fast express, rushed forward and managed to snatch up the little creature and deposit it on one side before-poor fellow !— he was struck and killed. There was no suggestion of counting upon six per cent. there, was there?"

Unless in another sphere," interjected Caspar Green.

"Don't be sacrilegious, Caspar," pleaded his wife, though she added her mite to the ripple of laughter that greeted the sally.

"It was superb!-superb!" exclaimed Miss Ann Newbury, a young woman not far from thirty, with a long neck and a high-bred,