ber has come, the bad weather is near. She knows that the least cold might carry her off in a few weeks. "How I shall work all the same at my picture!" she exclaims, with a last effort of courage. "People die whether they are at work or not. And here it is, then, at last! the end of all my miseries! So many aspirations, desires, and hopes to die at twenty-four, on the threshold of everything! Bastien also is sinking, and suffers terribly. "He has reached that point," says Marie, "when one is detached from the earth; he floats above us; there are days when I, too, am like that. You see people, they speak to you and you answer them, but you are no longer on the earth-it is a tranquil but painless indifference a little like the effect of opium. In a word, Bastien is dying. I only go there from habit; it is his shadow, I also am half shadow, and what is the use? He does not particularly feel my presence. I am useless; his eyes do not light up for He is glad to see me. That is all. Yes, he is dying, and it is a matter of indifference to me; I do not realize it; it is something which is passing away. Besides, all is over. All is over. I shall be buried in 1885." One more picture, the last. "October 16th. I can no longer go out at all; but poor Bastien Lepage comes to me; he is carried here, put in an easy-chair, and stretched out on cushions-I, in another chair, drawn up close by-and we sit there all day until six o'clock. me. "I am dressed in a cloud of lace and plush, all white, but of different whites; the eye of Bastien Lepage rests on it with delight. "Oh, if I could paint!' says he. "And I!" The Journal comes to an end. Marie dies fourteen days later, October 31, 1884. Her story is told, but one does her an injustice in culling here and there, and filling out as one chooses. The whole book is a monument. Its very defects and extravagances, its repetitions and insistence, give an impression which cannot be conveyed. The young girl is holding up the mirror for herself and for us. It is a pose, and yet the most artless of revelations. She is all there, with her Parisian surroundings, her toilettes, her vanities, and caprice-a living, breathing human figure. But human as it seems, and personal as any record ever given to the world, it is in reality the drama of the Impersonal, the ordeal of the spirit caged and imprisoned. It is the Psyche with gauzy, rainbow wings, struggling to be free. The whole motive power and action are in the regions of the Ideal. The thirst for beauty, and the need to express and create it, the heights and even the depths of emotion rather than the dead level of the commonplace-these were the springs of her life, the source and aim of her being, and these are the suggestions and the atmosphere, so to speak, of the book; dangerous and disturbing if you will, for she plants the fiery seed of unrest which rises and spreads like a conflagration, but exhilarating also, if we too have a spark ready to be kindled and show light and warmth. Marie will easily be criticised for her boundless egotism and self-conceit, her exaggerated individuality; but was there not a real force within her, something which craved expression and found it, both in literature and art, before the close of her short life. The tragedy of Marie Bashkirtseff's life lay in herself perhaps, but still more in the "Zeitgeist" which she reflects, the spirit of the age, which has lost its old moorings and has not yet sounded the new, which needs higher purpose and ideals, and a new statement of the eternal truths, whereby men live and die. To vision profounder Man's spirit must dive; His aye-rolling orb At no goal will arrive; The heavens that now draw him With sweetness untold, Once found-for new heavens He spurneth the old. NEW YORK and the vicious progeny far and fast alone, of the great cities of the world, has grown up with the century. The village of a hundred years ago is the metropolis of to-day. So fast a pace is not without its perils; in the haste to become great, our city has lost opportunities for healthy growth that have passed not to return. Lessons in homebuilding that would have been worth the learning have been lost on us. Other cities that took time to think have profited by them, and have left to New York the evil inheritance of the tenement, the Frankenstein of our city civilization. We are retracing our steps too late, and endeavoring to unlearn the pennywise ways of the past by tearing down to make elbow-room and breathing space for the pent-up crowds. What would have been easy at the start is a costly and unsatisfactory expedient now; ground has been lost that cannot be regained. It was in the old historic homes downtown that the tenement was born of ignorance and nursed in greed. The years that have brought to these houses unhonored age have not effaced the stain. Step by step it has followed them uptown, poverty and wretchedness moving in as the children of fairer fortune moved out, outgrowing its parent in ugliness. But where its cradle stood, the tenement has yet left its foulest stamp.* Long ago its encroachment upon the lower wards that were the New York of a hundred years ago, gave to the home of the Knickerbockers the name and fame of the worst wards in the city. Turn but a dozen steps from the rush and roar of the Elevated Railroad, where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, and with its din echoing yet in your ears you have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty. You stand upon the domain of the tenement. In the shadow of the great stone abutments, linger about the old houses the worst traditions of half a century. Down the winding slope of Cherry Street-proud and fashionable Cherry Hill that was their broad steps, sloping roofs, and dormer windows (solid comfort stamped by the builder in every one of their generous lines) are easily made out; all the more easily for the contrast with the ugly barracks that elbow them right and left. These never had other design than to shelter, at as little outlay as possible, the great The discovery made at a recent census of the tenements, that as the buildings grew taller the death-rate biggest tenements have been built in the last ten or fifteen fell, surprised most people. The reason is plain: The years of sanitary reform rule, and have been brought, in all but the crowding, under its laws. The old houses, that from private dwellings were made into tenements, in defiance of every moral and physical law, can be improved by no device short of demolition. They will ever remain the worst. Copyright, 1889, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved. At the Cradle of the Tenement.-Doorway of an old fashionable dwelling on Cherry Hill. before the public conscience awoke to the wrong that can never again be undone, and of which we must be always paying the penalty. Like ghosts of a departed day, the old houses linger; but their glory is gone. This one, with its shabby front and poorly patched roof, who shall tell what glowing firesides, what happy children it once owned? Heavy feet, often with unsteady step, for the pot-house is next door, have worn away the brown-stone steps since; the broken columns at the door have rotted away at the base. Of the handsome cornice barely a trace is left. Dirt and desolation reign in the wide hallway, and danger lurks on the rickety stairs. Rough pine boards fence off the roomy fireplaces; where coal is bought by the pail at the rate of twelve dollars brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they shelter. A horde of dirty children play on the broken flags about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it: it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums. From the great highway overhead, along which throbs the lifetide of two great cities, one might drop a pebble into half a dozen such alleys. One yawns just across the street; not very broadly, but it is not to blame. The builder of the old gateway had no thought of its ever becoming a public thoroughfare. But inside it widens; a man might fall across it, with nice judg ment, and not touch wall on either side with head or feet. No sound of chil |