that the Father would gladly have encountered martyrdom, if it had been ordained for him to meet it. If, however, death would have brought no suffering to the priest, dishonor would; and Thankful suggests that it was with the purpose in view of bringing him to dishonor at last, that the Sieur so guarded Mériel's life. She believes that he read in her face the fascination which Mériel early began to exercise over her. Reviewing their intercourse, she recalls what was not plain to her at the time, that from first to last Mériel was a frequent theme of their conversation, and that, without attracting her suspicion, he dwelt upon every circumstance in Mériel's life likely to attract her to the latter.

Moreover she holds that he wrought upon her with some diabolical spell. She knows from exclamations which he once or twice let fall, that sometimes, excited by his recollections, he imparted more than he intended. She feels sure that as he sought to interest her in Mériel, he also brought Mériel to seek her, by representing her as disposed to embrace the faith, with the idea that their relations might come to seem suspicious. When the time for her return drew near before his plot had matured, she suggests that he may have grown desperate, as his promised revenge seemed about to fail; that therefore he made his accusation to the Superior, and contrived his last plan, in the hope that her strangely timed visit to the Jesuit's lodge, and the weight of his own authority, might bring about Mériel's disgrace. When the plot failed, and Mériel knew him in his true character as an enemy, his schemes for revenge having at last miscarried, Thankful thinks it not strange that he should have hurried out to throw himself into the river. "Perhaps he was flung in," she adds, "by the power of Satan." To all this explanation, she finds some confirmation in the elemental tumult of the night. Believing that demons filled the air, she asks if such Satanic activity would not be nat

["How does it seem to you?" I said to my wife, after we had read it together. "Do you like Thankful's solution?" "I hardly know, Joseph," said my wife. "There's such a prejudice nowadays against the poor Devil; won't people find it hard to believe he was ever around so much?" For myself, I do not know whether to accept Thankful's explanation, or not, and I leave the reader to make his own decision concerning it. Only with respect to her hesitation at the end, I will give a conclusion that I came to after an experience with a certain Italian and French teacher, who, after being fostered in my very bosom, as it were, went off to that Institute under the most exasperating circumstances. It is, that among Southern Europeans a secret and malignant type of character may sometimes be encountered; a type to which the natures of the Sieur and that wretch Passédéfini may perhaps have belonged;-a type whose reflection given in the mirror of Shakespeare lies open to our study in Iago.]

When Thankful embarked at last, to leave St. Laudry, her face was so haggard that Annette exclaimed, "Has the Devil touched you, too, poor child?" Thankful considers that Annette's question was near the truth. As the batteau gathered headway upon the current, from the church came the sound of the Dies Ira, chanted over the body of the Sieur. Borne upon the wind came the words:

"Ingemisco tanquam reus Culpa rubet vultus meus Supplicanti parce Deus." She made the words her own, turning her eyes heavenward.

The English ship, after delaying a month and more at Quebec, dropped

down as far as the dreary port of Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, and before putting to sea, tarried an hour or two before these gloomy rocks. A few huts clung to the base of bare cliffs, past which the wide black current of the Saguenay poured itself. It was just dusk of the long summer day in that northern latitude, and Thankful, looking from the anchorage, saw upon the rocks the canoes of a body of savages. An Indian who came out from the shore brought word that it was a band belonging in the regions about Hudson's Bay. They had been to Quebec to sell furs, and were about returning with a Jesuit priest who had just been assigned, at his own desire, to this most dangerous and difficult of missions. At early dawn they were to depart up the melancholy river, and were now just about celebrating the Mass. It was too far to catch sight of any object, except most faintly. But the sound of the chanting, done probably by a few fishermen and their wives, belonging to the hamlet, came sweetly through the silence and twilight across the perfectly still water. Thankful could follow the plaintive Agnus Dei, and the louder swell of the Jubilate; and now she knew that the moment approached when the Host should be elevated. With a thrill that shook her whole Leing, Thankful heard across the water the sound of the bell that marked the event. Lo! it was the sound that she had come to know so well. With melody unutterable, from where it hung suspended in some crevice of the rock, the bell within which was bound the

soul of the dead wife shook forth into the stillness its tremulous toll. Now it throbbed upon the air with an almost dying cadence; then it reverberated from the bleak precipice with a soft power like the peal from the trumpet of an angel. Once, twice, thrice, came the unearthly music of its vibration, until the air seemed to Thankful to murmur with the pure harmony of celestial voices, voices that sang sublimely of sacrifice and holiness. Then, as it fainted into silence, and the darkness fell upon the cold wilderness, the sail above Thankful swelled out with the wind, and from beneath was heard the ripple of the ship's departure.

A

Here ends the tale. I know not what may have been the fate of Mériel, — whether he died in the snow like Father Anne de Nouë, or at the stake like Brébeuf and Lallemant, or lost in some forest like René Mesnard, or by some wilderness stream, close to his altar, like Marquette. With regard to poor Thankful there is no further record or tradition than the minister's brief note upon the back to her story. tall slab in our old burying-ground informs the world that Remembrance Pumry died, well advanced in life, and possessed of many virtues, during the old French War. By his side lies Judith, "his desirable consort and relict," who died two years after. The inscription states that she was a second wife; and this is the only existing hint, besides the mouldy leaves of the narrative, that Thankful ever lived.

ed hotels, and taken lodging in comparatively quiet by-streets, the various cries of the city must be a source of wonder, curiosity, doubt, fear, and sundry other emotions, according to circumstances and the respective temperaments of the rural persons. Along Broadway, the cries of the itinerant venders and tradesmen are seldom to e beard; for it is not in the great business thoroughfares that these industrials ply their vocations; and even they did, their voices would be lost the dominant din of that clashing, rattling, shrieking, thundering thorughfare.

An hour or two after midnight, the nak-trains from the rural districts arrive at the several railway stations in the upper part of the city. By three o'clock in the morning the depots in which the milk is deposited are beseed by crowds of milk-carriers in heir one-horse wagons, each waiting is turn to have his cans filled. The Wagons are generally tidy concerns, painted in bright colors, with the names of the owners, and of the counties or stricts from which the milk comes, ettered on them. The horses by which they are drawn are mostly compact,

ng animals, and they are almost variably well fed and groomed. As the drivers, the greater part are strong-built, sunburnt fellows, with Garse flannel shirts, slouched hats, and gut trousers tucked into heavy boots. They have, nearly without exception, a strong dash of the New York "rough in them, their fiery qualities not being in the least modified by constant contempation of the bland fluid in which they Ceal. Before five o'clock, all the mem ́ers of this milk brigade are away on ther respective rounds throughout the uity.

The peculiar cry of the New York

been a puzzle to investigators how this fiendish yell originated, and why that most innocuous and pacifying of marketables, milk, should be announced with a war-whoop to which that of the blanketed Arapahoe of the plains is but as the bleat of a spring lamb. The shriek of the New York milkman has no appreciable connection with the word "milk." The rural visitor who hears it for the first time in the rosy morn plunges out from his bedclothes and rushes to the window, expectant of one of those sanguinary hand-to-hand conflicts about which he has been so long reading in the New York papers. Instead of gore he sees milk; a long-handled ladle instead of a knife or pistol; and a taciturn man in rusty garments doling out that fluid with it to the sleepy-eyed Hebe who clambers up from the basement with her jug, instead of scalping her of her chignon and adding it to the trophies at his belt. The cry of the New York milkman is an outrage, and a provocation to breach of the peace. More graciously might his presence be announced by the tinkling of a cow-bell, or, what would be equally appropriate, by a blast from the hollow-sounding horn of a cow.

Among the sweetest of the city cries, and with a sadness about it, too, suggestive of the passing away of summer, and the coming of chill autumnal nights, is that of "Hot corn!" It is long after dark when this cry begins to resound in the streets, which are quiet now, the noisy traffic of the day having ceased. Most of the venders of hot corn are women or young girls, though men and boys are often to be seen engaged in the business. Many of them are of the colored race, and it is from these, chiefly, that the most characteristic and musical inflections of the cry are heard in the still hours towards

midnight. One of these strains, which has been chanted night after night, for several autumns past, by the same voice, in a central walk of the city, has a very wild and plaintive cadence, as will appear from the following:

Hot corn, hot corn, here's your fine hot corn!

After chanting this strain, the voice repeats the words "hot corn " several times, in a short, jerking note; and then the plaintive little song is heard again, dying away in the distance. On a still September night, when the win, dows are open, and sleep has not yet locked the senses of the drowsed listener, this cry of "hot corn," in all its variations, has a very pleasing effect.

What awful-looking cylinder on wheels is this that comes slowly along, floundering over the cobble-stones like a car of Juggernaut, or the chariot of Vulcan on its way to a cyclopean revel? Within the grimy, wooden tunnel sit two stalwart men, the most observable quality of whom is blackness from head to foot. Whatever color their clothes may originally have been, blackness - positive and extreme blackness -is now their hue. They have the features of the Caucasian races, have these fuliginous sons of Erebus, but their teeth flash and their eyeballs gleam silverly, like those of the African, for their features are dusky as his. Slowly drawled out in a deep, sad monotone, comes the cry "Charcoal ' from the chest of one of them. It is a very long-drawn, mournful cry, like that which might come from a deadcart driven round during a pestilence for the bodies of the victims. Charcoal has got the better of these men, and converted them to its own moods and shades. The thrones on which they sit within the great black cylinder are piles of charcoal. Burnt cork is chalk compared to the charcoal nigrescence of their faces and hands. Charcoal is all over them, and everywhere

about. When the charcoal man dies he needs no embalming, no sarcophagus hermetically sealed; for his system is charged with the great antiseptic by which he lives, and he is never so far gone but that he is thoroughly cured by it when dead.

In pleasant contrast with the supernatural cry of the charcoal man is that sweet one of "Strawber-rees!" which first falls upon the ear some balmy morning in June, when the fancies of the city man are all of fragrant meadows and tinkling brooks. Not pleasant, indeed, as it comes from the lips of the "licensed venders," who hawk fruit about in wagons; for nothing in the way of noise can be more disagreeable than the bawling of these loudmouthed men.

But hark to the clear

tone of a woman's voice, that comes ringing on the ear, repeating at short intervals the one word, with a sudden pitch of the last syllable to the octave above, in a prolonged sostenuto! Passing along the street, there goes the singer, generally a woman of middle age, for but few young girls are observable in this branch of street industry. The procession of the seasons is distinctly marked to city people by the cries of these hawkers. First, the strawberries, redolent of balmy June with its lilac-blossoms and plumed horse-chestnuts. Then, when the freshness of June has passed away, and the dog-day heat of July is upon us, the same note, indeed, is to be heard vibrating in the sultry street; but the libretto is changed, for strawberries are out" now, and raspberries “in.” Later still, near the close of July, and so throughout August, the wild-flavored medicinal blackberry, suggestive of dusty roadside fences and retreats lonely, takes the place of the others, in company with the huckleberry; and the same ringing cry announces the progress of these along the street.

Among the musical cries of New York City, one of the most peculiar is that of the chimney-sweeps. Their vocation is confined exclusively to col ored people, by whom also the shaking