wise and righteous living, if he does not learn to distrust his own convictions, he will at least learn that indulgence for those of others, which is the first of social virtues.

Translated for THE LIVING AGE from the French

of G. Valbert.

from your gestures, from your face, and absurdities subserve the cause of there breathed I know not what soothing suggestion of an impression, an impression of safety. Your European confrerès are not reassuring folk. They are never sure of what they say, or else they never tell you what you need to do in order to live in peace. They only teach you to repeat without ceasing, "What is truth?" But you-you hold it in your hands! It is all in your book!" Such are the varied impressions which a tourist capable of receiving them may glean abundantly along his pathway. Whatever he may pretend, M. Seippel is delighted to have been round the world; and if he affects to depreciate the tourists' calling, it is only that he may keep its advantages all to himself. He spits into the dish for the mere purpose of disgusting others therewith, It is not only people of inquiring minds, like his, who would do well to embrace this calling. Distant peregrinations are also to be recommended to idle folk, who will be stirred up by exercise, to mouldy brains which it will enliven, and to those men of routine, to whom unaccustomed things may minister a wholesome astonishment.

I do not see that there is any one, except the immediate sceptic, who has nothing to gain by becoming a globetrotter. The diversity of manners, customs and principles of conduct, the spectacle of human contradictions tends to ameliorate a man's malignity. will come back with a few additional doubts, and if he has not already mice enough in his granary, those which he brings from among the yellow races, will make short work of the little corn he has left. On the other hand, the bigot will find that it is an excellent thing to have seen the other side of the globe. When he has made the acquaintance both of the Shintoist Bonza in the garden of Bouddha, and the white-headed sheik in the Mosque of El Azhar, he will perceive that both have bowed their lofty reason, to what he himself considers a ridiculous chimera. But when he has also perceived that, in the perfect assurance of their faith they have made their errors

From Macmillan's Magazine. THAT AWKWARD BOY. The air was very still and laden with the perfume of innumerable flowers in the straight downpour of sunshine. The steaming sweetness of the earth rose in a vapor of light and heat, and the pungent scent of bloom fading in the sun, an infinity of light and color, of hot, heavy fragrance and ceaseless shining of all that makes up the glory of white noon in a southern garden. And in the radiant midst of it all, a small, grey figure wandered restlessly from bush to bush, from the bed of large, pale violets to the tufts of windflowers, from the orange-trees to the riotous tangle of tiny golden roses.

"Herr Baby! Oh, Herr Baby! You have broken that chair this time!" said Frau Horn.

"And knocked over my table,-and my work,-oh, do be careful, you very He awkward boy! Can't you learn to remember that your feet are about a mile away from the rest of you?" added the little baroness with a twinkle; but he was out of hearing, for he had seen Peggie going round the garden to say good-bye to the flowers she loved so well, and he had flung himself out of the window to have the chance of a last talk with her. He arrived upon his hands and face instead of upon his feet reasonably; but every one was used to the big Dutchman's clumsiness and no one more than himself, so he took such incidents as a matter of course, unconcernedly.

He had been big,-inconveniently, undesirably big-all his life, he said, though to be sure that was not such a

very long time.

But nobody would in the world can be; and having chosen the latter, she had developed into a very exquisite morsel of humanity indeed. And she had set herself to pet and spoil Peggie with all her might, seeing, in her sweet, shrewd wisdom, that the girl had pined for the want of it throughout her dreary young life; and since Hendrik, the big Dutchman, had been adopted as the other baby, the little baroness had petted him too, though with a hesitating familiarity, much as one pats a great awkward dog that is apt to sweep the table with his responsive tail.

have thought he was so young; even his awkwardness, which was colossal, as Frau Horn said plaintively, was not of a juvenile kind, and his huge limbs and spreading shoulders had something of the aged and ungainly look which is the birthright of an elepuant. Then he had big, uneven features, that were built together in a studied irregularity, and a rough mane of red hair which never settled itself in less than two or three directions. Altogether, as his old Dutch nurse had said of him when he was (relatively) a small boy, "Hendrik isn't handsome, and there's so much of him that one never has a chance of forgetting it." He had a way, moreover, of looking so ponderously solemn, even in his most frivolous moments, that the very idea of youth seemed ridiculous in connection with him. There had, in fact, been a shout of laughter when it was discovered one night that he was only Peggie's elder by a few weeks; and she, who had hitherto been made mucn of as the baby of the Pension, transferred to him maliciously half her proprietary interest in the title. Ever since that he had been called among them Herr Baby, to replace the difficult gutturals that made up his name by right; as she had long been nothing other than Ma'amselle Baby even to the French chambermaids. For it takes so little to make one laugh in the midst of sunshine and flowers, and the uplifted mountains that shut out of sight the grey face of winter, and, perhaps, that other shrouded phantom from the fear of which one has for a little while got free.

The nickname was the little baroness's doing in the first instance. She had made a pet of Peggie for the sake of her bright ways and laughing face, though, if it came to that, no one could be more elfinly merry and lovable than the little old lady herself. But then, if one has been crippled all one's life, in the course of time one arrives at heing either a very detestable person, or just such a fairy god-mother as only a tiny old woman with the merriest wit

There had perhaps been a good deal of jealousy between Hendrik and Peggie (though, to be sure, it was all on one side) when the little old lady first began to divide her favors; but when you are only nineteen and wholesomely unsentimental, it is so much easier to be good friends, especially when the one is a pretty, mischievous little girl, and the other a huge, good-natured, companionable boy. And after all, his very awkwardness had only been another excuse for laughter, and they were so ready to laugh in this safe little corner of the hills where it seemed so easy not to be ill; and Hendrik and Peggie had been the best of friends,till, on a sudden, the end had come, and the news of her uncle's illness had summoned her home.

Peggie was wandering about the garden, feeling very miserable. She had been so happy here, where every one had been kind to her, and the sense of being a petted child among them had been so unfamiliar and so sweet. And it was hard to go back to that dark, sllent house where she was so little wanted, away from the sunshine and the large air and the flowers; even here she shivered when she thought of the gloomy street, all the more dull and lonely that London lay close outside of it. And she would be shut into it again, as she had been before, till all the old tired feelings came back, and the headaches and the pale cheeks that the sun had driven away. Yes, she was very unhappy; and yet when Hendrik picked himself up from the rose-.

bed into which he had tumbled, and "I had much rather go to London

and oh, how funny to think of marry- must not say such things," she exing you, you queer big boy!"

"Now, Herr Baby," she said, "you know you don't mean it. Why, you never even thought of it till just this minute! And suppose I had taken you at your word, where would you have been then? Only I'm not so foolish, and we have been such good friends, that it seems a pity that you should have spoiled it all at the last. But it sha'n't be spoiled; we'll forget it altogether; fill some day, if ever we meet again, you will be ready to laugh at it with me, won't you?"

Hendrik looked away, over the top of her head. "I don't know that I want to forget about it," he said slowly; "and I think I would like you to remember too. I wish you would think over it a little, when you are away from here; and if it should happen that you changed your mind

claimed, “in my hearing. We have been good friends, and I will not allow my friends to be ill-spoken of, even by themselves. And besides, it is not true."

"Even the little baroness always calls me a clumsy boy."

"So do I, often. That's nothing; that's only a pet name; what you said was much worse. And if you had been the handsomest man in the world, it would have been all the same. I never thought of marrying anybody, and I don't think I want to. I want to amuse myself; I want to have flowers, sunshine, and people to be kind to me. I don't mean to be married at all."

and

"But I am sure I sha'n't," she mur- of the able-bodied residents at the Penmured.

"If you should," he went on patiently, "I would like you to write and tell me so. Or at least, write, and I'll know what it means, whatever you say. I want you to promise me that, Ma'amselle Baby."

sion, arrived at the station. Frau Horn broke down helplessly in saying good-bye, and carried away her amiable foolish face and latest Parisian fashions to weep in private; and the little baroness had at last to be forcibly removed from Peggie's arms, which were very loth indeed to let her go. Old Signor Baruca (who had a heart, as he explained ambiguously) was so ferociously ill-tempered that the rest of them wondered how Peggie dared to hug him with such irreverence; and Mr. Lawley-Green, who had tried to take refuge in a quite foreign facetiousness, had actually to wipe real tears from his own elderly eyes with the huge bandanna which he had brought out only to make them laugh. Ah! It "You had taken so little to make them laugh,

It was a long speech for him, and Peggie stared at him in a growing uneasiness. "Oh, yes," she said with a little hesitation, "I'll promise if you like. It would be a dreadful thing to do, you know, only there is not the least chance of it; please understand that. I-oh dear, I never even thought of such a thing at all!"

"Of course you didn't. That comes of being such an ugly awkward brate as I am."

She checked him indignantly.

but this was the beginning of the end, care, but she was disappointed in him.