Ever since?" asked Pierre.

"All the time."

"Why did you not go back?"

"I was to wait for orders, and they never came."

"You were a free man, not a slave." "The human heart has pride. At first, as when I left the governor at Lachine, I said, 'I will never speak, I will never ask nor bend the knee. He has the power to oppress; I can obey without whining, as fine a he.'"

"Did you not hate?"

man as

"At first, as only a banished man can hate. I knew that if all had gone well I should be a man high up in the Company, and here I was, living like a dog in the porch of the world, sometimes without food for months, save frozen fish; and for two years I was in a place where we had no fire, lived in a snow-house, with only blubber to eat. And so year after year, no word!" There came the mail once every year from the world?"

66

"Yes, once a year the door of the world was opened. A ship came into the bay, and by that ship I sent out my reports. But no word came from the governor, and no request from me. Once the captain of that ship took me by the shoulders, and said, 'Fawdor, man, this will drive you mad. Come away to England, leave your half-breed in charge, - and ask the governor for a big promotion.' He did not understand. Of course I said I could not go. Then he turned on me, he was a good man, and said, 'This will either drive you mad or make you a saint, Fawdor.' He drew a Bible from his pocket. I've used it twenty years,' he said, 'in evil and out of evil, and I've spiked it here and there; it's a chart for heavy seas, and may you find it so, my lad.'

66

"I said little then; but when I saw the sails of his ship round a cape and vanish, all my pride and strength were broken up, and I came in a heap to the

ground, weeping like a child. But the change did not come all at once. There were two things that kept me hard." "The girl?"

"The girl, and another. But of the young lady after. I had a half-breed whose life I had saved. I was kind to him always; gave him as good to eat and drink as I had myself; divided my tobacco with him; loved him as only an exile can love a comrade. He conspired with the Indians to seize the fort and stores, and kill me if I resisted. I found it out."

"Thou shalt keep the faith of food and blanket," said Pierre. "What did you do with him?”

66

The fault was not his so much as of his race, the mongrel thing. I had loved him. I sent him away. He never came back."

"Thou shalt judge with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one woman."

"For the girl. There was the thing that clamped my heart. Never a word from her or her brother. Surely they knew, and yet never, I thought, a word from them to the governor. They had forgotten the faith of food and blanket. And she she must have seen that I could have worshiped her, had we been in the same way of life. Before the better days came to me I was hard against her, hard and rough at heart."

66

Remember the sorrow of thine own wife." Pierre's voice was gentle.

66

Truly, to think hardly of no woman But should be always in a man's heart. I have known only one woman of my race in twenty-five years!"

"And as time went on?"

"As time went on, and no word came, I ceased to look for it. But I followed that chart spiked with the captain's pencil, as he had done it in season and out of season, and by and by I ceased to look for any word. I even became reconciled to my life. The ambitious and aching cares of the world dropped from

from was

her. She said that her brother, on the day she wrote, had by chance come across my name, and found that I had been here a quarter of a century. It was the letter of a good woman. She said she thought the governor had forgotten that he had sent me here, as now I hope he had, for that would be one thing less for him to think of, when he set out on the journey where the only weight man carries is the packload of his sins. She also said that she had written to me twice after we parted at Lachine, but had never heard a word, and three years after she had gone to India. The letters were lost, I suppose, on the way to me, somehow, who can tell? Then came another thing, so strange, so like the laughter of the angels at us. These were her words: And, dear Mr. Fawdor, you were both wrong in that quotation, as you no doubt discovered long ago.' Then she gave me the sentence as it is in Cymbeline. She was right, quite right. We were both wrong. Never till her letter came had I looked to see. How vain, how uncertain and fallible, is man!"

Pierre dropped his cigarette, and stared at Fawdor. "The knowledge of books is foolery," he said slowly.

"Man is the only book of life. Go on,

go on."

"There was another letter, from the brother, who was now high up in the Company, asking me to come to England, and saying that they wished to promote me far, and that he and his sister, with their families, would be glad to see me."

"She was married, then?"

The rashness of the suggestion made Fawdor wave his hand impatiently. He would not reply to it, but he said, "I was struck down with all the news. I wandered like a child out into a mad storm. Illness came; then who have nursed you, me back to life. . . . And now I have told all."

...

"Not all, bien sur.

do?"

What will you

"I am out of the world; why tempt it all again? See how those twenty-five years were twisted by a boy's vanity and a man's tyranny!"

"But what will you do?" persisted Pierre." You should see the faces of women and children again. No man can live without that sight, even as a saint."

Suddenly Fawdor's face was shot over with a storm of feeling. He took Pierre's hand, and after a moment, "I will go," he said. "There is a line in that Book He pointed to the Bible. Pierre's fingers flashed out, and he interrupted. "Not from any book, but from your own life!" he cried.

Fawdor paused; then, raising himself on his elbow, he said, "Not from the Book, then, nor from my life, but from yours. Judge with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one woman.' So I will go into the world."

Then he turned his face to the wall. Soon the storm ceased, the wild dog huddled on the hearth, and, save for Pierre stirring the fire, Fawdor's peaceful breathing was the only sound.

Gilbert Parker.

I WAS recalled to town, and had to bring my pleasant Somersetshire visit to an end. When I told the squire, he said, "I am sorry you must go; but a good host must speed the parting as well as welcome the coming guest. We have not had much to show you, except the humors of the general election. I hope you have not found your visit dull."

Foster. Far from it. I have seen and heard so much that I wish I could sit down to look round and consider a little before I make my last day's march, like the soldier in the French story which one of the ladies read to us the other day.

Squire. You mean the description of the soldier returning home, who stops, when in sight of his native village, to look back on his past service before he finishes his concluding march. It is one of Émile Souvestre's idyls, little pictures, which are always so charming; but it ought to suit me rather than you, as it is the opening of his Souvenirs d'un Vieillard. Old age comes in every variety of form. There are all sorts of men, soldiers, statesmen, men of business, of letters, of sciences, and peasants, who die in harness. There are some men and women whose powers of body decay, while their minds keep, or even add to, their original vigor; with others the mindperhaps it is really the brain goes before the body; while with others, again, there is a gradual and gentle decline of the powers of action both of mind and body to the last. And though we all instinctively feel death to be an evil for ourselves and for those who love us, yet a man may live too long, or at least till his life seems to have no further use than

- - or

Foster. You remind me of Swift's horrible picture of the Struldbrugs.

Squire. The caricature is frightful, but the likeness cannot be denied. It would be better for us all, for ourselves as well as for the young men in whose way we stand, if we old men took Swift's warning more to heart; for the old man dying in harness is for the most part a mistake. He deludes himself when he thinks that his wider knowledge and greater experience will enable him to do the work as well as if he had still the young man's powers of action.

Foster. Old age did not dim the artist's eye nor enfeeble the hand of Titian or Tintoretto, nor abate the military genius of Radetzky or Moltke; and Michael Angelo was between eighty and ninety when he planned and superintended the building of the dome of St. Peter's, hanging the Pantheon in heaven, as he said.

Squire. You carry too many guns for me. I might plead that artists are hardly men of action, or that exceptions prove the rule; but I confess that I have " generalized from too few particulars." I was thinking chiefly of our old generals in the Crimea, and our old statesmen in the last fifty years of our parliamentary history. Gibbon says, in his stately style, of one of the Roman emperors that he put an interval between life and death. I believe he means that he abdicated and went into a convent; but, without advising the conditions of the convent, I have no doubt that he is both the wisest and the happiest old man who does abdicate the functions of a life of action, and so in part puts an interval between life and death. Thus he may sit down, pleasantly enough, in sight of his home, and, like Souvestre's conscript, consider.

Foster. And tell us, whose service is still going on, something both interesting and instructive about his own experiences in that service.

Squire. We will hope so. Indeed, I often think that there is a use to the world in the occurrence of this interval between life and death, if both the old and the young employ it rightly. But the old man must beware of the besetting sin of such old age.

Foster. What is that?

Squire. Garrulous twaddle. Shakespeare, whom no form or condition of man's life escapes, has given us the picture of this garrulousness in Dogberry, Justice Shallow, and Polonius; but I need not quote him to you.

Foster. Who is, or was, Souvestre ? Squire. Émile Souvestre was a French man of letters in what I suppose I must call the last generation, though he was only six years older than myself. The son of an officer of engineers, and educated for the bar, he had early entered on a literary career in Paris, full of promise, when the death of his elder brother and the loss of the family property threw upon him the support of his widowed mother and sister-in-law. To provide for them he at once left Paris to enter on the humble work of serving customers behind the counter, and doing the other retail business of a bookseller in Nantes with whom he found employment. His literary ability and moral worth were soon recognized by one of those customers, a deputy and a man of wealth, who was engaged in plans for the better education of his countrymen. Souvestre's services were engaged for the conduct of a college founded by this gentleman; then he became a professor of rhetoric and editor of a newspaper at Brest, while occupying himself with other literary work also. Thence he eventually returned to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, diversified only by visits to the provinces and to French Switzerland for the purpose of giving lectures

to the crowded audiences which always welcomed him. He was eminently patriotic; the ruling motive—I might say passion of his life was the education (the culture, moral and religious, even more than the intellectual culture) of his countrymen. We English are apt to pride ourselves on our love of duty. but no Englishman makes duty the guiding star of his life more than did Souvestre. It is the keynote of everything he writes. And what he taught he had first tried and practiced in his own life. "In his own heart he first kept school;" and those who knew him most intimately said that the sense of duty, which was always strong and even stern to himself, only showed itself in perfect love to those around him.

Foster. What did he write?

Squire. Though he died at the age of forty-eight, he left nearly seventy volumes. His history of his native and loved Brittany, Les Derniers Bretons, is full of life and interest as well as of local and literary research, and is recognized as classical. But his chief literary work I speak not of his lectures, but of his books was that of story-telling. He has given us an infinite variety of tales of French life in town and country, all of which are true idyls. The characters as well as the incidents are full of dramatic interest. The high and generous moral spirit which guides their destiny is never obtruded. It is the atmosphere which we really though unconsciously breathe. And though I do not pretend to pronounce judgment on style in any language but English, I think I may call that writing terse, lucid, and graceful which was crowned with the approval of the Acadé mie Française; but a still higher eulogy was bestowed by that learned body upon Souvestre when they granted to his widow the testimonial founded by M. Lambert in recognition of the man who had been most useful to his country.

Foster. Have any of his books been translated into English?

Squire. His Philosophe sous les Toits, Confessions d'un Ouvrier, and two or three of the tales of Brittany were translated by one with whose hand my own was joined in the task; and of these at least a part was reprinted in America. His longer work, Les Derniers Bretons, was, absurdly enough, translated into English from a German version; the consequence, as the publisher said to me, of the bad habit of not reading prefaces. And one of his longer tales has been translated with the title of Leaves from a Family Journal.

Foster. Did you know him well?

Squire. I feel ready to say Yes, though I never saw him. Here is his own way of answering the question in a letter to his translator. (Takes a letter from a drawer and reads.)

"Et maintenant, madame, permettezmoi d'ajouter de vifs et sincères remercîments pour l'honneur que vous avez fait à l'auteur en choisissant son livre pour être traduit dans votre langue; c'est une distinction dont il se tient fort touché. Vouloir traduire un livre, c'est prouver qu'on entre en sympathie avec celui qui l'a écrit, et qu'on sent, qu'on pense comme lui. Il n'est rien de plus doux que ces adhésions obtenues de loin, et il y a un charme particulier dans les amis inconnus qui répondent à votre cœur sans que vous avez jamais entendu leur voix." 1

Of such unknown friends none lives so present to my memory as Émile Souvestre.

Foster. That must be the best kind of memory. But a memory for facts and words is a good thing, too, and must, I suppose, be an essential qualification for writing history.

Squire. Gibbon's memory must have

1 "And now, madam, allow me to add my most sincere thanks for the honor you have done the author in choosing his book for translation into your own language; it is a distinction which he feels very sensibly. To resolve to translate a book is to give proof of hearty sympathy with the writer of it, and of feeling

been at once enormous and minute; Niebuhr wrote down his quotations of chapter and verse without needing to refer to the books themselves; Johannes von Müller could repeat the pedigrees of all the little German princes; and Macaulay could tell the names in succession, and backwards as well as forwards, of the Archbishops of Canterbury or the Popes, or both. A host of other instances of verbal memory crowd on me; the prettiest, if not the most important, is the story of Pope reading his Rape of the Lock to Parnell.

Foster. What is that? I do not remember it.

Squire. Pope read the first canto of his new poem to Parnell. Parnell said, "I am sure I have heard those lines before, I think in a monkish Latin original." Pope declared that they were all his own; but Parnell persisted, and Isaid he would find and send them to Pope. And on his return home he sent Pope- to his great annoyance till the truth was known the Latin verses, which I think I can repeat, as well as Pope's own. Pope's lines are :

-

“And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,
Each silver vase in mystic order laid.
First, rob'd in white, the nymph intent adores,
With head uncover'd, the cosmetic powers.
A heavenly Image in the glass appears,
To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;
Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,
Trembling, begins the sacred rites of Pride.
Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here
The various offerings of the world appear;
From each she nicely culls with curious toil,
And decks the Goddess with the glittering
spoil.

This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transformed to combs, the speckled and the
white.

Here files of pins extend their shining rows, and thinking like himself. Nothing is more gratifying than to receive such assurances of sympathy from a distance, and there is a peculiar charm in the unknown friends whose hearts answer to your own, though you have never heard their voices."