"Hushing her sobs, I staggered on,

Faint, dizzy with pain, and perhaps despair; For sadly we needed some refuge safe,

And who would offer it ?-nay, who dare? Till an aged crone peeped fearfully out

Of her wretched hovel, and hid us there.

"But, alas! though almost too old to live,

She feared the mob, and she feared to die, And in selfish dread, when again night fell,

From her door she thrust us, and bade us fly; Yet she flung me a blouse, and bonnet rouge, That none should my soldier's dress descry.

"I donned them-hating myself the while

For the gates with my precious charge I made;
If those were passed, in the woods beyond
I knew of many a bosky glade,

Where the child might hide till friends appeared
And the further spread of the riot stayed.

"Bribed with the little one's rosary

Le voici! I have it here on my breast;
I bought it back for its weight in gold--
A fellow I drew aside from the rest,
Let us slip by while he kept the guard,
And like hunted deer for the woods we pressed.

"Scarce half a league from the city walls,
Lo! swooping down like a fiery blast-
Armed to the teeth, and hot with wrath-

Rank after rank spurring quickly past-
The avengers came of Jacques Enguerrande,
And I felt that his child was safe at last!
"She knew their leader-she shrieked his name-
He halted-I told you what garb I wore,
They thought me a rebel; the little one
With oaths and blows from my arms they tore,
And left me for dead on the cold hard earth;
But the child was safe-and my tale is o'er."

"But your payment?" a dozen voices ask,
And le capitaine smiles in his deep disdain;
"Pardon, mesdames, for a deed of love

No soldier his palm with gold would stain; Only this boon did I ever crave—

One look at her angel face again!

"Qu'importe? she is rich and happy, and I'
He pauses-la comtesse has left her throne;
Once more on his breast a fair head lies,
Once more round his neck are white arms thrown,
And sweet lips murmur, "Mon brave! mon brave!
Let my poor love for the past atone!"

The play is played, and the guests depart-
La comtesse was none so fair after all!
But many an eye looks back with regret
On the broad demesne, and the princely hall,
That Enguerrande's child with her hand bestows
On the scarred and sun-burned Capitaine Paul.

THE LABORIOUS ANT.*

[From "A Tramp Abroad." By MARK TWAIN.]

rested, we
watched the
laborious ant
at his work. I
found nothing
new in him-
certainly no-
thing to change

OW and then, I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have while we had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about politics. Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham. I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest-working creature in the world-when anybody is looking-but his leather-headedness is the point I make against him. He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what does he do? Go home? No; he goes anywhere but home. He doesn't know where home is. His home may be only three feet away; no matter, he can't find it. He makes his capture, as I have said; it is generally something which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else; it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be; he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it; he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts

my opinion of
him. It seems

to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird. During many summers now I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one.

By permission of Messrs. Chatto and Windus.

drags off the booty and him at the end of it. Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way. By-and-by when that grasshopper leg has been dragged all over the same old ground once more, it is finally dumped at about the spot where it originally lay. The two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property after all, and then each starts off in a different direction to see if he can't find an old nail or something else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it.

There in the Black Forest, on the mountain side, I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight. The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist. He had a round body the size of a pea. The little ant-observing that I was noticing-turned him on his back, sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air, and started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles, stepping on the spider's legs and tripping himself up, dragging him backwards, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him up stones six inches high instead of going around them, climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping from their summits-and finally leaving him in the middle of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an ant that wanted him. I

not towards home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and, instead of going around it, he climbs over it backwards, dragging his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side, jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it this way, then that, shoves it ahead of him a moment, turns tail and lugs it after him another moment, gets madder and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed; it never occurs to him to go around it. No; he must climb it, and he does climb it, dragging his worthless property to the top-which is as bright a thing to do as it would be for me to carry a sack of flour from Heidelberg to Paris by way of Strasburg steeple. When he gets up there he finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance at the scenery, and either climbs down again or tumbles down, and starts off once more- as usual, in a new direction. At the end of half an hour he fetches up within six inches of the place he started from, and lays his burden down. Meantime, he has been over all the ground for two yards around, and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across. Now he wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs, and then marches aimlessly off, in as violent a hurry as ever. He traverses a good deal of zig-zag country, and by-and-measured the ground which this ass traversed, and by stumbles on his same booty again. He does not remember to have ever seen it before; he looks around to see which is not the way home, grabs his bundle, and starts. He goes through the same adventures he had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend comes along. Evidently the friend remarks that a last year's grasshopper leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he got it. Evidently the proprietor does not remember exactly where he did get it, but thinks he got it "around here somewhere." Evidently the friend contracts to help him freight it home. Then, with a judgment peculiarly antic (pun not intentional), they take hold of opposite ends of the grasshopper leg and begin to tug with all their might in opposite directions. Presently they take a rest, and confer together. They decide that something is wrong, they can't make out what. Then they go at it again, just as before. Same result. Mutual recriminations follow. Evidently each accuses the other of being an obstructionist. They warm up, and the dispute ends in a fight. They lock themselves together and chew each other's jaws for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs. They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way, but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may, the other one

arrived at the conclusion that what he had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute some such job as this-relatively speaking-for a man; to wit: to strap two eight hundred pound horses together, carry them eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around) boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down, in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them, and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for vanity's sake.

Science has recently discovered that the ant does not lay up anything for winter use. This will knock him out of literature to some extent. He does not work, except when people are looking, and only then when the observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure him for the Sunday schools. He has not judgment enough to know what is good to eat from what isn't. This amounts to ignorance, and will impair the world's respect for him. He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again. This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact is established, thoughtful people will cease to look up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle

How that red rain hath made the harvest grow! He rush'd into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell! And is this all the world hath gained by thee, Thou first and last of fields! king-making victory?

[From "Griffith's Double." By FRANCES CASHEL HOEY.] SOLITARY ship, in mid-ocean, its white sails touched by the silver moonbeams which fall beyond them in a wide glittering track upon the waste of waters. Under the steelblue sky, on the restless bosom of the beautiful, awful sea, no other object in sight, seemingly in existence, but that silent, gliding ship; grand, even in its littleness, amid the great space; solemn and ghostlike as it moves through the booming waves under the steady heaven-flooding radiance on high. Save for the watch, her decks are solitary, and her human freight is below-sleeping for the most part, all quiet at least.

Mary Pemberton is not sleeping; she lies in her narrow bed, her child upon her arm, listening to the rhythmical rush of the surging waves as they go by the ship; she can see them through the small window of her state-room, where the moonlight daintily tips them with myriad sparkles of silver light. How beautiful the night is, and how unusually still the ship! The straining, the creaking, the flapping, the innumerable sounds which are inseparable from motion on the great deep, and the management of that floating wonder, a ship, are reduced to a minimum tonight, and the sense of quiet is soothing. Mary is dreaming, though she does not sleep; dreaming of a country that is very far off, and of a waiting figure upon its shore, keeping patient watch for her. And, still dreaming, though she does not sleep, she sees the years of the past go trooping by, they pass before her eyes, float out into the air, and melt into the sparkles upon the waves; a

long, long train of them-childhood, girlhood, womanhood, wifehood, motherhood-such is the order in which they pass, and pass away. The faces of the loved long ago, and the lost long ago-father and mother; a sister who died as a young child; a brother whom India slew among its thousands; child-friends; girl-friends; the lover who had been so false to her; the husband who had been so true to her; the home which had been so dear, until, in one moment, it ceased to be home at all, and home meant thenceforth for Mary the unseen land. How strangely it came back to her to-night, as she lay with the sleeping infant nestled in her bosom, an atom in the immensity around! It came back with every detail perfect, every foot of ground, every tree, every room, and piece of furniture. Mary felt as though her mind were roaming independent of her will through all the forsaken scenes of her lost happiness, and recognised with a placid surprise that the journey was not all pain. Such small things came out of the deep shadows of the past and showed themselves to her again, things which might be called trifles, only that there are no trifles in the storehouse of memory where death has set its seal; and, strange to say, they did not torture her, as small things can torture more keenly than the greater, because they tell of the frightful continuous intimacy and clinging presence of ruin and desolation. Mary, wondering, but very placidly, at herself, thought this must be one of the states of mind which she had read of as accompanying bodily weakness. She had been very ill during the carly part of the voyage. Yes, it must be so; thus people remembered and