his eyes fell on his fiddle, which lay at his side.

"This is all your fault!" shouted the boy, and seized the instrument
with the intention of dashing it to pieces, but hesitated as he looked
at it.

"We have had many a happy hour together," said he, then paused.
Presently he said, "The strings must be severed, for they are
worthless." And he took out a knife and cut. "Oh!" cried the E string,
in a short, pained tone. The boy cut. "Oh!" wailed the next, but the boy
cut. "Oh!" said the third, mournfully; and he paused at the fourth. A
sharp pain seized him; that fourth string, to which he never dared give
a name, he did not cut. Now a feeling came over him that it was not the
fault of the strings that he was unable to play, and just then he saw
his mother walking slowly up the slope toward where he was lying, that
she might take him home with her. A greater fright than ever overcame
him; he held the fiddle by the severed strings, sprang to his feet, and
shouted down to her,--

"No, mother! I will not go home again until I can play what I have seen
to-day."

_Contributed by An Oriental Traveller._

"A great, long devil of a Spahi in his red burnous."

_Daudet._

CHRISTMAS IN THE DESERT.

I.

It seemed all too good to be true: the rest from labor, the swift flight
across southern seas, the landing, amid strange, dark faces on a
burnished shore, the slow, delicious journey through tamarisk groves and
palm forests, and the halt in the Desert that came at last.

I had been doing for the last twelve months what young artists and
authors are constantly doing, to their own ruin and the justifiable
ill-humor of critics, namely, working against the grain. A sweet,
generous, and beautiful Patroness, seeing me on the high road to brain
fever or hopeless mediocrity, stepped forward in time, and sent me to
the Desert. If ever I achieve anything excellent, it will be owing to
that lady, the Vittoria Colonna of her humble Michael Angelo. My little
sister Mary came with me, and, when I tell you that she was a teacher in
a school, you will easily understand what an intoxicating thing it was
for her to see a new world every day, and have nothing to do from
morning, till night. The poor child could hardly believe in an existence
without Czerny's scales being played on three or four pianos at once,
and a barrel organ and brass band in the street. "Oh, Tom!" she would
say to me, a dozen times a day, "I've got