le are dwellers in the capital,
whether or not the scene of his story is laid in the city by the Seine,
the point of view is always Parisian. The _Circus Charger_ did his duty
in the stately avenues of a noble country-place, and _Blacky_ performed
his task near a rustic water-fall; but the men who record their
intelligent actions are Parisians of the strictest sect. Even in the
patriotic pieces called forth by the war of 1870, in the _Insurgent_ and
in the _Chinese Ambassador_, it is the siege of Paris and the struggle
of the Communists which seem to the author most important. His style
even, his swift and limpid prose--the prose which somehow corresponds to
the best _vers de societe_ in its brilliancy and buoyancy--is the style
of one who lives at the centre of things. Cardinal Newman once said that
while Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote
Roman; so while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the
other, may write French, M. Halevy writes Parisian.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

ONLY A WALTZ

"Aunt, dear aunt, don't believe a word of what he is going to tell you.
He is preparing to fib, to fib outrageously. If I hadn't interrupted him
at the beginning of his talk, he would have told you that he had made up
his mind to marry me from his and my earliest childhood."

"Of course!" exclaimed Gontran.

"Of course not," replied Marceline. "He was going to tell you that he
was a good little boy, having always loved his little cousin, and that
our marriage was a delightful romance of tenderness and sweetness."

"Why, yes, of course," repeated Gontran.

"Nonsense! The truth, Aunt Louise, the real truth, in short, is this,
never, never should we have been married if on the 17th of May, 1890,
between nine and eleven o'clock, he had not lost 34,000 points at
bezique at the club, and if all the boxes had not been sold, that same
night, at the Bouffes-Parisiens Theatre."

Gontran began to laugh.

"Oh, you can laugh as much as you please! You know very well that but
for this--on what does fate depend?--I should now be married and a
duchess, it is true; but Duchess of Courtalin, and not Duchess of
Lannilis. Well, perhaps that would have been better! At any rate, I wish
to give Aunt Louise the authentic history of our marriage."

"Tell away, if it amuses you," said Gontran.

"Yes, sir, it amuses me. You shall know all, Aunt Louise--all,
absolutely all; and I beg you to be judge of our q