nresisting hands. The boy is in all things so good, that I
can scarce say I was afraid; only I felt it had to be stopped ere
he could work himself up by dancing to some craziness. Our house
boys protested they were not afraid; all I know is they were all
watching him round the back door, and did not follow me till I
had the axe. As for the out-boys, who were working with Fanny in
the native house, they thought it a bad business, and made no
secret of their fears."

But indeed all the book is manly, with the manliness of Scott's
_Journal_ or of Fielding's _Voyage to Lisbon_. "To the English-speaking
world," concludes Mr. Colvin, "he has left behind a treasure which it
would be vain as yet to attempt to estimate; to the profession of
letters one of the most ennobling and inspiriting of examples; and
to his friends an image of memory more vivid and more dear than are
the presences of almost any of the living." Very few men of our time
have been followed out of this world with the same regret. None have
repined less at their own fate--

"This be the verse you grave for me:--
'Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'"

M. ZOLA

Sept. 23, 1892. La Debacle.

To what different issues two men will work the same notion! Imagine
this world to be a flat board accurately parcelled out into squares,
and you have the basis at once of _Alice through the Looking-Glass_
and of _Les Rougon-Macquart_. But for the mere fluke that the
Englishman happened to be whimsical and the Frenchman entirely without
humor (and the chances were perhaps against this), we might have had
the Rougon-Macquart family through the looking-glass, and a natural
and social history of Alice in _parterres_ of existence labelled
_Drink, War, Money_, etc. As it is, in drawing up any comparison of
these two writers we should remember that Mr. Carroll sees the world
in sections because he chooses, M. Zola because he cannot help it.

If life were a museum, M. Zola would stand a reasonable chance of
being a Balzac. But I invite the reader who has just laid down _La
Debacle_ to pick up _Eugenie Grandet_ again and say if that little
Dutch picture has not more sense of life, even of the storm and stir
and big furies of life, than the detonating _Debacle_. The older
genius

"Saw life steadily and saw it whole"

--No matter how s