only "Messalina" that had kept him alive so long.

However, with his death came a change in the nature of George Sand.
Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she was at her
very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters, but wrote
naturally, simply, stories of country life and tales for children. In
one of her books she has given an enduring picture of the
Franco-Prussian War. There are many rather pleasant descriptions of her
then, living at Nohant, where she made a curious figure, bustling about
in ill-fitting costumes, and smoking interminable cigarettes.

She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died in
1876. One might believe her to have been only a woman of perpetual
liaisons. Externally she was this, and yet what did Balzac, that great
master of human psychology, write of her in the intimacy of a private
correspondence?

She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She is
devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those of a
man, and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She is an
excellent mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is like a lad of
twenty; for in her heart of hearts, she is more than chaste--she is a
prude. It is only in externals that she comports herself as a Bohemian.
All her follies are titles to glory in the eyes of those whose souls
are noble.

A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither man
nor woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality responsible
for what she did, when we consider her strange heredity, her wretched
marriage, the disillusions of her early life--who shall sit in judgment
on her, since who knows all?

THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS

Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world, in the last
century, was so widely and intimately known as Charles Dickens. From
his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in journalism, down
through his series of brilliant triumphs in fiction, he was more and
more a conspicuous figure, living in the blaze of an intense publicity.
He met every one and knew every one, and was the companion of every
kind of man and woman. He loved to frequent the "caves of harmony"
which Thackeray has immortalized, and he was a member of all the best
Bohemian clubs of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were
his intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into the
homes of merchants and l