She leaned back as they drove through the sunshine, her filmy handkerchief
to her painted eyes, seeing nothing but an ugly, honest-faced boy hard at
work in a bare Presbyterian chapel. He would never know nor guess the life
of shame which his mother led! Her tears were real now.

She even had wild, visionary thoughts of a confession, of staymaking, of so
many dollars a week regularly. But she remembered the time when some fussy,
good women had put her in charge of a fashionable Kindergarten. There was a
fat salary! The house was luxurious: the teachers did the work. But one
night she had broken the finical apparatus to pieces, left a heap of
bonbons for the children, scrawled a verse of good-bye with chalk on the
blackboard, and taken to the road again without a penny.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

ALFRED DE MUSSET.

It is twenty years since the death of Alfred de Musset, a poet whose
popularity and influence, both in his own country and out of it, can be
compared only to Byron's. Not that the Frenchman is known in England as the
Englishman is known in France, but the latter country may be called the
open side of the Channel, and in establishing a comparison between the
relative fame and familiarity of foreign names and ideas there and on the
isolated side, it is proportion rather than quantity which must be kept in
view. While Byron is out of fashion in his own country, the rage for
Musset, which for a long time made him appear not so much the favorite
modern poet of France as the only one, has subsided into a steady
admiration and affection, a permanent preference. New editions of his
works, both cheaper and more costly, are being constantly issued, portraits
of him are multiplied, his pieces are regularly performed at the Theatre
Francais, his verses are on every one's lips, his tomb is heaped with
flowers on All Souls' Day. Until after his death it would have been easy to
count those who knew even his name in this country and England: as usual in
such matters, we preceded the English in our acquaintance with him. The
freedom with which Owen Meredith and Mr. Swinburne helped themselves from
his poems proves how unfamiliar the general public was with him ten years
ago, but his distinction is now so well recognized in that island, so
remote from external impressions, that some knowledge of his life and
writings formed part of the French course last year in the higher local
examinations of C