ent of the great
victory gained near it by the Huguenots under Henri IV. over the League.
This and the other Huguenot victories, alas! proved bootless; and it is
melancholy to visit the fields where they were won. By a series of
calamities, the party was in the end erased from history; and scarcely a
trace of its existence remains in the religious or political condition
of Roman Catholic and Imperial France. It has left some noble names, and
the memory of some noble deeds, which no doubt work upon national
character to a certain extent; but this is all.

There was nothing in the fashionable watering-place of Dieppe to tempt
my stay; and I turned from the Chateau d'Arques to embark for the land
where, in spite of our political reaction and the efforts of the
priest-party in our Church, the principles for which the field of Arques
was fought and won have still a home.

AUNT JUDY.

A soft white bosom, kissed by lips and fondled by fingers pure as
itself!

Back through the tender twilight of my one dim dream of a sinless
childhood I catch that accusing glimpse of my mother--and myself. And as
I stand here on this shapeless cairn of remorses, which, after forty
years, I have piled upon my butchered and buried promise, that child
turns from "the cup of his life and couch of his rest," to look upon me
wondering, pitying.

My mother died when I was scarce five years old; and save the blurred
beauty of that reproachful phantom,--caught and lost, caught and lost,
by the unfaithful eyes of a graceless spirit,--she is as though she
never had been. But in her place she left me a vicarious mother,--old,
foolish, doting, black,--the youngest, loveliest, wisest, fairest lady I
have ever known,--young with the youth of the immortal heart, lovely
with the loveliness of the gleaning Ruth, wise with the wisdom of the
most blessed among mothers when she "pondered all those things in her
heart," and fair with the fairness of her who goeth her way forth by the
footsteps of the flock, and feedeth her kids beside the shepherds'
tents,--black, but comely.

"Aunt Judy,"--Judith was her company name,--as the oldest of my uncles
and aunts, and other boys' grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the
rest of us children, delighted to call her,--was pure negro; not
grafted, scandalous mulatto, nor muddled, niggerish "gingerbread," but
downright, unmixed, old-fashioned blackamoor. Her father and mother were
genuine importations from the