or if she does not fully understand, you must say to yourself that it is partly your fault-Yes, your fault, my poor Reine! You are like me, you can> not show yourself as you are. All that your mother has done in this affair, as in everything else, has been for what she thought your good, yours and mine. She has had the same ambition for us which she would have liked us to have for her. You may ask anything of a person, you see, except to look at life from your point of view! She was born a great lady, and you and I, after all, are only peasants at heart. We are not like these people here; but she cannot be expected to see that-Above all my child, never allow yourself to bear a grudge against your mother on my account, as I have sometimes seen that you were tempted to do. I spoke the truth just now-a few articles more or less to write do not matter to me. You have dreamed I know, of my writing a book some day-some work of poetry or romance. It is too late, too late! If I were free, if I had abundant leisure, I could not do it now. I have shown you too plainly that this made me sad at times. It is true, I have often been sad in these last years! I have gone about with the air of a man whose life is a failure. You have believed too much in me, my sweetest Reine, when I was expressing these regrets, and you have been tempted to lay the blame at your mother's door. Do not deny it but look me in the face!" and taking his daughter's hands in both of his, he forced her to meet his gaze, eye to eye, and all the pride of a generous soul, conscious of being that which he has willed to be, suddenly shone in the face of this great lover: "You may read the depths of my heart, child-I am sincere before you as I should be in the presence of death. No, my life is not a failure. When at the age of twenty I longed to

be a poet, what did that word mean to me? It meant to have beautiful dreams and to realize them. Well, I have had the most beautiful of dreams,. and I have made it a reality-for I have married the woman I loved, shẹ bas been happy with me and I have you, my daughter. Your mother's. happiness-that is my work-" Then as if afraid of his own emotion and his own self-revelation, he shook his head, and added, with his habitual smile of gentle irony: "not my whole work, however, only the first volume. The second is to be your happiness-you must help me to publish it-and do you know many volumes in the whole. range of literature which are worth those two?"

X.

EPILOGUE.

It is now three years since the second volume to adopt his own harmless pleasantry-of the "Complete Works of Hector Le Prieux," was published under the form of the marriage bans of Mademoiselle Reine-Marie-Théresè Le Prieux and Monsieur Charles Photius Huguenin, and it is just two years since the birth of a little daughter, baptized Mathilde, brought about a formal reconciliation between Reine's mother and this happy pair of wedded lovers. They are living on the shores of a sapphire sea, beneath the cloudless skies of the South, amidst olive groves and pines. Fanny Perrin has been promoted to the rank of governess, and they form one family with Charles's father and mother in the hereditary mas, shielded from the mistral by its black screen of ancient cypresses against which the roses tremble. "The beautiful Madame Le Prieux" is still a living incarnation of Vanity-Fair, of that brilliant and artificial Paris, where everybody lives only to covet his neighbor's luxury.

Reine's mother has kept her word: she has never really forgiven her daughter for a happiness which she looks upon as an instance of the basest ingratitude. In the sort of campaign which she has undertaken for the conquest of high society, she regards her daughter much as Napoleon must have regarded the Saxons when he saw them in full retreat from the battlefield of Leipsic. But her will, like Napoleon's, is not one that surrenders, and you may see her any day-if you are of the same world-pursuing undaunted her daily routine, celebrating its minutest rites and submitting to its pettiest exactions, without aim, since she has no longer a daughter to establish, without hope of reward-all for honor! Her name figured this very morning in a society column, among the distinguished guests at a smart wedding, such as she desired for Reine. Yesterday her name appeared again, in the list of guests at "Madame de Bonnivet's select dinner at her sumptuous hotel in the Rue d'Artois." You may have noticed it the day before, in the same column, as one of the patronesses of a charity concert under the auspices of the Duchess de Contay; and if you chanced to be present at the first night of "Hannibal," the new drama in verse by René Viney, you cannot have failed to see Madame Le Prieux enthroned in the stage-box which has for years been assigned to the well-known dramatic critic. She was seated in the front of the box beside the young Countess de Bec-Crespin and was more befrilled and belaced and bedecked-more, in short, "the beautiful Madame Le Prieux"-than ever, and if chance had permitted. you to catch snatches of the conversation in the opposite box where the Molans and the Fauriels were posing also as "Parisian notabilities," you would have heard the judgment passed upon this veteran of the "sacred battalion"

of fashion by two of its prettiest women and two of its leading artists.

"She is a perfect wonder, Madame Le Prieux," Laurence Fauriel was saying: "I never saw her handsomer than she is to-night:-positively Madame de Bois Crespin looks the older of the two. What luck some husbands have! There is Le Prieux, as ordinary as he can be, and without a spark of talent-he married the Venus of Milo and she turns out a model wife into the bargain."

"And what is more, she will end by landing him in the Academy, in spite of himself," said Marie de Molan: "Won't she, Jacques?"

"Oh yes, quite so!" replied the novelist-playwright, "he was sounding me the other day as to my intentions, with an amount of finesse which showed clearly enough what his plans were. It is with this object in view, doubtless, that he is giving the world that stuff he calls his "Reminiscences." He must at least write one volume of some sort, to give his energetic wife the shadow of a shade of a pretext. With that, she is quite capable of scraping together a score of votes for him! And such a fine creature as she is too what a pity she is so handicapped!"

"True enough, she is devilishly handsome," rejoined Fauriel, who got his clothes in London and his language in Bohemia; and with his artist's eye he proceeded to scan Madame Le Prieux's points through his opera-glass; "what a line of the head! what a curve of the neck! what an arch of the eyebrows! How she's built, by Jove! At sixty, at seventy, she will still be magnificent. It's in the blood, by the way-the daughter was pretty, too! What has become of her?"

"She is in the South-as much married as ever," said Laurence Fauriel. "To that little cousin we used to see with them sometimes-an absurd marriage that distressed her mother great

ly. The little goose must be dreadfully sick of it by this time. I saw her last autumn when she spent a few days here. She is as pretty as ever, but it is easy to see that Madame Le Prieux does not dress her nowadays." "Reine spent a few days in Paris?" exclaimed Madame Molan; "you never told me, and she did not come near me! That was not nice of her!" "Oh, she didn't come to see me either," said Madame Fauriel; "it isn't her heart that will hurt her. I doubt if she even cares for her mother. If she had she would have married here in her own set-Such a charming mother too!"

"No doubt her daughter was jealous of her," concluded Jacques in a tone of indifference. This writer of successful imitations, whom we have seen shining by turns as a naturalist, a psychologist, a society novelist, an erotic novelist, a socialistic novelist, has at last settled down into a satirist. He does not emphasize his last remark, he merely throws it out casually, and then casting one more glance at the Le Prieux box; "Like father, like child" he says; "Come ladies, let us turn our attention to the play. must be rather good just at this point, for that ass of a Le Prieux is putting on his air of not attending to it, of being somewhere else"

It

He is indeed somewhere else at this moment, the husband of "the beautiful Madame Le Prieux," he is hundreds of miles away from the stage-box where his wife sits in triumph, and from that in which these

hirelings of art are dissecting him and his. He is leagues upon leagues away from the stage on which a set of soulless actors are declaiming to their blasé audience the machine-made verses of a modern playwright. The dramatic critic has been transported by fancy to the distant mas and sees Reine smiling upon him across the space that divides them, a tender smile, tinged with melancholy because of their separation but full of filial gratitude! This vision suffices to send a thrill of inexpressible happiness through the veins of the old journalist, and this is heightened by perceiving that his wife's beauty still attracts that admiration which she craves. He sits with halfclosed eyes, forgetting the extra labors which are before him in order to rid himself of his load of debt, forgetting the chorus of spiteful criticisms which have greeted his volume of "Reminiscences," forgetting the fauteuil under the cupola of the Academy and his wife's eager quest of votes, forgetting his lassitude over meaningless pages of task-work, and the incurable longing for his abandoned art. All this he forgets in the profound delight of knowing that the only two creatures he has so ardently loved are happy-each in her own way-and that they owe their happiness to him.

The ne'er-do-well is not always SO pitiable as he is painted. Society of ten loves the fool of its family, and not seldom does a handsome scamp possess passports which no amount of mere honesty and sobriety can obtain. The history of notable and entertaining persons opens the page on many a Barry Lyndon, who by sheer impudence and raffishness has won his way to fortune and more luck than he deserved. Often enough, too, they have had the indulgence of an easy-going tolerance which in this sterner age has become almost impossible.

And this, too, was the luck of that amazing vagabond and scamp, Bampfylde Moore Carew, who, born a Devonshire Carew and godfathered by noblemen, in early life became a roving gypsy, and in that capacity and in countless disguises, tramped and cheated and masqueraded in every part of the southern and western counties of England-not to speak of the Continent and America. So daring were his exploits and such his genius for lying that he became as famous as he was successful, and was elected "king" of the gypsies while still a young man. Cousin to half the best blood in Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, he took a special delight in victimizing the class from which he sprang; and to this day one of the most interesting features of his extraordinary career lies in the fact that he imposed an unparalleled series of audacious tricks on the well-known men of a century and a half ago, whose names are very familiar to us as borne by their descendants to-day, who live and flourish in the very homes in which Carew the Gypsy King played with the credulity and misused the benevolence of their forefathers.

To a man like myself, born and reared in the West, such a past is no mere history. I can follow every furlong of the road along which Bampfylde Carew limped-as the soundest cripple thereabouts-from Exeter to Axminster; every yard of his path as he went up to "Squire" Portman's house to impose audaciously upon him; every step of the way he went from Halswell to the spot where, disguised as a most respectable old housewife, he had a terrible fit in the road, and so extracted the dole which Sir Charles Tynte the Tyntes are still at Halswell -had sworn he would never give to Carew, disguise himself as he would! That strange visit to the Lord Weymouth of his day; that escapade at Taunton, with its sequel in the jail; the pranks at Dunster; the rout of the Revenue officers on the coast of South Devon, when there was something in smuggling and smuggling was something-these and a hundred more of such incidents are so connected with historic names and well-known places that no dweller in Wessex could fail to find an almost personal interest in the history of this well-bred and illconditioned scamp; while the story of his life, not to speak of its problems, has a whimsical charm for his fellowsinners on earth-at any rate, as long as their pulses beat quick and their blood runs warm.

Bampfylde Moore Carew was the son of Theodore Carew, rector of Bickleigh, or Bickley, near Tiverton, and was born in July, 1693. It was a family living, and is to this day held by a Carew. His Christian names were those of his godfathers who "tossed up" to decide whose should come first. In due course he went to that good old centre of flogging and letters, Blundell's School, at

Tiverton, and here it was that the crisis in his life came to him. For at that time the schoolboys of Tiverton kept up between them a pack of hounds, and Carew had distinguished himself above his fellows by his powers of running and jumping, and by a "Hi, tantivy-tantivy!" of such merit that we must suppose it was not unlike John Peel's, whose "view-halloa would waken the dead or a fox from his lair in the morning." He also learnt, probably from some keeper of the better sort (and they are made from penitent poachers), a method of enticing dogs to obey and follow him-no slight accomplishment for those sons of the soil who so love the fat game that, having none of their own, they cannot rest until they acquire that of their neighbors. All these accomplishments stood him in good stead in later life, and "The Dog Stealer" became one of his most common and not undeserved sobriquets. Curiously enough, the pack of hounds was permitted by the school authorities, even when used for a questionable variety of sporting purposes, though the fox was, of course, the supreme quarry. Now, just before harvest-time one year, as ill-luck would have it, a red deer wandered into the neighborhood of Tiverton; and promptly enough the Tiverton School pack followed in pursuit. A grand run of many miles ended in the death of the deer-and enormous damage to the standing crops; this speedily brought a deputation of yeomen and farmers to the school, and the ringleaders were identified. The headmaster (a proficient of the birch) promised them a most drastic punishment, and, to make the more of it, held it over them until the next day.

and

But on the morrow Carew and three of his schoolfellows-Escott, Coleman and Martin-ran away from the horrors they could well imagine, and, falling in with a band of gypsies, then and

It

there joined them, cheerfully taking the oaths and going through the rude ritual imposed by gypsy custom. is curious to note, by the way, that although all four were sons of persons of position and means, they never entirely turned their backs on people whom they then joined. Interludes of home-life there were, and circumstances in two cases ultimately brought responsibilities which could not well be shirked; but to the end all four retained an affection for the vagabond's life and exhibited a loyalty to the "Priggers," "Prancers," "Rufflers," "Swaddlers" and "Doxies"-as the gypsies are known among themselves-which I cannot help thinking should be put down to their credit.

Carew was now about sixteen years of age, and, just as he had shown him. self to be apt at all his school work, so he soon proved to be as quick at acquiring the gypsy "cant" and lore. His superior education, his gift of ready speech, and the energy with which he threw himself into all the "cunning arts" of the gypsies, very soon gained him a reputation through the country-side; and when the gypsies wished to "cut bene whiddies," or prophesy smooth things to some fine lady, they selected him as likely to do the work best. He thus became their "dimber-damber man," which is equivalent to saying, I fear, that he was a prince among the rogues-the completest cheat of them all. His first opportunity was not long in coming, for no less a person than Lady Musgrave consulted him about a large sum of money which she believed to be secreted about her house. Carew, after an elaborate performance of ritual, gave it as his opinion that she was right, that the treasure lay near a particular tree, and that the day and hour for discovering it had been placed by the constellations exactly seven days forward from that time. Overjoyed by this confirmation