would have given worlds to shout "Thank goodness, no!'"

"I can quite believe it. Well, they tried to govern Khemistan on the lines of the province next door, which has always been in the hands of a different school. Result, confusion, and all but civil war. Most of St. George Keeling's young men gave up in disgust, and the Amir of Nalapur, just across the frontier, who had been the General's firm ally, was goaded into enmity. That was the state of things five years ago."

"And then," said Georgia, "dear old Sir Magnus Pater, who was Commissioner for Khemistan in my father's time, used all his influence to get Dick appointed Frontier Superintendent. It was the last thing he did before he retired, and we were thankful to leave Iskandarbagh and to get back to our very own country."

"And in less than no time," put in Fitz, "the frontier was quiet, owing to a judicious application of General Keeling's methods, and the Amir of Nalapur was assuring Major North that he was his father and his mother. Mrs. North's fame as a physician of supernatural powers, and the Major's military discipline, have worked wonders in crushing the proud and extorting respectful admiration of the submissive."

"Oh, that reminds me!" cried Mabel. "Georgie, do you write Dick's reports for him? Mr. Burgrave really believes you do."

("Oh, Miss North, what an injudicious question!" murmured Fitz, sotto voce.)

"Certainly not," returned Georgia briskly. "Do you think I would encourage Dick in such idleness? We write them together."

"But," objected Mabel, "I can't see why Mr. Burgrave should come to disturb all you have done, if you have got on so well."

"Oh, wise young judge!" said Dick. "That's exactly what we can't see either."

"Because he is tired of hearing General Keeling alluded to as the best hated and feared and loved man in AngloIndian history," said Fitz. "Because to see your next-door neighbor succeeding where you have failed, by dint of methods which you regard with holy horror is distasteful to the natural man. But let me tell you a little story, Miss North-an Oriental apologue, full of local color. The ruler of many millions was glancing over the map of his dominions one morning, when his symmetry-loving eye lit upon one province governed differently from all the rest. To him, imperiously demanding an explanation, there enters Eustace Burgrave, Esq., of the Secretariat, C.S.I. and other desirable things, armed with a beautifully written minute on the subject, and points out that the province is not only a scandal and an eyesore, but a happy hunting-ground for fire-brand soldier-politicals who know better than viceroys-a class of persons that ought obviously to be stamped out, in the interests of good government. Any remedies for this atrocious state of things? Naturally, Mr. Burgrave is prepared with measures that will make Khemistan the garden of India and a lasting memorial of the ruler's happy reign. No time is wasted. "Take the province, Burgrave,' says the Great Great One, with tears of emotion, 'and my blessing with it,' and Burgrave accepts both. Hitherto he has been reforming the course of nature down by the river, now he comes up to teach us our lesson here." "And do you mean to let him do what he likes?" cried Mabel.

"Nonsense, Mab. He is supreme in this province," said Dick.

"Besides, Miss North," Fitz went on, "the Commissioner's imposing personality puts opposition out of the ques

tion. You must have noticed the condescending loftiness of his manner, springing from the conviction that his career will be in the future, as in the past, a succession of triumphs. Failure is not in his vocabulary. He is born for greatness. Who could see that cold, gray eye, that monumental nose and chin, and doubt it? Nothing short of a general convulsion of nature could disturb the even tenor of his way."

"Well, I'm not quite sure of that," said Mabel musingly.

"Oh, I'm afraid there's no hope of him as a lady's man, if that's what you mean, Miss North. It is understood that he is by no means a hardened misogynist, but neither is he looking for a wife. He is simply waiting quite dispassionately to see whether the feminine counterpart of his perfections will ever present herself. Year after year at Simla he has surveyed the newest young ladies and found them wanting, and their mothers go away into corners and call him names, which is unjust. His fitting mate would scarcely appear once in a lifetime, perhaps not in an age."

The Argosy.

"I think Mr. Burgrave needs a lesson," said Mabel.

"But consider, Miss North. It is no obscure future that the favored damsel will be called upon to share. In time she will clothe her rickshaw-men at Simla in scarlet, and by-and-by, if she does what he tells her, she will sport the Crown of India on a neat blue ribbon-or should it be a pink one?"

"I think it will be as well for me to take him in hand," Mabel persisted.

"For goodness' sake, Mab, don't make things worse by importing the celebrated smile into the affair," cried Dick.

"Worse? Dick, you are ungrateful. If Mr. Burgrave finds himself mistaken in one matter of importance, he will be less cocksure in others."

"I don't know about that," said Georgia. "And take care, Mab. It's dangerous playing with edged tools."

"Then I will take the risk. Behold your heroic sister, Dick, willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of your career."

"And if the worst comes to the worst, the prospective glories of the viceregal throne will gild the pill,” said Fitz.

The Spectator.

W. Beach Thomas.

Just a century ago, in an Irish village, a father and daughter were preparing the second edition of a highly successful and famous work entitled "Practical Education."

The book is as dead as a forgotten ode. It is to be found buried in the dust of libraries or hidden in that charnelhouse of many good things-a secondhand bookstall. Yet it was typical, and a very favorable type, of a branch of literature which once flourished and was green. The volumes are stiff with instruction. They are SO commonsensible, so obvious, so verbose, so leisurely, so minute-their virtues as much as their failings make them impossible reading for a generation widely different from their own. The two Edgeworths who wrote them, pious Mrs. Trimmer, correct Miss More, prim Mrs. Chapone, form a committee as it were, who sat in a dreadfully righteous judgment on the youthful manners and morals of their time, with the author of "Sandford and Merton" in the chair (that unique person whose destiny it was never to smile in life or to be mentioned without a smile after his death), and who are responsible for more Advice, Letters to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind, Strictures, Views, Opinions, Rules for the Bettering of This and the Encouragement of That, Moral Tales, Moral Reflections, Moral Considerations, Guides to Knowledge, to Genteel Manners and to Heaven than any other six persons in the world.

That they found plenty to reform in the upbringing of the young, there is very little doubt. The Golden Age for children was yet very far off. In France, thirty years before the Revolution, the greatest genius and scoundrel of his day had cried aloud in "Emile"

and a white heat of passion, for a few of their most elementary and natural rights. The French child of the time was the artificial and dressed-up little toy of a modish mother, taught to bow and pirouette, to coquet and compliment, and nothing else in the world. With its body deformed by irrational clothing from its infancy and its mind by a most vile and unnatural state of society, madame wrote the most charming little pamphlets on it in the pauses of her intrigues and went into hysterics over M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's astounding accusations in that novel of his, and the plain-spoken assurance of her dear doctor, the fashionable physician, M. Tronchin, that she had been put into the world not to be a mistress but a mother, and had failed in her only vocation.

There is no surer test of the character of a nation or an individual than its treatment of the helpless. A hun. dred and twenty years ago domestic John Bull did not stand that trial very much better than that immoral French brother of his whom he held in such a holy British horror. His servants, for whom anything was good enough, were in their turn good enough for his children. The fashionable mother, like her contemporary in France, left them to nurses whose character may be guessed from Swift's famous "Directions to Servants." If they were obliging enough to be pretty and set her off well, why, then they might come downstairs and do it: or be taken out driv ing by My Lady in the Parks-a fashion, as a toy-spaniel is the fashion one year and a plain companion with her back to the horses another. The boys escaped from an inadequate tutor, who was worse paid and less respected than the footman, to the improving

society of the grooms and the stablemen of a coarse age. My Lady's daughters were brought up to sell well. Once sold, they could be as vicious, useless, incompetent, listless and wretched as they pleased.

It was from such an education and its effects that that committee of good ladies and elderly gentlemen tried, in their turn, to save childhood. Their own conception of it, indeed, is not a little curious. The poet's "A child? A fragment of the morn a piece of Spring!" was not their idea at all. The child of reality-stumping little feet on the stairs, noisy when you want to be quiet and merry when you want to be sad, naughty and innocent, wilful and gay, the cause and cure of half the cares of life, had no place either in their philosophy.

Mrs. Trimmer's beau idéal of the young was a little grandson, who "so enjoyed the rest as well as the comforts of the Sabbath, that he put away his toys with alacrity on Saturday night," "would have scorned to seek amusement unsuited to the season and have been offended with the person who could have supposed him capable of it."

Miss More, on the other hand, thought it a fundamental error to regard children as innocent beings, and considered "the most important quality in an instructor of youth" a conviction of its innate wickedness.

No one perhaps has ever supposed the Sandford and Merton of their author's playful fancy to have the slightest resemblance to what Mr. Chadband called the Human Boy. While even Miss Edgworth, who wrote with a vigor and ability not known to her compeers little Miss Edgeworth's Charleses and Marys have, fortunately for themselves, never lived outside a book.

But if the Committee were at variance in many of their notions regard

ing a child, they were all agreed on one point. It was a Thing. It might be a bad Thing or a good Thing. But it was a Thing-to do as we choose with-to model after our ideas. No one seems to have thought it possible that the modelling might not take effect; that the clay might be stiff and the child born with a character. Ladies who had been complimented by Dr. Johnson may be forgiven indeed for being a little self-assured. They were the Pinkertons of Minerva Academy, who, having been crowned by the great lexicographer, could henceforth do no

wrong.

The most striking feature of the works for the use of the young is their moral aspect. Georgian Tommy began to be moral in words of one syllable and a frock. "Bob took a cake. Fie, Bob!" said his kind aunt. "I love a good boy, but a bad boy I do not love." The pattern is unaltered to this day.

Similarly, in the little "Pathway of Knowledge" book, Tommy's errant attention having been gained by the query "What is treacle?" had "Who made you?" fired off at him as question two, before the attention had time to wander again. Throughout the rest of such works the authors artfully skip in a like manner from inquiries on dormice and jam, to questions on immortal destinies and a future world, to which only the pious assurance of a Trimmer or the gay innocence of Tommy could have returned answers so pat, so certain and so damnatory.

Once in little frilled trousers and two or three syllables, Tommy of four advanced to more improving stories about squir-rels or rob-ins, in which he expressed the righteous opinion that as those ac-tive, nim-ble crea-tures could never be happy in a cage, and he loved to see them hap-py, his dear mamma should never have the grief of seeing him catch one. (To be sure, his mam-ma might have been pretty com

fortable on that particular point, in any case.)

Even history and geography were turned to a moral account. Tommy was to observe the workings of a beneficent Providence in the fact that in Arctic regions where there was no sun, there were no trees; while in the tor-rid zone, there were palms. He was also to be taught to see that the unright-e-ous di-vorce of Katharine of Arragon (poor Tommy!) led by the blessing of Heaven to Anne Boleyn and Pro-tes-tant Eliz-a-beth.

Tommy was, in fact, improved at every turn. He must have felt quite murderous towards kings and queens whose examples not only pointed out to him the way he should go, but served as reproaches when he had gone the way he should not go.

But Henry was frail and licentious beside,

And, at last, by a surfeit of lampreys he died

was, for instance, a direct hit at a youth who had only yesterday requested two helpings of cake, and been so audacious as to suppose that he knew better than the governess whether or no he was still hungry.

He could not even learn a piece of poetry which had not "Moral" written large over the last verse. "How Doth the Little Busy Bee" had had no sacrilegious parody written upon it then to enliven its solemnity for his youthful imagination.

The didactic pentameters of "You are Old, Father William," had not then any associations which could possibly raise a smile. One can picture the luckless Thomas, seated bolt upright in his drab-colored schoolroom, with a pair of chubby legs stuck out straight in front of him, a small sister on either side, and little anxious eyes fixed on that abominably improving woman, that stiff-starched emblem of

narrow bigotry, the Prunes and Prism of her day. No doubt, indeed, the schoolroom was not always drabcolored. Sometimes Prunes and Prism, under that frigid and correct exterior, felt the prompting of an overwhelming feeling called the maternal in. stinct. But if one may judge by the works for children combined with the works about them, the age thought too little of love and laughter and too much of reproof and improvement.

When the play hour was supposed to be come, Prunes and Prism read aloud stories in which a lesson was artfully concealed, like a powder in a spoonful of jam. One enthralling little narrative contained an account of Mr. Lovechild instructing Augustus on numerals and Roman figures. shall be happy,' replied the charming youth, 'to hear any questions my dear papa will propose: and I will endeavor to answer them as well as I can." "

66

A second narrative opened in this promising manner: "My dear mamma,' said Eliza Primrose, as she skipped playfully over a flowery mead with her beloved parent one fine summer evening, I think I have committed to memory all the verses you so kindly taught me: so that if you will ask me the questions which introduce them, we can hold a conversation all the way we have to go."

It may be taken for granted that Tommy and Mary, with the admirable downrightness of children, immediately detected that Eliza Primrose, for all her playful skipping, was going on to instruct them about somebody or something-and had, in fact, been created for no other purpose.

Neither story nor lesson was made more enthralling to luckless Tommy by all fields being alluded to as "flow. ery meads," hot climates invariably spoken of as "torrid"-in fine, a grand word used whenever a simple one would do much better. Yet it must