hand to the blue-and-white Dresden china figure sitting there.

"Then, sir, suddenly Aunt Jane Spender found out. She had been singularly obtuse. I had always, of course, intended to ask you; but I had omitted to ask Aunt Jane Spender. When she found out she informed us that you were coming home on purpose to prevent it, and that you had-other designs in view."

"A lie," remarked the General.

"I suggested-but of course Peggie felt I mean we-" The young man hesitated and stammered for the first time.

"I fancy it may have been my fault," put in Peggie, with an air of surprised discovery. "He did want to wait and have it out with you, papa dear; but of course I didn't know how nice you were, and I-I dissuaded him.-Papa is particularly pleasant-isn't he, Edward?"

The General looked gratified.

"Yes, I see," he observed to the young man; "but even that hardly justified this-this-"

Captain Adeane looked at Peggie for a moment, then he strode across the room and knelt down by her chair, and held a bit of the blue cloak that seemed as if it had a hand beneath it.

"Peg, I should have had to confess to you some time-I have played a horrible trick on you!"

The girl turned very white and kept her blue eyes fixedly on her face. The General took a step forward and clenched the fist that hung at his side.

"It was very stupid-very disrespectful," the young soldier went on. "The fact is, I was a coward, for you were so angry and I feared to lose you. You -we-arranged this, you know; but I telegraphed to your father-I saw his ship was signalled-to come on direct to this inn to-night. Then after I had

done this, it occurred to me if I could prevent your coming at all it would be better, so I wrote to tell you the reverend chap had scarlet-fever."

"And hadn't he?"

"He's as fit as a fiddle." "Then you told a-"

"Yes! And I'd have told a round dozen to save you, Peggie, because I knew it wasn't the straight way to set about it, even if it were a bit of an adventure, dear, and a dash to Aunt Jane! I thought we might give your father a chance first; and, if he were not the right sort, that we still would have time. I wouldn't have given you up for the telling, little playmate! But you had no faith in me, Peggie-andand-there's nothing against me for your father to cut up rough about. I'm a very decent chap, and his own sister's son into the bargain."

"Then you actually wired to father, and spoilt the whole thing!" cried Peggie, pulling her cloak away from him, and standing up, her blue eyes full of wrath. "It was utterly mean and nasty and horrid of you! I believe you asked Aunt Jane too! I'll never forgive you!"

The young man rose too and stood facing her.

The General gave his prospective sonin-law a great clap on the shoulder. "So the telegram was from you, was it? Carefully-worded dispatch, too! Capital soldier you'll make, sir!-afraid of nothing save this little minx here! And now we are all hungry, and I propose we have supper-or breakfast-I am not sure which it is-and drink your healths. Bless me! there's that little clergyman escaping again! Come here, young man. I don't quite yet feel clear as to you."

"Why, I brought him here to marry us, papa, as I was told"-icily-"that our own family clergyman was suffering from scarlet-fever. I thought this" -waving her hand to the collapsed Mr.

Pettiman-"would be better than none. He didn't want to come. I did not tell him till we were driving here. And I took him away so early from the ball, poor young man! And it was his first ball, too!"

"And my last!" muttered the curate. "Emma was perfectly right!"

The General deliberately put on his eye-glasses and surveyed his daughter.

"Have you always been allowed to have your own way, my dear?" he asked her in a voice of awe and dismay..

"Never! What can have made you think of such a thing, papa? Aunt Jane has always brought me up most strictly."

Chambers's Journal.

"Well, I shall be very lenient, and then, perhaps-"

"And so shall I!" exclaimed Captain Adeane.

"You! I'll never forgive you, Cousin Edward! Never! With your telegrams and your scarlet-fevers! Mean!" "But I will, my dear nephew!" said the General, turning to him. "You have taken a bride out of the window that you might have had out of the door.-As to you, reverend sir- Why, where's that curate?"

The Reverend Ambrose Pettiman had made good his escape. It was not until he and Emma had been married for eight years that he told his wife the history of his first ball.

Rosaline Masson.

The protest offered by Sir James Fergusson in our correspondence columns against a practice adopted by certain writers of historical romance at the present day will appeal to all gentle readers. He complains that in order to spice their works of fiction they do not scruple to introduce dis. torted and unpleasing fancy portraits of personages of whose public and private form authentic record exists. Against the method of Sir Walter Scott, who gave "cleverly fancied names to his typical characters," Sir James Fergusson has nothing to say. The practice that stirs his resentment is that of selecting persons of note in their day and then taking unwarrantable liberties with them. Thus in the special case which calls forth his protest, Lord Kilkerran, a direct ancestor of his own, a man of excellent private character and high official poIsition who flourished in the middle of the eighteenth century, is exhibited in a novel now appearing in Blackwood in an "artificial and disgraceful light," for which there is not the smallest foundation in fact-indeed, all the available evidence, whether in portraits, letters, his printed works, or his public career, shows him to have been not an "emeritus roué with the roving bloodshot eyes of a fast liver and a cruelly cynical knowledge of the world," but a "well-bred, highminded gentleman."

We sympathize fully with Sir James Fergusson's very natural and creditable indignation. One does not expect a writer of romance to sift his materials with the scrupulous conscientiousness of the scientific historian, but at best he is guilty of culpable carelessness in distorting the lineaments and traducing the character of a person

age whose record is clean and even honorable. The fact that certain eccentric historians devote themselves to the task of whitewashing the villains and anti-heroines of history-a few years ago a eulogy of Jezebel appeared in one of our magazines-is no reason why writers of fiction should invert the process and blacken the reputation of worthies. The offence is all the greater because the public, who know nothing of these minor historical personages, have no means of checking the accuracy of the portrait. The novelist cannot venture to traduce or caricature any prominent or illustrious historical figure about whom there is a general consensus of opinion, be cause by so doing he would at once lay himself open to correction. With the minor characters of past generations he is on safer ground, because ninetynine out of every hundred of his readers are unable to compare the fancy portrait with the original. So it will doubtless be urged in extenuation of his offence-What does it matter, when the ninety-nine regard the personage as wholly imaginary, if the family pride of the hundredth is wounded by an unflattering presentation of his ancestor? It is difficult to believe that any novelist, having been allowed access to family archives. would abuse the privilege by supplementing documentary evidence with invented additions, calculated to bring real personages into disrepute; yet Sir James Fergusson does not hesitate to bring this charge against a wellknown writer. If the accusation can be sustained, which we cannot believe, holding that in the alleged case there must have been some error or misunderstanding, it only furnishes fresh proof of the invincible æsthetic

attraction of moral obliquity to the writer of fiction. Only the greatest writers can invest goodness with attraction, or relieve simple worth from the suspicion of mawkishness. The infinite variety of wickedness appeals irresistibly to authors who are at all hazards concerned to give their readers a new thrill. In novels of contemporary life and manners the beaux rôles are now commonly assigned to the coruscating cad, and the Colonel Newcomes are boycotted, much as the Athenians ostracized Aristides. If Sir James Fergusson were more in tune with the trend of modern fiction he would regard the vilification of his ancestor in the light of a high artistic compliment. For what Mr. Dooley says of the American stage is applica ble to a great deal of English fiction. "In th' plays nowadays," remarks the philosopher of the Archy Road, "th' hero is more iv a villain thin th' villain himself. . . . To be a hero ye've first got to be an Englishman, an' as if that wasn't bad enough, ye've got to have committed as many crimes as th' late H. H. Holmes. . . . . Ye marry a woman who swears an' dhrinks an' bets on th' races, an' ye quarrel with her. Th' r-rest iv th' play is made up iv hard cracks be all th' char-ackters at each other's morals. This is called repartee be th' learned, an' Hogan. In Ar-rchy R-road 'tis called disorderly conduct. They'se another play on where a man r-runs off with a woman that's no betther thin she ought to be. He bates her an' she marries a burglar. Another wan is about a lady that ates dinner with a German. He bites her an' she hits him with a cabbage."

But to revert to the unwarrantable liberties taken with historical personages whose descendants are still to the fore. We fear that those who object to the practice will have to wait for the swing of the pendulum. Virtue

will not always be unfashionable, and if the yellow man is to conquer in the long run, the importation of the Chinese cult of ancestor worship will effectually put an end to the practice of which Sir James Fergusson complains.

For the present we are glad to give currency to his protest, though we feel sceptical as to its producing the desired effect. The only logical remedy would be to pass a retrospective Statute of Limitations fixing a date anterior to which anybody's ancestors should be available for oblo quy, and this, we are afraid, is even beyond the powers of the Society of Authors. Sir James Fergusson may take some slight consolation, moreover, from the fact that it is only an ancestor who lived one hundred and forty years ago who is held up to reprobation, and not himself. For no one who, from choice or necessity, makes a study of contemporary fiction can fail to notice the increased reliance of modern novelists on direct portraiture, or to discern in the spread of this practice a symptom of exhaustion and degeneracy. Optimistic critics will probably retort that as the "output" of novels is immeasurably greater than it was fifty years ago, portrait fiction has correspondingly increased; in other words, that the proportion remains constant. We doubt the accuracy of this explanation. On the contrary, we are inclined to believe that not only is the number of characters drawn from the quick proportionately larger than in the fiction of twenty or even ten years ago, but that less trouble is taken to throw the public off the scent, or to invent variations on the original theme. We shall be told, of course, that portrait fiction is as old as Fielding, that Dickens spared neither his father nor his friends, that Thackeray drew the Marquis of Steyne from the life, and

that Lord Beaconsfield's personages were all glorifications or caricatures of characters well known in London society. That is all true in a sense, but one has only to compare the methods adopted by these writers with those of the present day to realize the extent of the deterioration. Subtract from the sum total of Dickens's dramatis persona all those admittedly plagiarized from real life, and what a wealth of masterly and original characters still remains. The same holds good with Thackeray, who, when he was indebted to contemporary life, recreated the originals in the crucible of his imagination. Even Lord Beaconsfield's novels, though to a certain extent they fall under the category of the roman à clef, are free from the charge of servile imitation. If he satirized or idealized real people, he was at least at pains to invent incidents and dialogue. His books were not mere transcripts from life. They owed their success to something more than a good memory supplemented by a careful study of the society newspapers. Modern portrait fiction, on the other hand, is suggestive of the photograph, the phonograph, and the kinetoscope. Its exponents are not The Spectator.

content with letting the readers guess that to take a hypothetical case-Sir Milford Wilner is intended for Sir Alfred Milner, but they will supplement a transparent alias by anthropometric details minute enough to satisfy a Bertillon, a record of antecedents borrowed from every available book of reference, and extracts from every authorized or unauthorized interview that has appeared in print. Setting aside the ethics of such a mode of procedure, it violates one of the essential canons of art. It is a cheap, easy, and mechanical substitute for imagination, and as such must inevitably commend itself to authors who are impelled to write novels, not by the imperative stimulus of the creative instinct, but by the desire to manufacture a marketable commodity with the least expenditure of time and trouble. We can think of no juster condemuation of works of this type than that passed by Warburton on "The New Atlantis," an eighteenth-century novel. "It was," he said-we quote from memory-"a book full of Court and party scandal, written in a loose effeminacy of style, and appealing to the debauched taste of the better vulgar."

[A letter from a German officer of high rank, dated at Tien-tsin, translated from the Kölnische Zeitung.]

It certainly cannot be denied that among the great number of volunteers who have been sent hither, here and there a black sheep is to be found, who has been guilty of cruel

Translated for The Living Age.

ty and unjustifiable murder of a Chinaman. That will happen in all wars, and among all warlike people. But one thing is certain; that wherever such atrocities have been committed by German troops, they have been prosecuted and punished with the greatest dilligence. If any man shoot a peaceable Chinese without cause, he may be sure that he will be