By leaping the stone wall and brooklet; but never, sir, never before

Had anyone ever attempted that leap; it was madness, but, sir,

My young mistress knew that Delaunay was too great a coward and cur To follow; and, what's more, she knew, that she must be first in the race-For the sake of the Hislop honor, for the sake of the dear old Chase.

I looked at young Hilton beside me-and a finer lad never walked.

I don't think he thought as I knew, sir, their secret, for I'd never talked ; But I'd known for a long time, you see, sir, as he and my Lady Vi'

Had loved and would love forever. At last from his lips came the cry: "Good heav'ns! she never will clear it!" then he turned his face to the ground; While I--I looked on in terror, watching her taking the bound.

With a cold sweat bathing my forehead,

I saw her sweep onward, and gasped: "For heaven's sake, stop, Lady Vi'let!

a laugh was her answer. She passed On, on, like a shimmer of lightning, and then came her last great leap-The next, sir, I saw of my lady was a crushed and mangled heap. Delaunay? No, he didn't follow, nor even drew rein when she fell;

But rode on, the longest way round, sir, then he came back to claim herwell,

She was dead in the arms of her loverclasped tight in his mad embrace;With her life blood staining her tresses, and a sad, sweet smile on her face.

I heard the last words that she uttered"My love! tell my father I tried

To do what was best for his honor; for you and for him I have died."

X.

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

GROW FONDER.

T was in the early summer, when my love and I last parted,

She the seaside sought, and left me in the city, broken-hearted;

I to swelter through the summer, she on seakissed shores to wander.

But her last words gave me comfort,-" Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

How I loved the little letters that from time to time she sent me.

As I read, it seemed that they a momentary sea-breeze lent me.

When she wrote of picnics, bathing, yachting trips, she bade me ponder Well the truth of that old saying: Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

Oft she spoke of her admirers-how she made them dance attendance,

Made them carry books and baskets and forswear their independence;

Spoke of one she nicknamed "Croesus," who on her his wealth would squander.

But she added: " Dear old goosie, absence makes the heart grow fonder."

So I worked away quite happy, through the broiling summer weather,

Longing for the coming autumn when we'd walk the world together.

Though her letters were less frequent, still
I very often conned her last
One where the postscript told me: Absence
makes the heart grow fonder."

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Fewer still were now her letters, and she wrote: I'm very busy."

I expostulated wildly with my wayward, witching Lizzie.

Once more came the same old answer, any other seemed beyond her,"Don't you know, you stupid Willie, absence makes the heart grow fonder."

One more letter yet she sent me, while she at the seaside tarried,

Laughing at our wild flirtation, telling me that she was married.

And 'twas thus her note concluded-as I read, my face turned yellow

DOES

MORALITY AND THE STAGE.

OES the dramatic and musical profession foster immorality in its followers? The general prejudice against the stage is perhaps disappearing, but the impression that purity of thought and life is incompatible with a stage-career is still very strong. National characteristics enter the discussion of this question, and the views of one nation might not find acceptance among the members of another. We find in the Literary Digest an interesting translation of a symposium in the Paris Figaro on the subject of stage virtue and morality, and we reproduce it in part:

"Jules Claretie's opinion is brief and sufficiently to the point, though it rather avoids the matter at issue. He says simply: 'The all-important thing is to have talent.'

"Henry Fouquier's opinion is as follows: A young woman will express the passionate feelings of her roles with the greater perfection if she has felt them herself; her art will be made up of the recollections of her experiences, vivified by the emotion that remains to her from her own joys and her own griefs.'

"Lucien Fugère, the well-known baritone of the Opéra Comique, writes: One day the mother of one of my future cantatrices asked of one of our most illustrious composers, in my presence, the following question: "Is it not possible for my daughter to go on the stage and yet remain an innocent girl?" "Madame," gravely responded the master, "I do not see of what use that would be." Please accept this little anecdote as my answer.'

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Coquelin the younger is somewhat more explicit. He says: You ask me if innocence is a hindrance to an actress, on the stage, in rendering roles of passion? Certainly it is. It is necessary to have suffered, wept, cried, despaired, sobbed, loved, to be able, by remembrance, to express it all on the stage. All actors have been more or less ambitious, envious, jealous, angry, in love, vindicative, violent, hypocritical, melancholy, joyful, sick, nearly dead, laughing, sardonic, furious, lyric, cowardly, heroic, gay enough to go through anything, sad enough to make the whole world despair. The comedian must remember all these experiences in giving them expression on the stage. So with the actress. What we have not experienced we invent, but in this case it is not so, at least except with great geniuses. There is

very little genius, although there is a good deal of mere talent; many things may be divined when one has the gift, but it is worth more to have seen enacted, or to have passed through in person, that which the author demands of one. No innocent girls then-or as few as possible-on the stage.'

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Maurice Donnay, author of 'Amants,' gives his views as follows: You ask me if innocence is really a hindrance to an artist in rendering the roles of passion. That depends on the manner in which this passion is described and whether the characters demand in their interpreter sincerity and humanity. An artist may be innocent enough and play The Martyr," but not when she plays Maud in the "DemiVierges." To play Phèdre or Le Partage she must not be so, but she can be when she says in Lucrezia Borgia," "Gentlemen, you are all poisoned."

"Emile Zola writes a characteristic note in which he says cynically that a discussion of innocence on the stage is useless, for such a thing does not exist.'

It may be added that Anglo-Saxon actors, singers, and playwrights would hardly approve of these Gallic sentiments.

HOW TO SECURE POISE WITH CHILDREN.

Poise is fundamental and underlies health, grace, and symmetry. Specific directions to secure it are detailed in the New York Outlook by Delphine Hanna, director of the woman's gymnasium of Oberlin College. The summary of her directions reads:

Forget your shoulders and hips: avoid round shoulders by drawing the ribs forward and upward away from the shoulderblades; preserve the normal curves of the spinal column by leaning forward in an unbroken line from ankles to chest; add to symmetry by keeping the pelvis level; secure rest and freedom of motion by standing with the weight properly on one foot." To balance properly with the weight on both feet, then on one foot, the suggestions are in detail:

"Attention should be centred on two points-the upper part of the chest and the ankles. Tell the child to push forward and raise the upper part of the chest; next, to lean forward, keeping an unbroken line from breast bone to ankle, until the top of the bone is as far forward as the balls of the feet. Rising on toes from this position will develop the child's sense of poise. Whenever this position is taken (and it should be often), raise the heels slightly

from the floor for a moment, to be sure that the weight is well forward. If the child already has ribs that are flattened in front, and pushing out the shoulder-blades behind, it will be sometime before he can assume more than an approximately correct position. Every effort, however, toward symmetry is a move in the right direction. and this new position that now has to be consciously maintained will in time become habitual.

"This position, with the weight on both feet, affords no opportunity for rest, and so the child must be taught to stand properly, with the weight on one foot; properly, because the child is prone to assume a position on one foot in which the same hip is habitually lowered. The lack of symmetry caused by this tilted pelvis is seen in the lateral curve of the spinal column, the lowered shoulders, the face that is flattened on one side, and other similar results. The effect on internal organs is not so evident, but is equally serious, since there must be a readjustment of them all. Again poise the child properly, with the weight on both feet; ask him to take a step forward, still keeping the unbroken line from ankle to breast bone. Test the position by having him lift the back foot from the floor, at the same time slightly lifting the heel of the forward foot; the weight is now borne by that foot. Without changing the weight, lower the heel and replace the free foot nearer the body. The child is now properly balanced on one foot. To rest, take a step forward, thus transferring the weight to the other foɔt. If you wish the free foot in front, take a step backward."

BRAHMS AS A COMPOSER.

The place of Johannes Brahms, whose recent death was a shock to the musical world, has not yet been finally determined. There is great difference of opinion regarding the value and the permanence of his contributions to vocal and to instrumental music. Some have regarded him as the greatest modern composer, while others have found him too cold, mechanical, and technical. We give below two competent estimates.

Henry C. Finck, the critic of the New York Evening Post, has this to say:

"Brahms's list of works includes more than 120 compositions and sets, including four symphonies, two concertos for piano and one for violin, several choral works, of which the best is the German Requiem;' a large number of songs and piano peices, chamber music, etc. His symphonies will probably not live as long as his songs, and especially his chamber works, which are his most inspired compositions. His admirers claim that he has originated a new style of piano music, while the followers of Chopin, Liszt, and Rubinstein assert that his pieces are not pianistic. Brahms is greatly admired by Dvorák, Nikisch. Thomas, Joseffy; while among those who deny his claim to

the highest rank are and were Wagner, Liszt, Rubinstein, Tschaikowsky, MacDowell, Paderewski, Seidl.

"From a technical point of view Brahms was undoubtedly one of the greatest masters that ever lived. His erudition was enormous, and no feat of composition too great for him to overcome. Yet in orchestration he is seldom sensuously charming. He seemed, indeed, to be afraid to do anything that might please the public, being austere in his ideals.'

William J. Henderson, of the Times, is not quite so severe. He writes:

"The truth, as usual, lies between extremes. Berlioz, though he was not a composer of operas, was a dramatist in tones, and as for Wagner, he stands alone as the creator of an art-form which he alone could successfully employ. Brahms is not to be compared with such men, any more than Richard Hunt is to be compared with Bouguereau. There is almost as much difference between the music of Brahms and that of Wagner as there is between architecture and painting.

Brahms was a master of musical construction. Although he wrote so few symphonies, it is as a symphonist that he is best described. His melodic invention was happiest in the production of those fecund phrases which are big with possibilities of musical development, and which are the germs of works in the sonata form. It is true that many of his themes are sombre in character, that they steady the musical fancy rather than excite it, and that they are apparently devoid of that mysterious quality called temperament. It is equally true that the development of these themes is frequently difficult to follow at a first hearing, that its harmonic structure is severe, and that the instrumentation in the symphonies is often cloudy and ill balanced by reason of poor writing in the middle-voice parts. But it is equally true that in profound mastership of musical structure, in assimilation of the vital organism of the art, no masters save Bach and Beethoven have excelled Brahms. His sonatas and symphonies withstand triumphantly the severest analytical examination, and leave upon the student the conviction that they are imposing products of intellect.

"The controversy that has raged about him has centred itself upon this point. His advocates have celebrated his brainpower, and his opponents have condemned his want of heart. But year after year the general admiration of the world for Brahms has grown. The musical public has come to appreciate the austerity and restraint of his musical style and to realize that behind it lies a depth of feeling that is not always found in a more passionate utterance. Some of his works will never be popular, even among musical connoisseurs; but others, such as the second piano concerto, and the symphonies in D and F, have long been accepted as the lineal successors of the products of Beethoven. When contemporaneous misapprehensions have died out, and

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"The subject of the debate was not the happiest that could have been chosen. The question, Whether the United States should adopt definitely the single gold standard, and should decline to enter a bimetallic league, even if Great Britain, France, and Germany should be willing to enter such a league,' is important enough, but, in its essence at least, it has had a certain prominence in the public eye of late, and a remarkably full and free discussion. What perhaps struck the observer most forcibly in the speaking was the absence of the purely oratorical quality. It was throughout an attempt to persuade by presenting facts, not by any appeal to the emotions; in which respect it may be thought to have differed from many deliverances in the great debate that closed last November. There was not even an attempt to embellish with the graces and ornaments that belong to literary quality. The purpose of the occasion, the whole situation, forbade such an attempt. The demands of a twelveminute speech and five minutes' rebuttal effectually put a bar to anything that should withdraw the attention from the hard facts of the case. Whether or not this exclusion may not imply a loss in the power of persuasion which must be the chief end of forensic speaking, it is at any rate one of the chief characteristics of the formal debate, and it can not be denied that it gives a certain austerity to these intercollegiate contests that must prevent their being quite so immediate or so absorbing in their appeal to the hearers as they might otherwise be.

Sobriety in speech is the ideal: but a well-modulated, well-emphasized delivery is the rule. One debater had a monotonous habit of separating his sentences into inexplicable divisions by a fall of the voice. Another, evidently the pride and the hope of his fellow-students, had a notably free and facile style of speech, that gave evidence of considerable exercise before audiences outside of college walls; and inquiry subsequently confirmed the impression. There was but one line of departure from the rigorous treatment of facts noticeable in the discussion, and that was one which the speakers on both sides followed to a certain extent. It consisted in impugning the opponent's understanding of the terms of the question under debate, charging him with breaking faith with the premises and talking about something else. It is only one

of a vast store of attorney's methods that centuries of litigation have produced; but it was apparently the only one that the etiquette of intercollegiate debating authorizes, and its application was so frequent as to provoke a smile.

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The debate showed hard work in training. That was revealed to the casual observer by the fluency, continuity, and directness of each speaker not only in his main address, but in his five-minute rebuttal. As a matter of fact, the preparations for such contests are scarcely inferior in elaboration and even in strenuous exertion to those necessary for the great athletic contests. Nothing signifies more clearly the position to which college debating has attained than the fact that the three places on the team are so eagerly sought. In both Harvard and Yale the rivaly is intense. Success means honor and distinction, as does success in attaining a place on the crew or the nine or the eleven. One of the Harvard debaters, who entered college obscurely, without the friendships and the advantages that those who come from the great preparatory schools possessed, has won popularity and prominence in the college, and has made the Pudding'-or, in other words, been elected to membership in the Hasty Pudding Club-solely on his brilliant success as a debater. Yale was so delighted with the success of her freshman debaters last year in defeating Harvard that the crowning honor of the Fence was immediately given to them. Her successful debaters are honored in all the other ways known to the college community.

"Like all other brilliant success in the world, however, these pinnacles of glory can be reached only through hard work. Success in the classes in debate must first be shown; then success in the debating societies; then in the interclass debates. The debaters are chosen by a process of survival of the fittest: and appearance on the platform to represent the college implies a vast deal of preliminary work and training.

There is an important difference between the two universities, hitherto unreconciled, in regard to methods of preparation, that need not be dwelt upon now-the question as to faculty coaching and training of the contestants chosen for the debate. Yale is as strongly committed to the coaching system as Harvard is to its opposite. The faculty at the New Haven institution take the men in hand and train them as rigorously as an athletic coach keeps his men at work. The Harvard faculty refuse to go near their men for this purpose, and the preliminary practice of the latter is such as its members can get for themselves. Whichever method is the right one, it is in this preliminary work, of course, that the chief value of the whole thing consists, the work that engages the attention of the largest number of men, and that, if it does not lead them to distinction as the champions of the college prestige, gives them training that they need, and that, until a comparatively few years ago, few college men got.

It is not so long since the helplessness of men at both the great universities when they got on their feet to speak was made a just reproach. It was Harvard that first paid special and continued attention to this defect, by establishing regular courses in oral debating, which have been very largely extended, and by encouraging its continuance outside the classroom in a large debating society, which has had the stimulus of a rival in the last few years. These advantages account chiefly for the success that Harvard met in the first years of the intercollegiate contests. The adoption of her methods by other colleges has interrupted that unbroken line with what will doubtless be a great advantage to the real interests involved-which are not successive victories by one college or another, but the extension and enthusiastic cultivation of debating, and the attainment of power in public speaking."

GOOD TIMES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS.

Louis N. Parker, author of "Rosemary," in the course of observations during a brief visit to New York, gave the New York Herald these points of dramatic interest, from an English point of view:

"There is, I think, a good time coming for all playwrights, whether American or English; I object in the first place to this distinction, and prefer to say for all playwrights writing in the English language. We are pretty international now, for if Pinero, Jones, Grundy, and others send over their plays from England, you send us just as brilliant matter from Howard, Gillette, Belasco, and a dozen others. There is a good time coming, because on both sides there are symptoms of a revival in public taste. The craze for the dramatized novel is, I believe, ephemeral. Successful--colos sally successful--during one or two seasons, any play founded upon a book must then be dead as a door nail, because it is only a second-hand reflex of nature which has passed through too many minds to have much nature left in it. But the public seem tardily coming back to high comedy, to poetical plays, to tragedy, to romances, and to idyls. May they come quickly; then we'll have a good time and show our audiences what we can do.

"I have two crumpled rose-leaves which I want to smooth out. I deplore first the custom of your audiences of letting themselves be carried away by their enthusiasm and kindly feelings before a play is ended. I tell you it is a horrible ordeal for an author to be called in front of the curtain at the end of the second act, when he knows there is a third act to follow. I venture to think the European plan of waiting till the end of a play and then striking an average is on the whole the more merciful one.

at all. This may be very good fun for the audience, but it is death to the poor player, who is a bundle of nerves and sensitive to the slightest whisper. In every other respect the courtesy and the patience of Amercan audiences are past praise and find no counterpart elsewhere. Indeed, my first crumpled rose-leaf is only an excess of courtesy, a feverish desire to show the author and his actors that the audience is trying with all its might to be pleased."

READERSHIPS AS A PUBLIC EDUCATOR.

Writing of the social needs of the day, the editor of Popular Science Monthly, W. J. Youmans, makes the striking suggestion that readerships, instead of lectureships, be established as a means of culture for the masses. Mr. Youmans thinks that when millions of dollars are being given to endow higher learning-to create a learned class-that class ought to discharge some social ministry. In politics it seems true that the educated, as a rule, cut the poor figure of dropping to the level of the politicians, not to say the level of uncultured constituents whom he serves. This lack of culture and absence of interest in larger questions give dreariness and pettiness to politics and a constant tendency to corruption. Mr. Youmans believes that the lecture-system was a great aid to general culture; it had a higher level than the newspaper; there was an intellectual and social stimulus in it. With its decline in popularity, however, the same problem of popular culture by the learned classes confronts us. Mr. Youmans says:

"We conceive, therefore, that a wealthy man, desiring to benefit the people at large, might with great advantage establish not lectureships but rather readerships. The literature of to-day and of past days contains ample material for the instruction and the delight of popular audiences if read aloud by a properly-trained elocutionist. Our idea would be to have such readings entirely free, except that local expenses in the way of hall hire, etc., might be met by the locality; and we should further propose that the reader should, in each place that he visited, give a course of lessons, also free. in correct reading. For the results which might be expected to accrue from such measures we would refer to the little work by Prof. Corson entitled The Voice and Spiritual Education.' If Prof. Corson is right, culture, no less than faith, comes mainly by hearing; and an agency, therefore, by which the best literature of the day and of all days should be brought home to people's hearts through the tones of a sympathetic human voice could not fail, in time, to produce very beneficial effects both mental and moral. Within the household itself nothing is more humanizing than good reading