laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days. Henrietta, on her side, did not quite justify Isabel's declaration with regard to her indifference to masculine opinion; for poor Ralph appeared to have presented himself to her as an irritating problem, which it would be superficial on her part not to solve.

"What does he do for a living?" she asked of Isabel, the evening of her arrival. "Does he go round all day with his hands in his pockets?"

"He does nothing," said Isabel, smiling; "he's a gentleman of leisure." "Well, I call that a shame-when I have to work like a cotton-mill," Miss Stackpole replied. "I should like to show him up."

"He is in wretched health; he is quite unfit for work," Isabel urged. "Pshaw don't you believe it. I work when I am sick," cried her friend. Later, when she stepped into the boat, on joining the water-party, she remarked to Ralph that she supposed he hated her he would like to drown her.

"Ah no," said Ralph, "I keep my victims for a slower torture. And you would be such an interesting one!"

"Well, you do torture me, I may say that. But I shock all your prejudices; that's one comfort.'

"My prejudices? I haven't a prejudice to bless myself with. There's intellectual poverty for you."

"The more shame to you; I have some delicious prejudices. Of course I spoil your flirtation, or whatever it is you call it, with your cousin ; but I don't care for that, for I render your cousin the service of drawing you out. She will see how thin you

are!"

"Ah, do draw me out!" Ralph exclaimed. "So few people will take the trouble."

Miss Stackpole, in this undertaking, appeared to shrink from no trouble; resorting largely, whenever the opportunity offered, to the natural expedient of interrogation. On the

following day the weather was bad, and in the afternoon the young man, by way of providing in-door amusement, offered to show her the pictures. Henrietta strolled through the long gallery in his society, while he pointed out its principal ornaments and mentioned the painters and subjects. Miss Stackpole looked at the pictures in perfect silence, committing herself to no opinion, and Ralph was gratified by the fact that she delivered herself of none of the little ready-made ejaculations of delight of which the visitors to Gardencourt were so fre

quently lavish. This young lady indeed, to do her justice, was but little addicted to the use of conventional phrases; there was something earnest and inventive in her tone, which at times, in its brilliant deliberation, suggested a person of high culture speaking a foreign language. Ralph Touchett subsequently learned that she had at one time officiated as art-critic to a Transatlantic journal; but she appeared in spite of this fact to carry in her pocket none of the small change of admiration. Suddenly, just after he had called her attention to a charming Constable, she turned and looked at him as if he himself had been a picture.

"Do you always spend your time like this? she demanded.

"I seldom spend it so agreeably," said Ralph.

"Well, you know what I meanwithout any regular occupation." "Ah," said Ralph, "I am the idlest man living."

Miss Stackpole turned her gaze to the Constable again, and Ralph bespoke her attention for a small Watteau hanging near it, which represented a gentleman in a pink doublet and hose and a ruff, leaning against the pedestal of the statue of a nymph in a garden, and playing the guitar to two ladies seated on the grass.

"That's my ideal of a regular occupation," he said.

Miss Stackpole turned to him again, and though her eyes had rested upon the picture, he saw that she had not apprehended the subject. She was thinking of something much more serious.

"I don't see how you can reconcile it to your conscience," she said.

"My dear lady, I have no conscience!"

"Well, I advise you to cultivate one. You will need it the next time you go to America."

"I shall probably never go again." "Are you ashamed to show yourself?"

Ralph meditated, with a gentle smile.

"I suppose that, if one has no conscience, one has no shame."

"Well, you have got plenty of assurance," Henrietta declared. "Do you consider it right to give up your country?"

"Ah, one doesn't give up one's country, any more than one gives up one's grandmother. It's antecedent to choice."

"I suppose that means that you would give it up if you could? What do they think of you over here?"

"They delight in me."

"That's because you truckle to them."

"Ah, set it down a little to my natural charm!" Ralph urged.

"I don't know anything about your natural charm. If you have got any charm, it's quite unnatural. It's wholly acquired-or at least you have tried hard to acquire it, living over here. I don't say you have succeeded! It's a charm that I don't

appreciate, any way. Make yourself useful in some way, and then we will talk about it."

"Well now, tell me what I shall do," said Ralph.

"Go right home, to begin with." "Yes, I see. And then?' "Take right hold of something."

you take hold. Some new idea, some big work."

"Is it very difficult to take hold?" Ralph inquired.

"Not if you put your heart into it."

"

"Ah, my heart," said Ralph. "If it depends upon my heart "Haven't you got any?"

"I had one a few days ago, but I have lost it since."

"You are not serious," Miss Stackpole remarked; "that's what's the matter with you." But for all this, in a day or two she again permitted him to occupy her mind, and on this occasion assigned a different cause to his mysterious perversity. "I know what's the matter with you, Mr. Touchett," she said. "You think you are too good to get married."

"I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole," Ralph answered; "and then I suddenly changed my mind." "Oh, pshaw!" Henrietta claimed impatiently.

ex

"Then it seemed to me," said Ralph, "that I was not good enough." "It would improve you. Besides, it's your duty."

Ah," cried the young man, one has so many duties! Is that a duty

too?"

"Of course it is-did you never know that before? It's every one's duty to get married.”

Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that, if she was not a charming woman, she was at least a very good fellow. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave, and there is always something fine about that. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar arts; but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges matrimony upon an unencumbered young man, the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse.

"Ah, well now, there is a good deal to be said about that," Ralph rejoined.

"There may be, but that is the principal thing. I must say I think it looks very exclusive, going round all alone, as if you thought no woman was good enough for you. Do you think you are better than any one else in the world? In America it's usual for people to marry."

"If it's my duty," Ralph asked, is it not, by analogy, yours as well?"

Miss Stackpole's brilliant eyes expanded still further.

"Have you the fond hope of finding a flaw in my reasoning? Of course I have got as good a right to marry as any one else."

"Well then," said Ralph, "I won't say it vexes me to see you single. It delights me, rather."

"You are not serious yet. never will be."

You

you had said to her something that an American never would have said. But she didn't repeat it."

Ralph treated himself to a burst of resounding laughter.

"She is an extraordinary combination. Did she think I was making love to her?"

"No; I believe Americans do that. But she apparently thought you mistook the intention of something she had said, and put an unkind construction on it."

"I thought she was proposing marriage to me, and I accepted her. Was that unkind?"

Isabel smiled. "It was unkind to me. I don't want you to marry."

"My dear cousin, what is one to do among you all?" Ralph demanded. "Miss Stackpole tells me it's my bounden duty, and that it's hers to see I do mine! !"

66

'She has a great sense of duty," said Isabel, gravely. "She has, indeed, and it's the motive of everything she says. That's what I like her for. She thinks it's very frivolous for you to be single; that's what she meant to express to you. If you thought she was trying to-to attract you, you were very wrong."

"It is true it was an odd way; but I did think she was trying to attract me. Excuse my superficiality."

"You are very conceited. She had no interested views, and never supposed you would think she had."

"One must be very modest, then, to talk with such women," Ralph said, humbly. "But it's a very strange type. She is too personal-considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door."

"Yes," Isabel admitted, "she doesn't sufficiently recognise the existence of knockers; and indeed I am not sure that she doesn't think them a rather pretentious ornament. She thinks one's door should stand ajar. But I persist in liking her."

"I persist in thinking her too

familiar," Ralph rejoined, naturally somewhat uncomfortable under the sense of having been doubly deceived. in Miss Stackpole.

"Well," said Isabel, smiling, "I am afraid it is because she is rather vulgar that I like her."

"She would be flattered by your reason!"

"If I should tell her, I would not express it in that way. I should say it is because there is something of the 'people' in her."

"What do you know about the people and what does she, for that matter?"

"She knows a great deal, and I know enough to feel that she is a kind of emanation of the great democracy -of the continent, the country, the nation. I don't say that she sums it all up, that would be too much to ask of her. But she suggests it; she reminds me of it."

"You like her then for patriotic I am afraid it is on those very grounds that I object to her."

reasons.

"Ah," said Isabel, with a kind of joyous sigh, "I like so many things! If a thing strikes me in a certain way, I like it. I don't want to boast, but I suppose I am rather versatile. I like people to be totally different from

Henrietta-in the style of Lord Warburton's sisters, for instance. So long as I look at the Misses Molyneux, they seem to me to answer a kind of ideal. Then Henrietta presents herself, and I am immensely struck with her; not so much for herself as what stands behind her."

"Ah, you mean the back view of her," Ralph suggested.

"What she says is true," his cousin answered; "you will never be serious. I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading, till it stops at the blue Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta excuse my simile - has something of that odour in her garments."

Isabel blushed a little as she concluded this speech, and the blush, together with the momentary ardour she had thrown into it, was so becoming to her that Ralph stood smiling at her for a moment after she had ceased speaking.

"I am not sure the Pacific is blue," he said; "but you are a woman of imagination. Henrietta, bowever, is fragrant Henrietta is decidedly fragrant!"

HENRY JAMES, JR.

ARE not nations liable to an infirmity analogous to somnambulism? Are they not often seen walking confidently, or even rushing along eagerly, with their eyes shut, that is, not prepared by any kind of political education to see what is before them, or against what objects they may bruise themselves? The question might be asked at any time, but it is particularly seasonable at a moment when the nation seems unusually confident and ready for rapid motion.

Democratic states are especially liable to this infirmity, and of democratic states especially those which are in the first stages of democracy. Where the government is in the hands of a class there are other dangers, but there is not this particular danger of public action being taken wholly without due knowledge or consideration. Even a democracy, if you give it time, may perhaps learn caution, or educate itself politically. But a state where the democracy is young and sanguine, and where no one is taught politics, is a somnambulist state, and if it has at all a difficult road to travel, is exposed to the greatest dangers. Do not these conditions meet in England at the present time?

Assuredly the spirit of innovation was never at any former time so utterly unrestrained.

Reformers now and we are all reformers-have ceased to admit that any institutions are too fundamental to be touched. The time was when all the greater questions were closed for Englishmen by the happiness of an exceptional position which made it unnecessary for us to discuss them. We had a perfect constitution both in State and Church; the kingdoms might rage and the people be moved; we were sheltered from all

such agitations. But now insensibly we have drifted into other latitudes; we seem now quite prepared to raise, even without necessity, the very questions which our ancestors considered it the great masterpiece to suppress. Do we trust to our national genius for politics? I hope not. I like

to

hear foreigners speak of this genius, but I do not like to hear English people congratulate themselves upon it. How many exceptional advantages have we enjoyed! How

To

little have we been exposed to the particular trials which have impeded the progress of continental countries! When we consider this, we may well doubt whether we have any right to set down our prosperity to any peculiar wisdom of our own. Besides this, the political talent, which undoubtedly appears in some pages of English history, was the talent of our old governing classes. They acquired it by long practice in government, and by many mistakes which English history records not less plainly. What reason have we to suppose that the new governing classes have any such talent? judge by the last two general elections, they are beginning their politics, as might be expected, at the beginning. If they have the talent, it remains to be developed, and it will be developed probably in the usual manner, by monstrous mistakes committed, and great calamities suffered in consequence. Their advent to power is already marked by the total disappearance of all the old political maxims which embodied the wisdom of their predecessors. All those misconceptions of the nature and objects of government which we used to ridicule in the French, and hold ourselves superior to, are now taken for granted, as if they had never been