"Paul! you have got through sooner than you expected?" "Yes, and stolen a march on you and Rosa. Where is Rosa?" "Rosa is lying down. No, she is perfectly well," anticipating his anxious question. "But-but she is in such trouble!" "What, again?" said he, a queer kind of smile in his frown. "Well, I am here to put an end to that!" he added grimly. "Oh, Paul! if it were only that!" He looked at her and saw her very unusual agitation. "Whatever it is, only tell me the worst at once," he said, quietly, but she saw his features contract and whiten, and dared not prolong his suspense. He listened without comment to her rapid story, asked a few questions when it was finished, then silently rose and went to the door. She followed him. "Where are you going, Paul?" she said, beseechingly. "To find that man," he answered, removing, though gently enough, the detaining hand on his shoulder. Paul's sister was always a little afraid of him, and not the least in this seemingly quiet mood. She knew the uselessness of interference, much as she dreaded from this meeting. She went back to her seat and pressed her face close down on her folded arms, as if by deadening sense she might deaden thought as well during her period of suspense, while in the next room Rosa slept the sleep of the innocent. It would be hard to say what attraction drew Rosa and Paul together, for two human beings more unlike could not well have been found; unlike, not with the variation which often blends into harmony, but with that radical difference that is apt to make discord. But there was the fact, however it might be accounted for. As much as it was in her power to care for any person Roså cared for Paul; not exactly with her heart, for, except in a strictly physical sense, she had none--but perhaps with a kind of reflex of his own intensity of feeling, for Paul's was the stronger nature, and he loved her with all the force, all the latent fire, of a reserved and seemingly cold temperament; loved her all the more, perhaps, as against a perpetual inward protest. He walked on now with a fury under his outward composure that might well have justified his sister's fears. Little more than she did he know how far such a claim might hold, but, beyond the doubt, the mere claim itself was torture to one of his organization. To find his rival was the one thought that now stood out clearly in the whirl of his passion: what was to be the aim, the end, of such a meeting he hardly told himself; only, to find him, to stand once face to face with him, that was all he asked. He made his way directly to the river, where, as he had gathered, Dornvitch was likely to be found. Plunging through the first opening in the bushes to the path down by the waterside, he stood still and looked uncertainly up and down the stream. At length he saw a small boat coming round the bend above, and in it, as it approached, a man's figure lounging back. 66 Are you Dornvitch ?" he called out abruptly. Dornvitch, for he it was, guessed the situation at once. "Is it Monsieur Paul ?" he returned, mockingly. "Then you come too late." "Scoundrel!" cried Paul hoarsely, his hands clenching themselves in the desire to throttle him-"we will see that." "To our better acquaintance!" shouted back Dornvitch, springing to his feet with a mocking gesture. The boat trembled and shot out of sight. The blood was beating too hotly across Paul's eyes for him to see clearly through the dazzle of the sun on the water. When he found that the boat had disappeared, his only thought was that Dornvitch had slipped under one of the woody overhanging banks with the intention of getting out of his way. "Coward!" he called aloud in his rage as he sprang forward, "Coward! where are you hiding?" But not a breath answered his taunts. There was neither sound nor movement, save the little fret of the water where it curled round a great stone lying in mid-current. All at once his bewildered gaze fixed itself on some object visible a little past this rock. It was the boat bottom upwards. Only then a suspicion of the truth flashed upon him. Looking round he saw some one busy in a neighboring field, who at his shout came running to the place. But the man shook his head as he listened. "He went down under the boat, most likely," said he, "perhaps got a blow when she turned over. He's found a deep enough grave by this-one he won't rise out of this side of Judgment Day. Our river keeps what it gets," he added, with a kind of grim satisfaction in such a stream. Paul turned sick, as he stood there in the warm sunlight and saw the play of colors on the green-filled water and heard the soft purr of the current over the prey it had swallowed, and remembered how his own heart had been hot with rage, but now; how he had called out taunting words to the corpse even then sinking out of all mortal sight. The terrible perplexity hitherto wholly absorbing his mind was indeed thus terribly solved; but that Paul was incapable of making his first thought;-in the presence of this man's sudden death, he could think only how he had himself been longing for it, and for the moment he felt like a murderer. Leaving the man to carry the news of the accident to the hotel, he staggered up the bank and mechanically made his way back to his sister. She sprang up anxiously, turning pale at the record she read in his face. "What has happened, Paul?" she cried, catching his arm as he dropped into a seat. Before he could answer, Rosa came hurrying in. Her face was pale and excited. She took no notice of Paul's presence. "Lina!" she said, breathlessly, "do you know? have you heard-Dornvitch-" "What! what!" cried Lina, with a horrible sinking of heart. "He is drowned!" "Paul!" gasped his sister under her breath, "it was not-" She could not go on. He shook his head silently, understanding her fear. "Drowned in the Leise," recommenced Rosa. "How strange it seems! Do you remember Gertrude Hildebrand warning him about the bottomless holes?" The first shock was already passing with her; but as for Paul, this sort of gossiping comment jarred on him inexpressibly. For that matter it was not the first time, and probably would not be the last. His sister comprehended better, that had he hated this man less he would have been more indifferent to his fate, but that now the catastrophe had come too much like an answer to his own revengeful desires. Dornvitch's speech to Rosa had come strangely true: he had lived as long as she wanted him. Did those words of a man who had at least loved her in earnest come back to her with any sting, now that he had, as it were, paid his life for his love? Not at all. The first shock over, she did not hesitate to consider the convenience to herself of this man's death. Incapable of having wished for it, she was equally incapable of the remorse that would almost have bought back his life at the price of its own: both feelings were beyond her. Paul knew this perfectly, and so he awakened from his dream, you say! But did he have to learn Rosa's character to-day? Does love always go by deserving in this world? CHILDREN'S MAGAZINES. SOMETIMES I feel like rushing through the world with two placards-one held aloft in my right hand, BEWARE OF CHILDREN'S MAGAZINES! the other flourished in my left, CHILD'S MAGAZINE WANTED! A good magazine for little ones was never so much needed, and such harm is done by nearly all that are published. In England, especially, the socalled juvenile periodicals are precisely what they ought not to be. In Germany, though better, they too often distract sensitive little souls with grotesquerie. Our magazines timidly approach the proper standard in some respects, but fall far short in others. We edit for the approval of fathers and mothers, and endeavor to make the child's monthly a milkand-water variety of the adult's periodical. But, in fact, the child's magazine needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other. Its cheer must be the cheer of the bird-song, not of condescending edi torial babble. If it mean freshness and heartiness, and life and joy, and its words are simply, directly, and musically put together, it will trill its own way. We must not help it overmuch. In all except skillful handling of methods, we must be as little children if we would enter this kingdom. If now and then the situation have fun in it, if something tumble unexpectedly, if the child-mind is surprised into an electric recognition of comical incongruity, so that there is a reciprocal "ha, ha!" between the printed page and the little reader, well and good. But, for humanity's sake, let there be no editorial grimacing, no tedious vaulting back and forth over the grim railing that incloses halt and lame old jokes long ago turned in there to die. Let there be no sermonizing either, no wearisome spinning out of facts, no rattling of the dry bones of history. A child's magazine is its pleasure ground. Grown people go to their periodicals for relaxation, it is true; but they also go for information, for suggestion, and for to-day's fashion in literature. Besides, they begin, now-a-days, to feel that they are behind the age if they fail to know what the April Jig jig says about so and so, or if they have not read B-'s much-talked-of poem in the last Argosy. Moreover, it is "the thing" to have the Jig-jig and Argosy on one's drawing-room table. One must read the leading periodicals or one is nobody. But with children the case is different. They take up their monthly or weekly because they wish to, and if they don't like it they throw it down again. Most children of the present civilization attend school. Their little heads are strained and taxed with the day's lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor taught nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine. They want to enter the one place where they may come and go as they please, where they are not obliged to mind, or say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir," —where, in short, they can live a brand-new, free life of their own for a little while, accepting acquaintances as they choose and turning their backs without ceremony upon what does not concern them. Of course they expect to pick up odd bits and treasures, and to now and then "drop in" familiarly at an air castle, or step over to fairy-land. They feel their way, too, very much as we old folk do, toward sweet recognitions of familiar day; dreams, secret goodnesses, and all the glorified classics of the soul. We who have strayed farther from these, thrill even to meet a hint of them in poems and essays. But what delights us in Milton, Keats and Tennyson, children often find for themselves in stars, daisies, and such joys and troubles as little ones know. That this comparison holds, is the best we can say of our writers. If they make us reach forth our hands to clutch the star or the good-deed candle-blaze, what more can be done? Literary skill in its highest is but the subtle thinning of the veil that life and time have thickened. Mrs. Browning paid her utmost tribute to Chaucer when she spoke of his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine." Darwinianism broadly and fairly as they. "Hickory, dickery dock! The mouse ran up the clock. And whatever Parton or Arthur Helps may ups. "Little boy blue ! Come, blow your horn! So we come to the conviction that the perfect magazine for children lies folded at the heart of the ideal best magazine for grownYet the coming periodical which is to make the heart of baby-America glad must outgrowth from the old-young heart of Maga not be a chip of the old Maga block, but an itself. Therefore, look to it that it be strong, warm, beautiful, and true. Let the little magazine-readers find what they look for and be able to pick up what they find. Boulders will not go into tiny baskets. If it so happen that the little folks know some one jolly, sympathetic, hand-to-hand personage who is sure to turn up here and there in every number of the magazine or paper, very good: that is, if they happen to like him. If not, beware! It will soon join the ghosts of dead periodicals; or, if it do not, it will live on only in that slow, dragging existence which is worse than death. A child's periodical must be pictorially illustrated, of course, and the pictures must have the greatest variety consistent with simplicity, beauty and unity. They should be heartily conceived and well executed; and they must be suggestive, attractive and epigrammatic. If it be only the picture of a cat, it must be so like a cat that it will do its own purring, and not sit, a dead, stuffed thing, requiring the editor to purr for it. One of the sins of this age is editorial dribbling over inane pictures. The time to shake up a dull picture is when it is in the hands of the artist and engraver, and not when it lies, a fact accomplished, before the keen eyes of the little folk. Well enough for the editor to stand ready to answer questions that would naturally be put to the flesh-and-blood father, mother, or friend standing by. Well enough, too, for the picture' to cause a whole tangle of interrogation-marks in the child's mind. It The Jig jig and Argosy may deal with need not be elaborate, nor exhaust its theme, VOL. VI.-23 but what it attempts to do it must do well, and the editor must not over-help nor hinder. He must give just what the child demands, and to do this successfully is a matter of instinct, without which no man should presume to be a child's editor and go unhung. Doubtless a great deal of instruction and good moral teaching may be inculcated in the pages of a magazine; but it must be by hints dropped incidentally here and there; by a few brisk, hearty statements of the difference between right and wrong; a sharp, clean thrust at falsehood, a sunny recognition of truth, a gracious application of politeness, an unwilling glimpse of the odious doings of the uncharitable and base. In a word, pleasant, breezy things may linger and turn themselves this way and that. Harsh, cruel facts—if they must come, and sometimes it is important that they should-must march forward boldly, say what they have to say, and go. The ideal child's magazine, we must remember, is a pleasure-ground where butterflies flit gayly hither and thither; where flowers quietly spread their bloom; where wind and sunshine play freaks of light and shadow; but where toads hop quickly out of sight and snakes dare not show themselves at all. Wells and fountains there may be in the grounds, but water must be drawn from the one in right trim, bright little buckets; and there must be no artificial coloring of the other, nor great show-cards about it, saying, "Behold! a fountain." Let its own flow and sparkle proclaim it. RECOLLECTIONS OF A RESTORED LUNATIC. A SKETCH FROM LIFE. A FEW months ago I visited one of those retreats for the insane by the establishment of which my native State has done itself honor. Large additions to the buildings had recently been made; and the original structure was then undergoing extensive changes, beautifying and modernizing it, and conforming it to the late additions, thus giving to the institution most of the elegancies and conveniences that architectural skill and enlightened philanthropy could suggest. The chapel, the place to me of pleasant and hallowed associations, was a mass of ruins, and workmen were busy in bringing order out of the confusion. The institution, when completed, will be a noble pile, an ornament to the place of its location, and an honor to the State which established it, and which will maintain it in the future with even an increasing liberality. As I was passing through the halls of the stupendous edifice, under the guidance of its superintendent, speaking, as we passed along, a pleasant word now and then to its unfortunate inmates, I was on the qui vive to identify the apartment which at one time had been the place of my own abode. "Doctor," said I to the superintendent, fearful that the changes which had been made had taken away the marks by which it would be known to me, "I would be pleased to see the old third ward again." He said nothing until we | had walked much farther on, and weariness had begun to creep upon me. Entering a compartment that was untenanted, and half filled with the debris of the changes which it was undergoing-"This," said he, "is the old third ward." I entered one of its rooms alone; and then thought and memory began a busy work. This had been my home for long, long, and weary months. Here I had been the object of remark and pity to others, as others were now the objects of remark and pity to myself. I contrasted my condition and prospects and my existing feelings with what they had been when I was the hopeless tenant of this narrow room; and my sensations were embodied in the words, "What hath God wrought!" The time of my constrained occupancy of this ward is an epoch of my life which stands out prominently from all the rest of it; a lif which, upon the whole, had been a cheerful one. Sometimes, however, a gloominesswould steal upon me and cast its shadow over my mind. While it continued I enjoyed no blessing in possession, and was uncheered b any hope of good to come. At the first this moodiness was of a transient kind, and I would hide it from the view of even those most familiar with my habits of mind. When the cloud was lifted from my soul, and the cheerful sun shone in again, all things both within me and without became more brilliantly lighted up than they had been before. But the mind grew dark again, and the cloud which shadowed it was darker, and the night was longer and gloomier than any that I yet had passed. Still the morning dawned at last; and I realized the truth of what the wise man says, “Truly the light is pleasant to the eyes;" for it seemed to come from heaven, and was sent by Him who said, at first, "Let there be light!" and light at once shone throughout the realms of "chaos and old night." Then I fancied that my days of darkness all had passed away. But it was a foolish thought; for soon another cloud, the heaviest with which I had been yet oppressed, settled upon and enveloped every faculty of my mind and soul. It floated in my mental atmosphere so long, that every hope that light would shine on me again died within my heart. The future was a blank, and more appalling than a blank to me; for I was filled with fear of greater ill to come. I could not comprehend the causes of my deep depression. My surroundings were of My surroundings were of a cheerful kind. My domestic ties were strong in their very tenderness. Our social position was a pleasant one; and I was gathering rapidly a competence of worldly stores. The future was full of hope; for in the race for patronage in my profession I had distanced all competitors, and my hold upon the public favor was strengthening day by day. As I could not find the reasons of my moodiness of spirits in my outward state, I searched within to find them there. But if there are few of those afflicted with the "ills which flesh is heir to" who can diagnosticate with certainty their bodily diseases, there are fewer still whose minds are sick that can determine what are their mental ailments; and if the former class can seldom administer wisely for themselves, still less often can the other one prescribe correctly for their more hidden maladies. I was ignorant of these truths until after I had striven long to change my state, and had but wearied myself in vain endeavors to throw my burden off. Deep as my despondency already was, it became profounder still, and it was no longer but a jaundiced feeling regarding whatever object my thoughts chanced to fix themselves upon; but it took a definite direction, and became a deep religious melancholy. This was the rod which swallowed up the other rods; for when this type of mental malady revealed itself, and I fancied that I had stepped beyond the bounds of hope and help, I could study calmly any other subject than the one which had become the absorbing topic of my thoughts. I did not think, as others have so often thought, when taking their own morbid imaginings for the teachings of a higher power, that I had done that deed of awful turpitude for which pardon has never been provided-sinned against the Holy Ghost; but I fancied that I had rejected the work of Christ as the foundation of my hope, and that consequently I was lost-hopelessly and forever lost. And yet, so inconsistent with himself is man, while I thought that I refused to tread this path of safety, it seemed to be the only one of pleasantness and peace, and that those who walked therein were the choice ones of earth, the wise and good; that light from a better world shone on their pathway, and that, as they journeyed on, it beamed more brightly still, until, before they reached its end, the sunlight of the perfect day shone on their footsteps; and I longedoh, how ardently I longed!-to become the fellow-traveler of these favored ones. During the period in which my mind was so strangely wrought upon, I never doubted that the Bible was the word of God. My perceptions were so much quickened that I saw the truth as I never saw it in my life before. These perceptions were not based on evidence alone. It was knowledge, clear and undoubted knowledge of the doctrine that it was the truth of God. But my intuitions failed to give me any comfort; for I imagined that a curse rested on my blessings. My pastor and other religious people strove to give me peace. But I thought of them as the stricken man of Uz said, when harassed by the unskillful comfortings of his friends, "Ye are all physicians of no value." My hallucinations were realities to me; and I became almost impatient at any endeavor to prove them to be but morbid imaginings. But there came at length a man humble in position and modest in pretension, yet of more than common powers--a man who had made the mind a study of his life, and who understood its workings, whether healthful or diseased, and who was skillful to discriminate between the symptoms of depravity and the evidences of disease. He pronounced me to be self-deceived. I told him that my were not belief alone, but consciousness. Mine, he said, was a mistaken consciousness. The idea of mistaken consciousness was new to me. Its effect upon my mind was that of the steel in contact with the flint. It evolved one flash of light, but which, failing to fall upon a prepared combustible, sank into gloom again. It failed to work a lasting views |