mistake when, in the course of a day or two, she begins to perceive that her lover has a certain air. of patronage in his manner to her, and conveys an impression that he thinks he is doing rather a magnanimous thing. She is quiet for a day or two, to make sure that she is not misjudging him, but then she fires up, and tells him that she gives him quite as much as he can give her, for she gives him her heart, and nothing but hearts are of worth. Next morning she follows up the stroke by ordering him to go with her to a summer-house, where she explains to him her views, and offers to release him from his engagement. She could not even then believe that he would not be overpowered by so great a blow; but he quietly says, "With all my heart," and so all is over between them. It is a nice touch of art that, before she leaves him, she takes his hand and kisses it. These are the sort of touches which make us imagine, or recognize, that Mr. Trollope knows what girls are like. and perhaps we may never be so." To which he not unnaturally replies, "Isa!" The months pass away; relatives are applied to without success; and the result of the final deliberation is, that Herbert is told he may either be betrothed to Isa and wait four years to be married, or let the thing come to an end at once. Isa is quite ready to acquiesce in this, but Herbert thinks it hard on him, and finds it still harder that Isa does not think it hard. He asks her whether she really loves him, and, with a fine power of analyzing and stating her feelings, she replies, "I do not love you so that I need make every one around us unhappy because circumstances forbid me to marry you. That sort of love would be baneful; and thus waiting would not make me unhappy. I should go on as I do now, and be contented." Herbert's remark is"Oh, heavens!" Afterwards Isa warms up, and teases her uncle into letting Herbert be admitted as a partner, and in this part of her behavior she shows romance as well as courage. Still, to English readers, the parson's daughter is a dearer type of a possible wife than this too tranquil German. These are good girls, but Mr. Trollope can draw naughty girls too. One of the most amusing stories in the collection tells of a gentleman who travelled about the Continent with a grown-up daughter and a young second wife, and who kept his wife's jewels and his money in a box. This box was the great object of thought to the whole family, and they were overwhelmed by their anixety lest it should be lost. At length it is lost. The party-accompanied by a young gentleman, a casual travelling acquaintance, who is supposed to tell the story-land at Bellaggio, and when Mr. Greene and the ladies are established in their rooms and come to count their bag Another study is that of a German young lady, who behaves as German ladies are, we suppose, accustomed to do, and who is pleasant, and with a kind of heroism, but who is also more undisturbed and practical than her lover likes. This lover is a young Englishman who has come out to learn business in the banking-house of which the father and the uncle of the lady are the proprietors. Of course he falls in love with Isa, who, of course, knows he is in love with her. But she has so much to do in the way of business for him, as he is a lodger in her father's house, and she is so business-like and calm that two years steal away before he tells his tale. At last he finds an opportunity and a tongue, and goes through it very nicely. Isa tranquilly remarks that she must have a day to think over it. To his surprise, he finds his offer the sub-gage, the one precious package is missing. ject of a regular family debate, which is conducted freely without his presence being an obstacle. His proposal seemed to be considered exactly as if it had been an offer to take another sitting-room at a slightly increased rent; and Isa, though quite willing that, metaphorically speaking, her room should be let, was also quite willing that the best arrangement possible for all parties should be made. The discussion ends by an agreement that everything shall go on as it is for a few months, and Isa explains to her admirer that "We are not betrothed as yet, you know, The whole house is thrown into confusion; Mrs. Greene denounces everybody as a thief; and the unfortunate young gentleman is persuaded or ordered by her and her step-daughter, with whom he has struck up an incipient flirtation, to go off to Como and Milan to see if he can find it. His search is unavailing, and he returns. Sophonisba, as the lady of his passing affection is called, rewards him with a confidential history of her family, consisting principally of abuse of her step-mother. Soon, however, things are changed, for Sophonisba takes it on her to assure her papa that their young friend will lend them all they want. This frightens him, and when they go to the Serbelloni Gardens to have a stroll and a tête-à-tête, he candidly tells her that it will be impossible to advance Mr. Greene any money at present. "Then Sophonisba's arm dropped all at once, and she exclaimed, 'O Mr. Robinson!"" In the end, the box is found in the wretched Robinson's bedroom, covered with a rug, and he is, of course, thought to be a swindler by all the family, excepting, in a half sort of way, by Sophonisba, who good-naturedly remarks that, "after all, it may have been accidental." But Sophonisba-though a neat sketch of the pretty and tolerably well-behaved girl whom we are not meant to like is excelled by another of Mr. Trollope's young ladies, in a story which seems to us the best in the book, and which is called " A Ride across Palestine." The narrator tells us how he was once sitting lonely in an hotel at Jerusalem, planning an expedition to the Jordan and the Dead Sea, when he was told that a young Englishman wished to see him, and in walked Mr. John Smith. He is a nice, delicate, melancholy looking young man, and the narrator takes a fancy to him; and when Mr. Smith says that he is come to ask whether, as he too is staying alone at Jerusalem, he may join in the expedition to the Dead Sea, the proposal is cordially accepted. Mr. Smith is punctual the next morning, and rides some miles on a hard Turkish saddle without uttering a sound or syllable of complaint, but, when the halting time comes, is found to be so faint and stiff that his stronger companion has to lift him to the ground. At last they reach the Dead Sea, and the narrator, being enthusiastic, determines to bathe in its waters, in order to say he has done so; and he earnestly implores Smith to join him, that some day he may tell his children of his feat. But Smith replies that he does not expect to have any children, and does not like bathing, and gently rides away behind a clump of trees, where he waits for his more adventurous companion. The same scene is repeated at the Jordan. They pass through Jerusalem, and as Smith, hearing that the narrator is going to Jaffa, expresses a wish to go there too, they reach the sea together, and are just going to start off in the Austrian boat for Alexandria when an infuriated old gentleman rides up to the hotel, and seeing the narrator, accuses him of eloping with his niece, Miss Julia Weston. Then a scene follows, such as might be expected. The uncle laughs at the notion of his being asked to believe that the gentleman travelled with his neice and honestly thought her to be Mr. Smith. So he calls on the narrator to marry his niece at the nearest British Consulate, or else take the punishment he deserves. Most of this work an inferior artist could have done, but the conclusion is touched in with the hand of a master. The narrator has to own that he is married, and although he sincerely wishes to spare Julia's feelings, and to get her and himself out of a scrape, he cannot help trying to ascertain whether she looks disappointed at hearing a piece of intelligence that must end their intimacy. To let Julia's disappointment be seen, and yet to make her perfectly proper to give the impression that she is sorry her days of being Mr. Smith are over, and yet that she has not involved herself too deeply—is a task which few artists could fulfil as Mr. Trollope has fulfilled it. EXTRAORDINARY CHRISTMAS CAROL.-In a town" He did whistle and she did sing [three times], in Mid Kent some children were going from house And all the bells on earth did ring, A Christmas day in the morning. to house the other day, singing carols; one of them struck me as very odd; I took down the words" And now we hope to taste your cheer [three as well as I could collect them, which ran thus: "As I sat under a sycamore tree [the last three words three times], I looked me out upon the sea, A Chrisnas day in the morning. times], And wish you all a happy new year, A Christmas day in the morning." The children said there were a great many more verses, which they did not know. Has this "I saw three ships a-sailing there [three times, very singular production ever been printed? The tune was that generally known among children as "A cold and frosty morning." A. A. -Notes and Queries. From The Athenæum. Recollections of Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants. By Mrs. Atkinson. With Illustrations. Murray. EVEN after the very full and highly colored works on "Oriental and Western Siberia," and on "The Upper and Lower Amoor," produced by the pen and illustrated by the pencil of Thomas Witlam Atkinson, there was still room for this pleasant little volume by his wife. The married pair made their great journey through the Steppes together; and if he was the better artist, she excelled in a more available knowledge of the Russian idiom and race. and the universe; a woman is satisfied when she has come to a cordial understanding with her housekeeper's book. The real and the near have an enduring charm for her, to which the poetic and the romantic can make but a vague and passing pretence. Every one has met that pair of rosy Britons who are always studying nature on Lake Leman, or in the Bay of Naples, or on the Rhine. The male points to the snowy Alps, to the smoke of Vesuvius, to the ruined schloss among the vineyards, as the case may be; spouts a mouthful of Byron, or mumbles some filmy and Shelley-like stuff about the spirit of the scene: the female lifts now and then a rebuking blue eye, smiles meekly at her slave, and falls back again to the realities of a collar with a rent. That woman will take a stroll in the Coliseum by moonlight with a man she loves; but the chances are many that her attraction to the walk, and the object of her thoughts, is the living lover at storied arches overhead. She would lose the finest sunset in the world to go in and make tea: and in doing so she would be acting by the best lights of her sex. A woman first looks to the useful, and, reversing the saying of Goethe, leaves the beautiful to take care of itself. She has a very poor opinion of abstract truth, and she barely finds toleration in her heart for endeavor which brings no visible return in either meal or malt. No woman has ever tried her hand at speculative philosophy. Women have no imagination, though they have active and abundant fancies. All the larger exertion of the race must be achieved by men. Yet much remains for the other sex to do. The male investigates, the female applies. To one belongs the distant, to the other the proximate. Man creates, and woman cooks! Besides, a woman's points of view, when visiting a strange land and mixing in a new society, are different from those of a man. If she is apt to omit a good many things which he might consider of leading interest, she will be pretty sure to describe for us many scenes which he in his pride would have overlooked. A man will commonly her side, not the melancholy arena or the seize on the masses, a woman on the details; he will take count of the landscape, she give her eyes to the roadside. If it pleases him to depict the mountains and the sunsets, she will delight in collecting and preserving the flowers. If he deals mainly with the important topics of history, ethnology, and physics, she will pay attention to the domestic arrangements, the customs of society, the manners, and the dress. If nothing is too large for him, nothing, on the other side, is too small for her. If he has more sympathy with nature, she will probably have more sympathy with life. The feminine mind has a peculiar genius for that detail of observation which is the soul of recorded travel. Whether rolling through Hyde Park or scampering over the Tartar Steppe, a woman will avoid, so far as she can, the distant, the ideal, and the complex; loving what is near, appre- This diversity of function lends a charm and ciating what is useful, and enjoying what is imparts a character to the observation of each. plain. Women hate nonsense. The most In some departments of literary art, such as practical engineer that ever built a bridge or story-telling and travel-talk, the ladies have a a mill, was probably a dreamer and a theorist place of their own, distinct from that of their when compared against his wife. The one masculine rivals, and certainly not below it. speculates, the other acts. A man feels a We have a noble army of female tourists, each thousand temptations to wander into space; of whom has left her mark on the country while his companion plants herself immova- through which she passed. Italy has won the bly at the kitchen fire. One is discursive, attention of a thousand writers; but has any the other adhesive. One is centrifugal force, of them left us brighter pictures of her beauty the other centripetal force. A man yearns than Lady Morgan, Fanny Kemble, and George to establish relations between his own being | Sand? Has any pen done more than Harriet Martineau for the Holy Land? Has any one described the Sogné Field in a style to compare with the Unprotected Female? Then, again, we have to remember that in some countries, with very peculiar and highly exciting domestic institutions, women are the only explorers of the seralgio, the harem, the zenana a male inquirer can learn nothing beyond the vaguest of travellers' tales. His eyes may not profane the family precincts. He is an outcast from the hearth. One-half of life, and that the most interesting to strangers of another creed, is hidden away from him. Here the female tourist comes to our aid. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu makes us amends for the silence or the blunders of a hundred writers of the less privileged sex. This advantage of womanhood lends a charm to Madam Pfeiffer's volumes. Mrs. Lucy Atkinson, in her long ramble through the wild districts of Northern Asia, had all the privileges of her sex. She was a woman, and was therefore admitted to the intimacy of women everywhere, in the Russian aoul and in the Tartar harem. Her husband was an artist, an explorer, a sportsman; where he moored his boat or tied up his horse, it was to use his paint-brush or seize his gun: She had hours, and even days, to herself in the savage desert, which gave her plenty of time, not only to observe, but to write. She knew the languages of the country, for she had resided in Russia from the days of her youth. She had also the great advantage, for a Siberian traveller, of having enjoyed in St. Petersburg, an acquaintance with the families of many of the public men who had been exiled for political crimes against the Czar, which caused her to be everywhere received as a friend. She entered the houses of these exiles, and saw the conditions under which they live. The glimpses which she gives of these exiles will, to many persons, make the charm of her book. came known to the families of many exiles that I was going to visit regions where their husbands, fathers, and brothers had spent more ber of these families had something to comthan twenty years of their lives. Each memmunicate-a wife, who had stood at the gate of Moscow with an infant in her arms, to take the last look at the husband and the father as he was driven slowly past; young children, who were now men and women, who had been horrified with the clanking of chains when receiving the last embrace; then there were mothers who had gazed with agony on their sons as they passed under the great archway, and were lost to them forever; sisters who had received the last salute of those so dear, and brothers who had met here and grasped each other's hands, but were destined never to meet again; all these had some message which they wished to be delivered.” Each family that had a son, a father or a brother at the mines-and these were of the best and bravest in the land-would have had the English travellers for their guests. They dared not write to their beloved ones far away. They could only send to them a message of affection and of comfort by word of mouth, and so each one would have had the two travellers make of their grief a particular case. They loaded them with details of distress, many of them dramatic, and all of them melancholy to the last degree. But who can blame them? How the wife who had been parted from her husband for twenty years, how the mother who had been torn from her son, must have envied the English lady who was going where she would look on the well-remembered face! "There was a melancholy interest in these gatherings which few can appreciate; it was only by a knowledge of the circumstances which had sent their friends into exile, and the difficulty of making any confidential communication to those so dear to them that I could understand their anxious desire to detain us; nor shall I ever forget the parting and the blessing which they bestowed upon At length the travellers started. The first pause in the journey was at the Siberian Gate of Moscow: The Russian question has arisen once more; and men who had almost forgotten the existence of our Literary Association of the Friends of Poland are again looking back to the poetic ardor of Campbell and Tennyson in the cause, "The horses were soon in a gallop, dashing and are even recalling their romantic sorrows up the snow and slush in showers. In some over the Exiles of Siberia. At the very out-parts we were really brought to a stand on set of Mrs. Atkinson's book, we stand in nel stopped us at the gate of Moscow, an the bare stones, and at five o'clock the sentipresence of the frightful realities of banish- officer demanded our passports, which were shortly returned, and the bar was ordered to be raised. As we passed through, I seemed ment to the mines: 66 During my short stay in Moscow, it be to be bidding farewell to the world; I thought him my maiden name; I was instantly received of the many exiles who had crossed this bar- with open arms; he then hurried us into his rier; and it was a relief when we had passed sitting-room, giving me scarcely time to inbeyond the great archway. Amongst the troduce my husband. I was divested of all prisoners who are marched through this portal my wrappings, although we stated that our on their way to Siberia, some are steeped in stay would be short; he then seated me on the deepest crimes, others are convicted of a sofa, ran himself to fetch pillows to prop minor offences, and hundreds have passed this against my back, placed a stool for my feet; spot whose only crime was resisting the cruel indeed, had I been an invalid, and one of the treatment of their brutal masters." family, I could not have been more cared for, or the welcome more cordial. One of his comrades, whose family I was likewise acquainted with, was immediately sent for, as also the wife of one of the exiles, a peasant woman; her husband was dead; many of these poor unfortunates' have married with Cossacks. This woman came with her two the peasantry, or with the daughters of the children; I was the bearer of many a message, as well as little gifts for all. There was children, so that they might receive proper likewise a request for her to part with her And so they rode into the clear night and the frosty air, alone with nature and their Cossack guides: 6 6 matter over; we all urged her to consent, education. She told me she would think the "Mouravioff was looked upon as one of the most determined of the conspirators of 1825. His brother Serge was hanged. His was a hard fate, for the rope broke before life was extinct, and another had to be procured; in the mean time, consciousness returned, and he became aware of what was going forward, when he mildly said, it was very hard for a man to have to die twice.' The one who was exiled was condemned to solitude on reaching Siberia; he was separated from his comrades, seeing it was for their future well-being; she and banished to the forests of Yakoutsk, where left us, promising to do her best in bringing he spent a wretched life; his food was of the her mind to look upon the separation as she coarsest kind. The ground on which he had ought to do. I am happy to say that I have to lie was nothing but a marsh; here he dwelt two years, having intercourse with no one. Every comfort was denied him, even to books and writing materials. Count Orloff, in one of his despatches to the officer of justice who had him in charge, and who had received strict injunctions that a rigid supervision should be kept over the poor exile, demanded how he spent his time. His reply was rather laconic, he sleeps-he walks-he thinks.' He was after this never interfered with, till he joined his companions in exile. He is a most perfect gentleman, but there is no doubt that he has great determination of character; and I should think to look at him, years of exile have not changed his indomitable spirit." just heard she has allowed the children (a boy and a girl) to go to their aunt's, in Ekaterinburg, with whom we are acquainted, and who will receive them with great affection. Poor mother! at the same time, I know the pang of parting with her little treasures must have been great; but by the parting from them she has shown her great love." In some respects, the exiles of Jaloutroffsky are leniently treated; their crime being one of old date. According to our countryvery woman's report, they "form quite a little colony, dwelling in perfect harmony, the joys and sorrows of one becoming those of the others; indeed, they are like one family. The freedom they enjoy is, to a certain extent, greater than any they could have in Russia; for instance, full liberty of speech. They fear nothing; the dread of exile has no terrors for them. But what they have not, is liberty to go where they please; they are restricted in distance, as also in the use of firearms; however, the authorities in the town are exceedingly lenient towards them, permitting those who are fond of the chase to hunt wherever and whenever they please. These gentlemen, grateful for the indulgence given them, never fail to return the same night." M. Mouravioff, from his family connection with powerful governors and active generals in the service, was perhaps enabled to shield |