I

enough to crow over because we didn't get Thomas Maxwell's money; they sha'n't have this nohow. You'll have to lend me some money, an' I'm goin' to Boston to-morrow, an' I'm goin' to buy a silk dress for Flora, an' get it made, so she can go out bride when she comes home; an' they've got to come here an' board. might jest as well have the board-money as them Freemans, an' folks sha'n't think we ain't on good terms. Can you let me have some money to-morrow mornin'?” "Of course I can, Aunt Jane," said Francis, soothingly. "I'll make Flora a wedding-present of it."

You

"I don't want it for a weddin'-present. I'll pay you back some time. If you're goin' to give her a weddin'-present, I'd rather you'd give her something silver that she can show. I ain't goin' to have you give her clothes for a weddin' present, as if we was poor as the Freemans. didn't never have any pride. There ain't nobody in this family ever had any pride but me, an' I have to keep it up, an' nobody liftin' a finger to help me. Oh dear!" The old woman quivered from head to foot; her face worked as if she was in silent hysterics.

"Don't, Aunt Jane," whispered her nephew-"don't feel so bad. Maybe it's all for the best. Why, what is the matter with your wrist?"

66

She didn't," Mrs. Robbins motioned back, shaking her head.

Francis sat beside the minister's wife. She talked on about the wedding, and he listened soberly and assentingly.

"Well, it will be your turn next, Francis," said she, with a sly graciousness, and the young man reddened, and laughed constrainedly.

Francis seldom glanced at Lois, but it was as if her little figure in the window was all he saw in the room. She seemed so near his consciousness that she shut out all else besides. Lois did not look at him, but once in a while she put up her hand and arranged the hair on her forehead, and after she had done so felt as if she saw herself with his eyes. The air was growing cool; presently Lois coughed.

'You'd better come away from that window," said Mrs. Field, speaking out suddenly.

There was no solicitude in her tone; it was more like a harsh command. Every

"Why, it's an awful burn. want something on it?"

Don't you

"No; I don't mind no burns." Suddenly Mrs. Maxwell moved away from her nephew. She begun arranging the plates on the table. "You go into the parlor," said she, sharply, "an' don't you let them know you didn't know about it. You act kind of easy an' natural when they speak about it. You go right in; tea won't be ready quite yet. I've got something a little extra to see about."

Francis went into the parlor and greeted the guests, shaking hands with them rather boyishly and awkwardly. The minister's wife made room for him on the sofa beside her.

"I suppose you'd like to hear about your cousin's wedding that I went to this afternoon," said she, with a blandness that had a covert meaning to the other women, who listened eagerly.

"Yes, I would," replied Francis, with steady gravity.

anxious interest. He partly arose, as if to make room for her on the sofa, but she simply moved her chair farther back. Presently Francis went over and shut the window.

The minister, Mr. Tuxbury, and Mrs. Robbins's husband all arrived together shortly afterwards. Mrs. Maxwell an

nounced that tea was ready.

"Will you please walk out to tea?" said she, standing in the door, in a ceremonious hush. And the company arose hesitatingly, looking at one another for precedence, and straggled out.

"You sit here," said Mrs. Maxwell to Lois, and she pointed to a chair beside Francis.

Lois sat down, and fixed her eyes upon her green and white plate while the minister asked the blessing.

"It's a pleasant day, isn't it?" said Francis's voice in her ear, when Mrs. Maxwell began pouring the tea.

"Real pleasant," said Lois.

Mrs. Maxwell had on her black gloves

pouring the tea. The women eyed them surreptitiously. She wore them always in company, but this was an innovation. They did not know how she had put them on to conceal the burn in her wrist which she had gotten in her blind fury as she flew about the kitchen preparing supper, handling all the household utensils as if they were weapons to attack Providence.

1871

MRS. HENRY MAXWELL.

Mrs. Maxwell poured the tea and portioned out the sugar with her black-gloved hands, and Mrs. Field stiffly buttered her biscuits. Nobody dreamed of the wolves at the vitals of these two old women.

However, the eyes of the guests from the first had wandered to a cake in the centre of the table. It was an oblong black cake; it was set on a plate surrounded thickly with sprigs of myrtle, and upon the top lay a little bouquet of

white flowers and green leaves. Mrs. Lowe and Mrs. Robbins, who sat side by side, looked at each other. Mrs. Lowe's eyes said, "Is that a weddin'-cake?" and Mrs. Robbins said: "I dun know; it ain't frosted. It looks jest like a loaf she's had on hand."

But nothing could exceed the repose and dignity with which Mrs. Maxwell, at the last stage of the meal, requested her nephew to pass the cake to her. Nobody could have dreamed as she cut it, every turn of her burned wrist giving her pain, of the frantic haste with which she had taken that old fruit cake out of the jar down cellar, and pulled those sprigs of myrtle from the bank under the north windows.

"Will you have some weddin'-cake?" said she.

The ladies each took a slice gingerly and respectfully. Mrs. Lowe and Mrs. Robbins nodded to each other imperceptibly. The cake was not iced with those fine devices which usually make a wedding-loaf, it was rather dry, and not particularly rich; but Mrs. Maxwell's perfect manner as she cut and served it, her acting on her own little histrionic stage, had swayed them to her will. Mrs. Lowe and Mrs. Robbins both thought she knew. But the minister's wife still doubted; and later, when the other women were removed from the spell of her acting, their old suspicions returned. It was always a mooted question in Elliot whether or not Mrs. Jane Maxwell had known of her daughter's marriage. Not all her subsequent behavior, her meeting the young couple with open arms at the station on their return, and Flora's appearance at church the next Sunday in the silk dress which her mother had concocted during her absence, could quite allay the suspicion, although it prevented it from gaining ground.

All that evening Mrs. Maxwell's courage never flagged. She entertained her guests as well as a woman of Sparta could have done. She even had the coolness to prosecute other projects which she had in mind. She kept Mrs. Field and Lois behind the rest, and walked home with the mother, that Francis might have the girl to himself. And she went into the house with Mrs. Field, and slipped a parcel into her pocket, while the two young people had a parting word at the gate. [TO BE CONTINUED.]

IF

F the creator of Duncan was right in saying that there is no art to find the mind's construction in the face, then must the author of the Novum Organum have been wrong when he declared that "physiognomy....discovereth the disposition of the mind by the lineaments of the body"; and these, curiously enough, are parallel passages never quoted by the believers in the theory that Bacon was the writer of Shakespeare's plays.

It is not intended here to enter into a discussion of the merits or demerits of physiognomy. This is an Exhibition of Portraits, not a Phrenological Lecture. I shall try to show how these men and women looked, in death and in life, not why they happened to look as they did; and I shall dwell generally upon their brains, occasionally upon their bones, but only incidentally upon their bumps.

The ancient Romans are said to have made colored masks, in wax, of the faces of their illustrious dead, and recent explorers have satisfied themselves that in the early burials of all nations it was the custom to cover the heads and bodies of the dead with sheets of gold so pliable that they took the impress of the form; and not infrequently, when in the course of centuries the embalmed flesh had shrivelled or fallen away, the gold retained the exact cast of the features. Schliemann found a number of bodies "covered with large masks of gold-plate in repoussé-work," several of which have been reproduced by means of engraving in his Mycence; and he asserts that there can be no doubt whatever that each one of these represents the likeness of the deceased person whose face it covered.

When Hamlet said that Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, he overlooked the fact that Alexander's dust, instead of being converted into loam to stop a beer-barrel, was preserved from corruption by the process of embalming, and from external injury by being cased in the most precious of metals. Pettigrew, in his History of Egyptian Mummies, says of the death-mask of Alexander that "it was a sort of chase-work, and of such a nature that it could be applied so closely to the

skin as to preserve not only the form of the body, but also to give the expression of the features to the countenance." He does not quote his authority for this statement, but it is unquestionably derived from the account of the death and burial of Alexander written by Diodorus Siculus, who said: "And first a coffin of beaten gold was provided, so wrought by the hammer as to answer to the proportions of the body; it was half filled with aromatic spices, which served as well to delight the sense as to prevent the body from putrefaction." Then follows a description of the funeral chariot, and of the long line of march from Babylon to Alexandria, where Augustus Cæsar saw the tomb three hundred years later; but there is no reference to a mask of Alexander's face in gold.

The value of a plaster cast as a portrait of the dead or living face cannot for a moment be questioned. It must of necessity be absolutely true to nature. It cannot flatter; it cannot caricature. It shows the subject as he was, or is, not only as others saw him, in the actual flesh, but