Whilst the Honorable Mr. was waiting for a wind at Dover, it had been caught upon the cliffs, before it could well fly, by an English lad who was his groom: who not caring to destroy it, had taken it in his breast into the packet; and by course of feeding it, and taking it once under his protection, in a day or two grew fond of it, and got it safe along with him to Paris. At Paris, the lad had laid out a livre in a little cage for the starling; and as he had little to do better, the five months his master stayed there, he taught it in his mother's tongue the four simple words (and no more) to which I owed myself so much its debtor. Upon his master's going on for Italy the lad had given it to the master of the hotel. But his little song for liberty being in an unknown language at Paris, the bird had little or no store set by him; so La Fleur bought him and his cage for me for a bottle of burgundy. In my return from Italy, I brought him with me to the country in whose language he had learned his notes; and telling the story of him to Lord A, Lord A begged the bird of me; in a week Lord A gave him to Lord B; Lord B made a present of him to Lord C; and Lord C's gentleman sold him to Lord D's for a shilling; Lord D gave him to Lord E; and so on - half round the alphabet. From that rank he passed into the lower house, and passed the hands of as many commoners. But as all these wanted to get in, and my bird wanted to get out, he had almost as little store set by him in London as at Paris. It is impossible but many of my readers must have heard of him; and if any by mere chance have ever seen him, I beg leave to inform them that that bird was my bird, or some vile copy set up to represent him. I have nothing farther to add upon him, but that from that time to this I have borne this poor starling as the crest to my arms:- And let the herald's officers twist his neck about if they dare. IN LANGUEDOC: AN IDYL From 'A Sentimental Journey) WAS in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel, where there is the best Muscatto wine in all France- and which, by-theby, belongs to the honest canons of Montpellier; and foul befall the man who has drank it at their table, who grudges them a drop of it. The sun was set-they had done their work; the nymphs had tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a carousal. My mule made a dead point.-"Tis the fife and tambourin," said I.-"I'm frightened to death," quoth he."They are running at the ring of pleasure," said I, giving him a prick.-"By St. Boogar, and all the saints at the back-side of the door of purgatory," said he (making the same resolution with the Abbess of Andouillets), "I'll not go a step further.” — «Tis very well, sir," said I: "I will never argue a point with one of your family as long as I live." So leaping off his back, and kicking off one boot into this ditch and t'other into that "I'll take a dance," said I, "so stay you here." A sunburnt daughter of labor rose up from the group to meet me, as I advanced towards them; her hair-which was a dark chestnut, approaching rather to a black-was tied up in a knot, all but a single tress. "We want a cavalier," said she, holding out both her hands as if to offer them.—“And a cavalier ye shall have," said I, taking hold of both of them. "Hadst thou, Nannette, been arrayed like a duchess! But that cursed slit in thy petticoat!" Nannette cared not for it. "We could not have done without you," said she, letting go one hand, with self-taught politeness, leading me up with the other. A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe, and to which he had added a tambourin of his own accord, ran sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank.-"Tie me up this tress instantly," said Nannette, putting a piece of string into my hand. It taught me to forget I was a stranger.—The whole knot fell down. We had been seven years acquainted. The youth struck the note upon the tambourin, his pipe followed, and off we bounded.- "The deuce take that slit!" The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven sung alternately with her brother, 'twas a Gascoigne roundelay Viva la joia! Fidon la tristessa! The nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an octave below them. I would have given a crown to have it sewed up: Nannette would not have given a sous; Viva la joia! was in her lipsViva la joia! was in her eyes. A transient spark of amity shot across the space betwixt us. She looked amiable. Why could I not live and end my days thus? "Just Disposer of our joys and sorrows," cried I, "why could not a man sit down in the lap of content here, and dance and sing, and say his prayers, and go to heaven with this nut-brown maid?" Capriciously did she bend her head on one side, and dance up insidious. "Then 'tis time to dance off," quoth I. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) BY ROBERT BRIDGES N HIS illuminating essay The Lantern-Bearers,' which in a very few pages seems to bear the secret of Robert Louis Stevenson's life and art, he puts the kernel of it in the sentence: "No man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids; but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." If he was the most loved writer of his generation, it was because he freely gave his readers access to this warm phantasmagoric chamber. His "winning personality" is the phrase which his admirers use oftenest to express his charm. One of the most acute of these, Mr. Henry James, has still further defined this charm as the He Boy R. L. STEVENSON perpetual boy in him. He never outgrew the boy's delight in "make-believe." tells how the cardboard scenery and plays of Skelt, "A Penny Plain, 2d. Colored," which fascinated him as a boy, had given him "the very spirit of my life's enjoyment." and man, all that he needed for delight was "a peg for his fancy." "I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book." Burnt-cork mustachios expanded his spirit with "dignity and selfreliance.» To him the burnt cork was not the significant thing, the warm delight of it. It is not the silly talk of the boys on the links, or the ill-smelling lantern buttoned under their great-coats, but "the heaven of a recondite pleasure" which they inhabit, that is worth considering. "To find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing,"-that was Stevenson's endeavor; "for to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action." That is the very spirit of romantic youth; the search for "the incommunicable thrill of things," which his friend and biographer Sidney Colvin says was the main passion of Stevenson's romances,motive. life. "To his ardent fancy," says Colvin, "the world was a theatre, glaring with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance." To any one looking for the reason of Stevenson's perpetual charm, -even to those who can give a score of arguments for not liking his this brave spirit of youth is an adequate and satisfying The young find in it a full justification for their own hopes; the middle-aged feel again the very spring and core of the energy which they have been so long disciplining and driving to the yoke of every-day effort that they have forgotten its origin; and the old find their memories alive and glowing again with the romance of youth. In sickness or in health, in comedy or tragedy, Stevenson and the characters he creates are never wholly unconscious of man's inalienable birthright of happiness. No matter how dire his circumstances, it is a man's duty to keep looking for it, so that at the end he may say that he has not sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. "If I have faltered more or less This temperament in many men of a different race would surely lead to a life spent in the pursuit of pleasure,-in one long quest for new sensations, which in the end is sure to arrive at ennui and disgust. But Stevenson united the blood of the Balfours, who were preachers, given to metaphysics and the pursuit of moralities, with the Stevensons, "builders of the great sea lights," practical men of trained scientific minds and shrewd common-sense. The touch of the moral philosopher was never deeply hidden in his lightest work, which also showed the hand of the artisan in the skill of its construction. << What I want to give, what I try for, is God's moral," he once said; and 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' is a potent exhibition of it. How very early in life this temperament began to reveal itself in the craftsman, he shows in one of his essays: "All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy in my own private end, which was to learn to write. I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. . . I lived with words, and what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It |