not unworthy, I thought to myself, of a de la Mangerie-Rôch vàllénciêne.

[In fact, it is quite unnecessary to account for it at all; for in this branch of art the incidents need merely be picturesque in themselves and follow so closely at the heels of one another as to leave no time for criticism. I shall give an instance of this now.]

Her lips parted to answer me, a smile was beginning to gather in the dimples of her cheeks, when a strange thing happened. The color suddenly flew from her face, leaving it white as the pallid Duc upon the carpet, and into her lovely eyes rushed an expression of terror that after all these years haunts me still.

Quickly following their frozen glance I turned my head, and there, seen for an instant through the oriel window, I beheld the face of-the Duc Raoul Saint Christophe de la Mangerie-Rôchvallénciêne!

[By this neat trick attention is diverted from the mysterious entry of the lady-which might be difficult to explain without some constructive care; and if you waste time on this you may miss your market.

We will now suppose that our readers have been hurried through seventeen or eighteen similar episodes; that the lady is still partly wrapped in obscurity, though her name is discovered to be Antoinette Enaspic de Cotolette, and herself the high-spirited representative of a rival and much-injured house; that the mystery of the two Ducs has merely thickened; that a wicked Archbishop and a designing Count have appeared on the scene; and finally that our hero has come to Paris for reasons which have been evaded by a similar device to that described above. Let us now assume we are at chapter 20, and let us do the Earl'sCourt Exhibition old - Paris - street scene so popular with devourers of these romances.]

The landlord conducted me up stairs interminable and along corridors damp as vaults, where the arras rustled stealthily as we passed and the bats flitted noiselessly through the radiance of our lantern, till at length he paused before a door high up in this labyrinth of a hostelrie and turned a ponderous key. I looked over his shoulder in time to catch a glimpse of two gigantic rats scampering across an uncarpeted floor.

"Monsieur will find company," he said with his mocking leer.

"The company will find monsieur," I retorted with as cheerful an air as I could muster.

The fellow grinned at the jest [a fair sixteenth-century sample], and withdrew. I was alone at last!

Rapidly I cast my eyes round the room to make sure that I was unobserved, and then drew from my wallet the precious packet. The seal was still unbroken!

I smiled with renewed satisfaction and approached the window.

The stars were twinkling peacefully over Paris, as though they twinkled upon a Paradise instead of this huge cesspool of passion and hate. Far down below I looked upon a dark pavement and gleaming gutters, where the passing watchman with his cry of "Vive la France encore, mon ami!" and the muttered countersign, "Ma père, mon mère!" alone broke the deathly silence.

Right opposite I saw a jumble of peaked gables, latticed windows, and timbered fronts, and about half-way down the perpendicular wall of darkness confronting me I could just perceive a glimmer of light escaping from a narrow loophole.

It was my only chance.

Carefully measuring the distance with my eye and finding that it was only 52 kilometres 8 ells [this has a fine Franco-archaic sound; what it is in miles I cannot tell you, but no one

will stop to inquire at this exciting juncture], I commended my soul to Saint Julienne de Potage and leapt into the dizzy void.

Unfortunately I had miscalculated the distance. Instead of 52 kilometres it should have been 152! Round and round I spun in the cold midnight air till I had lost all count of my revolutions. I told my beads more hurriedly than I care to confess, and then stretched out my hand at a venture. What exactly happened I can scarcely describe; I only know that I caught a glimpse of the lighted loophole, grasped the projecting iron bar as I shot past, and with an almost superhuman effort seated myself astride the sill.

[After this feat our hero may with advantage witness a murder through the aforesaid loophole, fight a single combat with the murderer, bury the victim with a spade and a dark lantern, and in the act of doing this make the acquaintance of some popular historical character, such as Richelieu, Talleyrand, Henry the Fourth, or a Bourbon. He then rescues the heroine from a coffin, where she has been laid while drugged, confounds the machinations of the wicked archbishop, and all ends happily somewhat as follows.]

"I leave the decision in the fair hands of Mademoiselle Antoinette," said his Majesty with a courteous inclination.

I looked toward her, and my heart stood still. My fate was sealed indeed; her coolness for the last two days could have but one explanation. She had resolved to have my life.

I removed my breastplate and cried— "Strike, mademoiselle! A MangerieRôchvallénciêne knows how to die!" To my astonishment her beautiful eyes filled with tears.

"Anatole!" she exclaimed, stretching out her arms, "quelle rôti aujourd'hui!"

"Mademoiselle has decided," smiled

My dear Nephew,-The illustration I am now going to give you is an example of what may be styled the North British Melodramatic Idyll, one of the most popular brands at present in the market. The principal points to attend to in the construction of these remunerative epics are as follows.

In the first place, you must understand that the North Britons possessed at one time a language of their own as distinctively national as their marmalade, and fragments of this, together with certain phrases from the Venerable Bede, the Bible, and Mr. R. L. Stevenson (such as whithersoever, whereby, and peradventure), have been skilfully blended to form what is technically known in the hardy North as “a' oo' blethers." A few moments must certainly be employed in mastering this.

Secondly, it is highly advisable that the tale be put into the mouth of one of your fictitious characters, lest your friends should really suppose that this patois is the habitual outlet for your feelings.

Then a certain strain of sentiment must be caught. It is hard to exactly define this, but perhaps I can most nearly describe it by asking you to conceive the simplicity of an Oxford freshman united to the uncontrollable emotions of a Salvation Army captain, and illuminated by flashes of intelligence at

about the intervals at which they occur in a senile alcoholic patient. Place a hero thus equipped in a quagmire of hazardous adventures, give him the devil's own luck in getting out of them, and you can easily see that fourand-sixpence will not be too great a price to put upon his experiences.

And now, with these principles in mind, let us begin.

God wots I am but a feckless loon, and the ongoings I herewith give to the world only the clavers of a dreich and waesome peat-hag; yet it behoveth all men to speak of what they have seen, particularly should the profession of the ministry have given them (as by the grace of Providence it has given me) the gift of what they call in our parts the gab; and so will I e'en take up the tale upon a frosty morning in the latter part of November towards the close of the Fatal Year. Fatal indeed it had been for the old house of Auchterfechan. Two braw sons snippit awa' by the tattle-bogles, the kye blithered but and ben, and the winsome bit lass Miss Buttercup wrestling now with the dread curse of the Drumwharrochs. For the malison had erstwhile withered her rosy cheeks, and the doctor's nag stood even at that instant before the sneck kailyard.

Wae's me that I should have come into the parish on that day! The birken shaws that late had coyly smiled upon the keeking kisses of douce September, hung now so snell and drear that my heart almost failed me as I lingered in the Wabster's Wynd. The very curlydoddies seemed to have won some inkling whereby they might read the portents of the morrow.

[And so on for as many pages as the glossary employed continues to supply you with epithets. Throw them in like a snowstorm while it lasts, even should you have to lapse into English by the middle of the volume. The compara

tive clarity of your latter chapters will be forgiven by the unsuspicious Sassenach, and possibly even by the surfeited Caledonian.

This introductory outburst may be termed the brose or first course of your Scottish refection, and the experienced reader will soon begin to look out for the love-passage which inevitably oc curs in the course of chapters 2, 3, 4, or 5. It must of course be a girl-andboy affair, a case of simple-hearted, impulsive, pre-adolescent affection; what, in fact, is popularly termed "pretty," and known more technically to North Britons as "havers." Thus:-] "Buttercup," said I, "now that I am become a man, 'tis time my beard 'gan sprout."

["'gan sprout" equals began to sprout; a melodramatically idyllic manner of expressing it, calculated to produce a kind of poetic effect.]

"Man?" quoth she, laughing, and shaking her elf-locks at me with very merriment. "Thou a man!"

["Thou" used for same purpose.] "And why not man?" I answered stoutly, though I felt my face reddening 'neath her laughing gaze. "I am going to Glasgow College come Martinmas a se'nnight."

"That will not make a boy into a man," she said more sedately.

""Twill make a sonsy lass into a flint-hearted woman," I retorted, with a strangled uprush of tears that eftsoon bechoked my utterance.

With mischancy divination I saw her in my mind's eye as I was after to see her in the flesh, enclasped by the black arms of Bloodyaxe 'neath the pitying twinkle of the stars. "Ye neep-heided gomeral!" she scoffed. "A man like you to greet! Think shame to yourself!"

Yet her look was kinder than her keen-edged wit, and suddenly, ere I had time to catch my breath, she had kissed me roundly on the neb.

"Tammas, lad," she cried, "am I no' nicer than haggis after a'?"

"Whiles," I replied, pressing her snowy bosom 'gainst my homespun jerkin.

[This delicate morsel of poetry having been digested, and found not to lie too heavy on the "stammick," we shall now suppose our readers carried breathlessly through the assassination of Grey Jock by his hereditary rival Muckledowp of Middenbraes, through the moonlight landing of the Clan Collop on the shores of Cookypen, and through the fifteen or sixteen murders, hamesuckens, robberies, and abductions to which this untoward event gives rise. Our hero, who has hitherto borne a blameless character in the ministry, becomes involved in an attempt to fire the Kirk by the horrid yet ingenious device of steeping the elders in paraffin and grouping them round the stove. This occurs through no fault of his own, but merely as a natural consequence of the disposition and acquirements indicated at the beginning of this letter. However, just as one thing leads to another in kindred fields of life (such as the nursery and the asylum), so the joys of arson lead our archaic raconteur to consecrate himself to a life of gore. A magnificent opportunity for Turkish-bathing in undiluted pathos is afforded by his farewell to the survivors of his congregation and the cinders of his elders. Thus:-]

For the last time I ascended the steps of the pulpit, whence Sabbath after Sabbath, through hirpling May and wowf November, I had striven as well as a man might to daunt the faithful and controvert the heresies of the schismatics. For we were sore troubled with the Free Kirk in Auchterfechan. The effects of my thoughtless violence were still to be seen in the roofless vestry and charred precentor, but of Blackwood's Magazine.

these manifestations I took but little beed at that moment. An I had possessed a belly stiff enough to face the moved countenances of my flock [note the forcible vulgarity of this phrase; it is one of the hallmarks of the N.B. epic], then peradventure I should have spied salt tears in eyes that never grat before, but my heart was too full to jalouse them.

"My poor friends and brethren," I began-and you could have heard a bawbee drop for very silence when I oped my lips,-"you are going to be bereft of me. Would that I might continue to sustain, fructify, and inspire you, but, my friends, it is not to be. A higher calling awaits me, a louder voice booms in my lug. I have tasted the joys of brandishing claymores on the moorlands, of enthusiastically loving hoydenish maids, of burying mine enemies by the half hundred, of swimming the waterfall and leaping the precipitous ravine, and nothing more is needed to convince me that herein lies my duty. Yet I shall aye think of you kindly, and hope to meet the best among you hereafter."

At these words my voice failed me, my mind clouded, and all I can now remember is being carried by Andra Sneckett and Cristie Mackay towards the Kye trough in Thrums Lane.

At this point I shall leave you to finish the epic as you think best. The only two essential points are these: You must not leave too many characters surviving at the fall of the curtain, or you will have a blood-fed publ lic demanding back their four-and-sixpences: and you must appropriately reward your hero for his exertions by legally uniting him to that exuberant product of amorous innocence, Miss Buttercup of Auchterfechan.-Your affectionate and well-intentioned Uncle.

Some time ago I held conversation with a Spanish gentleman who had been making a tour of England. "Yes," he said, in reply to an inviting question of mine, "I have seen many things that have filled me with wonder: the rush of business in London, the magnificence of your buildings, the keenness in trade. I have seen your great steelworks in Sheffield, your busy Black Country about Birmingham, your shipbuilding yards on the Clyde-side, and your great cotton-factories in Lancashire. It is all marvellous. But I wouldn't like to be an Englishman. I am glad to be going back to my own sunny Spain. We're a poor people, but we get some brightness out of life. We've got no great commerce to be proud of; but then we've got no country bleached of all beauty, as I've seen in your Black Country; we've got no

crowds of young men and women in consumption from working in mills, as in Yorkshire and Lancashire. You're a great people, a mighty industrial nation. But what a price you are paying for it! I'm going back to my orange trees and sunshine and happiness."

At the time I thought little of my friend's outburst. Recently I have been recalling it every day. For I have returned from a mission of inquiry into industrial conditions prevailing in the United States. I have been coming in contact with many British manufacturers, and the reply they have invariably given, when I have pictured to them the dash, the sweeping success of industrial America, has been, "Oh, yes, the Americans are a great people. But we in England don't live to work: we work to live. What is the good of be ing alive if you have to slave from