Here also is the sculptured prie-dieu on which she daily knelt before a large-sized engraving of the Crucifixion, very valuable it is said; a sculptured press where the lady stored her neatly folded linen, and other things of similar interest and value. Near this, again, we are introduced to the children's room, with a curtained alcove, where the two little girls were wont to nestle at night after they had said their prayers at the mother's knee, and received her evening blessing. This curtained alcove interested me, for I have noticed the same contrivance in remote corners of Flanders and in forgotten nooks in Wales. Adjoining here again is a room devoted to the spinet, such a one as would rejoice the heart of lovers of antique instruments. The notes are of ivory and number but one octave only, while the strings stretch out ad infinitum and in the wildest system of spinet manufacture. I did not stay to ascertain the age of the spinet. But it could not have belonged to Madame Plantin, as in her time spinets had not been invented. Virginals, I believe, were then in use. must have been made at a later date, a hundred and fifty years ago, when last the place was inhabited by the possessing family. It But the greatest wonder to me was the room where the Bibles and illuminated missals are kept, under long glass date 900. Here also the great, grand Polyglot Bible ordered by Philip II., to obtain which the directors of our own British Museum have vainly offered large sums. The illuminations of this and the other Bibles are exquisitely beautiful, in design, color, execution, and finish. And long and eagerly did I linger here to take in what of it I could, but our party were waiting and I was hurried on to other parts. The walls of this long room were covered with works of art Rubens, Vandyke, Jordaens, Boschaert, Vandenbrack and others, figuring in brilliant and precious form so as to complete a most valuable picture-gallery. These were collected by that Balthazar Plantin in 1629 who revived the establishment by his activity and sumptuous taste for art. There are two cabinets here of elegant and elaborate workmanship, the designs much too wonderful to escape my memory, even among so many objects of overwhelming interest, and a clock of the same style and make, given to the family by a member of the house of Austria. I never saw a more exquisite scroll design. There is a room filled with woodcuts, all kept under glass letters large and small intended for ushering in an especial chapter; heraldic devices, armorial bear ings, patterns, scrolls, frontispieces of most graceful design; all cut in the blackest oak and all drawn and designed by the greatest artists of the day. The etching room is no less wonderful and interesting. Both copper and proof, side by side, ranged in the same fashion and equally guarded under glass. Then the engraving room a museum of treasures in itself, such as no sum of money could purchase. The only engraving Rubens ever executed is seen in this collection. Also a room dedicated to the diplomas given to the founder, where among the rest are letters from Philip II. and the Duke of Alva. And here, hung up against the wall, is another precious document, containing the written regulations for workmen and the tariff of their wages. Neither must I forget the shop where books were sold over the counter; not open to the street like vulgar boutiques; but gained by a handsome street door and up stone steps flanked with balustrades in keeping with the rest. Even the paved courtyard possesses an interest and charm of its own, and delivers its individual message from the day when it was planted, they say, by Plantin's own hand. An ancient vine, black as ink, and, although three hundred years of age, still gives out vigorously rich leaves and tendrils in the spring, and a wealth of grapes in autumn. This is, after all, but an incomplete sketch of a museum unique of its kind, and so rich in interest that perhaps no attempt at description could do it justice. A catalogue has been printed and is sold on the premises; and to its pages I must refer such visitors as may be induced through the perusal of these lines to visit the latest and greatest wonder of Antwerp. MARCELLA F. WILKINS. From St. James's Gazette. ST. BERNARDS. THE first thing which must have struck anybody, at the great show of St. Bernard dogs lately held under the auspices of the St. Bernard Club, is that the type of the dog called of St. Bernard is still under process of development. We shall probably get to him by-and-by; but we have hardly arrived at him yet. Among the two hundred and fifty noble beasts exhibited, some of which were set down at a price exceeding that of a large borough to a candidate for Parliament, there was much variety of form and of character. Many of them might have passed in the catalogue as only big mastiffs; while the parents of others must certainly have been on visiting terms with a family of colleys. We need not enter into the difference as to texture of coat, for it is as yet a moot point whether the true St. Bernard granting that there ever was such a breed was rough or smooth. There is as much to be said on one side of the controversy as on the other. Probably the monks of the hospice, when they had a traveller to fetch out of the snow, did not lay any great stress on the length of hair of the dog despatched on that errand. But admitting that there may be true St. Bernards of any kind of coat or of any color, there still remain some points to be settled on which the judges appear to be by no means unanimous. Any one who took the trouble to compare the prize-winners at Knightsbridge must have been puzzled to discover what, beyond size and weight, constitutes a true St. Bernard. If Champion Barry," the winner of one hundred and fifty-seven cups and prizes, is a typical St. Bernard, then the award of a first prize to "Beauchief" must be regarded as a capricious judgment, for certainly no two large dogs could be more unlike than Barry and Beauchief. To add to the confusion there were two dogs under the " Foreign Class" hailing directly from Switzerland, which were unlike any of the prize-winners and very much smaller. And the climax of our perplexity is reached when we find the Reverend Mr. Macdona giving the first prize in the class for "champion roughcoated dogs to "Save," who is deficient in double dew-claws. Now, if there is any judge of St. Bernards who is supposed to know the breed, it is Mr. Macdona; and if there is any point on which Mr. Macdona has hitherto been firm, it is the double dew-claws. What is the precise value of the double dew-claw? Nobody has yet been able to discover; but if there is one thing more than another that goes to make the perfect St. Bernard, it is this abnormal superfluity of claw. Present the dew-claw, the dog is a true St. Bernard; absent the dew-claw, and he is a mongrel. Such is the faith under which we have been reared by the Reverend Mr. Macdona himself. The Père Metroz, monk of the hospice, has made solemn affirmation that to the true race of the St. Bernards, bred for a thousand years, it is essential to have double dewclaws. Yet here is an animal allowed to win the chief prize at the show who is wanting in this patent of purity. The conclusion is irresistible that we have no certain marks by which to know a true St. Bernard. The dog is a very noble dog, of sublime appearance and most gentlemanly manners; but the sooner we drop the hospice legend the better. The dogs which were shown last week at Knightsbridge never could have been reared among mountain snows, nor are they adapted to a monastic life. To all intents and purposes the animal which the St. Bernard Club has taken under its special charge is an English dog, who is no more from St. Bernard than the spaniel is from Spain and the spotted dog from Dalmatia. He is the product of artificial selection and unlimited good feeding; one result of which is to have made him at least one-half as big again as the native dog of the Alps. We can. not look upon such a dog as "Save without being impelled to say, with Henry V., "Those limbs were made in England." Nor is it possible to avoid the conviction that the St. Bernard of the shows is but a larger kind of mastiff, whose physical enlargement has been obtained at the sacrifice of some of those moral qualities which distinguish the old-fashioned English dog. It is true that connoisseurs speak of " a typical head" in connection with their favorite dogs, and there is doubtless a character of head belonging to the St. Bernard which is to be seen in no other dog. But there is not much in a head after all, and the rest is but big. ness. Magnificent as he is in form and bulk, we fear it must be said that the St. Bernard is one of the most useless of the dog kind. His intelligence is but of a very ordinary sort. His courage must be taken very much upon trust, and is prob ably inferior to that of dogs of lesser stature. In native sagacity he is certainly eat him. For all that, the St. Bernard deficient. As a watch-dog he cannot has many friends; and the fact that there compare with the mastiff. He is too big is a club established for his special culti for the house and too grand for the ken- vation is a proof of the extent to which nel. As a companion, his bulk is objec- the taste for this particular kind of dog tionable: one might as well be familiar has spread. His grandeur of aspect and with a jackass or romp with a brown bear. his general amiability entitle him to our He is supposed to be useful as a "pro- respect; his very helplessness is a claim tector," but it is a protection which savors upon our sympathy. There is something very much of proprietorship. To take melancholy in a dog of a hundred and him out for a walk is to reduce yourself forty pounds' weight having no motive to be led by your dog, instead of your whatever in life, and going about, with all leading him. To correct him is a delicate his tremendous potentiality of bite, unaoperation, which may lead to unpleasant ble to do anything to repay the love and results. There is nothing a St. Bernard meat which have been expended on his can do to justify his existence; and the education. Yet, as a result of what may digging of belated wayfarers out of the be done in the cultivation of the dog, the snow affords but a narrow opening for a St. Bernard is stupendous. He will condog in this country. The probabilities tinue to have his admirers, and probably are that a modern St. Bernard would not to grow bigger and bigger as the years know what to do with a man whom he advance, a magnificent testimony of Britdiscovered in a mountain pass, except to|ish skill in the art of breeding. A SLIDING MOUNTAIN IN OREGON. - The | government engineers engaged upon the ship canal around the rapids where the Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Mountains, and the engineers of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, whose railroad runs beside the government canal, have discovered that a point of the mountains, of tremendous height and three miles in extent, is moving down an incline into the river. The fact of a moving mountain is strange, but not incompre hensible. It seems, says an intelligent correspondent of the New York Times, that the great river and the ravines that point to it have cut their way down through a superincumbent mass of basalt into a substratum of sandstone. This sandstone, we will suppose, presents a smooth surface, with an incline toward the river; the river cuts under the basalt into the sandstone, and the natural effect is for the superincumbent basalt, acting like a similar formation of ice in a glacier, to slide down hill. The same gentleman says, on the authority of Mr. Thielson, engineer in chief of the Western Division of the Northern Pacific Railroad, that when an examination was made a year ago of a disused portage tramway past that point, the track was found to be twisted as much as seven or eight feet out of the true line in some places, caused beyond doubt by a movement of the mountain. It seemed certain to Mr. Thielson that there was a movement of a tremendous mountain spur opposite this piece of road. The correspondent goes on to say: "It is a fact well known to all river men that above the Cascades, where the river is tranquil, the waters cover a submerged forest, whose trunks still stand with their projecting limbs to attest some wonderful phenomenon. It has been a query in the minds of all as to what convulsion of nature or process of time caused this overflow of waters. Over thirty years ago I saw the dead trunks standing beneath the waves, and the interest in this connection was increased by learning from the Indians that among their traditions was one that ages since the mountains rose precipitously at the river's side, and a great arch of stone spanned the river from shore to shore, and that their canoes passed under it. Tradition further says that in course of time a great earthquake threw down the arch and blocked the river, causing the cascades as we see them now. It is not often that Indian tradition is so specific in detail. As the records of the aborigines of this region are very transient, it is possible that this story rests on some fact of natural history of not very remote occurrence. Joining tradi tion and speculation with the discoveries and deductions of science, we must conclude that some convulsion of nature has thrown great masses of rock into the stream sufficient to deaden its flow for eight miles above and to submerge the forests just above the rapids. Mr. Brazee, who has been engineer of the navigation company that owned the portage road around the falls, informs me that he has watched the movements of the mountain for twenty years, and that it is no myth.” Scientific American. Tor EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. To me and to my quarrel, king of men, and say, "This mound is his, who wrought great woe to Greece," And curse the day my mother bare a son. If Zeus, who guards the homes and hearths of Within the lion's heart, what time he sees Of Aphrodite, bane of gods and men, The misery, when the gods make sport with 'Neath double load of snow and foliage bowed, The man he wronged so foully. Yea, this Though journeying Death have beckoned us morn, I saw him in the vaward of their lines, Flaunting the godlike beauty of his limbs, And all the passion leapt in me that leaps to start? And faded smiles oft linger in the face, heart! |