Avery had seen his gallery every time he went to Dresden, and knew the picture. The conversation in the studio continued, and Avery and Lucas agreed that "Le Renseignement" was, indeed, a wonderful canvas. Petit had 1ried to buy it back, but could not get it. It was thought it would be impossible to get Mayer to sell it, but Avery, authorized by Mr. Vanderbilt, resolved to try. He did not wish to make a trip to Dresden at the time, so he wrote to Mayer that a friend of his wanted the picture, but not as a matter of business. It was not to buy to sell again. The banker replied that he had often been importuned to sell the picture, but had invariably refused; yet, now that he felt himself growing old (he had then reached the age of eighty), and that as after his death his family might not care to keep it, he would take a certain price for it. He added that he might change his mind over night, for he found it hard to decide to sell.. Avery lost no time in telegraphing, and the next day received the canvas by parcels post; the marvellous picture was actually in his room in the hotel! A draft on London was sent to Dresden at once, and the deed was done.

Mr. Vanderbilt and his two fellowconspirators now set about arranging a surprise for Meissonier. The next day was to be the last sitting for the portrait, and when they arrived at the studio one of them carried a parcel, which was placed in a safe corner. The sitting proceeded, and at last Meissonier said the portrait was finished; there was not another touch to be added. "Now you may see me sign," he announced, and the act was accomplished with a due observance on the part of the company of the importance of the moment. The artist then went into another room to put the little portrait in a frame he had ready for it. "Le Renseignement," was quickly taken from the corner, set in a frame on the easel, and the three men stood by to see what Meissonier would do. "When he came in and suddenly saw the picture," says Mr.

Avery, "he almost went crazy in his joy. He got down on his knees before it so that he could look at it closely, and cried out, 'Oh, mon bon tableau! Oh, mon bon tableau!' and with difficulty found words to express his delight. He loved his picture that he never expected to see again, and his heart was full."

From "Souvenirs of a Veteran Collector," By William A. Coffin.

MR. BARRIE AND HIS MOTHER. In the introduction to the "Auld Licht Idylls" in the new Thistle Edition of his works (Scribner's), Mr. Barrie says that "they were written mainly to please one woman, now dead." In the beautiful biography of his mother, "Margaret Ogilvy," just published, he speaks of "the mute blue eyes in which I have read all I know and would ever care to write; for when you looked into my mother's eyes you knew as if he had told you why God sent her into the world-it was to open the eyes of all who looked to beautiful thoughts, and that is the beginning and end of literature." How much, how very much, Mr. Barrie owes to his mother and to his home life may be gathered from this little volume. It is a book to lay beside "A Window in Thrums," not only because of the beauty of the work, but because it flashes a light upon those chapters which illumines them, and, if possible, makes them more noble and enduring in their revelation. He tells us how one day as a boy he conceived a glorious idea, "or it was put into my head by my mother, then desirous of making progress with her new clouty hearth-rug." He was suffering from a moment of suspense in the interval between the last and forthcoming numbers of a magazine called Sunshine, which contained a serial story. "The notion was nothing short of this-why should I not write the tales myself? I did write them-in the garret-but that by no means helped her to get on with her work, for when I finished a

chapter I bounded down-stairs to read it to her, and so short were the chapters, so ready was the pen, that I was back with a new manuscript before another clout had been added to the rug." At twelve or thereabout he put the literary calling to bed for a time, and took up cricket and football instead, but from the day on which he first tasted blood in the garret his mind was made up. "There could be no hum-dreadful-drum profession for me; literature was my game. I remember being asked by two maiden ladies about the time I left the university what I was to be, and when I replied, brazenly, 'An author,' they flung up their hands, and one exclaimed, reproachfully, 'And you an M.A.!'' His mother's views at first were not dissimilar, and her ambition for her boy was that he should be a minister, with a lurking hope at the bottom of her heart that he might rise to a professor's chair. Mr. Barrie relates an incident of those years which has a prophetic significance. "I had one person only on my side; he was an old tailor, one of the fullest men I have known, and quite the best talker. This man had heard of my sets of photographs of the poets, and asked for a sight of them, which led to our first meeting.... I remember how he spread them out on his board, and, after looking long at them, turned his gaze on me and said solemnly,

...

'What can I do to be forever known, And make the age to come my own?' These lines of Cowley were new to me, but the sentiment was not new, and 1 marvelled how the old tailor could see through me so well. I hurried home, but neighbors had dropped in, and this was for her ears only, so I drew her to the stair and said imperiously,

'What can I do to be forever known, And make the age to come my own?' It was an odd request for which to draw her from a tea-table, and she must have been surprised, but I think she did not laugh, and in after years she would repeat the lines fondly with a flush on her soft face. That is the kind you would like to be yourself!' we would

...

say in jest to her, and she would reply, almost passionately, 'No, but I would be windy (proud) of being his mother.' She who stood with me on the stair that day was a very simple woman, accustomed all her life to making the most of small things, and I weaved sufficiently well to please her, which has been my only steadfast ambition since I was a little boy."

I have said that this is a book to put side by side with "A Window in Thrums," and there is a deeper reason for this when we remember that on the recent deaths of Mr. Barrie's mother and her daughter, within a few hours of each other, it was then disclosed that they were the originals of Jess and Leeby. The lovely story of their lives had a beautiful and not wholly mournful end; it was mournful as mortal things are, but the beauty was more than the sorrow, and Mr. Barrie's book will make this clearer. In the almost intolerably pathetic chapter, "Dead This Twenty Years," Mr. Barrie, in writing about the tragedy in another woman's life, drew his inspiration from a similar tragedy in his mother's life. "It was the only thing," he says, "I have written that she never spoke about, not even to that daughter she loved the best. No one ever spoke of it to her or asked her if she had read it; one doesn't ask a mother if she knows that there is a little coffin in the house. She read many times the book in which it was printed, but when she came to that chapter she would put her hands to her heart or even over her ears."

From "Three Scots Worthies in America." By James MacArthur.

From The Forum.

CHURCH ENTERTAINMENTS.

I need not, I fancy, further transcribe from my record. The extremes to which venders of sensational religion, and managers of sensational church performances, are forced, will sufficiently appear from the instances already given. Referring to the Sunday performances, I would be under

at any well-meant effort to make religion attractive. Dignity is not the chief consideration in a divine service, and it is conceivable that it is sometimes expedient to sacrifice good taste to a more important thing-the benefit of souls. But I deplore, and I feel that serious men must everywhere deplore, the conditions which make the sensational Sunday show frequent and familiar. As a means of drawing a big house, I concede its convenience, under our present unhappy divisions; but I traverse the opinion, if it is anywhere held, that a Sunday show would be necessary under a sane and Christian-that is, a united, a Catholic -administration of religion. Where

now rival sects find it necessary to "go to the masses" with Prize Texts, Bicycle Runs for Christ, Cyclone Evangelists, and Lantern Services, a united Church, soberly engaged in its proper work, would find the masses eager to come to it. I greatly misjudge the people if they would not be more strongly attracted by an institution with a distinctive and easily discerned character, than they are by a multitude of nondescript concerns which are indifferently meeting-houses, cycle depots, or barber shops.

But it is not a desire to gather the people, in order to preach the gospel, to them, that actuates congregations which engage in the miscellaneous entertainments, some of which I have described. Thereat suck they out no small advantage. The raison d'être of these things is in the fact that a hundred and forty seets have fastened themselves upon a people who cannot support them. The show is the only means by which thousands of our innumerable and unnecessary religious societies can pay their bills. The inevitable tendency toward greater and greater sensationalism has been repeatedly pointed out in this series of papers. The present article may perhaps suggest the conclusion that this tendency is now not far from the limit which a decent civilization will impose. The end of the path is being reached.

past year affords evidence that, with dangerous rapidity, church entertainments are taking the nature of improper exhibitions. Ordinary buffoonery no longer draws. The more tempting attractions of the forbidden, the more spicy morsels of the variety theatre, are demanded, and are being supplied.

Here again I would not be misunderstood. Healthy amusement, honest fun, is for human enjoyment. God has filled the world with good things, and we ought to use them. Good-natured nonsense is refreshing. Beautiful faces and graceful dances are joys in which we are wise to take pleasure. That there is a frank, though restrained, life of the senses possible as an attendant upon the highest spirituality, I believe to be the teaching of the Sacraments ordained by Christ. Over-squeamishness is not a necessary characteristic of earnest morality. Le: us be human; let us be hearty; let us be, as we were made, men and women; but, in Heaven's name! let us insist that when people appear in, or for the benefit of, churches, they shall keep on their proper clothes. The theatre and the music-hall, properly conducted, are not establishments upon which the Church has any war to wage. But the Church is not a system of theatres and music-halls. It is a divine institution with a definite, particular, and sacred office, distinct from that of all human agencies whatsoever. It is to teach the sacredness of life, by standing for the essentially sacred side of life. Its songs are not merry glees, but litanies of human hopes and sorrows, and chants of human hearts in winged aspirations seeking God. If there is in life anything pure, and virginal, and sweet,-God knows it is hard enough to keep the faith that there is!-where is there to be kept any place and expression for it, if what are called the houses of God are given over to immodesty? We expect certain things from Mr. Hardy and the Zolaists, but we are hurt and grieved when the Galahad of