the place and the stables and outhouses in its rear. We enter a voorhuis, or front room, very lofty and but slightly furnished. Its walls are lined by benches, and a table stands in the middle. There are pictures, it may be, very quaint and old world; scenes in the life of the Prodigal Son, or limnings of the Manger at Bethlehem, or the Cross on Calvary. A new piano may be noted, and a good harmonium, and pious books with Dutch titles lie scattered about. And there are flowers on table and on mantelpiece, photographs and albums, for there are daughters in the house. In some place of honor lies a great old Bible, a massive folio bound in leather and with brass clasps; it is printed in foreign-looking type on ancient-looking paper, and full of the strangest pictures that ever delighted the antiquary or mystified the child. A companionable book upon a dull occasion, but disappointing, inasmuch as its date discovers it to have been printed but the other day. Spittoons stud this chamber's floor, for it is the great reception-room, and visitors sit round it and smoke their pipes at times and seasons of conference and waiting; and many such times there be.

At the back of this voorhuis is the dining-room, entered by large and even handsome folding doors. In both apart ments the walls are painted light blue, or green, or mauve; in both the ceiling is raftered and wooden, varnished and dark. The great feature of the diningroom, apart from the usual furnishings, is a small table near the window, with a chair on either side. Upon this table stands a coffee urn with chafing-dish beneath it; and the day has scarcely turned before this urn begins to steam and to bubble. On its dexter side is seated the lady of the house, who pours out coffee for all comers, and, with feet well planted on a box-like footstool, rules and manages her household. Children play around her, a colored girl sits watchful at her feet, and at favorable moments her lord and master occupies the corresponding chair, utters familiar maxims and remarks, and his friend, sitting hard by, carries on an intermittent conversation between wary mouthfuls of the scalding beverage. He is a wellbuilt man, not unlike the English farmer of our early days, but more sallow and

less cheery, more puritanical and staid. His ancestors came from France and Holland, but in this wondrous climate of the Cape, perchance for animal life the finest under the sun, their offspring have developed into a race sui generis, nobly grown and quite unlike the typical Hollander or Frenchman. We converse in Dutch, the only language he cares to speak, although his children are apt scholars in the English tongue, and byand-by he takes us into his garden.

A shady place this is, with groves of peach trees, apricots, and almonds, a stray apple-tree here and there, and pears, walnuts, and nectarines, all in excellent bearing. Here a vineyard, there a patch of tall Indian corn rising far over our heads. At our feet a wilderness of gourds and water-melons-a veritable garden of cucumbers.' There are white-hearted cabbages which would fill a bucket, and cauliflowers that would puzzle a boiler to cook them; enormous potatoes and carrots large as our mangold-wurzel. Scarcely a weed to be seen; the ground was a desert before the water came there, and grows only what is planted there by man. Twice weekly the place is carefully flooded, and our friend rises in the middle of the night for one of these hebomadal spells of water leading. The region is hereabouts too cold for oranges, but in many a district from Capetown to the far Transvaal these beautiful and fruitful trees lend a romance and pleasantness of their own to the orchards of the Boers.

The poorer Boer lives in a humbler dwelling, with floors of hardened mud consolidated by frequent washings of liquid cow-dung. His rooms are ceiled with reeds laid cunningly on rough beams of yellow-wood. The attic beneath his comfortable thatch is a very storehouse of vegetable products, dried and housed for winter use. His furniture is ruder and of home construction. His walls are whitewashed, and in shelved recesses stand favorite pieces of crockery, mysterious bottles, and well-thumbed books of devotion. He spends his leisure in making boots of untanned leather, which he sews together with the sinews of animals which he has previously prepared for the purpose; and in mending the bottoms of his chairs and benches

In the Boers we have the remarkable spectacle of a nation holding but one religion, strict conformity to which is essential to respectability of any sort; while the devotee or active professor alone can hope for social leadership among them. In the district of which our village is the only town there are three thousand souls. On the occasion of a revival some years since, a religious paper stated there were but fifty persons of the number who had not been converted. The district was founded in order to support a place of worship, and the village is known technically as a "Church town." A scoffing European suggested it should bear a kirk rampant for its coat of arms. Nine thousand pounds were expended on the church and parsonage. The former much resembles a dissenting chapel, but is dignified by steeple and bell, and by a town clock which strikes the hours. At the cost of £500 and more an organ was added. The purchase was made in Germany. At a cost of £200, again, the building was lighted with hanging lamps. The parsonage-pastorie is the local word -large, low, convenient, and handsome, stands in a garden, with lone vine-roofed walkes and peaches of admirable flavor. The Dutch minister or Predikant—often a man of good Cape family who has studied at Utrecht or at Leyden-is the spiritual leader and director of his flock, subject only to the mild and hesitating control of his deacons and his elders. No English rector enjoys a higher social status. A bishop of Grahamstown, witnessing the comfort and the unlimited influence of such an one, ejaculated almost unconsciously, "You are little Popes."

Not only are the ministers great men, but ecclesiastical discipline reigns supreme. Woe to the unlucky couple who have married too tardily for absolute propriety, to the young man who has been sowing wild oats, or to the jolly old fellow who has taken a glass too much! One and all are hauled up before the Consistory, in full conclave assembled, and publicly censured and punished. An accused person whom the Solicitor-General had refused to prosecute for lack of evidence was summoned before the Kerkraad, witnesses were ex

Church and people being thus identical, the first-class undenominational school is really a very denominational institution indeed. The head-master with his £350 a year, the head-mistress with her £200 or more (a young lady from Capetown, who is sure to be persuaded into matrimony by some ardent and eligible bachelor, almost before the year is out), and their subordinates, are managed and chosen to all intents and purposes by the Dutch congregation and its leaders. Nor could it well be otherwise. To the Boer stripling, even to the Boer child, school-going is a passion -a relief, it may be, from the monotony of home. Holidays are deplored, and the end of a vacation is hailed with delight. Dullards there are, of course, but some of the pupils make admirable progress. Some aspire to the ministry, and the University of Capetown is besieged by eager candidates from the haunts of the springbok and the ostrich. Young girls too, some very sweet and lovable, more enthusiastic than their brothers, proceed to local examinations, and pass with éclat. Learning is the fashion, and a good one; and the professions begin to teem with scions of Boer houses who have sought pursuits more ambitious and eventful than the watching of harvests or the herding of sheep.

The colored people have a minister and a chapel to themselves, nominally autonomous, but practically managed and mostly paid for by the Boers. Their services are more emotional and often more interesting than those of their palefaced masters. Their minister is a kind of curate, socially inferior to the Predikant of the Boer congregation; nor is he permitted to ascend the pulpit of the white man's church. He, too, has his elders, deacons, and church wardensKafirs, Hottentots, or the mixed descendants of Malay slaves. Now these poor negroes have a passion for religious worship and for school. men and women seated among the children, slate in hand; boys and girls give up everything for their lessons. Servants will desert you at the school-hour and neglect their duties to con their spellingbooks. The tyranny of some of their teachers is almost worthy of a School

You will see

Board, but it is backed by the scholars themselves, and the much-enduring employer of labor has only to grin and bear it as best he can.

Foremost among the local magnates is the wealthy landowner-a Boer, as are all the up-country landowners, but whose intelligence, hospitality, and commonsense would be a credit to any nationality. He owns a first-class house in the town, which he inhabits on Sundays, coming on the Saturday with his entire family and riding off again on the Monday; a house which rivals his country residence in the excellence of its furniture and appointments. All kinds of people call to ask his advice or his assistance, to do business or to evidence their friendship. All drink his coffee, shake hands round the circle of his family, and call him "uncle" or "cousin" as the case may be; and with show of reason too, for the district is peopled by his kindred. The town is filled with such houses, whose closed shutters have a dreary aspect all the rest of the week. Such a rushing and plunging of horsemen, a rumbling of wagons drawn by trains of oxen, a whirling of tented carts, as Saturday comes round; such buying and selling in the stores; such throngs of men and women in the streets, where grass would grow at other times if the growth of grass were possible in such a desert; such crowded services at church; such crowded and hearty prayer meetings; such pleasant converse at those evening gatherings on the stoeps; such thrilling love passages between the young and such cordial greetings among the old; such fuss, noise, sensation, and life as we have long forgotten in these old and jaded communities of Europe.

The local supervision of the township is intrusted to a municipality, founded on European traditions and provided with regulations which have had the previous sanction of the Government. Here again the members, from the Chairman to the Town Clerk, are Boers and Africanders. The large town lands are admirably managed. No one can quarry stone or dig sand without a license. Each householder is allowed to departure so many sheep, horses, or oxen, and no more. Special laws are enacted respecting ostriches and pigs. Sanitary requirements are not forgotten. But the great

bone of municipal contention, if contention there be in so peaceful and united an assembly, is the control of the water supply. A special contractor keeps in working order the trench or canal which conveys a stream some two miles long from the higher level of the distant river bed; a stream on which depends the very existence of the town. Unpleasant for this functionary it is when the watercourse, which winds sometimes along hillsides and sometimes in deep cuttings, becomes choked with sand, or breaks its banks, or gets too palpably full of frogs and weeds. The public are aggrieved, and it is easier to worry a subordinate than to have it out with a drought or a water flood. Then there is a pound, filled sometimes with stray cattle, and there are rather lively sales when the said cattle remain unclaimed. Gangs, too, of prisoners have to be superintended, who clean and level the streets and construct earthworks and dams. A municipality, slow but honest, of well-to-do middle-class men, untroubled by the warfare of politicians or the hectoring of demagogues.

Such then, is a Boer village from Anguillas to Kuruman, from Capetown to the Portuguese frontier. In some the European population is much larger; in some anti-English feeling is more intense.

In the Transvaal Republic the Landrost took the place of the Resident Magistrate, Dutch was the language of the Government as well as of the people, and the negroes were more palpably an inferior and subject race; but there the distinction ended. English communities of any size are only to be met with in the coast districts around Algoa Bay, in Natal, and at the Diamond Fields. British rule is fairly tolerated, if we except the older divisions about Capetown and the widespread settlements beyond the Orange River-and there we are hated with a hatred that affects no concealment. The causes of this dislike are not far to seek. We govern an alien race who hunger for the mastery. In their eyes England is represented by the unsympathizing stranger, the drunken navvy, or the quasi-aristocrat whose arrogant puppyism has made us a by-word the whole world over. Their Church, with its pulpits filled by pastors trained in the Universities of Holland, or by the

pupils of these men, is a propaganda, passive it may be, of anti-English sentiment. Stern Puritans of the Cromwellian type, and the children of baffled slaveowners, they deem the negro a veritable Canaanite, doomed to the hewing of wood and the drawing of water to the end of time. This dream, so dear to their hearts, we have rudely broken. The savage, raw from his kraal, and the cultured European, hedged about by moral restraints innumerable, are both alike in the eyes of our Government. The colored thief, vagrant, or laggard, smitten aforetime with over many stripes, we now tickle with punishments of farcical mildness; and, legally speaking, the quondam slave is as good a man as his master. It is not difficult to conceive how intolerable such a turning of the tables must have seemed to the Boers, many of whom were ruined by the process. At a date so recent that some of us can well remember it, thousands of them sold their farms for anything they could get, and crossed the Orange and the Vaal, if only to be rid of the hateful stranger. Shirking our responsibilities, we gave them autonomy, and with

statesmanlike elaboration planted angry Republics at our very doors. It was like the creation of another Ireland. To these new governments disaffected colonists have ever turned their eyes. When the Transvaal started into active life under the leadership of an enthusiastic and imaginative President, and made alliances with the Continental powers, Boer and Africander alike looked forward to the day, now dawning upon their vision, when the strong young Commonwealth should wrest the Cape from the wavering grasp of England. The annexation crushed these hopes for a while. To restore the independence of such a Republic would be the renewal of a terrible blunder, postponing to a distant epoch the pacification and the advancing civilization of the whole land. The Cape Dominion we have been endeavoring to construct, when out of its tutelage, and leavened sufficiently with English influences, will form a noble country of the future. But no argument can be adduced for the premature independence of any portion of it that is not equally applicable to all the white communities of Southern Africa.-Contemporary Review.

MADAME DE STAËL: A STUDY OF HER LIFE AND TIMES. By Abel Stevens, LL.D. In Two Volumes. With Portraits. New York: Harper & Bros.

In

Those who go to Dr. Stevens' work expecting to find a calm and careful study of Madame de Staël's character, a detailed and dispassionate record of her life, or a critical estimate of her literary work, will be disappointed. spite of the eminence of her position and the number of her friends, the materials for a biography appear to be the reverse of copious; but however abundant and accessible they might have been, only one variety of them would have answered Dr. Stevens's purposes. No one of her contemporaries was inspired by Madame de Staël with a more infatuated and uncritical admiration than that exhibited by Dr. Stevens; and his really praiseworthy industry has been expended chiefly upon the effort to bring together every eulogistic phrase that has been inspired by her person, her conversation, her wrongs," or her writings. It is scarcely injustice to say that his "study" consists of the passages thus gathered. Anything like independent opinion Dr. Stevens

has not aimed at; and his own contributions to the record are confined for the most part to intensifying the epithets of praise and to palliating or discrediting the faint hints at faultfinding which, in spite of his vigilance, sometimes creep into his quotations. When he cannot either commend or excuse, he maintains that discreet silence which is said to be the finest fruit of affection; and no one would infer from his narrative that "Corinne's" eloquent tributes to "love in marriage" were otherwise exemplified than in her relations to her two husbands, Baron de Staël and M. Rocca. To the grosser fascinations and complaisances which drew some at least among the worshippers at the shrine of this " greatest of literary women," Dr. Stevens makes no faintest reference; and by reason of this, no doubt, his book is free from objections which would have lain against any completer and more unbiassed record.

Due allowance being made, however, for the biographer's partiality, the book is not without value, and in parts, at least, is very readable. The chapters on the Revolution, on Life at Coppet, and on the German travels, are par

ticularly interesting; and in general the author's skill in the use of his materials is to be commended. The sketches of Madame de Staël's father and mother, M. Necker, the statesman, and Madame Necker, Gibbon's early love, are more satisfactory than the more elaborate study of Madame de Staël herself; and animated pictures are given of the brilliant social circle which gathered around her alike at Paris and at Coppet.

BUILDING A HOME. By A. F. Oakey. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

HOW TO FURNISH A HOME. By Ella Rodman Church. New York: D. Appleton & Co. These little books are the initial numbers of "a series of new hand-volumes at low prices, devoted to all subjects pertaining to home and the household," to be known as 'Appletons' Home Books." Plain, practical, and serviceable hints-a clear exposition of the elementary principles involved in each case-is what is aimed at, rather than æsthetic disquisition; and there can hardly be a doubt that the series will render valuable aid in guiding and maturing that taste for household art which is one of the most unmistakable evidences of a widening popular culture.

Mr. Oakey treats his subject with the easy confidence of a master, and it is surprising how much really helpful information about the choosing of a site for and the building of a house he has managed to compress into his small and copiously illustrated volume. Some few of his crisp sentences should be memorized and used as maxims by those proposing to establish homes for themselves; and there is scarcely a paragraph in the book without its practical lesson or implication. There is a noteworthy absence, too, of that cant of culture" which is already producing a reaction among those who prefer a rational to a sentimental view of such matters; and the volume contains nothing which will not be as helpful to the man who proposes to build a cottage as to him who intends to erect an abode of wealth."

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Miss Church's task was more complex if not more difficult. In matters of architecture, the principles of taste are closely involved in honesty of design and construction, and can be formulated in a few general rules that are well nigh universal in their application. In furnishing a house, on the contrary, personal individuality is all-important, and nothing which fails to express this can be really tasteful in the highest sense. This is why general rules in such matters are so hard to construct, and must be so carefully qualified; and the difficulty is not lessened by the infinite variety of the articles and considerations that must enter into the furnishing of a house. The utmost that

can be done, as a general thing, is to make a few suggestions negatively, which may serve as warnings against violations of certain elemental canons of taste; and to supplement these with a few recommendations which may serve as indicators of the direction in which the individual fancies should work. Miss Church's little book does about as much in both respects as discretion would justify, and both her warnings and her suggestions are in most cases judicious and helpful. The illustrations are much superior to what would naturally be expected in books of this character. THE ECLECTIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. BY M. E. Thalheimer. Cincinnati and New York: Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co. This little book exhibits the characteristic merits of Miss Thalheimer's work-competence of knowledge, clearness of statement, and graphic animation of style. By transferring most of the personal and other details to notes at the end of each chapter, she has managed to secure great compactness of treatment without burdening her text with those arid tracts of bald dates and facts which manuals of this sort are apt to consist of for the most part. Particularly good is her treatment of constitutional questions, and helpful suggestions are given as to the books which should be consulted by those who desire further information on special subjects or periods. Designed primarily for practical use as a text-book in school, the vo!ume is properly equipped with questions, tables, and maps. The latter are of especial excellence, and the numerous illustrations Inake up in picturesque vigor for what they lack in finish.

TREATISE AND HANDBOOK OF ORANGE CULTURE IN FLORIDA. By T. W. Moore, Fruit Cove, Florida.

This compendious treatise, on a subject which is every year attracting wider attention, is recommended by the State Bureau of Immigration, and has every appearance of being written with both candor and knowledge. The author's experience as an orange-grower covers a period of more than ten years, and his range of observation has included not only the whole of Florida, but nearly all the orange-producing regions of Europe and America. His book furnishes the needed corrective to the exaggerated and somewhat fantastic stories that interested parties now and then set afloat through the press; and demonstrates — what every discriminating reader might readily have guessed that in orange-growing, as in all other occupations, success is the result, not of blind chance, but of patient and well-directed labor. There can be no doubt that many hundreds of would-be orange-culturists have failed because they did not know the conditions and