who were never to be seen again; then we walked home through the gay streets to their quaint little rooms.

To sit there by Colonel Ridgeley's side, and see Ida busying herself with the little preparations for tea, while I told of you and of Lucy, and heard of their daily life, their plans for the future! - I think I am a little crazy to-night, I shall not write you any more.

Yes, Colonel Ridgeley walked to the bridge with me, and we stood looking over the parapet at the great pile of the Louvre, which stretched out before us, while he spoke for the first time of the war, of himself in connection with it. He said very little, but that little was said with an earnestness that makes every word stand out before me. "I have lived to feel that in the most important decision of my life I decided wrongly; I have lived to be glad that events have proved me in the wrong; but, believe me, Major Thayer, utterly blinded to our country's claims as we may have seemed to you, the dupes of intriguing politicians as we certainly were, I am not the only Southerner who thought he was doing his duty in standing by his State. Not for slavery, -you know what my feeling has always been there, but because we really believed that our first duty was to our State, to go with her, right or wrong. Does this seem impossible to you? When you have lived as long as I have, you may come to know what it is to be torn by doubt as to the right.”

"But now -" said I.

"Yes, now I see my way clearly, hard as that way may be, to stay here a few months,-long enough to give myself breathing time, and to allow some bitter feelings at home to pass away, and then to go back and follow the example set by some of our best men in trying to reconcile our people to what is and must be. Nor am I unhappy; I see hope for us in the future, I see a clear path of duty before me. I am not to be pitied," he continued, shaking my hand as he said good night: "those are to be pitied who will not accept the inevitable, those of my countrymen

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who have exiled themselves forever in a cowardly despair."

Yesterday morning found me as desponding as the day before I had been hopeful, but I would not send my letter till I knew my fate; and now that blessed little Parc Monceau - I have seen it again, seen it with Ida alone. I think there is a broken colonnade there, which stretches beside the loveliest of walks, along which go wandering the merriest of children and the archest of bonnes, who bent knowing glances toward the young foreign couple, one of whom never saw them till he knew how happy he was. I do not know how soon I took her home to her father, - a man in a three-cornered hat came to say that the gates were shut at dark, but Colonel Ridgeley did not look surprised when I told him how long I had loved her. He said, there on that same bridge where we had talked two nights before, "It is true that there was a time when the thought of my daughter's marrying out of her own circle, out of my own peculiar connections, would have been a very painful thing to me; perhaps I should even have thought such a connection an unequal one; but a larger knowledge, a more extended experience, have taught me a truer wisdom. And for yourself, you must not think that I have been so careless a father as to trust my daughter so entirely and so intimately to your society without remembering that this might be the result. I know you, Horace, very thoroughly, I believe; and there is no one to whom I would give her more readily. My dear boy, there is nothing so strange in all this; is the friendship of years to go for nothing? did you not believe it to be sincere?" After that, my dear brother, do you wonder that I came home happy? Your brother,

HORACE.

After these letters I have only one thing to say. I am glad it was not the police that brought them together. That would have been more prosaic than even the telegraph official.

THE value and significance of the

human face is hardly appreciated in our industrial life. So many of us are intent upon the same thing that all our faces have but one meaning; so much monotony, very often ignoble, is tiresome. We are classified by our life, and fall under a type, either the clerical, the mercantile, or the political type. The unending succession of variations of these types is not stimulating to artists or poets. The novelist, to find a subject that interests him, has to go down to the picturesque and vagabond classes. He carefully avoids the respectable; they may point his moral, but cannot adorn his tale.

In that great period of modern Europe which succeeded to the Middle Ages, and called man from renunciations and asceticisms to his natural life, which completely set aside mediæval inspirations, and gave us the natural and humanizing works of Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Titian, and Tintoret, of Rabelais, Montaigne, Corneille, Cervantes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, - spirits that fed themselves at those twin sources of all good and all beauty, nature and Greek antiquity, the human face was a poem, individual, charged with its own burden of meaning, marked with the character of its personal and uncommon experience. But to-day we have so systematized everything, our social life is so perfectly organized, we are in such public and close communion, that we have obliterated all striking differences; we resemble each other. All of us have the same story to tell; we tell it in the same language; we carefully avoid a peculiar experience and an uncommon expression. The press and the pulpit have given the people fade phrases and trite sentiment in place of the racy and fresh expressions which were the outcome of their occupation and of their idiosyncrasies of character.

In our country, which is the most perfect result of modern ideas, the uniformity of life, and consequent uniformity of faces, is more apparent than in continental Europe; for in Europe there are whole populations not yet out of mediæval ideas, others that yet remain bound to those of the First Empire. There are provinces in the middle of France that live by the ideas and passions of the sixteenth century. In Bretagne, for example, it is said that the peasants have the naïve faith of the time of the good king Saint Louis, and live entirely in the thirteenth century. Among such people you find the average face is not to be classed as clerical, political, or mercantile; as that of trader, gambler, or grasper.

From the provinces of France, from the heart of the solitary and simple life of the country, young men go to Paris. They make the glory of France. They are not modelled after common types; they have not been made by newspapers and pulpits; they are themselves. One day it was Rabelais from Chinnon, Montaigne from Perigord, Napoleon from Corsica, Lamennais from Saint-Malo, Lamartine from Macon, Millet from Greville. Although Molière, Rousseau, and George Sand, three great personalities, three remarkable faces, were born in cities, the life of Rousseau derived all its beauty and all its literary charm from his experience in the country; the same may be said of George Sand. As for Molière, he lived at a time when Paris, still a medieval city, occupied by the powdered and ruffled and ribboned gallants of the court of Louis XIII., was varied and picturesque.

We build so rapidly to-day, that, unlike our ancestors, who always lived in the houses of their forefathers, we live in our own shells, and our cities always correspond with the actual gen

eration. The monotony and system of our life does not produce individuals, but general types of a common character. What we call the American face is high-browed, cold-eyed, thinlipped; it has a dry skin, long nose, high cheek-bones; it is a face wholly devoid of poetry, of sentiment, of tenderness, of imagination; it is a keen, sensible, calculating, aggressive face, certainly not a face to fascinate or love. It is most interesting when it is most ugly, like the good Lincoln's. Happily, he was an individual that no system, no routine, no official life, could destroy or make negative. But how many public functionaries thought he had a poor face! The average American face has not the interest to me of Lincoln's; it is not so noble, so good. Lincoln's face, full of rude forms, expressed a simple, benevolent, thoughtful spirit.

On the Continent you will meet with a vast variety of physiognomies, individual, suggestive, and often full of charm. The ugliest faces, I suppose, are to be found at Bale. The Swiss women of the lower classes are absurdly ugly. A walk through Bale explained to me why Holbein was the greatest painter of ugly faces that the world has produced, or is likely ever to produce. But I am to speak especially of faces seen at Paris.

In a students' restaurant of the Quartier Latin, for example, I have observed romantic and beautiful faces of young men. One, perhaps from the South of France, had a warm, bronzed skin, warm eyes, abundant black hair falling upon either side of a low, square, white forehead. He had a dreamy, brooding face. It had no trace of trade or machinery; it was like a troubadour's song; his hair reminded me of the curls of Antinous in the Louvre. Certainly I enjoyed taking my dinner opposite to him. He was far better to me than one of the million duplicates of Young America, whose face is bare of poetry, romance, and sentiment. The face of the young American, regular, handsome, full of energy, will, decision, shows too much

the domination of purely material things.

At one time I became interested in two brothers. They were twins, about twenty-five, with comical, libidinous faces. They always dined with company, bubbled with laughter and fun, and sang half the time. They were law students. When they ate and drank and sang, in spite of their very proper clothes they seemed like two fauns strayed into modern Paris. If they were, happy for the jury that shall listen to their pleading, and happy the judge who shall hear their citations. They revived a chapter of pagan mythology, and suggested all the sport of their ancestors. Nature was in full force in their great awkward bodies.

The women faces of Paris are of an indescribable variety. Paris draws to herself, at one time or another, the most beautiful women of the provinces. Paris is the gallery in which they are best seen, the salon where they will be the most admired. The gay and unrestrained Parisian does not withhold the expression of his feeling as the Englishman does.

At the public balls you will remark the rare beauty of the girls, — girls and women of the people. The black-eyed or blond Parisian, slender, graceful, nervous, all fire and action; or the peasant-girl, large, round, soft, ruddy, quiet. One obscure Paris model, I knew, was a tall blond Lombard girl, with luxuriant taw hair, which, always in "admired .sorder," was simply drawn back and twisted on the head. She loved Victor Hugo's books, was a Red Republican, and would have fought and sung on the barricades like an Amazon of Liberty, with the same careless spirit that she sang and sat in Parisian studios. She had eyes blue as her own Adriatic, a finely formed full mouth, a fair skin, and a superb neck, well placed. She carried her head like a swan. Although poor, almost homeless, no social slavery had touched her. Her face was wild and free like a Bacchante's. A great painter could have found an immortal type in her

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large noble face and heroic figure, could have seen under the rags of her poverty an antique virgin, sister of the Venus of Milo. How long would an artist have to hunt in New York or Boston for such a type! We produce one type," the girl of the period," — who generally overdresses, who is pert and trivial, who is intelligent and vivacious, but dreams just as little as her brother the clerk or her father the banker. They have but one idea, it is to advance. The girl of the Continent dreams, feels poetry, is impressionable, naïve, and has sentiment; if of the people, she is generous, and respects her impulses. I have seen in Paris, at the public concerts, French girls, white and blond, demure and frail, delicate like New England Sunday-school teachers; looking at them, you could not expect anything but a tract or a hymn, but they give you something very different.

A type very often seen is the beautiful dark woman, with an oval face, dead olive skin, very pale, Oriental eyes stained with henna, hair in great flat bands on the temples, coiled and twisted behind, —a type admired by Gautier, Baudelaire, and De Musset; the kind of woman of whom De Musset wrote, "Two destroying angels, sweet and cruel, walk invisible at her side; they are Voluptuousness and Death."

But let us look upon celebrated faces; there is Nillson, she who is loved and admired by all Paris. I have seen her modest and girlish face, heard her sweet voice. Such a face makes critics eloquent and versifiers poets. The French commit excesses in describing her. A writer, in one of the first Reviews, tried to express the meaning of her eyes, and wrote: "The eye of Christine Nillson, now green, now of a limpid blue with gold reflections, has the cold and cruel beauty of the blinding and shivering suns of the Falberg, always crowned with snow and ice; and it also resembles that gulf of the Maelstrom about which Edgar Poe speaks to us, the strange and ravishing sensation with which it confounds

the spectator, strange indeed! From afar, vague and fleeting apparition, night crowned with stars, that slender figure from the North, when you see her close by, shows features largely cut as in the antique statues; the cheeks and the chin are solid and reassuring like strength." This interesting verbal extravagance has some meaning, and helps me to appreciate the suggestiveness of the Swedish face of Christine Nillson.

Another remarkable face at Paris was Charles Baudelaire's. At twentyone, rich, handsome, having written his first verses, his face was said to have been of a rare beauty. The eyebrow pure, long, of a great sweep, covered warm Oriental eyes, vividly colored; the eye was black and deep, it embraced, questioned, and reflected whatever surrounded it; the nose graceful, ironical, with forms well defined, the end somewhat rounded and projecting, made me think of the celebrated phrase of the poet: My soul flutters over perfumes, as the souls of other men flutter over music. The mouth was arched, and refined by the mind, and made one think of the splendor of fruits. The chin was rounded, but of a proud relief, strong like that of Balzac. The brow was high, broad, magnificently designed, covered with silken hair, which, naturally curly, fell upon a neck like that of Achilles.

Theodore Rousseau had a face that was said to resemble one of the black bulls of his own Jura; Courbet, called handsome, resembles an Assyrian, Gautier, a Turkish Pacha; Ingres's face resembled that of a civilized gorilla. He was probably the ugliest and most obstinate man in Europe, - obstinate like Thiers. The noble and beautiful head of George Sand, so superbly drawn by Couture, resembles the Venus of Milo. Her large, tranquil eyes are almost as celebrated as her romances; they are brooding and comprehensive; they suggest sacred and secret things. Liszt had an uncommon face; "nervous, floating loose, all the emotions of his music, all the fantasies of his impro