saw the pilgrimage of Charlotte Corday. In Paris she took (for reasons of her own, one must suppose) the calling of "unfortunate female"-the euphemism will be remembered as Carlyle's and dubbed herself the people's Aspasia -"l'Aspasie du peuple.' In "tunic blue," over a "red petticoat," crossed with a tricolor scarf and crowned with the Phrygian cap, she roamed the streets,criant, jurant, blasphémant," to the tune of the drum of rebellion. One day the women of the town, in a rage of fear or jealousy, fell upon her, stripped her, and beat her through the streets. She went mad, and in the first years of this century she was still an inmate of Bicêtre. When the "women's side" of Bicêtre was closed, in 1803, Théroigne was transferred to the Salpêtrière, where she died.

During the hundred years (17481852) of the prisons of the fagnes those convict establishments at Toulon, Brest and Rochefort, which took the place of the galleys, and which in their turn gave way to the modern system of transportation-it was from Bicêtre that the chained cohorts of the forçats were despatched on their weary march. through France. The ceremony of the ferrement, or putting in irons for the journey, was one of the sights of Paris for those who could gain admission to the great courtyard of the prison. At daybreak of the morning appointed for the start the long chains and collars of steel were laid out in the yard, and the prison smiths attended with their mallets and portable anvils; the convicts for whom these prep arations were afoot keeping up a terrific din behind their grated windows. When all was ready for them, they were tumbled out by batches and placed in rows along the wall. Every man had to strip to the skin, let the weather be what it might, and a sort of smock of coarse calico was tossed to him from a pile in the middle of the yard; he did not dress until the toilet of the collar was finished. This, at the rough hands of the smith and his aids, was a sufficiently painful process. The convicts were called up in alphabetical order, and to the neck of each man a heavy collar was adjusted, the triangular bolt of which was hammered to by

blows of a wooden mallet. To the padlock was attached a chain which, descending to the prisoner's waist belt, was taken up thence and riveted to the next man's collar, and in this way some two hundred forçats were tethered like cattle in what was called the chaine volante. The satyr-like humors of the gang, singing and capering on the cobbles, shouting to the echo the name of some criminal hero as he stepped out to receive his collar, and sometimes joining hands in a frenzied dance, which was broken only by the savage use of the warders' bâtons-all this was the sport of the well-dressed crowd of spectators.

As far as the outskirts of Paris the convicts were carried in chars à bancs, an armed escort on either side; and when the prison doors were thrown open to let them out the whole canaille of the town was waiting to receive them with yells of derision, to which the forçats responded with all the oaths they had. This was one of the most popular spectacles of Paris until the middle of the present century.

An essential sordidness is the character most persistent in the history of Bicêtre-a dull squalor, with perpetual crises of unromantic agony. There is no glamour upon Bicêtre; no silken gown with a domino above it rustles softly by lantern-light through those grimy wickets. It is not here that any gallant prisoner of state comes, bribing the governor to keep his table furnished with the best, receiving his loveletters in baskets of fruit, giving his wine-parties of an evening. In the records of Vincennes and the Bastille the novelist will always feel himself at home, but Bicêtre has daunted him. It is poor Jean Valjean, of "Les Miserables," squatting" in the north corner of the courtyard," choked with tears, " while the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted with heavy hammerblows." This is the solitary figure of interest which Bicêtre has given to fiction.

If a shadowy figure may be added, it is from the same phantasmagoric gallery of Victor Hugo. Bicêtre was the prison of the nameless faint-heart who weeps and moans through the in

credible pages of "Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné." Then, and until 1836, Bicêtre was the last stage but one (l'avant-dernière étape) on the road to the guillotine. The last was the Conciergerie, close to the Place de Grève. The shadow-murderer of "Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné"-for there is no real stuff of murder in him, and he is the feeblest and least sympathetic puppet of fiction is useful only as bringing into relief the old, disused and forgotten cachot du condamné, or condemned cell, of Bicêtre. It was a den eight feet square; rough stone walls, moist and sweating, like the flags which made the flooring; the only "window" a grating in the iron door; a truss of straw on a stone couch in a recess; and an arched and

blackened ceiling, wreathed with cobwebs.

Starting out of sleep one night, Hugo's condemned man lifts his lamp and sees spectral writings, figures and arabesques in crayons, blood and charcoal, dancing over the walls of the cell

the visitors' book" of generations of condamnés à mort who have preceded him. Some had blazoned their names in full, with grotesque embellishments of the capital letter and a motto underneath breathing their last defiance to the world; and in one corner, "traced in white outline, a frightful image, the figure of the scaffold, which, at the moment that I write, may be rearing its timbers for me! The lamp all but fell from my hands." - Temple Bar.

THE theology of the nursery varies considerably from age to age. There is far greater liberty of thought and far less severity of doctrine among the mothers of to-day than there was thirty years ago; and even nursery maids are beginning to waver in the support and patronage which they used formerly to accord without hesitation to an uncompromising Providence-a Providence who meted out rewards of somewhat doubtful attractiveness to good children, and, to the bad, punishments too numerous to mention and too prolonged to realize. The days are happily gone by when the terrors of hell were described in startling detail, and the last thing at night, for the warning of the perverse or the deceitful baby. But for all save the very enlightened or the very securely fenced round among modern children, the bottomless pit still exists, and speculations as to the habitat and customs of the devil are indulged in as freely as ever. The simple creed of the savage, who believes in the existence of a Good Spirit and a Bad Spirit, and of a Happy Hunting Ground where the distant future may be spent by the more deserving of his tribe, is practically the

same as that of the civilized baby. The latter must be promoted into the school-room before these rudimentary notions can be supplemented by more advanced theological studies. His curiosity about the Bad Spirit is never satisfied, for the simple reason that his parents and teachers never seem to have any trustworthy information to give him. Jacky's questions are either ignored altogether, or answered with such blighting reserve that he learns nothing worth mentioning. "Do tell me some stories about Satan when he was a little boy," he entreats. "He never was a child," answers his mother boldly; "he was always old," and is grateful to Jacky for accepting her theory unquestioningly. "Dollie says, if I am a bad boy I shall go to hell," he proceeds, " and that I shall have to say my prayers to the devil, and my hymns on Sunday too. How is he dressed, mummie? Has he really a tail?"

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Jacky is almost always on good terms with his mother, but he has a tiresome aunt whom he has good reason for disliking. He was once unavoidably left in her charge while his mother was away from home, and her visit was not

altogether a success. She had been "obliged" to punish him severely for some fault, and after the operation was over he was seen to get a pencil and, retiring into a corner of the nursery, laboriously write something upon a small piece of paper. The same spy who observed him do this watched him afterward from the window while he dug a hole with his little spade and buried the bit of paper in a corner of the garden. When Jacky was safely out of the way the spy exhumed his manuscript. It ran as follows: "Dear Devill-Pleas come and take Antie."

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The temptations of the devil are very real to poor Jacky. "Satan tempted me to eat my potato-skin to-day when you were out at lunch," he confesses to his mother when she goes to tuck him up one evening. "I did only eat a weeny bit, and then I left off." Poor child, he had been laboriously scraping the fine transparent skin off his new potato because he had been forbidden to eat potato-skin earlier in the season when the hardened elderly ones still prevailed!

Satan trembles when he sees

The weakest saint upon his knees. "Now, Jacky, why does Satan tremble-shake, you know?" "Oh, because I suppose the saint is so dreadfully heavy," is the unexpected and rather confusing reply.

It is a source of distress to the tender mother that the wars and vengeances and awful judgments in the Old Testament should make it so much more interesting to her children than the New. The stories of Jael and Sisera, of Jezebel, of Samson or of Gehazi have a barbarous charm about them which is lacking in the narrative of the New Testament. "Little Dollie loves to read her Bible to herself," says grandmamma to the unregenerate Jacky. "I wish I could see you do that, darling." "Oh, I know she does, Granny," he answers; "but I'm sure she skips all the religious parts." All the ghastly parts delight Jacky. At the age of four his sole comment on the tragic death of Samson was "Poor Thamthon! did he bleed ?" But Dollie is of milder mould, and weeps so loudly over the troubles of poor Job

that the set course of morning reading has to be interrupted, and a chapter of crack-jaw genealogies resorted to as a calmative.

Jacky was sorely disappointed once by the failure of an experiment based on a verse of the Psalms: "If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me-" He went alone into the nightnursery one morning, shut the door, and called out " Peradventure!" Although he repeated the word several times, the darkness did not cover him, and he left the room much chagrined, to confide to Dollie his want of suc

Can a mother's tender care
Cease toward the child she-bear?

For he has heard many stories of the wonderful maternal instinct of the bear.

The author of the hymn in which the lines

Happy birds that sing and fly
Round Thine altars, O most High,

occur, has a good deal to answer for. He has brought heaven down so very low; and it was not astonishing that Jacky, after hearing the hymn for the first time, should have asked his mother if she had ever seen any angels roosting in the very tall trees. He also complained that he couldn't make out how the angels did without a floor; it was all ceiling in the sky, and he wondered they didn't fall out.

When a child encounters a strange word for the first time with no one at hand to explain it, he naturally creates for it a meaning which is as likely as not widely different from the right one. "Rock of Ages, cleft for me" meant for Jacky "pray for me." He

took cleft to be the imperative of the verb to cleft. It had to mean something, so why not pray? Learning by heart before they are able to read leads children into extraordinary mistakes. "All that are put in authority under them" became "All that are pet in a forty" in the mouth of Jacky struggling with his Duty toward his Neighbor.

Then when he came back from his first visit to the seaside, the kind old Vicar asked him what he had seen. "You saw the sea, and the rocks ?" "Yes." "And the fish and crabs and sea-anemones all the wonderful and beautiful things God has made?"

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Yes, but I never saw the tinomies.' "What do you mean, my child ?" "Well, the tinomies that's in the Commandments. It says the sea and all the tinomies" (that in them is), "but I never saw them."

There is a picture of the Virgin Martyr in his mother's room, and he has heard her speak of some music called the "Stabat Mater." But the words have got mixed up in Jacky's head, and he was heard to tell the nurserymaid that the picture was called the Stabat Martyr, which was the French for stabbed martyr, the cloaked ruffians departing in the distance having stabbed the poor martyr before throwing her into the water! It is to be hoped that this nursery-maid has been well grounded in the doctrines and dogmas of the Anglican Church, for Jacky's theological notions, which he is always careful to impart to Elizabeth, are often unorthodox. "You know, Elizabeth," he said to her a few days ago, our bodies don't go to heaven, mummie says-only our heads and our legs." A cherub made up of a head and a pair of legs would be a most ungraceful substitute for the recognized form, but it is pretty clear that Jacky was not contemplating such an innovation. It was only that a body to him meant simply a torso.

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Sometimes poor Jacky's theology is very muddled, so much so as to make his mother fear that her teaching has been at fault, and wonder whether she would not have done better to hand him over to the tender mercies of Miss Namby at the Sunday school. She

NEW SERIES.-VOL. LXIV, No. 4.

told him gravely one day that he had broken one of the Commandments (the fifth, very likely). “Ah, well," said he quite cheerfully, "I've only got nine more to break now!"

But he makes shrewd enough remarks sometimes. When he was in the south of Ireland the other day, he observed seriously, "I'm beginning to know the Roman Catholics from the Protestants quite well. The Roman Catholics are the ones that go to church on weekdays"-an excellent. commentary on the lukewarmness of the "Black" Protestant, who keeps his religious ardor for controversial purposes.

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Again, he showed his quickness when his nurse reproved him one wet Sunday for playing "circus" with the rocking-horse. "It's not a Sunday game, Master Jacky," Master Jacky," she said; couldn't you think of something nicer ?" "All right," cried Jacky, after a moment's reflection; "Dobbin shall be a missionary's horse in the desert. He's drawing a caravan full of converted slaves."

The well-known story of the little girl who was told to go and ask God to forgive her for her naughtiness and came jauntily downstairs after her prayers to inform her friends that God had replied, "Pray, don't mention it, Miss Perkins; it really is a matter of no consequence," is an illustration by an extreme instance of that over-familiarity with the Deity in which some people see fit to encourage their children. Jacky longed above all things for a bicycle-longed and prayed, too, that some one, his godmother for choice, would give him one. Every day he came downstairs hoping to find the machine of his prayers in the hall. At last something came, but it was a tricycle; and god mamma, lying in ambush to be a witness of the child's raptures, heard instead a heavy sigh, and "O God, I did think you would have known the difference between a bicycle and a tricycle." Once, when he had been so exceedingly naughty that his mother almost despaired of him, she told him he must pray to God to make him a better boy. Accordingly he began with the usual formula, Pray, God, make me a good boy," adding,

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after a pause, and, if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again." He no doubt hoped to rid himself of any responsibility in the matter of his badness which might be considered to attach to him. Of course he asks unanswerable questions, based only too often on the unguarded, and perhaps unfounded, statements of his elders. "Why do people's guardian angels let

"After the school of Stratford atte Bowe

For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe."

Shakespeare, it is true, somewhat redeemed the character of the middle ages in this respect-for has he not given us, among others, the charming Rosalind and Portia? Richardson, too, tried hard to make the literary lady popular. Clarissa's journal testifies to this, as does also the fact that this charmer could, when making a drawing, remember not to draw "the sun, moon and stars all in one piece!" But all Clarissa's, and even all Harriet Byron's accomplishments, did not change the fashion. Fielding, who did not care in the least whether or not his heroine was learned, as long as she was forgiving, has remained to this day more popular; for the world in general, like Mrs. Malaprop, thought and thinks it "a shame for a young woman to be a progeny of learning. Not so long ago, indeed, Dickens and his contemporaries ran riot in unpleasant literary females, from Mrs. Jellyby to the "Mother of the Modern Gracchi ;" and Leech's caricatures of about the same period-Leech, the most amiable and daring of draughtsmen-show the contemporary state of public opinion regarding a "blue stocking." Surely the unfortunate lady author

must have pleaded guilty to other crimes than mere learning to palliate such cruel usage?

But now is the Era of Emancipation begun. Nemesis, slow to move but terrible in her vengeance, has at last overtaken the erring male, and dearly will he be made to pay for his past arrogance. Let him no longer imagine that he is to hold the field against the Yellow Asters, the Keynotes of the New Literature. Dickens's "L. L.'s" are not to be mentioned in the same breath with the Literary Ladies of today-the Pioneers in the Vanguard of the Battle. (Where women-especially literary women are concerned, everything must be made to begin with a Capital Letter.) Woman is rebelling from centuries of ill-usage and deadly will be her aim. The worst of it is, she may overshoot her mark :

We may outrun By violent swiftness that which we run at, And lose by over running ...

The Wandering Jew, if his wanderings lead him in the neighborhood of literary circles, will be amused to find, after all, women really so much the same as they were. Character is not altered by conditions-not even by the New Era itself. In Dickens's time the "L.L." interlarded her novels with French words, for this procedure was then thought "distingué;" the George Eliots of to-day prefer German. At some future date, perhaps, it will be Hottentot or Chinese. It is all a matter of fashion. We must use some foreign language to express our most inexpressible feelings-a foreign language is so much less hackneyed. It also