horror and despair. Life averages up fairly, as any novel-reader
will admit, and there has been much of delight--even luxury and
idleness--between the carnage hours of battle. Is it not so? Ask that
boyish-hearted old scamp whom you have seen scuttling away from the
circulating library with M. St. Pierre's memoirs of young Paul and his
beloved Virginia under his arm; or stepping briskly out of the book
store hugging to his left side a carefully wrapped biography of Lady
Diana Vernon, Mlle. de la Valliere, or Madame Margaret Woffington; or
in fact any of a thousand charming ladies whom it is certain he had met
before. Ladies too, who, born whensoever, are not one day older since
he last saw them. Nearly a hundred years of Parisian residence have not
served to induce the Princess Haydee of Yanina to forego her picturesque
Greek gowns and coiffures, or to alter the somewhat embarrassing status
of her relations with her striking but gloomy protector, the Count of
Monte Cristo.

The old memories are crowded with pleasures. Those delicious mornings in
the allee of the park, where you were permitted to see Cosette with her
old grandfather, M. Fauchelevent; those hours of sweet pain when it was
impossible to determine whether it was Rebecca or Rowena who seemed to
give most light to the day; the flirtations with Blanche Amory, and the
notes placed in the hollow tree; the idyllic devotion of Little Emily,
dating from the morning when you saw her dress fluttering on the beam as
she ran along it, lightly, above the flowing tide--(devotion that is yet
tender, for, God forgive you Steerforth as I do, you could not smirch
that pure heart;) the melancholy, yet sweet sorrow, with which you saw
the loved and lost Little Eva borne to her grave over which the
mocking-bird now sings his liquid requiem. Has it not been sweet good
fortune to love Maggie Tulliver, Margot of Savoy, Dora Spenlow
(undeclared because she was an honest wife--even though of a most