He

a white coin slipped and fell with a silvery sound upon the flagging. He could not believe either his eyes or his ears. picked up the coin. It was a beautiful bright piece of five pesetas. The Virgin had not mocked him, and he could go to the bull-fight! With a bound he was on his feet, and running toward the Plaza de Toros.

As he was turning the corner of the Calle San Pablo, he almost rushed against a slip of a girl of the faubourg of Triana, whom he had known since childhood, and who was named Chata. She was very pale, and her great black eyes were full of tears. "What is the matter, Chata?" he asked her.

"My mother is sick," she answered, "and I have not been to bed for two nights. The doctor came this morning and ordered remedies. I went to the druggist's, but he would not give me anything on credit. What shall I do? If the bells toll for her, they will toll for me too: I will not outlive her!"

Morenito remained thoughtful a moment, his gaze plunged into Chata's tearful black eyes; then suddenly, taking the miraculous coin, he put it into the hand of his little friend.

"Here, nina mia," he said, take this money: it came from the Virgin of the Esperanza, and the bonita Madre will not be vexed if I use it to cure your mother."

Chata was so excited that she did not take time even to thank him, but ran to the druggist's without once looking back. It was written that Morenito was surely not to go to the prime bull-fight. But as there are compensations in the world, he passed a gay Sunday nevertheless. That day Chata's mother was better, and the little girl came to the lodging-house court to thank Juanito. She had made something of a toilet; and with the remainder of Morenito's money she had bought two red roses, which she had thrust into her black hair. The two went for a walk along the Guadalquivir, under the orange-trees in blossom.

The springtide had kindled an indescribable light in Chata's eyes, and perhaps a more tender sentiment contributed to this illumination. When they found themselves in a corner shaded by high bushes of myrtle, she suddenly threw her two arms around Morenito's neck, and said without the least false shame, "Te quiero, companero!" (I love you, comrade!) And while the bells rang for the Easter festival, these two children tasted their first kiss of love.

AUGUSTIN THIERRY

(1795-1856)

BY FREDERIC LOLIÉE

UGUSTIN THIERRY, the celebrated historian and renovator of historical research in France, was born at Blois, May 10th,

1795. He died in 1856. A pupil of the École Normale, and at first destined to the profession of teaching, he was for several years the collaborator of Saint-Simon. With this venturous economist he prepared several works upon industry, speculative politics, and the organization of European societies; imbib

ing his master's ideas without sharing his chimeras. But his true vocation was elsewhere. He had felt it awakening within him from his school days. This was in 1811, as he was finishing his studies at the lyceum of his native town.

9

AUGUSTIN THIERRY

An enthusiastic reading of Châteaubriand's Martyrs' lighted the spark in his intellect and decided his destiny. The striking evocation of the empire of the Cæsars in its decline; and the admirable narrative of Eudorus; and the dramatic picture of a Roman army marching across the marches of Batavia to meet an army of Franks, as though to hurl against each other, in one terrible shock, civilization and barbarism,- had given him already a very vivid glimpse of a new and picturesque manner of exhuming and reanimating the past. He was still very young when he decided to establish the basis of his renovating method. He began by a straightforward attack upon the erroneous science of the old historical school, and by demonstrating the necessity of breaking with the false views of traditional teaching. This was the object of his 'Lettres sur l'Histoire de France' (Letters upon French History: 1827), in which are brilliantly developed the principles of an entirely modern art of restoring to original documents their primitive physiognomy, their color, and significance. For he possessed to a marvelous degree the intuition. which could discover the spirit under the dead letter of charters and

chronicles. Then, armed with a science painfully acquired in the depths of libraries, where he lost health and later sight, he proceeded from theory to practice. He published 'L'Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands, de ses Causes et de ses Suites' (History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and Consequences: 1825, 3 vols.; new edition revised and enlarged, 1845, 4 vols.); an account, detailed and extremely lucid, not only of the national struggle which followed the victory of the Normans over the Saxons, but also of the tendencies, impulses, motives, which impelled men placed in a social state approaching barbarism. Then in his 'Récits des Temps Mérovingiens' (Narratives of the Merovingian Era: 1840, 2 vols.), he presented with a truly Homeric color of truth the manners of the destroyers of the Roman Empire, their odd and savage aspect, and the violent contrasts of the races which in the sixth century were mingled but not yet blended on the soil of Gaul. This is the most finished of Augustin Thierry's works. One should read also the pages, full of candor and charm, of his 'Dix Ans d'Études' (Ten Years of Study: 1834).

Augustin Thierry did not wholly escape the risk of errors,- -the anticipating views or daring conjectures always more or less entailed by the spirit of generalization. In return he penetrated with astonishing profundity to the very heart of barbarism; and rendered as living as contemporaries the characters of one of the most complex and least known epochs of European history. A great author as well as a great historian, he carried his care for form to an incomparable degree. Sainte-Beuve called him a translator of genius, of our old chroniclers. Indeed he possessed the double seal of genius: boldness in creation, and finish in detail.

The life of Augustin Thierry, like his style, deserves to be offered as an example to the writers who seek in art something more than selfish and transitory satisfactions. A martyr to his researches,blind, crippled, helpless, -until the last hour he never stopped perfecting his writings in the sense of beauty and truth. Nor did he ever cease to consider devotion to science as superior to material pleasures, to fortune, and even to health.

Frederic Police

THE TRUE HISTORY OF JACQUES BONHOMME, FROM AUTHEN

J

TIC DOCUMENTS

From the Historical Essays'

ACQUES was still very young, when strangers from the south invaded the land of his ancestors; it was a fine domain. bathed by two great lakes, and capable of producing corn, wine, and oil in abundance. Jacques had a lively but unsteady mind; growing up on his usurped soil he forgot his ancestors, and the usurpers pleased him. He learned their language, espoused their quarrels, and bound himself to their fortune. This fortune of invasion and conquest was for some time successful; but one day fortune became adverse, and the tide of war brought invasion on the land of the usurpers. Jacques's domain, on which floated their standards, was one of the first threatened. Bodies of men who had emigrated from the north besieged it on all sides. Jacques was too unaccustomed to independence to dream of freeing his habitation: the sole alternatives his mind suggested to him were, either to deliver himself up to new masters or to adhere to the old ones. Wavering between these two resolutions, he confided his doubts to a grave personage of his family, the priest of a religion which Jacques had recently embraced, and which he practiced with great fervor.

"My father," said he, "what shall I do? My present state wearies me. Our conquerors, who call us their allies, treat us really like slaves. They exhaust us to fill their treasury, which in their language they call the basket: this basket is a bottomless abyss. I am weary of submitting to their yoke: but the yoke of their enemies frightens me; those north men are, it is said, very rapacious, and their battle-axes are very sharp. For mercy's sake, tell me whose side I shall take."-"My son," replied the holy man, "you must be on the side of God: God in the present day is on the side of the idolatrous north against the heretical south. The men of the north will be your masters: I can predict this; for I myself, with my own hands, have just opened your gates to them." Jacques was stunned by these words; he had not recovered from his bewilderment when a great noise of arms and horses, together with strange acclamations, told him that all was over. He saw men of great height, and speaking from the throat, hurry into his dwelling, divide the furniture into. lots, and measure the land in order to divide it. Jacques was sad;

but feeling that there was no remedy, he endeavored to become reconciled to his fate. He looked patiently at the thieves; and when their chief passed, he saluted him by the cry of Vivat rex! which the chief did not understand. The strangers distributed the booty, settled on their portions of land, reviewed their forces, exercised themselves in arms, assembled in councils, and decreed laws of police and war for themselves, without thinking more of Jacques than if he had never existed. He stood at a distance, awaiting an official notice of his destiny, and practicing with a great deal of trouble to pronounce the barbaric names of men in high stations among his new masters. Several of these euphoniously disfigured names may be restored in the following manner: Merowig, Chlodowig, Hilderik, Hildebert, Sighebert, Karl, etc.

Jacques at last received his sentence: it was a formal act, drawn up by the friend and compatriot who had made himself the introducer of the conquerors; and who, as the price of such service, had received from their bounty the finest portion of the cultivated land and the Greek title of Episcopus-which the conquerors transformed into that of Biscop and granted without understanding it. Jacques, who until then had been called Romanus, the Roman, from the name of his first masters, saw himself qualified in this new diploma with the title of litus seu villanus noster; and ordered, under pain of the rod and cord, to cultivate the land himself for the benefit of the strangers. The word litus was new to his ears; he asked an explanation, and he was told that this word, derived from the Germanic verb let or lát, permit or leave, really signified that they had the kindness to let him live. This favor appeared to him rather a slight one; and he took a fancy to solicit others from the assembly of the possessors of his domain, which was held on fixed days in the open air, in a vast field. The chiefs stood in the midst, and the multitude surrounded them; decisions were made in common, and each man gave his opinion, from the highest to the lowest-a maximo usque ad minimum. Jacques went to that august council; but at his approach a murmur of contempt was raised, and the guards forbade him to advance, threatening him with the wood of their lances. One of the strangers, more polite than the others, and who knew how to speak good Latin, told him the cause of this treatment: "The assembly of the masters of this land," said he, "dominorum territorii, is interdicted to men of