red was not of sun or moon, but the reflection of dancing flames. "Something is burning in the village," he said, and he quickened his pace.

"It is my house that is burning!" he exclaimed a little later, as he came near enough to distinguish details.

Truly indeed his house was burning; the great red flames leaped and gambolled on the roof with a rustling, crackling noise; already half of the thatch was gone, and the fire had caught the empty cow-shed alongside as well, which, being but lightly covered with twigs and dried moss, was rapidly being consumed.

A number of the neighbours had been feebly attempting to extinguish the conflagration; but some of them were timid, and many were indifferent, and none of them knew how to work without a head to direct them. Luckily that head had appeared upon the scene in time, before it was too late to save the rest of the building. Wet sheets and blankets spread over the thatched roof prevented the flames from extending farther; and as the night was calm and still, the fire, thus discouraged, soon died out of itself. It smouldered away by degrees, showing still a red-white glow at places, while the crisp thatch crumbled away in the shape of fiery worms on to the ground below.

"How did it happen?" was Filip's first question when he could draw breath.

"It was the children," said the neighbours.

"No, father, it was the potatoes," said Kuba; and Kasza put in, "We were so hungry, Kuba and I, and there was nobody to give us our supper, and there was no milk, because the cow is gone; so we lighted the fire ourselves,

but it wouldn't burn rightly, so we put in the hay and the straw out of the shed, and then the fire got too big, and all our potatoes were burnt up before we had eaten them;" and at the painful recollection Kasza's mouth began to quiver ominously. "And we are very hungry, Kuba and I; and please, father, will you give us our supper now?"

"I shall give you a beating," said the distracted father with a groan. Next morning Filip stood looking at his burnt-down cow-shed and his charred roof for a long time, lost in thought, his foot pensively stirring the heap of grey ashes; then he seemed to come to a sudden resolution, for he shouldered his axe abruptly, and went off to the forest to cut new props and beams to replace those that had been destroyed.

In spite of his thrifty nature, he engaged two workmen to help him, and laboured with indefatigable energy at the repairs; and when the roof was finished, he set to building up the shed again.

"What is the good of a cowshed when you have no cow?" asked one of the neighbours. "You will not be buying another cow this year, I reckon, and what is left is big enough for the horses."

"How do you know that I shall not have a cow to put in it this year?" said Filip.

When all was finished, Filip one morning early harnessed his cart, and told Kuba and Kasza to get in. He was going away for the whole day, he said, and he would not trust them alone again. He locked the cottage-door, and they drove away.

"He has gone to buy a cow,I had it from himself," said one. "But where can he have gone for a cow?" objected another. "There is no fair this week anywhere in the country."

"And," said a third, "if he has gone to buy a cow, why take the children with him?"

"Perhaps he has gone quite away to settle elsewhere, or take service with some Panie."

"But then, why should he have built up the cottage?"

"And the cow-shed?"
"That is for the new cow."

"But he has not gone to buy a cow, I tell you; the children

"The children! Now I have it," said an old woman. "He has taken away the children to give them in charge to some relation. When a man has no wife to mind his house, what should he do with two bairns like that? Burning his house down over his head and getting him into fresh trouble every day. So mark my wordshe will come back without the children."

"Yes, yes, Mother Halka," repeated a chorus; "you have hit the nail on the head; you are a wise woman. He will come back without the children."

That day and the next the cottage remained locked, but late in the evening of the second day a cart was seen returning from the direction which Filip had taken the day before. It was already wellnigh dark when the vehicle was seen driving into the little courtyard, the gate of which was immediately

shut behind them. Despite the darkness, however, the neighbours had been able to distinguish the outlines of several figures-two larger and two smaller black silhouettes.

"He has brought back the children, after all," said one in surprise. "And so old Mother Halka was wrong for once."

"A cow, a cow!" announced a lad who had been peeping over the paling. "He has bought a new cow; I saw him lead it into the shed."

"What colour is the cow?" was asked in great excitement.

"I do not know; I think it is black."

"There is a woman in the cart," was the next piece of news. "A woman!" This was even more surprising intelligence than the cow.

"What sort of woman?"

"I cannot see very well. Now she has gone into the house. I think it is an old woman-perhaps Filip's grandmother; and she is carrying a bundle."

"Shall I go over and look?” asked an enterprising maiden— "just to see what the woman and the cow are like?"

"No, no," decided the other. "It might anger Filip Buska; he likes not to be pried upon. Tomorrow will be time enough to see a black cow and an old woman. Let us go to bed; it is late."

Nevertheless the black cow and the old woman, combined with the fact that Filip had brought back his two children, disturbed many minds that night at Rudniki.

-JEAN PAUL.

all colour and gilding, she further delights in confusing outlines and exchanging forms, so that we ask ourselves in vain which is youth and which is age? where is beauty, and where ugliness?

We cannot guess at the answer to those riddles as long as everything is veiled in a uniform black domino. But the counter - enchanter Day is at hand, and with the first wave of his golden wand he dispels all illusion, tears off the black domino, and the masquerade is at an end. Everything resumes its primitive colour and shape; beauty and ugliness, age and youth, are once more as distinct from each other as goat from sheep.

When, therefore, as usual, the sun rose next morning at Rudniki, changing black weird ghosts back into gnarled oak-trees, bands of spectre warriors into peaceful haycocks, crouching dragons into rotten tree-stumps, the inhabitants of the village became likewise aware that their eyes had deceived them singularly the night before, in showing them a black cow, and an old woman with a bundle.

The cow was not black-it was speckled; and the woman was not old she was young and beautiful, and in place of a bundle she carried a baby in her arms. In other words, it was Magda herself who, with her baby and her speckled cow, had returned to her husband's house, henceforward to leave it no more.

The neighbours wondered and stared for a day or two; but wondering and staring are never of long duration, and people soon forget the little episode of Magda's visit to her brother's house and her sensational return.

Most people said that Filip had done a wise thing in taking back his wife, and others added that it would have been wiser yet if he

had never sent her away; he would have spared himself a useless journey and a burnt roof.

What had passed between husband and wife was never exactly known, nor what had been the reason which had determined Filip to take back Magda and agree to forgive and forget the past. Perhaps the burnt roof and Kuba's misdemeanours had something to do with the matter; or perhaps the speckled cow, which had once weighed so heavily in the matrimonial balance, had still further displayed her matchmaking propensities in bringing the couple once more together. Or was it not perhaps a better and nobler motive than all these?-the godlike spirit of charity, which teaches us to forgive the wrongs of others, as we hope ourselves to be forgiven?

Probably the motives were SO complex, that not even Filip himself could have analysed them.

Some weeks after Magda's return, she found her husband standing in the shed gazing intently at a small piece of charred wood which he held in his hand. This was all that remained of those luckless gates, which once had been so near completion, but which now would never adorn the village church.

"Seventy florins!" he said, mournfully. "It would have brought me in seventy florins. And now it is too late; I cannot begin again, and the Curé will order the gates elsewhere. I shall never have such a chance again. Seventy florins gone!"

"Let them go!" cried Magda, impetuously; "there are other things, better things, than money. Those gates have led to nothing but misery; let them remain closed for ever!

Filip gazed intently at his wife; then he extended his hand to her and echoed her words, "Let them

go!" and he stifled the sigh with which he threw away the last remnant of St Peter and his key.

As years passed on, there was peace in the little cottage, and Filip never regretted his generosity towards Magda. Seeing her thus, with the light of happiness in her eye and a smile on her lips, no one would have thought that she had ever been otherwise than a happy and contented wife. Even the little fair-haired baby who had brought such revolution into the household, ceased by degrees to be a source of irritation: time, which harmonises so many things, darkened his hair and browned his face, so that he grew more like the other children, and was less of an eyesore; and it was scarcely felt to be a relief when one summer, when he was about four years old, the spectre cholera, in paying another flying visit to the place, thought fit to pluck this useless little weed.

Magda has now a new string of corals round her neck, and two other children of her own by her side, black-eyed urchins who bid fair to rival their step-brother Kuba in pranks and mischief. Kuba's famous achievement, however, with the duck's egg, they will not be able to imitate, for the storks never built again upon that roof.

Danelo has removed to a distant village, where he has married a wealthy widow some years older than himself. He beats his wife when he comes home drunk on Saturday nights, and at such times she cries, and vows that she is the most miserable woman on earth; but on the whole, they do not get on much worse than their neighbours, and for the sake of his blue eyes and radiant smile she would

doubtless forgive yet greater offences.

Madame Wolska, now Princess Rascalinska, rarely comes to Rudniki. She is usually to be heard of at Paris, or at some of the fashionable watering - places. Some people say that her second marriage has not been more successful than the first, for Prince Rascalinski gambles away a large proportion of her income, and cares far more for the society of notorious actresses than for that of his handsome wife; and such people wonder that Sophie Rascalinska does not seek for a divorce.

Better-informed folk, however, who know more of the world, are probably right in asserting that the penniless and obscure Sophie Bienkowska has been perfectly successful in both her matrimonial ventures. By the first she got wealth; by the second, position. Prince Rascalinski married her for her money, and she took him for his name, which gives her the entrée to fastidious aristocratic circles where plain Madame Wolska would not have been received.

Thus it comes about, all over the world, that couples are kept together by some sort of link-but that rarely, very rarely, that link is the golden rivet of pure love.

It is usually gold of another sort, or interest, or only a cow, or still less- a name.

Many people start in life with a stock of high principles, but have to lay them aside as unpractical and expensive luxuries. Poor people cannot afford them, and rich people do not seem able to afford them either.

High principles are therefore only made for storks, who are free to act according to their lights with an undeviating sense of justice.

We do not pretend that the above title completely covers the ground occupied by Dr Tulloch's recently published volume, named below, to which we propose to call the attention of our readers. The nine essays collected in it, two only of which are new, the rest having already appeared in the periodical literature of the day, are reviews of as many different philosophical utterances of one kind or another, ranging from Dr Tyndall's dithyrambic apotheosis of Matter before the British Association, to the ponderous transcendentalism of Kant, and the deification of abstract humanity by Comte. They deal, accordingly, with many problems of thought which are too abstruse for these lighter pages, and which, if we were to attempt to discuss in a popular manner, we should run the risk of only puzzling our readers, if not ourselves into the bargain. To serious students, indeed, of human thought, who wish to dig down to the foundations on which science and morals have been built up, and to ascertain how far sensation can be the basis of knowledge, and instinct of ethical judgment, the abstruser parts of these essays will furnish valuable hints to guide them in their arduous investigations, warn them off the pitfalls which gape for the unwary, and clear up for them some of the countless perplexities with which the field of metaphysics is thickly strewn. But we confess that we have not

sufficient confidence in the prevalence of an appetite for such strong meat, to embolden us to offer even so much as a scanty meal of it here. Nor shall we do more than make a passing allusion to the lighter and more generally attractive portions of the essays, which are of a biographical character. Those and we hope they are many

who have made acquaintance with Dr Tulloch's delightful little treatise on Pascal, in the series of "Foreign Classics for English Readers," will not be surprised to find him, in the present volume, sketching with perspicuity and graceful sympathy the story and character of more than one of the wellknown writers, whose works come under his hands for judgment. With a few masterly touches he places before us the eccentric apostle of Positivism, and expounds the strange metamorphosis produced in his gospel by his short acquaintance with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, under whose stimulating influence an arid classification of human knowledge budded apace into an enthusiastic religion, with its temples and priesthood, its sacraments and festal commemorations.

At the opposite end of the philosophical scale, as well as of the volume, will be found a charming sketch of the oracular critic of reason and conscience, to whom the dreary old town of Königsberg owes its fame the immortal Kant, who may be said to have divided himself rather unfairly between his so