works, combining the Attic severity with the modern poet's realism and truth of detail. It resembles our own English dramas of Atalanta in Calydon and Philoctetes more closely than what the continental poets usually give us as revivals of the antique tragedy. The metre in which it is written is closely modelled on what the Swedish poet has conceived to be the tragic measure of the Greeks, a sort of solemn alexandrine.

When, in 1873, Professor Nyblom, in editing the works of Runeberg, issued a biographical notice which still remains the chief storehouse of information, the poet was already in very weak and precarious health. As late, however, as April 1877, he was well enough to publicly congratulate his old friend and fellow-poet Cygnæus on attaining his seventieth birthday. But he was taken ill very shortly after, and on the afternoon of Sunday, May 6, 1877, he passed away in his seventy-fourth year. He has left many disciples behind him, and in his friend and follower Topelius Sweden once more borrows from Finland her most prominent living poet. The influence of Runeberg on the literature of his time has been healthy and vigorous. In Talis Qualis, who survived him only a few weeks, he found in Sweden itself a quick and strong imagination lighted at the lamp of his own. The present King of Sweden, Oscar II., in his excellent poem of Svenska flottans minnen, has shown himself a scholar of the great Finnish realist. In Carl Snoilsky, the latest product of Swedish poetry, we find another side of Runeberg's genius, the artistic and classic, laid under the contribution of discipleship. We know as yet little of his life, little of the inward development of his great powers. A collection of his posthumous writings, as well as an exhaustive biography, will be welcomed by every lover of his noble verse.

E. W. G.

Cobin's Revenge.

CHAPTER I.

MAKING HAY IN THE SUNSHINE.

I WAS at the top of my cour-a grassy slope, thickly set with appletrees-we should call it an orchard in England, where a "" "court seems to suggest pavement, which it is far from doing in Normandy. Not but what there are plenty of stones in my cour, and Gracie, my precious, only daughter, sits in the sunshine making Druidic circles with them—Gracie, who is a vision of delight, the small tyrant of our fields and home. Mirza, the big dog, is watching her with a grave and puzzled mien, some occult resemblance in the flint stones to well-polished bones seeming to enchain his interest. There is another circle-maker close by-the cow-tethered by a chain passed round her horns to an iron pin, driven firmly into the soil. To give the cow a new centre of operations is my present objectbut where to put her? She has eaten up all my grass, and is now looking wistfully at the green veil tied round Gracie's hat, as if she would like to eat that too.

The weather is fine-too fine for those who keep cows. We have had a broiling day, but the heat of it is past, and cool shadows begin to rest in the valley below, where you can see the chimneys of my house-where I live with Hetty my wife and Gracie my daughter, in peace and tranquillity. There, too, you can see the quaint, squat spire of the church, and its triple roof, slanting at various angles, and in a broad patch of sunshine the gaunt Gothic arches of a ruined abbey church, with the white florid conventual buildings beyond, suggesting at once the pallid, rigid cenobites who were the first settlers in this quiet valley, and the stout, easy-going Benedictines, the last occupants of the old nests, "where now the screech-owl builds his baleful bower." All about is forest, where the wild boar grows fat and fierce over the beech-mast, and the deer flit softly by, much as they did in the days of that Norman William who loved them so well. It is a charming prospect, but I wish it were all shut out by a good thick mist and a heavy downpour of rain. For then the grass would grow, and the cow would thrive, and my wife would cease to sneer at it. For I must say that Hetty is not so devoted to the cow as she ought to be. She counts its cost in a niggardly kind of way -scores against me the wages of the dairymaid and the cowboy, and even the cost of the trifle they eat-which is manifestly unfair, as everybody knows that one or two more or less in a household make no appreciable difference, and makes out that our butter costs us ten francs a pound.

My speculations are suddenly cut short by a low growl from Mirza, the object of which, I see next moment, is a man leaning over the gatethe one that leads forestwards—a sallow, heavy-browed man, in the universal blue blouse and a closely fitting fur cap, this last quite out of keeping with the climate. He touches his cap politely.

"Monsieur has a nice cow; but she looks thin. And the grass of the cour-it is worth nothing."

"The grass is not bad," I remark, "if there were only more of it.” "Ah! Monsieur should see the grass in my cour, thick and luscious, and I have no cow to eat it. Will Monsieur sell the cow?"

No, I would not sell the cow. It had cost me too much to acquire a real practicable working cow, whose milk foams in the pail, milk that will develope into cream and butter. I would not part with the cow, but would my new friend sell his grass?

"Oh!" cried Gracie, running up at this moment, "it is my little père Covin. Bo'jour, petit père, and have you made the little boat you promised me?"

"Not yet," said Covin, stooping down to kiss the proffered face. “1 have not yet found a piece of wood suitable."

"But there is wood everywhere."

There was nothing astonishing in Gracie's being on friendly terms with a man who was quite a stranger to me. In her daily walks she formed continually new friendships-the whole village knew her and admired her, her fearless ways and readiness of speech. M. Covin, having paid his respects to Gracie, goes on to say that he might possibly arrange to let me his cour, and we walk together amicably to look at it, Gracie trotting by my side, chattering away in her mixture of French and English child talk. Covin, in spite of his heavy and forbidding look, is kind and obliging. He certainly has got a nice piece of grass, with not so many flint stones cropping up. We strike a bargain at once, without troubling the notary to put it into writing-a lease of his cour for an indefinite period, at a rent of fifty francs a year, payable quarterly in advance.

That "in advance" seemed mistrustful and unfriendly; but Covin was no doubt poor, and the money in pocket was his main inducement to let the cour. We went down together to ratify the compact in the village café.

As we came out, I saw the professor coming along, and paused to wait for him.

The professor and his wife reside in the neighbouring town, our only compatriots within a circle of many miles. We always call him the professor, although I don't know that he professes anything, but ho reads, philosophises, lays down the law, and is insatiable in his thirst for infor mation. He is a stout, jovial-looking man, and a great friend of mine.

"That's an Irishman," said the professor, wheeling round, and pointing out Covin, who was making his way up the hill. "In spite of his

blue blouse and his Norman patois, he is Irish. Look at the high curved cheek bone, the projecting muzzle, the sunken eyes, the shapeless nose. That man's grandfather was a Peep-o'day Boy, a United Irishman, or what not. He made his country too hot to hold him about the times of gallant Hoche, the Bantry Bay fiasco, and so on. His name is Covin, eh! I'll be bound it was Coghlan then. Mutat cœlum non animumhe is Irish still. An honest, hard-working fellow, I dare say-only not to be desired as landlord or tenant. But especially as tenant. Just the man to live rent free in your house, and shoot you if you try to turn him out."

The professor's words gave me a certain amount of uneasiness, for there seemed to be something possibly prophetic about them, but how could we possibly come to a disagreement about half an acre of grass?

Still the character I heard of Covin hardly tended to reassure me. He was a fisherman, it seemed, having a boat on the river, and often sleeping on board it. No one in the village liked him; he was "sauvage," morose, and uncommunicative, living an utterly lonely life. The only person who had a good word for him was the curé. "Covin,” he said, "is industrious, and attentive to his religious duties. I have known him spend hours in the church, praying, his face working with strong emotion, his eyes fixed upon the sacred images." "He had no friends but God and his saints," he had once told the priest.

But the curé added gravely that although estimable in some points, he feared the man was passionate and revengeful. His unbridled temper had already brought him into trouble; about which the curé declined to say any more.

I found out what the trouble had been from another quarter. He had attempted to assassinate his "proprietor" (his landlord), and had only lately finished a term of imprisonment for the offence. I comforted myself by the thought, that even the most rabid of Ribbonmen would not assassinate a tenant who paid his rent regularly, and I determined that Covin should get his quarterly payment with most scrupulous punctuality.

Soon after this I exchanged my cow for a pony, an operation which called forth many jeers from the professor. He likened me to Hans in the German story, who changed his cow for a horse, his horse for a pig, and so on till he got to a grindstone, that tumbled into the river; but here Gracie, who has got her Grimm at her finger's end, triumphantly refuted him. It was the horse that Hans changed for a cow-and so the whole structure fell to the ground. Her parents were naturally delighted at Gracie's cleverness in refuting so opportunely the professor. But we were not so well pleased when Gracie, boasting of knowing all the stories, went on to say she had told them all to père Covin.

"What! is that the man the professor thinks so dangerous?" cried Hetty, turning pale.

"Not dangerous to his friends, and, for the matter of that, to be

trusted with a child or a woman under any circumstances-one would think. Not that there have been wanting very ugly examples to the contrary-when the quarrel has been agrarian," said the professor, who has a tendency to talk like a book on occasions. Hetty could not draw such fine distinctions, and questioned whether we should not interdict Gracie altogether from talking to Covin. But that would be interpreted by him into a sign of hostility, and I was anxious to avoid the slightest occasion of dispute. And the man was very kind to Gracie: he had carved with his knife a little boat for her, with mast and sail complete, that would always swim bottom upwards.

cour.

Of course, having a pony and no cow, I no longer wanted grass, but hay. And so next spring I put down both cours for hay. It was a fine year for herbage that, and as summer came on the grass in Covin's cour grew longer and longer, thicker and thicker. I was delighted at the prospect of such a crop, and one evening took Hetty and Gracie up to look at it. Covin had a capital garden about his cottage and had hitherto kept it in good order, working at it in the summer evenings, the smoke of his pipe rising peacefully into the blue. But now it had a neglected, deserted look. A few weeks' neglect at this time of year and everything runs riot. Perhaps Covin was away for the summer fishing. No-he stood at the door of his cottage, gazing blankly out upon the He must have come home recently, and beheld perhaps for the first time the progress of my crop. Perhaps he was vexed that he had let me have it so cheap, for there was at least a hundred francs' worth of hay there. Anyhow, he looked as black as night, taking no notice of our courteous salutations. But Gracie went up to him headlong and clasped his knees with her little arms, in the exuberance of her delight at seeing her Covin again. She had a long story to tell him about the boat, which had run away down the stream. He was to make haste and carve another, that would swim the right way up. His face softened by degrees, but he hardly seemed to understand what she said. Then he stooped down and gave her a hasty kiss, put her gently away, went in and slammed the door.

and

One evening, soon after, I wanted some fresh grass for the pony, took my scythe and went up to Covin's cour to cut a swathe of the rich, sweet herbage. The clank of the scythe brought Covin out of his cottage, and he watched me for a few moments with louring brow.

"It is forbidden to cut this grass," he said just as I had finished. "How!" I cried, "I may not cut my own grass? Do I owe you any rent, Monsieur Covin?"

"I did not let it for such a purpose. I forbid you to cut any more." "I don't want any more at present, but in a fortnight's time I begin to cut the hay."

"I forbid you!" he cried, in a voice husky with passion. "All the same, I shall begin."

"And I shall prevent you."