got a basin of water and looking-glass. He put the glass into the water, and he burned some paper. He then used some incantations, and told complainant that he saw the thief in the glass: he was a man of about 30 or 40 years of age, and wore a black coat and a pair of white trousers. The defendant asked the complainant to look into the glass, but failed to see anything. The defendant then said that only children could see, and two children, one boy and one girl, both aged about 18 years, were brought to the test, but they also could not see. The girl afterwards, however, said she could see a man with a black coat and a pair of white trousers on. She said this after her eyes had been rubbed with some charmed water. The defendant said if the man did not return back the property in one week, he would return the complainant the $3. Weeks had elapsed, but the stolen property was not forthcoming, and complainant went frequently to ask the defendant about it, when he put him off from day to day. At last he had to give him into custody. Young Alui, a girl 12 years of age, was called. She said she saw a man who was wearing a black coat and white trousers, in the mirror. He was walking; he had a bundle in his hand, and had no umbrella or a fan. From subsequent evidence, however, it turned out that this girl was a relation of the defendant. The magistrate sent him to two months' hard labour.

From the foregoing examples it will, I think, be considered that, to those who have "eyes to see," life in the Far East is far from being devoid of interest as regards the teeming millions so little studied by their foreign visitors. The subject is indeed inexhaustible, but the patience of readers has a limit.

In Town.

1.

I HAVE a friend across the street,
We never yet exchanged a word,
Yet dear to me, his accents sweet,
I am a woman,―he a bird.

2.

And here we twain in exile dwell,

Far from our native woods and skies, And dewy lawns with healthful smell, Where daisies lift their laughing eyes.

3.

Never again from moss-built nest,

Shall the caged woodlark blithely soar; Never again the heath be pressed, By foot of mine for evermore!

4.

Yet from that feathered, quivering throat,

A blessing wins across to me;

No thrall can hold that mellow note,
Or quench its flame in slavery.

5.

When morning dawns in holy calm,

And cach true heart to worship calls, Mine is the prayer, but his the psalm, That floats about our prison walls.

6.

And as behind the thwarting wires
The captive creature throbs and sings,
With him my mounting soul aspires,

On Music's strong and cleaving wings.

Brantôme.

In the early years of Louis XIII. there was still surviving in the Dordogne an old man who had lived through the most stirring period of the many religious wars in France-who had known Charles V. and his rival Francis I.; who had been familiar with the Court of the house of Valois, and their mother Catherine of Medicis ; who had accompanied Mary Stuart on her return to Scotland; had seen and admired Elizabeth of England, the only fault of whose character, in his opinion, was the usage of her cousin; who had been intimate with all the Guises; who believed in the consummate wisdom of Philip II., and was enthusiastic in his admiration of Margaret of Valois, to whom he ascribed every grace and every virtue. He had conversed with those who had been present at the greatest battle of the sixteenth century, the battle of giants-the fight of Marignan— when the terrible Swiss pikemen suffered their first defeat, though they retired in good order, none daring to follow them, and their conquerors hardly believing in the victory which they had won. He had talked with men who had taken part in that horrible sack of Rome, which thrilled the Christian world from one end to the other. In his youth and middle age he had shared in all the wars of the League, till nigh upon the death of Henry III. For, when the two Guises had been murdered, and the old queen soon followed them, he lost his patrons and friends and retired from the French Court. During the residue of his life, which was prolonged for twenty-four years after these events, he busied himself in writing memoirs of his contemporaries, in quarrelling with his family, in comparing his merits with his fortunes, in glorifying the nobility of his ancestry, and in dwelling on the scenes of his past activity. Few writers of French memoirs have given a more lively picture of the age in which he lived, and none in one particular have been more scandalous. The old man had an evil reputation, even for that unclean and unchaste age, for the 'Femmes Galantes' of Brantôme is the naughtiest book that has, perhaps, ever been written even by a French ecclesiastic, and the more particularly because it does not profess to be a satire, or anything else than an account of what the writer thought quite natural, and very general.

Brantôme was the third son of the Vicomte de Bourdeille, a Périgord noble, whose family had been long settled in Guienne.

There was no part of France in which pride of birth was so general as it was in Guienne, not even in Brittany. The family of Bourdeille pretended a descent from a king of France and a princess of England, king and princess both being as mythical as the Lear of Britain and the Fergus of Scotland. They alleged that before Charles the Great founded the Abbey of Brantôme, he took the advice of the Lord of Bourdeille, his contemporary and friend. There was no period in the social history of France in which the distinction between noble and ignoble was so pertinaciously, so insolently insisted on, and so patiently endured. And in that district of Guienne, in that age of French life and manners, there was no haughtier aristocrat than Pierre Brantôme. If he does tell a story of men or women who did not belong to the noblesse, he makes an apology for introducing the names and the manners of such people into his pages, and for the breach of etiquette which he commits. The large outer and lower world is to work and be commanded, to find the means for the fine gentlemen and ladies who were quartered on them, and to obey their orders without grudge or murmur. There was only one sense in which the noble did not entirely disdain his fellow-countrymen. It was necessary to conciliate the soldier, and not a little of the dash and spirit of the French army in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to be referred to the interest which the commanders took in their This was the secret of the great influence which the Constable of Bourbon had with the forces under his control. This man, the head of the family from which Henry IV. was descended, was offended by Francis I., quitted his service, entered that of Charles V. and was killed at the capture of Rome. His treason was for a time the ruin of his family, and justified, in the eyes of the Guises and the Spanish faction, the resistance which was made to the King of Navarre after the murder of Henry III.

men.

Pierre Bourdeille was destined for the Church. He studied at Paris, and afterwards at Poitiers, and seems to have witnessed the progress of the Reformation in that part of France. The reform of the Church, and even the acceptance of novel doctrine, did not at first provoke an active spirit of persecution. The popes of the latter part of the fifteenth, and the early part of the sixteenth, century affirmed the pretensions of the thirteenth century, while their morals were worse than at almost any period of papal history. Italians of the most orthodox belief are the authorities for the ill repute of Alexander VI., for the cunning ferocity of Julius II., and the voluptuous scepticism of Leo X. It is very likely that in time the action of the Inquisition would have been directed against opinion in Western Europe as it was in Spain, and the severities of the crusade against the Provençals have been renewed against the followers of Luther