impress all unbiased minds alike, thus beautifully illustrating the sententious old maxim of the Romans, Vox populi vox Dei. These intuitions are always strongly marked with the peculiarity that, although they may not need the support of argument, they are not opposed to reason. There are cases, however, in which the vox populi has been in direct opposition to the vox Dei, as afterward revealed by reason, though none of these cases are of a moral nature, nor is their accompanying perception worthy the name of intuition. A few generations back, under the guidance of another old proverb that Seeing is believing, "everybody said" that the world was flat, and that it was a sort of immovable centre around which daily revolved the sun, moon, and stars. But when this "voice of the people" came to be tested by facts, which reason proclaimed to be utterances of God in Nature, it was found to be utterly false, being an illusion of the senses; the earth is not flat, nor do any of the heavenly bodies daily rotate around it. Then, again, that mysterious and all-prevailing authority known as everybody" is proved in many cases to be a mere myth, being composed oftentimes of one's own party in politics or clique in society, while their maxims are contradicted by people of other parties and of other cliques. There is one form, however and perhaps but one-in which reverence for a universal verdict is usually liable to be cherished to an injurious extent. It is when that verdict comes in the shape of a time-honored but unsound proverb, or in the false interpretation of a sound one. popular sentiment toward all such proverbs is well expressed in the stanza of an old English poet :

"The people's voice the voice of God we call ;

The

And what are proverbs but the people's voice, Coined first and current made by public choice?

Then sure they must have weight and force withal."

At the risk of disturbing the shades of the poets by irreverent criticism, we must notice another saying from the land of song, being nothing less than Dr. Young's celebrated line

"All men think all men mortal but themselves."

These words embody a noble as well as a reprehensible truth—not always appreciated, however, by those who quote, and not even acknowledged by the learned author from whose pen they flowed. He intended them as a biting sarcasm on the folly of procrasti nation, especially in the matter of religion; and he seems not to have been able to discern any thing but insanity in the slowness of mankind to realize the truth of their own mortality. Now, whenever this slowness is

The following lines will suffice to show the animus of the passage, though better shown by quoting more largely :

'Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool,

And scarce in human wisdom to do more.

All promise is poor, dilatory man.

At thirty man suspects himself a fool;

Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves-and reresolves; then dies the same.
And why? Because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think all men mortal but themselves."

the result of an unwillingness to entertain an unwelcome truth, we must admit that it is in the highest degree chargeable with folly. But we may question whether it is always, or even usually, the offspring of a parent so unworthy, and whether, on the contrary, it may not be one of those deep and resistless intuitions of the universal mind, having in this fact the proof that it is the outspeaking voice of God himself. That the human body is mortal no one can doubt; it is obvious to every sense, and attested by every law of Nature. If man has an immortal part, it must be a something which is invisible, intangible, beyond the reach of sense and of material laws. Now, it is an important fact, as significant as it is singular, that the conception we form of other people and the conception we form of ourselves are from totally different standpoints. When the name of another is mentioned there instantly rises before the mind of the listener an image of that person's bodily presence. When our own names are mentioned there arises no bodily image (we do not thus symbolize ourselves; indeed, we cannot, for the man who "beholdeth his natural face in a glass, goeth his way and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was "). The mention of our own names is instantly associated with certain consciousnesses of thought and feeling, which constitute our mental picture of self, and by which we distinguish that self from all other beings. In other words, the idea we naturally form of others is bodily; the idea we form of ourselves is spiritual. When, therefore, the mortality of another is alluded to, our conception of it is easy, because we have only to imagine the living body of that other pale, cold, and stiff in death. But when our own mortality is the subject of thought, we cannot without special effort realize it, because these consciousnesses by which self identifies self cannot be conceived of as pale, cold, stiff, or, in fact, other than living and active. If, therefore, the soul of man be immortal, this natural tendency of men to

"think all men mortal but themselves "

is not in all cases the insane habit which Dr. Young seems to have supposed, but, on the contrary, may be a noble instinct, revealing to us, as by a voice from heaven, the momentous truth that we are immortal!

F. R. GOULDING.

WOMAN'S NATURE.

HE'S very shy, forsooth;
Well, is there fny hurry?

When women hesitate,

There is no cause for worry.

What mean the April clouds? Nothing but summer roses; And Love one moment frowns,

The next a smile discloses.

When she is proud and cold,
You should be pleased the better.
Given her own wild way,

She'll ask you for a fetter.

What have you been about?
Not woman's nature learning-
Her dear heart goes away,

For sake of the returning.

M. F. BUTTS.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

THE

HE average American tourist is good-humored and easily contented. It is rarely that he grumbles, even under injury. And he is prone to lively gratitude when, in the course of his travels, he is made here and there thoroughly comfortable. It is quite needless to point out how dependent he is upon the well-keeping of hotels. We do not design to become cynically bitter upon the American landlord, much less to compare him unfavorably with his foreign confrère. In very many respects the average first-class American hotel is quite superior to the average first-class European hotel. Its rooms are larger; its linen is cleaner and drier; its service is more assiduous, and on the whole less mercenary; its food more various and quite as good; and its method of charging more satisfactory. rarely to be found. such a one must be or two little, or seemingly little, things a very beneficent improvement might be made in most of our hostelries, large and small, with little expense, and no very harrowing amount of care. The average traveler, for instance, might be conciliated, in the matter of food, by a few simple and wholesome reforms. We would commend to enterprising "mine hosts" everywhere rather more attention to the arts of making good bread, distilling good coffee, and the cooking of plain steaks and chops. A traveler, even if he be stopping at a hotel-palace in New York, Saratoga, or Newport, will generally find the fancy, fixed-up, Frenchified dishes, which take up so much space on the bewildering bill of fare, pall upon his taste ere many trials; and will fall back upon the plain and substantial food to which he is accustomed at home. If he finds the coffee, the bread, the beef, and the mutton, as good as they are upon his own table, he is usually thankful and content. An hotel that is famous for its good bread has a far better lease of prosperity than one that is famous for its good fricandeaus, vols au vent, or new-fangled entrées. Yet it is exceptional when the traveler hits upon really good bread and good coffee. The average bread and coffee, even at firstclass hotels at summer resorts, are just sufferable, and that is all. Better bread and coffee will be found in nine out of ten of the private houses of a respectable New York street. Yet it would seem to be an easy matter for a landlord, who must be supposed to have abundant means with which to secure the best bread and coffee making talent, to provide his guests with that for which they would, as a rule, far more heartily thank him than for the more ostentatious

Yet the ideal hotel is He who aspires to keep great in detail. In one

dishes which his head-cook tasks an inventive brain to produce. Few can enjoy a breakfast, however sumptuous, without good coffee; or a dinner, with however many courses à la Paris, without good bread; and amendment in these respects seems so feasible, that we hope the hostly mind will some time be inspired by it.

While upon the subject of American hotels, we may as well quote some rather surprising information about them which the London Daily Telegraph has been giving to its readers. The ignorance of this paper about every thing American is inveterate, and must, we should think, sooner or later become notorious. We can hardly look to a journal to enlighten Englishmen about this country which gravely asserts Brooklyn and Staten Island to be a civic part of the city of New York. Its description of our hotelsystem is quite as wide of the truth. The London reader is told that it is the custom "to drive the guests, at the sound of a gong, at certain times of the day, and at no others, into a common dining-hall, and there allow them to browse at will in a wilderness of second-rate cookery." There is just enough truth in this statement to encourage the false inference that Englishmen will make from it, that the meals in our hotels are confined within arbitrary and narrow periods-the fact being, that a range of two or three hours is given for each meal. If we mistake not, the guests of English hotels are much more restricted; at most of them it is only at a certain precise hour that one can get a dinner with "a hot cut off the joint." Then, as to service, the Telegraph seems to regard the system of feeing waiters, and chambermaids, and porters, and boot-blacks, which prevails in England, preferable to our fashion of paying for service in the lump hotel-charge. Our hotels "discourage the giving of fees to waiters, the result being that a visitor is mainly compelled, except at meal-times, to wait upon himself." We venture to assert that in our well-conducted hotels guests are waited upon quite as assiduously as at the best London houses. We supposed, moreover, that the feeing of waiters was generally regarded in England as an evil and nuisance which it was well to get rid of. Certainly the Telegraph, when it has not happened to want to turn a contrast unfavorable to America, has spoken regretfully of the universal bribery of English waiters, and the pecuniary competition of guests to secure special attention. That American hotels are not such places of cheerless vastness, elaborate discomfort, frantic food-bolting, and curiously-devised methods of inconveniencing the guests, as the Telegraph would have its readers believe, is evident from the wide-spread imitation of them in Europe. It was the American hotel

THE commotion excited in England in consequence of the sentence of Colonel Baker is very great. Society seems to be divided upon the question-one faction bitterly denouncing the sentence of the court as unjustly lenient, the other defending it as fully as severe as the offense and the circumstances pertaining to it warranted. The subject is one that has brought out no little discussion on the whole question of the penal law as it relates to different classes of society. It will doubtless always be maintained, and with a good deal of reason, that legal punishments should be enforced without distinction of persons. There must be, it is claimed, the same law for the rich and the poor. This is fundamentally very true, and the truth of the maxim is so generally accepted that in every civilized country capital crimes are equably punished. Whenever there are any distinctions at all, they pertain to minor offenses. Rich peculators sometimes succeed in escaping the penalty of their misdeeds, not because the law makes a distinction between the rich and the poor thief, but because the peculation has not been the theft direct, has been adroitly managed so as to stand beyond the reach of the law. In all cases of a graver character where the offenses committed are identically of a like nature, the penalty is the same, no matter who the person is. But there are a few cases that necessarily involve a question of condition or of antecedents. The rich and the poor forgers suffer alike; but perhaps the rich and the poor drunkards, or the rich and the poor combatants in an assault, are quite likely to have a different sort of penalty dealt out to them. But this different justice in appearance may be very far from being different in fact. The noisy vagabond who is sent to the penitentiary for ten days probably feels no disgrace, and experiences only a little temporary inconvenience in the penalty; but to the man of customary sobriety, who in an exceptional convivial hour disturbs the peace, a single night in the station-house is an intense humiliation, a bitter fact likely to stain and embarrass all his future life. To a man of sensibility and refinement a prison is ten times more formidable than to a man of coarse instincts and rude habits of life. Every thing in this world is much or little by contrast: a mode of life that to a laborer is comfortable and even agreeable, to one of another kind of training would be unendurable; the tasks that some find easy, others find intolerable; the act that with one man is a matter of custom, to another is a bitter hu

tion of its penalties makes no distinctions, it simply succeeds in making practically tremendous differences. If it be a fundamental maxim that all men should suffer alike for similar offenses, then, in order that they may suffer alike the penalty should be adjusted to the character, rank, and conditions pertaining to the persons under judgment. An inflexible law is sure to be an unjust law. A law incompetent to recognize the difference between a woman reared tenderly, amid ease and luxury, and a fierce termagant of the gutter, or insensible to the difference between a man of breeding and life-long repute and one hardened to every form of degradation, such a law is actually very unjust, however much it may carry upon the surface a seeming equity. How far it may be prac ticable to act upon these differences of char-. acter and condition, it is not easy to say. In many kinds of offenses it is certain that it cannot be done; but, as the law always falls even at its best with peculiar harshness upon that better class who are not habitual criminals, who have under some mad temptation sacrificed every thing that had made life dear, there need be no fear that these unfortunates will not experience the bitter consequences of their misdoing to the full.

A VERY intelligent correspondent of a Western paper has been dilating upon the evidences which he found, on a recent visit to England, of the power, glory, and great future, of our mother-land. Among other subjects, he examined that of the English land-tenure. Going thither with the strongest prejudices against that system, which "puts great estates in the hands of a few persons, and divorces the many from any interest in the soil except as tenants and hirelings," he seems to have made some discoveries which modified his opinion. The chief was, that farming in England has come to be not only an industry but a trade. Companies and firms have been organized, with the object of leasing large tracts of land, and of cultivating it to the best advantage by the aid of the latest appliances and of generous outlays for wages and improvement. As far as it goes, the result of this system is to convert the peasant into an artisan, and, if he so chooses, also into a stockholder. No one can deny that this is a great advance upon the old customs of English landlordism; nor is it surprising that these agricultural companies, when in full operation, get eight or nine per cent. profit, where the landed proprietors have long been, and are to this day, content with two or three. But the corre spondent of whom we speak greatly exaggerates the extent and influence of agricult ural companies. After all, there is but a

inserts in the Times, first, a fictitious announcement of her own marriage with a certain Nugent Orme, and afterward a fictitious announcement of Jean's death. The first is intended for Jean alone, and, of course, she sees it at once, while no one of the dozen or more persons who could have exposed the falsehood happens upon it. The second announcement, on the other hand, is intended for these dozen or more people exclusively, and, of course, they see it immediately on its appearance; while Jean, and those of her friends who might have corrected it, conveniently overlook that special issue of the paper. The author's ingenuity, such as it is, is expended in getting Jean out of one set of difficulties immediately to plunge her into another, all of them being destitute of any conceivable reason except to give a cumulative impression of Jean's angelic loveliness of character. Spite of all, however, the numerous complexities are removed by the one solitary sensible act, which is credited to Jean during the entire course of the story: the wicked are punished, the virtuous rewarded, and the curtain descends to the familiar music of wedding-bells.

It would be waste of time to analyze the several "characters," which are of a piece with the plot. Mrs. Newman evidently wished to create a heroine who should attract by contrast with the typical, worldly-wise young lady of ordinary fiction; and her recipe for making one is to endow the said heroine with every quality which the ordinary young lady has not, and to represent her as doing on any given occasion the exact opposite of what the ordinary young lady would do. Accordingly, Jean really loves her aunt and cousins, and actually believes them when they declare that they love her; when a certain lady, to whom she has just been introduced, politely expresses the wish to become better acquainted, she opens widely her dark, liquid eyes, looks wistfully into those of the other, and asks "Why?" when the young men pay her compliments and make love to her, she utterly refuses to become self-conscious, and frankly pays them back in kind; when she goes to a ball, she exclaims aloud to her aunt, so that all the room can hear, "Isn't this splendid? did you ever see any thing so delightful?" and, when the young men crowded around for dances, "she delightfully gave them her tablets to fill up as they chose, and when they disagreed among themselves as to who was to have which, frankly informed Edward Lawrence, who appealed to her, that it did not matter in the least-it was all the same to her." Of course, such freshness and simplicity, after our surfeit of heroines who are acquainted with the ordinary convenances of society, are very charming, and it is not surprising that wherever she goes she wins the hearts of all except the wicked. But, in addition to all this, Jean is a "genius," as distinguished from her accomplished cousin Maud, who only has "talent." The difference between genius and talent, as defined by Mrs. Newman, is that, while Maud could detect the slightest flaw in logic or reasoning from given premises, Jean, though weak in logic, had an intuitive perception of the weakness of the premises

themselves. Indeed, Jean won Nugent Orme's love (which should have been given to Maud) by revealing to him that after reading a certain philosophical pamphlet four times with the aid of the dictionary, and sitting up till twelve o'clock at night to do it, she had "hit the centre-point of the writer's fallacy, when Maud's quick intelligence had failed to find it." As to Nugent Orme, the hero of the story, who spends his income in social experiments for the benefit of the laborer-who has "every important question of the day-religious, political, and social-represented upon his library-table, with all the best opinions for and against it "-who discusses with his betrothed at balls the "new philosophies as they arise," and who is a "skeptic," but not an "infidel "he is as pretty a prig and as neat a specimen of the woman's ideal man as we have lately encountered.

Most young ladies will be sure to follow Jean's example in falling in love with him; and we are compelled to confess that, in spite of all we have said, "Jean" is a story with which many readers will be greatly pleased.

REFERRING to the death of the late Bishop Thirlwall, the Saturday Review says: "The name of another great scholar has to be added, alongside of the names of Finlay and Willis, to the list of those whom death has taken from us within a year of which little more than half has as yet passed. It may be that a generation which has not yet learned to know the name of Finlay has already forgotten the name of Thirlwall. But those who know what writing history really is, and who know the powers which it calls for-those who hold that two good books on the same subject are better than one, and who do not think that the appearance of the second makes the former useless-they will feel that one of the few men at whose feet the learner might sit in the full trust that he would never be misled has passed away from among us. Of three great English historians of Greece, three men of whom any age and land might have been proud, all now have gone, and two have gone within a few months of each other. The two men who have, between them, told in our own tongue the tale of Greece, from her earliest to her latest days, were in life far apart from one another in their callings and in their places of abode. They were yet farther apart in the motives and circumstances which led them severally to undertake the task of which each of them so well discharged his own share. In the life of each there was a contemplative and a practical stage; but those stages came in reverse order in the lives of the two men. The writings of

one deal wholly with a distant past; the writings of the other begin, indeed, from the distant past, but carry on the tale down to days in which the historian recorded events in which he had been an actor. The man who went out to fight for Greece lived on in the land which he had helped to free to be at once her historian and her censor. The other, a scholar from his cradie, finished his one great work early in life, and was then called away to practical life in a post as toilsome and difficult as any that could be found within the range of his calling. This marked contrast in the position of the two men leaves its impress on their writings. It is vain to argue which does his work the better of the two. Each does it as it was natural that he should do it in the position in which he found himself, and from the point of vie in which he necessarily looked on his subject. It is enough to say that, between them, they have told the whole tale of Greece, and that each has told his part of it as it never was told before him."

London a somewhat extraordinary and, we ONE Mr. George Vasey has published in should judge, very comical work, entitled "The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling," which the Saturday Review notices as follows: "Mr. Vasey has devoted himself to the study of laughter with, as he says, 'all the seriousness and gravity becoming a scientific or philosophical inquiry,' but he has as yet only a rough outline of his views to offer. Mr. Vasey is of opinion that laughing has become a confirmed habit of the human race from the practice of tickling babies, and doubts wheth-. er children would ever begin to laugh if they were not stimulated or prompted, but let alone, and treated naturally and rationally.' He is very severe on parents and nurses for being so foolish as to imagine that the sounds proceeding from babies under such circumstances are manifestations of pleasure and delight. His own view is that they are nothing more nor less than spasmodic and involuntary contractions and dilatations of the pectoral muscles and the lungs, excited into action by absurd ticklings and stupid monkey tricks. . . . The conclusion is unavoidable, that the absurd habit of laughing,' which Mr. Vasey also thinks uncomfortable, is entirely occasioned by the unnatural and false associations which have been forced upon us in early life.' One of the chapters is devoted to the degrading and vicious consequences of the habit of laughing.' Sensible people, Mr. Vasey holds, rarely laugh, and fools who like laughing do a great deal of harm by encouraging folly in others in order to have something to laugh at. How much better, he thinks, it would be if people would be content with smiling, which does not twist the face into horrible grimaces; and he gives a number of illustrations to deter his fellow-creatures from making frights of themselves by laughing. On the other hand, there are pictures of the 'entreating smile,' the confiding smile,' the 'mother's sympathetic smile,' the infant's smile of delight,' the 'joyous smile of friendly recognition,' the 'supremely affectionate smile,' the 'pensive smile' (of a very idiotic character), and so on, which readers of the work can practise with the help of a mirror. We suspect Mr. Vasey will have some difficulty in putting down laughter, but it might perhaps be well if people were more reason-able in regard to what they laugh at."

THE Paris correspondent of the London Academy, writing of Mérimée's "Lettres à une autre Inconnue," says: "This new Inconnue

3

was a Polish lady, who with her sister was one of the stars that glittered at the imperial court: she was, if we are to believe Mérimée, possessed both of beauty and wit, and had the free-and-easy cavalier manner then (1865-1870) regarded as the special mark of the highest breeding. She was the president of a Cour d'Amour, organized by way of pastime by the empress, and composed of ladies of her suite. Mérimée was their secretary, and he carried on the pleasantry which had been begun at Fontainebleau or Compiègne by continuing at distance in his capacity of secretary to keep his fair president au courant of all that is going on around him. The notes he addresses to ber, for they are notes and not letters, are couched in the frivolous and gallant language of the court, and long trains and striped stockings are as fully discussed as politics and literature; but the style throughout is clear and brief, and as free from pretension as it is bright and witty, while the language is precise, nervous, and expressive, and owing to these qualities Mérimée ranks as one of the two or three most distinguished writers of this century. He cannot, either as a novelist, historian, or archæologist, be said to be the first of his age, because by his own choice he was an amateur to the last, and wrote and studied professedly, solely for his own amusement; nevertheless, he is the most marvelous story-teller, and, in his way, a perfect writer. At the same time his letters are a valuable record of the moral history of the Second Empire. They reproduce in a wonderful manner the vanity and ignorant levity of the imperial world, as well as the vague dread which was beginning to make itself felt in spite of the efforts made to stifle and dissipate it by the mad pursuit of worldly distractions and pleasure. Written, as the whole volume is, in a light, jesting tone, there is a note of bitter sadness sounding through it, which we cannot but feel to be the unconscious presentiment of coming misfortunes."

"Ir it be true," says the London Spectator, that imitation is the sincerest flattery, then Miss Broughton must be quite satisfied with the testimony to her powers which she is constantly receiving. Her style has an air of ease about it which beguiles one into believing that it is easy. Unconventional people who lead unconventional lives of their own, but with elegant surroundings, and with the leisure and locomotion which writers of fiction bestow as easily us immense fortunes upon their protégés, and which are not a bit more like reality; odd talk, untrammeled by the rules of society as by those of grammar, and a combination of vehement passion with tawdry cynicism-such are the components which we usually find in novels of the imitation-Broughton school. In reality, even the defects of Miss Broughton's style are not easy to imitate, and that something which pleases in every thing she writes, which frequently pleases side by side with much that one most dislikes and deplores, is just what nobody can imitate the spirit, at once subtile and audacious, which sets her stories apart."

The Portfolio, edited by Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, is an art-publication the merit of which is very generally recognized. Its illustrations consist of etchings by a prɔcess known as photogravure, which for certain classes of subjects is very satisfactory. The etchings in the August number consist of a sea-study by Turner, which is very striking in character and effect; "Le Chaudronnier," by Legros; and " Kingston-on-the-Thames," by

L. B. Phillips. Among the articles of special interest is the beginning of a paper on Antoine Joseph Wiertz, the half-mad Belgian artist, whose collection of paintings at Brussels is the amazement of all who witness it. It is fairly described in this article as "a pictorial pandemonium where rages the perpetual conflict between good and evil, God and devil, where demons are in mortal combat with angels, dragons belch out fire in the face of Heaven, lightnings rend rocks asunder," but mingled with which are some of the quaintest fancies and the most delicious ideals of women ever put on canvas. The American publisher of The Portfolio is J. W. Bouton.

THE Marquis of Lorne has written, and Macmillan & Co. are to publish, a poem entitled "Guido and Lita: a Tale of the Riviera," founded, it is said, on an incident in one of the many Saracen inroads which troubled the coast of Provence in the tenth century. . . . The Saturday Review is merciless on Mrs. Wood. It thinks that "whatever qualities valuable for story-telling Mrs. Henry Wood may possess, whatever problematical graces time may take from her or bestow, one thing is tolerably sure to be left in its integritynamely, the ingrained and ineffaceable vulgarity of her writing." . . . It is anxiously asked by some of our contemporaries, "What is the matter with Professor Lowell?" His recent gloomy utterances seem to indicate a very despondent and hopeless state of mind. The Springfield Republican advises him to read daily the closing lines of Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," and the Christian Union urges him to tear up his lugubrious satires and give us a strain of hope and courage. A book entitled "Leverana," consisting of reminiscences and anecdotes of the late Charles Lever, will be published in November. . . . A new book, entitled "Nero: an Historical Play," by W. W. Story, the artist, will appear in the autumn. A novel, the scene of which is laid in antediluvian ages, has just been completed by M. Elie Berthet. It is entitled "Parisians of the Stone Age," and it is to be the first of a series of such romances.

Mr. J. Hill Burton, the distinguished historian of Scotland, is engaged on a "History of the Reign of Queen Anne." Messrs. Chatto & Windus (London) have in preparation two volumes of correspondence of the late B. R. Haydon, abounding in matters of interest, and throwing much new light upon his life and character. . . . Mr. E. C. Stedman's work on the "Victorian Poets" will be published simultaneously in England and America. . . . Herr Julius Kostlin, a professor in the University of Halle, has just published what is said to be the best life of Luther yet written. In it many of the legends that have gathered around the early life of the great Reformer are shown to be untrue.

Ν

The Arts.

IN the middle of the village of North Con

way, and close beside the Kearsarge House, its chief hotel, is an old school-house two stories high, surmounted by a small bell-tower. One or two scrubby trees stand in front of the door of this building, hacked and cut with the names of the children who attend the school in the winter; and its windows and weather-worn sides are quite dilapidated. This house overlooks the lovely Conway intervales, softly shaded with green turf

as smooth as velvet, and before its windows the range of Mount Washington spreads out bathed in a purple atmosphere like the tint of the bloom on a plum.

The upper floor of this school-house is as rough as its exterior, with wooden desks piled about it, and its walls are partially colored by patches of old whitewash. In this odd-looking place George Inness has established his summer studio, and here through many of the summer days he may be found at his easel. Many of our readers will recollect his beautiful and peaceful landscapes in the neighborhood of Perugia, pictures full of the lovely atmosphere of the Apennines. These paintings, more than any other landscapes, have excited admiration by the richness of their color and their spacious aërial effects.

An idea prevails among unobservant people that the sky is everywhere the same. Than this impression nothing is more untrue, for the coarse humidity above salt, boggy meadows produces rich color in the clouds flat-banded in their level forms as the earth beneath them, but as coarse in color as the atmosphere whence they derive their character; a dry and hilly country has its own cloud-figures, which "stoop from heaven and take the shape" of the general outlines of the land, the atmosphere of which is neither humid with sea-mists nor possessed of the silvery and golden purity and light that bathe the upland. In the mountain-regions themselves the clouds have a variety of shape varying from small silvery flocks, in bands and level cirrus, to the majestic processions of storm and wind clouds. There is, besides, an infinite variety of delicate fringes, wreaths of mist, and high and low wandering vapors caught in eddies of air, totally different from and much more varied than those found elsewhere. Each country has its own distinctive sky, so far as we know, and great bodies of water affect their surroundings equally. Italy forms no exception to this rule, but in analyzing the peculiarity of a summer sunset at Florence, or the opaline hues that reflect themselves in the canals and lagoons of Venice in the end of the day, we could not detect that the atmosphere was deeper from its mistiness, purer in its freedom from smoke or fog, more varied or more sparkling, than our own. It was only in the Apennines that a glittering yet tender light seemed to surpass any of our skies. Claude has always been famous as the artist of these wonderful and spacious atmospheres, and his pictures by comparison dim and blur all other paintings into a coarseness like mud. Of late years Mr. Inness has shown this same peculiarity, and when we entered the dingy, dull little school-room, his summer studio, the full glory of our own mountain heavens first dawned upon us.

On the easel in the middle of the room, which was lighted by the sky above Mount Washington, and which itself spread serene and blue across the valley, was a painting of the mountain and of the mountain skies, so delicate, so distant, and so full of light and space, that we felt that all the pictures of all the artists had never revealed before the best excellence of North Conway. Mr. In