of courtesy, of love without reproach. It may be that I am not very wise, and yet I think I am,- but you seem to me like one who has lost his way and made a great error in life. You are attending to the little wants, and you have totally forgotten the great and only real ones, like a man who should be doctoring toothache on the Judgment Day. For such things as honor and love and faith are not only nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think we desire them more, and suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to you as I think you will most easily understand me. Are you not, while careful to fill your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart, which spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually wretched?»

Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonizing. "You think I have no sense of honor! he cried. "I'm poor enough, God knows! It's hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in your hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Any way I'm a thiefmake the most of that; but I'm not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I've an honor of my own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about it all day long, as if it was a God's miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it's wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone in the house? Look at your gold plate! You're strong, if you like, but you're old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want but a jerk of the elbow, and here would have been you with the cold steel in your bowels, and there would have been me linking in the streets with an armful of golden cups! Did you suppose I hadn't wit enough to see that? And I scorned the action. There are your damned goblets, as safe as in a church; there are you, with your heart ticking as good as new; and here am I, ready to go out again as poor as I came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth! And you think I have no sense of honor God strike me dead!"

"I will tell you

The old man stretched out his right arm. what you are," he said. "You are a rogue, my man; an impudent and black-hearted rogue and vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh! believe me, I feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at my table. But now I am sick at

your presence; the day has come, and the night-bird should be off to his roost. Will you go before, or after? »

"Which you please," returned the poet, rising. "I believe you to be strictly honorable." He thoughtfully emptied his cup. "I wish I could add you were intelligent," he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles. "Age! age! the brains stiff and rheumatic. "

The old man preceded him, from a point of self-respect; Villon followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle. "God pity you," said the lord of Brisetout at the door. "Good-by, papa," returned Villon with a yawn.

thanks for the cold mutton."

The door closed behind him.

« Many

The dawn was breaking over

the white roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon stood and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.

"A very dull old gentleman," he thought. "I wonder what his goblets may be worth."

WILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN

(1828-1901)

ILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN was prominent among those American writers whose lives are spent for the most part away from the country of their birth. His writings partake to a degree of the character of this voluntary exile; being somewhat desultory, concerned with what is of uppermost importance at the moment, - whether a search for a rare intaglio in forgotten little streets of Rome, or an insurrection in Crete, whither the author has wandered, or a discussion concerning the identity of an exhumed Greek statue. Yet these seemingly ephemeral magazine articles are of a true literary quality, witnessing to deep and fine perceptions of art and life underneath their surface carelessness. Mr. Stillman began his life as an artist, but was drawn by its natural currents into the career of a writer. Born in Schenectady in 1828, he was graduated from Union College in 1848; beginning soon after the study of painting under F. E. Church. He was for a time a resident artist in New York city, where he established with Mr. Durand the first art journal ever published in this country, the Crayon. After the year 1870 he devoted himself, however, exclusively to literature; yet his art training proved invaluable to him in his office of critic, enabling him to understand and to formulate the instincts of his artistic temperament. From 1861 to 1865 he was United States consul in Rome; holding the same office in Crete from 1865 to 1869. He was therefore a witness of the insurrection in that island, concerning which he wrote the volume entitled The Cretan Insurrection.' For many years he was a regular staff correspondent of the London Times, being stationed first at Athens, and afterward at Rome; and for another long period he was art critic of the New York Evening Post. His environment was ever peculiarly well adapted to his temperament: a fierce, free soul, rejoicing in beauty and battle, he was equally at home in the still art galleries of Florence and Rome, and in scenes of strife. His appreciation of art was subtle and intimate, in the nature of instinct, as was also his appreciation of nature; though in this he was more mystical, more deeply touched with the invisible soul of things. He was one of the first artists who penetrated the Adirondacks, feeling to the uttermost the almost oppressive beauty of the wilderness. His simple, sensuous, and passionate love of art led him directly back to Titian.

"In our time we have a new ideal, a new and maybe a higher development of intellectual art; and as great a soul as Titian's might to-day reach further towards the reconciled perfections of graphic art: but what he did, no one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away, its unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct,- reveling in art like children in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to science,-all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory, as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic souls kindling into like glow with faint perception of what had passed from the whole world beside: Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix kept the line of color, now at last utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the greater substance: we kindle with the utilities, and worship the aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our right mind: but we have lost the art of painting; for when Eugène Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood art as Titian understood it, and painted with such art as Veronese's, passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion of a kingly race dies in some alien land."

Again he writes of the Venetian painters: "Their lives developed their instincts and their instincts their art;" and of a modern painting: "It is in the minor key of that lovely Eastern color-work such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an Æolian harp, or the greeting of certain sad-voiced children touched by the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone." These passages indicate an unusual degree of sensitiveness to both the spirit and matter of art products, a sensitiveness especially marked in Mr. Stillman's articles on the Old Italian Masters' contributed to the Century Magazine.

The side of his nature which was congenial with struggle is exhibited in high light in The Cretan Insurrection'; and 'Herzegovina,' a book dealing with the insurrection of 1875-76 in that country. Regarding the Eastern question he writes: "The interests of civilization-of Europe entire-demand its [the Mussulman government's] replacement by a new government which shall be amenable to those interests and progress. Having once admitted the necessity for its cessation, we shall more quickly find an accord over the manner of replacing it. It is in attempting to reform it that the danger lies." Besides his various magazine articles on subjects of art or politics, and the two books already mentioned, Mr. Stillman published 'Turkish Rule and Turkish Warfare,' 'The Acropolis of Athens,' and 'On the Track of Ulysses.' He died at Surrey, England, July 6, 1901.

BILLY AND HANS: A TRUE HISTORY

From the Century Magazine: Copyright 1897, by the Century Company

O LONG as the problem of the possession of the capacity of

S reasoning by the animals of lower rank than man in crea

tion is investigated through those of their species that have been domesticated, and in which the problem of heredity has become complicated with human influence, and the natural instincts with an artificial development of their faculties, no really valuable conclusions can be arrived at. It is only when we take the native gifts of an animal under investigation, at least without the intervention of any trace of heredity and of what under teaching may become a second nature, that we can estimate in scientific exactitude the measure of intelligence of one of the lower animals. The ways of a dog or cat are the result of innumerable generations of ancestors reared in intimate relations with the human master mind. As subjects for investigation into the question of animal character, they are therefore misleading, and the wild creature must be taken. And so far as my observation goes, the squirrel, of all the small animals, shows at once the most character and the most affection; and I believe that the history of two that I have lately lost has a dramatic quality which makes it worth recording.

In my favorite summer resort at the lower edge of the Black Forest, the quaint old town of Lauffenburg, a farmer's boy one day brought me a young squirrel for sale. He was a tiny creature, probably not yet weaned: a variation on the ordinary type of the European Sciurus (Sciurus vulgaris), gray instead of the usual red, and with black tail and ears; so that at first, as he contented himself with drinking his milk and sleeping, I was not sure that he was not a dormouse. But examination of the paws, with their delicate anatomy, so marvelously like the human hand in their flexibility and handiness, and the graceful curl of his tail, settled the question of genus; and mindful of my boyhood and early pets, I bought him and named him Billy. From the first moment that he became my companion he gave me his entire confidence, and accepted his domestication without the least indication that he considered it captivity. There is generally a short stage of mute rebellion in wild creatures before they come to accept us entirely as their friends,-a longing for freedom which makes precautions against escape necessary. This