whatever it may be, remember that to do it well is the best thing-it is better than paying visits, better even than a Princess!"

"Ah, yes, I see what you mean!" Hyacinth exclaimed, exaggerating a little. "I am very fond of my trade, I assure you."

"I am delighted to hear it. Hold fast to it, then, and be quiet; be diligent, and honest, and good. I gathered the other night that you are one of the young men who want everything changed — I believe there are a great many in Italy, and also in my own dear old Deutschland and even think it's useful to throw bombs into innocent crowds, and shoot pistols at their rulers, or at any I won't go into that. I might seem to be speaking for myself, and the fact is that for myself I don't care; I am so old that I may hope to spend the few days that are left me without receiving a bullet. But before you go

one.

any further, please think a little whether you are right."

"It is n't just that you should impute to me ideas which I may not have," said Hyacinth, turning very red, but taking more and more of a fancy, all the same, to Madame Grandoni. "You talk at your ease about our ways and means, but if we were only to make use of those that you would like to see”. And, while he blushed, smiling, the young man shook his head two or three times, with great significance.

"I should n't like to see any!" the old lady cried. "I like people to bear their troubles as one has done one's self. And as for injustice, you see how kind I am to you when I say to you again, "Don't, don't give anything up. I will tell them to send you some tea," she added, as she took her way out of the room, presenting to him her round, low, aged back, and dragging over the carpet a scanty and lustreless train.

Henry James.

Julie K. Wetherill.

I TRUST that I may from time to time have an opportunity to open this New Portfolio of mine. There are papers which have come to me from the Secretary of the Pansophian Society, which I hope hereafter to lay before the readers of this magazine. There are poems which lie hidden among its leaves, and are only waiting to be carefully extracted; for although the eye of the owner sees them, they are invisible to all others, and to get them out of the Portfolio is as nice a process as lifting a sheet of gold-leaf out of the book in which its gossamer tenuity is held and protected.

But at the present moment I am not going to open the Portfolio at all. I am going to write on the back of it, as I have done before, in my individual capacity, as personally known to my readers, and on such terms with them that I can speak freely, as if they were sitting with me by my fireside. I have often spoken in the disguise of fiction of the matter which I propose to bring before them, so often that I can hardly help repeating some things which they may have had enough of already. There is really no great difference in talking to the public through the lips of a fictitious personage and in one's own voice, for the sheath of assumed personality does not commonly more than half cover the blade it pretends to conceal. Besides, in returning to an old subject, I am doing no more than all the preachers, all the orators, all the public men, politicians, philanthropists, reformers, are constantly doing.

One should be shy of bringing his private affairs, his individual joys and griefs, before the public, unless he is assured that there are others who have

had similar experiences, or who are at least in a position to understand and to sympathize with him. In speaking of my own conditions, though I am forced to use the first person singular, I feel that I am very far from being alone or representing only individual interests.

I am overburdened with a correspondence which I find almost unmanageable. It has reached such a point that I feel as if it would not be unreasonable for me to put out a sign bearing my name with the following additions:

*** Professional Correspondent, attends to letters on all subjects, from all persons and all quarters. Autographs in quantity at short notice. The Correspondent will furnish stationery without charge to all applicants, in the form of envelopes addressed to himself, and stamped, containing a blank sheet of paper for the letter or message he is to receive. All communications, long or short, all manuscripts, legible or illegible, all books and pamphlets, readable or unreadable, thankfully received and immediately read and criticised. The Correspondent expects no pecuniary return for the few daily hours consumed in this labor of love. It is more than enough to be told that his well-known kindness and universally recognized genial nature have emboldened the writer to venture on what he (with superfluous modesty) calls his "unauthorized intrusion." The Correspondent would add that, if any sentence or any fragment of a sentence can be found in any letter of his which can be made use of so as to add commercial value to any publication, it cannot be expected that the word Private prefixed to that letter should be considered as preventing the recipient

Seraphina ought to know, for nearly all my letters pass through her hands. That is what she said. But to draw from her answer, which I report honestly, the inference that I get six thousand letters a year, letters, that expect answers, would be rash. Thousands, if you will, but hardly six thousand. A business man or a politician may receive six or sixty or six hundred thousand, for aught that I know, but for a private individual six thousand would be an exorbitant number. We can afford to leave out statistics, and compromise on the fact of a very large number.

It must be remembered that I have a reading constituency which includes three generations of my own contemporaries. My reckoning is not in years, but in fractions of a century. It is longer in a retrograde direction from this day when I am writing to the time when I first began to print than it is from that time backwards to the battle of Bunker's Hill. Half a century with half a decade to spare is a long time to

be before the public. Too long, it may be, but that is not the point I wish to make just now. I am thinking of the wide range in the ages of the great procession of my fellow-mortals who have been or are with me among the living. Many young persons, as they glance along these pages, looking for the story they are in eager search of, will hardly believe that they are older than their grandfathers were when they read my earlier productions. I get letters from septuagenarians and octogenarians who were at school in the same years with myself, and from boys and girls to whom the war of the rebellion is as much a matter of old history as the siege of Troy.

Now before saying another word I wish to make the fullest acknowledgments to the kind friends, personally unknown to me, who have expressed themselves by letter with perfect freedom and unmistakable sincerity with reference to my writings and myself. I could not have believed it possible that any printed pages could have brought me so many hundreds of letters, I will stop at hundreds, - which went to the heart because they came from the heart. It would be a shame to pass out from human companionship without the most grateful recognition of the good feeling that has prompted such numbers of men and women to address me in words which could not fail to move the sensibilities of the least susceptible lover of his kind. It is an experience I never dreamed of, encouraging in the midst of doubts, soothing after the rough handling of the antagonistic elements which none can wholly escape. It is hard for a rose to blow in a field of thistles; and to every author, great or humble, his gift is the rose which he is trying to nourish into such bloom as nature meant for it. Blessings on those who have helped it with a ray of sunshine!

I have hitherto made it a point to answer all letters of the kind I have re

ferred to. There may be authors who receive so many that it is out of the question to take any special notice of them. It is a matter of feeling, and not of obligation, but the writers would like at least to know that their letters have reached the object of their affection or homage. If one should live to see the days when the grasshopper becomes a burden, it might be impossible even to acknowledge the receipt of letters which deserved a grateful reply. The writers of such letters may be assured that they always give pleasure, even if they bring no other response than the tears which are the luxury of worn-out poets and other sensitive natures in their days of weakness.

for them? Would a cabman drive them about the streets of London during an hour for nothing? Would a waterman pull them an hour on the Thames for nothing? Would a shoe - black brush their boots and trousers an hour for nothing? And why am I to serve these men gratuitously, and be called an ill-bred, discourteous person if I tacitly decline to be their servant? We owe sacrifices

occasional sacrifices- of this kind to friends and relations, and we can afford them to a few, but we are under no obligation to answer everybody. Those whom we do answer may be thankful for a word on a post-card in Gladstone's brief but sufficient fashion. I am very much of the opinion of Rudolphe in Ponsard's L'Honneur et L'Argent. A friend asks what he does about letters:

Je les mets

"Rudolphe. Soigneusement en poche et ne reponds jamais. Premier Ami. Oh, vous railliez.

by no means so honestly entitled to respect. I have known so much of their exactions that I was on the point of issuing a pronunciamento defining the rights of an author in this matter, when I happened to fall upon this passage in a recent volume of Mr. Hamerton's, entitled Human Intercourse:

"If a man asked me the way in the street, it would be rudeness on my part not to answer him, because the answer is easily given, and costs no appreciable time; but in written correspondence the case is essentially different. I am burdened with work; every hour, every minute, of my day is apportioned to some definite duty or necessary rest, and three strangers make use of the post to ask me questions. To answer them I must make references; however brief the let ters may be, they will still take time, - altogether, the three will consume an hour. Have these correspondents any right to expect me to work an hour

Rudolphe. Non pas. Je ne puis pas admettre Qu'un importun m'oblige à répondre à sa lettre, Et parce qu'il lui plait de noircir du papier

The commonest letters are those ask

ing for autographs. A simple request accompanying a stamped envelope directed to the applicant, and containing the card or slip of paper to be written on, will often bring an answer. If the applicant will not take the trouble to make everything as easy as possible to the respondent, but contents himself with sending a stamp, his letter should go into the waste-basket, and the stamp be appropriated as the person thus imposed upon sees fit. The request should always be

brief; the best I ever received had no length at all, being simply a blank card in a stamped and directed envelope. The number of words sometimes used to convey the applicant's request is truly astonishing. A really important message may be expressed very briefly.

"Master Barnardine, you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine. You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death." This is to the point; no