School Scenes-The Confessional

chondria, so graphically portrayed in « Villette,” and found the discarded costume of the spectral nun lying upon her bed, and here Miss Brontë passed those nights of wakeful misery which Mrs. Gaskell describes. A long, narrow room in front of the class-rooms was shown us as the réfectoire, where the Brontës, with the other boarders, took their meals, presided over by M. and Madame Héger, and where, during the evenings, the lessons for the ensuing days were prepared. Here were held the evening prayers which Charlotte used to avoid by escaping into the garden. This, too, was the scene of Paul's readings to teachers and pupils, and of some of his spasms of petulance, which readers of “ Villette" will remember. From the réfectoire we passed again into the corridor, where we made our adieus to our affable conductress. She explained that, whereas this establishment had been both a pensionnat and an externat, having about seventy day-pupils and twenty boarders when Miss Brontë was here, it was after the death of Madame Héger used as a day-school only, the pensionnat being in another street.

The genuine local color Miss Brontë gives in "Villette" enabled us to be sure that we had found the sombre old church where Lucy, arrested in passing by the sound of the bells, knelt upon the stone pavement, passing thence

into the confessional of Père Silas.

Certain it is that this old church lies upon the route she would take in the walk from the school to the Protestant cemetery, which she had set out to do that afternoon, and the narrow streets which lie beyond the church correspond to those in which she was lost. Certain, too, it is said to be that this incident is taken from her own experience. Reid says, "During one of the long holidays, when her mind was restless and disturbed, she found sympathy, if not peace, in the counsels of a priest in the confessional, who soothed her troubled spirit without attempting to enmesh it in the folds of Romanism."

Our way to the Protestant cemetery—a spot sadly familiar to Miss Brontë, and the usual termination of her walks-lay past the site of the Porte de Louvain and out to the hills beyond the old city limits. From our path we saw more than one tree-shrouded farm-house which might have been the place of Paul's breakfast with his school, and at least one quaint mansion, with green-tufted and terraced lawns, which might have served Miss Brontë as the model for La Terrasse, the suburban home of the Brettons and temporary abode of the Taylor sisters whom she visited here. From the cemetery are beautiful vistas of farther lines of hills, of intervening valleys, of farms and villas, and

The Cemetery

of the great city lying below. well described this place:

Miss Brontë has Here, on pages of stone and of brass, are written names, dates, last tributes of pomp or love, in English, French, German, and Latin." There are stone crosses all about, and great thickets of roses and yews; cypresses that stand straight and mute, and willows that hang low and still;" and there are "dim garlands of everlasting flowers." Here "The Professor" found his long-sought sweetheart kneeling at a new-made grave under the overhanging trees. And here we found the shrine of poor Charlotte Brontë's many pilgrimages hither, the burial-place of her friend and school-mate, the Jessy Yorke of "Shirley;" the spot where, under "green sod and a gray marble head-stone, cold, coffined, solitary, Jessy sleeps below."

Beloved of Littérateurs-Gibbon-D'Aubigné-Rousseau-ByronShelley-Dickens, etc.-Scenes of Childe Harold-Nouvelle Heloise-Prisoner of Chillon-Land of Byron.

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PILGRIMAGE in the track of Childe Harold brings us from the shores of Albion, by Belgium's capital and deadly Waterloo, along the castled Rhine and over mountain-pass to" Italia, home and grave of empires," and to the sublimer scenery of " Manfred," "Chillon," and third canto of the pilgrim-poet's masterpiece; to his "silver-sheeted Staubbach" and "arrowy Rhone," "soaring Jungfrau" and "bleak Mont Blanc." We linger with especial pleasure on the shores of "placid Leman," in an enchanting region which teems with literary shrines and is pervaded with memories and associations-often so thrilling and vivid that they seem like veritable and sensible presences -of the brilliant number who have here had their haunts. Here Calvin wrought his Commentaries; here Voltaire polished his darts; here Rousseau laid his impassioned tale; here Dickens, Byron, and Shelley loitered and wrote; here Gibbon and de Staël, Schlegel and Constant, and many another scarcely less famous, lived and wrought the treasures of their knowledge and fancy into the literature of the world.

Haunts of Littérateurs

A lingering voyage round the lake, like that of Byron and Shelley, is a delight to be remembered through a lifetime, and affords opportunity to visit the spots consecrated by genius upon these shores. At Geneva we find the inn where Byron lodged and first met the author of "Queen Mab," the house in which Rousseau was born, the place where d'Aubigné wrote his history, the sometime home of John Calvin. Near by, in a house presented by the Genevese after his release from the long imprisonment suffered on their account, dwelt Bonnivard, Byron's immortal" Prisoner of Chillon," and here he suffered from his procession of wives and finally died. Just beyond the site of the fortifications, on the east side of the city, is an eminence whose slopes are tastefully laid out with walks that wind, amid sward and shrub, to the observatory which crowns the summit and marks the site of Bonnivard's Priory of St. Victor, lost to him by his devotion to Genevan independence. Not far away is the public library, founded by his bequest of his modest collection of books and MSS. which we see here carefully preserved. Here also is an old portrait of the prisoner, which represents him as a reckless and jolly "good fellow" rather than a saintly hero, and accords better with his character as described by late writers than with the common conception of him.