LA HENRIADE.

It is with great pleasure that we offer to the readers of the Repository Mr. Le Fevre's excellent translation of this noble poem of the great French philosopher and poet. We must, however, at the beginning, forestall any prejudice which may exist in the mind of the reader on account of the reputation for infidelity which the author unfortunately, and doubtless with sufficient ground, sustains, by assuring them that this poem is free from this blemish. Its sentiments are of the noblest kind; and the severe thrusts at the Catholic Church, which will be found in its pages, will be seen by the reader to be richly merited, and should not, of themselves, stamp their author with the name of infidel.

The poem is in ten cantos, and with the introduction will occupy each number of the entire volume.

One of our associates sends the following original and piquant anecdotes of child-wisdom -always so interesting:

The bright, pretty, witty speeches of children always have a charm for me. A certain little Eddie occasionally gets up very nice bits with the most charming unconsciousness. One Christmas day he stood by the window watching the clouds which rapidly drifted across the sky. "Mamma, mamma," he cried, "what makes the clouds go so fast?"

Mamma answered dreamily that she did not know.

"I can tell," said Eddie, "it is the Good Father taking his Christmas ride!"

Isn't there a touch of sublimity in that idea? The same little one fancied the moon to be the Good Father's face.

Eddie says his prayers on his own responsibility, asking for what his young heart most desires. One night he began his prayer with a most Christian-like petition, which older people would do well to imitate: "Good Father, let me not knock Harry when he knocks me. At that instant, hearing the car-whistle of the evening train, which brought his father home from daily business, he cried, intimating that his communication with the Lord was to be suspended, not concluded, "Hold on a minute, Good Father, while I hear the six o'clock train!"

In a well-written memoir of a child of precocious development, I find the following incident:

"Little A. was in the habit of talking aloud to

We retire from our table, after making the usual offering to the children.

A STORY FOR A CHILD.
BY BAYARD TAYLOR.

Little one, come to my knee!

Hark, how the rain is pouring
Over the roof, in the pitch-dark night,
And the wind in the woods a-roaring!

Hush, my darling, and listen!

Then pay for the story with kisses;
Father was lost in the pitch-black night,
In just such a storm as this is!
High upon the lonely mountains,

Where the wild men watched and waited;
Wolves in the forest, and bears in the bush,
And I on my path belated.

The rain and the night together

Came down, and the wind came after,
Bending the props of the pine-tree roof,
And snapping many a rafter.

I crept along in the darkness,
Stunned and bruised and blinded,
Crept to a fir with thick-set boughs,
And a sheltering rock behind it.
There, from the blowing and raining,
Crouching, I sought to hide me;
Something rustled, two green eyes shone,
And a wolf lay down beside me.

Little one, be not frightened;
I and the wolf together,
Side by side, through the long, long night,
Hid from the awful weather.

His wet fur pressed against me,

Each of us warmed the other; Each of us felt, in the stormy dark, That beast and man was brother.

And when the falling forest

No longer crashed in warning,
Each of us went from our hiding-place
Forth in the wild, wet morning.

Darling, kiss me payment!

Hark, how the wind is roaring! Father's house is a better place

When the stormy rain is pouring!

GAINS AND LOSSES.

By Mrs. Ada H. Thomas Nickles.

CHAPTER III.

MONSTERNATION reigned in the palaces uptown, consternation reign ed among shopkeepers and merchants and bankers and manufacturers. The monetary crisis of the Eastern cities had sent an arterial channel outward, and paralyzed the West with premonitions of disaster. Fortunes had been bursting like bubbles under the pressure; and timid merchants, whose ledger pages footed up in good round thousands, began to quake and wonder on whom the dire disease would fasten next.

As yet the fear of danger was only a vague alarm; but it took tangible form when the house of Redway & Co. came down with a crash, a dead failure,beyond all hope of resurrection.

Lesser tenements began to nod to their fall, and daily the news of failure startled the ears of the business population. So Consternation walked the streets and dwelt in the palaces, while the owners and occupants of a few days before went about as strangers in a strange land.

But Galena Redway, thrown in an instant out of the station she had always occupied, seeing all that had made her external life swept out of her reach, was neither stunned into apathy nor excited

into indignation. Young as she was, she had lived too much within herself to let so slight a thing as an empty purse fetter her soul.

I don't wish you to think she held all these things in contempt; she felt keenly what the change would be to her, the loss of the luxurious surroundings of home, the brilliant society-life, the operas, the summer journeyings and wateringplace fascinations, all these, in which she had grown and blossomed like her exotics in the conservatory.

But every selfish regret faded before the anguish in her father's face when he told her, and she said, "I'm only sorry for you, father; I am young and healthy and happy; I've an immense reserve force of physical energy lying dormant somewhere, and now it can find full scope. After all, it is only a little that is taken; the essentials of life are all left."

"How little you know, child," he said, patting her head in a pitiful thankfulness that she should not know how a score of his years- the ambition of his youth, the pride of his manhood-lay shattered with the wreck of his fortunes.

That was a week since, and now, as she stood by the window of the room that could be home to her but a little longer, watching her father's return, she noticed with a thrill of terror how white his face, how slow and mechanical his step.

She ran to meet him at the door; but he pushed her aside almost roughly.

"Not yet, child; go to your aunt and tell her to come to me. I will see you by and by."

She called her aunt, and throwing a shawl over her head, ran out into the early evening. The air was chill and frosty, the grass shimmering under the light of the full moon. Shadows of indentations never seen by daylight flecked the moor with blackness; heavy clouds lay low in the west, - it would snow by the morrow certainly; the air was full of a crisp, icy promise of a coming storm. The night, star-lighted, beautiful, full of mysterious meanings and full silences, was falling upon the earth; the great thanksgiving hymn of nature, attuned to many souls in the freshness of life, swelled melodiously throughout the vast extent. How puny seemed her voice in the anthem of creation! How insignificant man, to be telling of his little winnings and losses, weeping and wailing for his broken images of gold, or silver, or copper, while the chorus of creation was shouting the Te Deum Laudamus!

Did you never watch with awe the mysterious providences that help to guard, unknown until past, each one of us through the fiery trials we endure? How, before the trial-hour, the soul is exalted, ried up into a tense, nervous height never before attained, that it may not be drawn under the wheels and crushed with the terrible torture? I know that, in our normal condition, each one of us delivered up to the terrible power of our trials would be lost.

This girl here, elevated above herself into the realm of spirituality almost, heard sharp voices of alarm from the house, hurried runnings to and fro, and with a sigh awoke to feel Vinton's muzzle against her hand, and the white face of her aunt before her.

"Come in, Galena," she said. And Galena, trembling with an indefinable dread, went in to a dead father.

She could never afterward clearly recall the events of the days following.

She only remembered an aching loneliness, a sense of loss, and a weary desire

68

for rest and love of answering questions, and smiling back into her aunt's face to assure her: "Oh, no, she needed nothing, only she wished Edward would come. And then how Aunt Martha had kneeled down by her and told her that God's way was not ours always, but always good and just,—how it might seem hard to us, so that we should cry, We will not have it so; " but that some day, either in this life or the next, we should see that it was right and we were wrong. And still holding her hands, continued, "So whatever may come, Galena, remember, oh, remember, life was not made for a dream of earthly love, but for an expression of the heavenly! So be strong in the faith of love eternal, if earthly love fail. This letter, Galena, your father was reading to me when he died; it is best you should see it."

Galena took it; it bore Edward's handwriting, she knew that,- a letter to her father. A cool renunciation of his engagement with Galena, a plain explanation of his reasons, he was poor, had his way to make, was ambitious. He trusted a man of the world, clear-headed, conservative as Mr. Redway, would understand how impossible, with his desires. and prospects, it would be for him to be burdened with a family.

His respect for the daughter was unbounded. He regretted if she should be called upon to bear any disappointment through him, but felt certain that her youth and natural good sense would preserve her from any pain. Would Mr. Redway be kind enough to explain the plain facts to Miss Galena, and he remained, . Sincerely,

EDWARD H. BENTON. No prevarication, no specious pleading, or silly excuses. It was the man, - cool, calculating, audacious. Galena read it through without a movement; not a muscle started from the stolid repose of face or form. It was as though she had been turned into stone by a Gorgonglance.

She had no perception of pain or loss here,-no feeling at all, only a full knowledge of the meaning of the letter, the character and selfish views of the writer,

as though the Galena mentioned bore no relation or possible interest to her. Her aunt came in finally, with an anxious look, and asked had she called, did she want anything?

-

No, she wanted nothing, only rest. She was tired so tired.

So Aunt Martha seated herself on the sofa, drew the brown head into her lap, and, passing her fingers in and out the silky hair, singing a simple song, the same she had sung to the little children buried long ago, she soothed the fretted nerves of the girl into quiet and sleep. A low, nervous fever followed this, and the holidays were approaching before she had become strong enough to be removed to the new home Aunt Martha had prepared. Galena's little fortune, received from her grandmother, was untouched, and, with her aunt's, was enough to ensure them all the comforts and a few of the luxuries of life. Their new home was a cottage, newly-painted, freshly-papered, clean, and homelike, with a little front yard filled with evergreens and willows, giving it an air of gentility and repose. Dr. Gurnsey came in upon them a few days after their removal, and seated himself by the grate.

แ

Our patient looks a little better off for flesh and color, Mrs. Burnett," he said, nodding toward Galena.

"I'm as strong as ever; I can begin my work immediately," she said. "You persist in that idea?" "Yes."

"Very well; but you undoubtedly have some idea of the kind of work you would wish to do."

"I shall do nothing but what is respectable."

"Exactly; but respectable kinds of labor are not always quite so easy of per

formance."

for a few years past, and I find in my case that the labor is greater than the remuneration. I know of a vacancy in the primary department of the Sixth Ward as assistant. The ward isn't one of the best, the children uncouth, unwashed specimens of humanity, with heads as full of cunning and deceit as destitute of knowledge. It isn't an inviting field of labor."

It was not to Galena's mental vision. All the old repugnant feelings her disgust and horror of the filth and impudence and unchildlike precosity of the children of the class came back, and the thought sickened her. But this terribly stagnant life, this death of hope, this dearth of interest, she must do something to waken her out of this lethargy. She hesitated not a moment in her resolve. 66 I will take it."

The doctor was not in the least surprised at her answer, as he told his wife that night. It is wonderful what an escape-valve a discreet wife is to a man so intimately related to others' interests as Dr. Gurnsey.

"The girl's got stuff in her, Jane, for all you persist in calling her proud and aristocratic. There is no necessity for her to teach."

"What makes her then? she isn't strong enough; is she?"

"Not under ordinary circumstances; but the girl is in a sea of trouble, I know by her face. She can't settle down into the quiet of a home existence; it would be the ruin of her, I think."

"Poor child! it's a sad thing for so young a girl to be cast upon her own life for happiness."

And the womanly heart, forgetting all else, overflowed in pity for the motherless girl.

The following day Mrs. Gurnsey and Ruth called on Mrs. Burnett, both full of an earnest desire to relieve them of the

tedium of their new life, and Ruth anxious already to help her new assistant in the beginning of her arduous labor.

Galena's new life the coarseness and unrelieved prose of daily meeting at school-was beyond even the doctor's unvarnished statement; but no one knew

if there were any distaste, or repugnance, or weariness, more than that induced by the actual physical and mental labor. Aunt Martha scrutinized keenly the daily-returning face, with no farther insight than others. The eyes kept strict guard over the inner life of the girl, with a "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther;" so if there were regrets for past loss, or weariness at present need, or terror at the thought of a continuing future, no one ever beheld a sign.

She put her whole energies to the work before her. Day after day she traversed the streets from her home down into the squalid district of the Sixth Ward, passing among rows of noisy, ragged children started for school, with, I think, no thought beyond that so many letters of the alphabet must be drilled into them before night should send their noise and raggedness out again into the street.

At first her walks were taken by herself, but finally, persistent Ruth, with dinner-basket in hand, was her invariable companion. Ruth was not a strong-minded woman; she never reasoned. It was fortunate her impulses were always good; for she would follow them always.

rior into her stomach; who invariably and good-naturedly listened to all the complaints of foul play at recess, or of sickness and hunger and trouble at home.

I don't know how long it was before Galena awakened from her apathy into sufficient observation of outside occurrences and events to see these, and finally to wonder at the girl; but one noon, when Ruth returned to her seat and placed her depleted dinner-basket on the desk after a tour through the room, Galena looked up at her with the old, earnest expression, and said,

-

It was like a breath of pure air in a clouded, foul district, to see Ruth's sweet face and smile.

The screaming children with hard, old faces even put on an expression of joy at her cheery good-morning, her hand-pat for the frowziest head, her merry laugh at some unfortunate sally.

They always glanced askance at Galena, a little awed, even the boldest, by the indefinable something in her face. In school hours, Miss Bates was the one from whom all rewards were anticipated; who saw the weariness depicted on little old faces; who had sly pieces of bread and cake and rosy-cheeked apples to distribute; whose dinner-pail, capacious as it was, seldom conveyed a bit from its inte

Ruth looked at her. Her eyes were wells of light, shining warm with the tint of a leaf when the sun shines on it in October. They grew almost solemn now.

"Yes; it does me good because, except that, I know he will have nothing more to-day, probably."

Galena shuddered. She looked at him as at a hyena or any other natural curiosity, a pinched figure of six years, clad in a heterogeneous assortment of castoff garments, out at the elbows, out at the knees, out at the toes.

He had finished his bread, and was carefully picking up the crumbs. He looked pinched and wild-eyed like a beast; she remembered now to have seen that same expression in others. Was it possible these little creatures were in actual physical as well as mental and moral need?

She had not thought of that before.