time is self-analysis, and such novels as "Eleanor" encourage this. We begin to analyze our own emotions as the author has analyzed her heroine's, and the result is self-consciousness, and a great deal of self-questioning, and indecision of character. How much happier a life Belinda had, preserving her calmness through all vicissitudes and sublimely conscious that all would come right at the end of the third volume. We are not so sure of that. The end of our third volume may be clouded in sorrow and doubt, our mind in a chaos, and nothing settled with regard to the future.

Eleanor leaves us with somewhat this feeling. She is a beautiful and noble woman, and yet from the beginning her life seems unjustly sad. First there is her unhappy marriage, her child's death, her own ill-health, then the taking from her of her lover, by the girl she has championed and befriended. We ask ourselves what is the justness of this, and can find

none.

To turn from Mrs. Ward to W. D. Howells is like coming from the mountain tops to the prairie. Mrs. Ward treats her heroine emotionally. Mr. Howells lays bare Silas Lapham's character in the most cruelly matter-of-fact way. He is a common man, and all the commonness of his character is shown us as calmly as though the author were describing the deficiencies of the scenery. This is a man, he says, with all the common virtues of love of family, honesty, and integrity, and the common vices of vulgarity and vanity, just as he would say, this is a back-yard with the usual clothes-line and cabbage plants. And yet in the end he makes us feel that "the essence of life is divine"; and Silas is a hero, and still a common man. We may, perhaps, almost shrink from the plainness with which he tells us that Lapham's feet were large, or that he said "ain't" and "want to know", but we forget all this when the character of the man stands revealed to us in all its heroism. Is not this true character-analysis, and profitable, too, with its large charity of the world.

These two books, then, represent two different phases of character-analysis. The one is emotional, the other practical. The one shows a delicate and refined soul, under the stress of the most brutal and barbaric of all passions, jealousy; the other the heroism of a common man in the common walks of life.

George Meredith's stories represent still another phase of the

novel analyzing character. There is a strain of sarcasm in his books which is not always pleasant. He has the attitude of an outsider looking on at the world's pranks, keenly alive to all its hypocrisies and foibles, and gently amused by them. In his "Diana of the Crossways", for instance, he analyzes, too truthfully perhaps, a woman's character and certainly leaves the feminine little on which to congratulate itself by the end of the book. The worst of it is that, up to the last few chapters, we are assuring ourselves that it is a eulogy on what the sex can achieve. Diana, it will be remembered, is a beautiful, good, and clever woman. She has our admiration and sympathy, through her unjust desertion by her husband, and then, at the end, on the verge of bankruptcy, she reveals her lover's political secret to the newspapers, for a promise of some thousand pounds. Our idol is fallen; we think her turned a complete villain. But her lover informs her of the betrayal; she tells him, with innocent surprise, that she was the traitor, not knowing that she was revealing so important a fact. "You did not tell me to keep it secret," she says. So, after all, our wouldbe idol is not a villain but a fool, which is worse, and Meredith has been laughing at us all the time for supposing that his heroine, an exact copy of nature, could keep a secret.

It would be hard to tell wherein lies the interest that novels analyzing character have for us. Perhaps it is that we all like to think that we have a taste for the study of our fellowcreatures, and the analytical novel encourages our aptitudes in this direction. An author has no surer way to popularity than taking for granted the culture and perception of his reader, and this he is obliged to do, to an extent, in analyzing character. Besides that, we are all of us excessively bored at times with the novel of action. Even the Hugh Wynnes and the Gentlemen of France pall occasionally. (It is only the love stories that we find eternally interesting). This taste for analytical novels is undoubtedly growing. Would a publisher have been found for "Eleanor" fifty years ago, much less readers? We all want to know, and that by short cuts, and this is psychology made easy. Besides, we all pride ourselves on our knowledge of the world - for Belinda's rôle of sweet ignorance has been played out-and the analytical novel gives

us our cues.

LUCY WEBB HASTINGS.

SKETCHES

WHEN DAYLIGHT DIES

When daylight dies, the world is hushed and still,
All nature trembles, Heaven itself bends low,
And from the woods the wailing whippoorwill
Sings elegies in cadence sweet and slow,
When daylight dies.

When daylight dies, o'er all the earth is spread
A quaker robe of softly shaded gray.
The flow'rets slumber 'neath their leafy bed,
In dreams with wooing butterflies at play,
When daylight dies.

When daylight dies, the whispering zephyrs stir
The quivering leaflets, children of the dawn.
The shadows fall from oak and beech and fir,
And melt into the darkness, newly born,
When daylight dies.

When daylight dies, the water's mirroring breast
Reflects the breathless calm of earth and sky;
While over it, with downy pinions spread,
The winged ships, like birds, glide slowly by,
When daylight dies.

When daylight dies, peace enters troubled hearts.
From wearied souls, by countless cares oppressed,
The deadly burden of each grief departs;

And earth and sky and sea are all at rest,
When daylight dies.

BERTHA CHACE LOVELL.

They had broken his little heart, but they did not know it. He didn't understand just what the matter was, either. It was all so different. America was very nice. His mother had always said it was, and this used to be her home till she had gone out there where he had been born. She had told him all about

A Little Man

it under the banana trees—and it must be so. He looked out of the dormer window over the old-fashioned garden.

Yes, they had all kissed him, his maiden aunts, and-and two or three others who had just "happened along," they said, "to peer at the boy". They said they used to know his mother. He-he supposed it was all right for his aunts to kiss him, tho' he had never seen them before-but he really would have preferred to shake hands. And he didn't quite see why they should look at him so pityingly. One aunt, he had forgotten which one, had said, "Poor little dear", and asked him if he had ever played ball "in them regions". Why, yes, he used to play ball all the time with his brothers out there, and he used to climb for cocoanuts and run races and yell, and he could swim like a fish-why, he used to live in the water. Wasn't he a boy? He guessed he was. He pinched himself to see if he wasn't. The very afternoon of his arrival his thirteen-year-old cousin had said rather condescendingly, that he "s'posed he'd never batted a ball"! It was real kind of cousin Bill to show him how so carefully, and he hadn't wanted to hurt his feelings by saying that his father, who used to be a great hand at baseball in college days, had taught him all about it. Then the tea bell had rung before he had shown Bill he could do it too.

Aunt Joe the thin aunt with a long nose-she had spread his bread with jam. That was kind of her he thought, but then he wasn't a baby-he-he was thirteen, and mother used to call him her "little man" when he shooed the green snakes away.

And last night -Saturday night-he had only been here one day. . He looked wistfully out of the window and thought of the little bungalow, and the piazza, and the dusky nurse crooning baby to sleep. And-and-yes, the other aunt was kind last night. She had dug out a lot of Sunday School books, and "Rollo" books, and "Jack" series, and "Friend Fido", and said compassionately as she put on her mits to go out,— "naow the poor dear should hev a chance to read; like uz not he'd hardly looked inside a book out in them cannibul isles!" To be sure, he had read them all, and much more too, but then it wasn't polite to say so, after she had scooped them out of the "back settin'-room" chest. So he looked over the pictures, and watched the old-fashioned timepiece, and trod manfully up to his room.

He had opened his old-fashioned little leather trunk, which his mother had taken out on her wedding journey to Zululand. He used to think what a grand thing it would be to pack his clothes in a trunk, and when mother had brought it out and brushed it up, and pasted bits of heavy cloth over the torn parts of the interior, he had almost jumped for joy to think he was going to America to be educated-yes-this was America. He had just been taking out his faded colored shirt and stockings when the other aunt had come in to see about his clothes for Sunday. And-she had swept all his stockings into her apron! He didn't just see what was the matter with them. He had mended them all himself too, on the sailing vessel, for it was before the days of quick transportation, and the missionary packet wasn't of the fastest. Yes, he had sewed the holes up tight with darning cotton-a sailor had given him some, as his colored yarn had given out. And then the coarse colored blouses which he had taken such care of, she had stared at through her gold spectacles; then had picked them all up and gone out. Pretty soon a starched white one was laid on his chair. It used to be Frank's, she had said. He didn't know who Frank was, probably one of his relatives. But what had she done with his? Why, his mother had made them all! Yes-she had sat up nearly all one night to finish one, after the busy day's work was done. Mother knew how to make clothes, didn't she?

He didn't see why they all looked at him that way, and sort of smiled, when he walked to church that morning. Yes-he guessed they were all kind-only-only if they wouldn't look at him so. Why, he was a healthy strong boy, had come halfway round the world, and had seen lots of things, and could talk about lots of things, too, if they'd stop asking him about the heathen, and whether he had ever tasted butter before, or had seen pie! Why, of course he had! He supposed he had eaten like other people. Why, yes, he had eaten rolls and muffins often for breakfast. He didn't see why they always called him "Poor little dear"-if sister Mary were here she'd like that, you bet! that's what Bill said Saturday, "you bet". The moon was rising over the shrubbery now. He was sort of glad the moon hadn't changed. It seemed like-like home. Not that America wasn't new and-and-nice. Mother had said