animalism into the rear-rank of thinking humanity. One gets impatient for the fulfilment of augury or the crowning of desire, founded upon the hardly readable features of obese babyhood, and out of its inertness and heaviness is ever hunting for resemblances to those who have worthily wrought out their own lineaments of face and character. What value then in a pic ture which can pourtray to you only the utter stupidity of callow mortality, with no possible suggestiveness of what you hope or long for? There is an unwelcome limner, however, who is able to forestall the future for you, and from Nature's dim hints, one of the plastic and unformed features of infancy, give you a sharpened outline of what the face in mature life might have betokened. Death will give you a more worthy picture in your baby's face than any mortal artist can do. Sharpened by disease, its little rigid features shall stand out to you with a storied distinctness, so that you may read, as from an open page, your child's possible and probable character and bearing. You lose hold of its flesh and blood semblance in time; but the clear cut, marble face, invested with spirit and suggestiveness of fine capacities, by the stripping off of mortal vestments, stays with you with beautiful distinctness as long as you live.

I am sure that the triumph of a short-lived maternity was once found by me, as I looked upon the glorified features of my dead child. Through the many past years I bring that face back to me. I remember how my grief, hushed in awe, when I beheld the blighted promise of high nobility in his broad and beautiful brow, when I saw how much capacity for grace and dignity, all unknown to me, had been born into the little form. I had never been so proud of him before. Never so grandly had he folded his little hands, or carried his shoulders, or knit his lips together. There was no such character or meaning in his living attitudes; but death, as a heart offering, had composed him into a type of what time and culture would bave made him had he lived into manhood. This picture, cut into my memory with agony, ennobles me, for it tells me that I was thought worthy to be intrusted with a child too rare for earthly probation. I would not exchange it for the best work of mortal hands.

Graceful attitudes and expressions, caught from childhood, are always attractive. I have the photograph of a tear in the eye of a little three-year-old, and it is the tear, not the face, which has preserved the picture for many a year. The little chin is puckered up with huge grief; the child might have been crying for the moon, or a sugar-plum for aught I know; but nothing can take the rareness out of the photograph of a child's tear. I have another, which fairly laughs at me with a round, chubby face. It is not a silly, fixed-up simper, but the mellow, merry laugh of a roistering girl. Thrust children into the artist's hands, unawares, from the schoolroom, and their wild grace needs no bolstering with centre-table or books. How forcibly these youthful pictures tell of mortality to

decrepit age! It always seemed to me a feeble consolation to fall back upon one of them as a proof of by-gone beauty and retrograding power. I would rather strive to think that I am always at my better looks, as I get nearer to eternity; that, as I grow into immortality, the effluence of a nobler and purer spirit redeems the decay of my mortal body.

Card photographs are not apt to flatter; no subterfuges of attitude or dress can gloss over the baldness of an angular face or lend force to a meaningless one. "It does not do you justice," is a common courtesy of beholders; but, after all, the fault does not so much lie in the process as in the subject itself. Vain women are astonished to see the meanness and meagreness of their own faces; never suspecting that the meanness and meagreness are inherent in their own natures; that the pretty graces, which set them off with the world, are only surface deep, such as are marred or stolen by disease, sorrow, and time. The soul has small part or parcel in a likeness, and the best sitters are amazed to find how little nobility is born and how much inwrought by culture into their features. A card photograph must always be untrue to an inspired face, for it gives no room for the artist to engraft high toning of your inner life upon the harsh truthfulness of your mortal features. They are chiefly valuable, therefore, as the currency of common friendship and common life, and they have a broad mission in this working, everyday world. Thieves are caught by them; posts are burdened with them; the living exchange them and the dead leave them as pledges of remembrance and love. They are messages of peace and good-will; but they have had also high martial uses, following the soldier's rough march with a tender and refreshing presence. Pathetic stories, caught from the experiences of the battle-field, have come back to us, of what they did by way of consolation for the suffering and dying.

Once upon a time, waiting in the office of an army-hospital, my eye caught a package lying upon a table amongst scores of others of the same sort. It was not worth much in money; an old daguerreotype case, tied up with two or three soiled letters by a cord, the cord passing through a coarse finger-ring. It was simply inscribed with the name of a private, unknown soldier; not worth much, as I said, in solid currency, but of priceless value in some smitten household, and utterly redeemed to me by its beautiful suggestiveness. Whose picture was inside, how near its relationship to the dead owner, I know not. It was doubtless an ordinary face, more like that of the homely wife of a homely soldier, for the finger-ring betokened his humble origin. It was, however, fine enough to be kept with utter care by him, from whom it was going back sacred with the tragic history of his short-lived ownership.

Yesterday Kathleen started her picture across the ocean to brighten up an Irish cabin. It was badly taken and badly finished by a beggarly artist; but Kathleen was none the

A person ascended in succession the highest mountains would have seen nothing but unlimited forests, stringy-bark ranges, salt-marshes, blue hills in the distance, and sometimes extensive grassy plains. Silence would have reigned supreme, broken only by the screams of the parrots, the cawing of the crow, the whistle of the magpie, the laughter of the jackass, or the seldom shout and war-song of the natives. Very few were then the signs of natural life in South Australia. The kangaroo, with the rest of the marsupial genus: the wombat, a sort of wild-cat; the dingo, or wild-dog; the emu, and a cloud of wildfowl on the lakes and rivers, being, with a couple of thousand aborigines, living separately in scattered wurleys formed of branchess of trees, the only in

THE HAWK: "A monthly hover from the | the arts and exports of South Australia might Vale of Avon. (W. Wheaton, Ringwood, and be summed up as exhibited in, and consisting may be had of all booksellers.)—The seventh of, quaintly carved boomerangs and stonenumber of this promising periodical lies before sharpened spears, the rude rush-baskets and us, and fully bears out the impressions we ex- simple fishing-nets so frequently met with in pressed of the former one. The paper entitled our museums, and beyond which, according to "South Australia," by the Rev. Basil Tudor Mr. Craig, the aborigines have not progressed; Craig, M.A., with which it opens (the first, by and though they have been taught to plough the way, of a promised series) is not only in- and reap, to ride and drive and row, saw-up teresting, but, in all probability, will prove timber, &c., the native only exerts these talents eminently useful as presenting exactly the sort when in want of dinner, and abjures industry of information most needed by those who may after a full meal. Some of them have lived and contemplate emigration. Wonderful indeed is died as Christians, early brought-up at the the change which has heen wrought in this two mission-stations; many have been carefully country in the brief course of thirty years, at educated, and can read and write well; but they which period we are told that "South Australia never apply these advantages to their advancemight well be designated a desolation. ment, and the reverend writer has only heard of them as servants of servants in the open fields. But in the meanwhile wheat and wine, wool and copper, reward the enterprise of the white man, who exported last year copper to the value of half a million sterling, and to whom the fields under culture yielded a produce of six millions two hundred thousand bushels of wheat. It will be good news for many in and beyond the vale of Avon to know (we quote the emphatic phrase of the author) that "all steady, sensible, hard-working men will prosper" at Adelaide, and in other parts of South Australia. Mr. Craig does not slur over the climatic drawbacks to this land of promise. Some fifteen days of hardly endurable heat, some few of almost tropical rain; but, with these exceptions, the climate is balmy and full of sunshine, conducive to health and high spirits; but whether productive of long life has yet to be proved. An essay on "Goodness" deserves to be widely read: it has for its foundation Cicero's book, "De Officiés," and the few illustrative cases of conscience quoted from the great Pagan philosopher, notwithstandig the precise teaching of Christian ethics on such matters might readily find duplicates, on ""Change" and elsewhere, in the present day. The selfish subtlety of the human heart seems to have undergone no alteration since the time of Cicero; so that a large proportion of modern men and women, tried by the philosopher's standard of integrity, would be found wanting. We are sorry that the space devoted to "Notes, Queries, and Replies" is shorter than usual, regarding them as a most interesting feature of the publication. "The Four Pages" contain the usual amount of

habitants.

66

At present two hundred towns and villages occupy the sites of prarie and forest-two hundred towns and villages having populations in them of from one hundred and fifty to ten thousand inhabitants. Iron and other roads, several thousand miles in extent, connect these towns and villages, and are mediums of continual traffic. Railways, trams, docks, viaducts, and a hundred bridges have been introduced or constructed; while to a half-score of ports and roadsteads there is a ceaseless influx of ships and steamers." Instead of two thousand inhabitants they number at present about a hundred and sixty thousand, and every year, of course, must materially add to these figures. The mansions of wealthy squatters, gardens and vineyards, occupy the fairest spots; farms flourish, and 450 places of worship have been built. Never has thirty years made so wonderful a change in the aspects and condition of a country. Thirty years ago

amusing matter, anagrams, enigmas, &c. A, paper, continued from page 91, treats of the "Third and Fourth Creation Days," and is written by Dr. Wilson.

THE SEA-SIDE REGISTER. (London: Orban and Dickens, 27, Walbrook.)-We find the above with other pamphlets on our table, and mention that its purpose is the facilitating of letting furnished and other houses and apartments at sea-side places, not only in England we perceive, but in Wales, Ireland, and the Channel Islands. The idea is an excellent one, and will be found a great advantage to heads of families in quest of temporary homes or houses at the sea-side. The Register is published at short intervals, and distributed gratuitously by Messrs. Orban and Dickens, and its lists are suited to all requirements, containing houses and apartments at rentals from two to twenty guineas per week.

justice for the daughters of the poor which we take good care shall be done to our own daughters?" No wonder that 72 members of Parliament, including pairs, voted in favour of giving the suffrage to women. "The position of women in America," by Mrs. Bayle Bernard, is a suggestive paper, and deserves to be attentively read.

to

An article entitled "photography as an employment for women," points to a very suitable field for feminine labour, one in which, as usual, they are allowed to keep a share of the least profitable portion, but are never allowed to learn enough of the profession in a photographer's studio, to make it a profession for themselves. The society for the promoting of the employment of women have taken premises in Belgravia nearly opposite the Grosvenor Hotel Victoria Station, for the teaching and practising of photography by women, an enterprise which has ENGLISH-WOMAN'S REVIEW.-(London: our best wishes for its success, especially as 23, Great Marlborough Street, Regent Street; from her Majesty downwards, lady photograph Kent and Co., Paternoster Row. A ca-ers have exhibited special facilities for excelling pital summary of Mr. Mills clever speech in the art. The remainder of the number will on the enfranchisement of women, and other be found highly interesting, the Reviews espematters connected with the debate, occupy the cially so. greater part of this number. To the admirable arguments of Mr. Mill little can be added; his (representations) of the position of women in their relation to men have the force of conscientious truth in addition to lucid illustration. His suggestion for a numerical return of wives, directly or indirectly done to death by blows, or other ill-treatment of their husband, told emphatically; his allusion to the fact so completely lost sight of by women, that not one mother in a hundred perhaps ever heard of it, viz., that the endowments of public schools by our forefathers were intended to benefit not boys only, but boys and girls indiscriminately; his instancing the treatment of Miss Garrett, and the prohibition of others who would follow in her steps at the hands of the chivalrous Society of Apothecaries, with another phase of the same feeling, exhibited by the Royal Academy, must give a heavy blow to this short-sighted and narrow policy, and make large-minded men ashamed of such mean measures. How forcible he sets forth the law with regard to married women. "By the common law of England everything that a woman has belongs absolutely to her husband. He may tear it all away from her, may spend the last penny of it in debauchery, leaving her to maintain by her labour both herself and her children, and if by heroic exertion she earns enough to put by anything for their future, unless she is judicially separated from him he can pounce upon her savings and leave her penniless; and such cases are of very common occurrence. If we were besotted enough to think such things right, there would be more excuse for us, but we know better. The richer classes have found a way of exempting their own daughters from the iniquitous state of the law. By the contrivance of marriage settlements they can make in each case a private law for themselves and they always do. Why do we not provide that

THE LABORATORY: A Weekly Record of Scientific Research.-(James Smith, Cannonstreet, London). The fifth number of this work lies before us, filling a place of no common interest to physicists and chemists, and in these days (when so many take an interest in science for its own sake) to a large circle of studious men, neither the one or the other. The report of the Chemical Society must interest the most common - place reader, and though we cannot see the use science of a memoir of "Geber," founded for the most part on legend and supposition, yet it is well that justice should be sought to be done to the founders of a science to which humanity is so largely indebted. Without the mysteries of alchemy the miracles of chemistry had remained unknown and undeveloped. Amongst other matters we find a well-written report of the chemical products at the Paris Universal Exhibition. It may, perhaps, be new to some of our readers to learn that in France (as a rule) the old sulphurmatch is still adhered to; yet in the face of this fact the lucifer-match is unrepresented at the Exhibition-an oversight by no means singular, at least in the English chemical sections. It was hoped by Dr. Hofman, at the Exhibition of 1862, that before that of 1872 phosphorusmatches might be abolished; and the writer of the report (C. W. Quin, F. C. S., Superintendent of the Chemical Classes of the International Exhibition of 1862) observes that, amongst the numerous cheap compounds that are ignitable by friction, something might be found to supersede the objectionable phosphoruspaste. One sound reason for getting rid of it is conveyed in the reminder that the large amount of bones now consumed in its manufacture would then be free for agricultural purposes.

THE TOILET.

(Specially from Paris.)

FOURTH FIGURE.-A costume for a boy of eight, composed of Breton trowsers of a white woollen fabric, bordered with red above the knees, and a wide band of the same down the side-seams. Russian boots, black, with a red Paletots continue to be the favourite confec border at top. On the head a Pyrenean caption; these are trimmed with lace and jet; I called a berret.