an air of evading me.  All at once, with surprise and delight, I remembered that she might be found in actual existence, in real flesh and blood.  I deserted the image for a week in the hope of finding the reality.  I paced Fifth Avenue; I went to the dry-goods stores; I attended the theatres.  Often I seemed to see her before me—­the picturesque hat, the long plume, the rich mantle and dress.  At such moments while I pressed forward my heart beat.  When the cheek turned toward me and the eyes lighted up with surprise at my disappointed stare, it was easy enough to see that I had made a mistake.  There was the hat, the cloak, the bewitching little frippiness of lace and net and ribbon about the bust.  She had, however, copied the masterpiece without investing herself with its soul:  her face was vague and characterless, her whole personality void of that eloquent womanliness which had so wrought upon me.  This experience was so many times repeated that I was frightfully tormented by it.  The familiar dress seemed to reveal with appalling truthfulness the lack of those qualities of heart and soul which I demanded.  Those lovely, picturesque outlines suggest not only rounded cheeks colored with girlish bloom, but something more; and the graceful draping is not a meaningless husk.

I have gone back to my shop-window image.  She never disappoints me.  She is as beautiful, as magnificently endowed, as full of fascinating life and spirit, as ever.  I sometimes think, unless I find her actual prototype, of buying that Gainsborough hat, that cloth mantle and velvet dress, and hanging them up in my room.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

     History of the English People.  By John Richard Green.  New York: 
     Harper & Brothers.

Most readers interested in English history have long felt the need of such a work as this, in which the results of recent research among original sources and of the critical examination of earlier labors are gathered up and summarized in a narrative at once clear and concise, free from disquisition, minuteness of detail and elaborate descriptions, without being meagre or superficial, devoid of suggestiveness or of animation.  In calling his work a History of the English People, Mr. Green has not undertaken to deviate from the beaten track, devoting his attention to social development and leaving political affairs in the background.  What he has evidently had in view is the fact that English history is in a special sense that of the rise and growth of free institutions, exhibiting at every stage the mutual influence or combined action of different classes, permeated even when the Crown or the aristocracy was most powerful by a popular spirit, and contrasting in this respect with that of France and Spain, in which during many centuries the mass of the people lost instead of gaining ground, representative bodies analogous to the English Parliament