obscure cottage, where she lived in great
poverty and privation. Almost paralytic, she was
compelled to have recourse to the assistance
of an attendant, and engaged a delicate girl,
some eighteen years of age, the daughter of
poor parents in the neighbourhood. Constant
illness exhausted the poor paralytic's store,
when her youthful nurse, who already worked
at her needle by day in part support of her
own family, devoted a greater portion of
every night to work to procure bread for her
helpless old charge. Little Blue Mantle was
soon on the spot; conversed with the invalid
and her nurse; and on leaving, not liking to
wound the delicacy of either, left a little store
of gold pieces on the mantel-piece. He
returned in a few weeks, when the young girl,
who was rapidly losing her health through
over exertion, handed him his gold, supposing
that he had left it on the mantel-piece by
accident. For once Little Blue Mantle
repented of his shame-faced benevolence; had
he been a little less delicate, this poor couple
would not have been starving in the midst of
plenty. But he succeeded in making the
poor needle-worker accept his assistance, and
left directions with a tradesman in the village
to watch over her, and administer to her
wants. A few months afterwards he returned
again; the poor paralytic was dead,—and his
protegée? She was at the Château. To the
Château went Little Blue Mantle, and there
he found a handsome young man, and a
blooming, well-dressed young lady. The
squire had heard the story of the devoted
little nurse, had become attached to her, and
had married her. The story is thoroughly
French, and thoroughly true to French
nature.

And so, through long years, went trotting
about  on his Master's business Edmé Champion,
the man in the little blue mantle. It
may be objected that his charity was
indiscriminate, and that he may have relieved
rogues and vagabonds, as well as the virtuous
poor. I am not aware that he understood
anything about poor laws, old or new; about
prison discipline, or the workhouse test; or
that he had the least idea of political economy.
He was a simple man, with little lore, but
surely with a large heart.

At length, in extreme old age, he felt his
end approaching. Beloved and revered by
his family and friends, the Government
had heard of his unobtrusive merits and
awarded him the cross of the Legion of
Honour. He took it as he took all things,
pleasantly and thankfully. He expressed a
few days before his death a longing to die in
his native place—dans son pays, as the French
affectionately express it. Although not
attacked with any mortal malady, he seemed to
know that his time was come, and said to his
friends, "Adieu! you will see me no more."
He had scarcely arrived at Castel Censoir,
when he fell down dead. His end can scarcely
be called sudden, for it was anticipated and
prepared for. "He had everything to hope,
and nothing to fear." The mercy he had so
often shown to others seemed shown to him,
in sparing him the agonies of a protracted
struggle with death.

He sleeps in his quiet grave, and no
monumental victories will sound trumpets over it.
But his fame is written in that most indelible
of pages, the remembrance of the people;
and fifty years hence, beneath the cotter or
the workman's roof, the garrulous grannam
will gather the little children round her
knee by the bright fire, and when they are
tired—if children of any growth ever can be
tired—of hearing of the exploits of kings and
conquerors, tell them of the good deeds of
Little Blue Mantle.

THE FORBIDDEN LAND

It is natural to men to have a strong
curiosity about the least known parts of the
world they live in. There are thousands of
children in every country in Europe—to say
nothing of America—whose hearts beat as
they read the story of the first voyage of
Columbus; and, when these children grow
up to be men and women, they read the story
with more and more interest; with not less
sympathy with the spirit of adventure of those
ancient mariners, and with a more experienced
sense of the perseverance and heroism which
accomplished the acquisition of a hemisphere.
The time for such curiosity to be felt and
indulged is not over yet; for there are large
spaces of our globe which are still almost
unknown to us. There are some, the existence
of which is a matter of little more than
suspicion. There are some which have been
seen only as a faint but distinct outline
against the pale skies of the Southern Pole.
There are some which we know only on the
testimony of a ship's crew or two, who have
seen at night, miles off across a surging sea,
volcano fires lighting up vast plains of snow. And
there is one great country; which, having
been familiarly talked of two or three
centuries before Columbus looked abroad over
the Atlantic, has since been shut up from
observation, and has by degrees become the
profoundest secret of its kind that is shrouded
from every eye but that of heaven. Its
inhabitants are compelled to let the sun and stars
know about their country, but they have
taken all possible care that nobody else
shall. Thibet is the very Bluebeard's closet
of the great round house we live in. For
several centuries the certain penalty for
peeping and prying into it has been death.
It is supposed, indeed, that Russia knows
more than she chooses to tell; but whatever
she may know is of no use to anybody else.

When Indian officers repair to the skirts
of the Himalaya mountains for coolness in
the summer months, they look up, as generations
before them have done, to the vast snowy peaks
towering in the sky, and feel how provoking