ing in various newspaper offices early in life. For many years he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly; at present he is connected editorially with Harper's Magazine. He has written many novels, sketches, and farces. Of his novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham is the strongest. Here he gives us a picture of the self-made American who has been such a familiar figure among us in these latter days. Howells stands for realism in fiction and has a large following among the younger writers. He is justly called the dean of American letters.

SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS

(From Venetian Life, Chapter XII)

Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these "summer isles of Eden" lying all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede, and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the east and west you can see their borders of sea-shore and mainland; but looking north and south, there seems no end to the charm of their vast, smooth, all-but-melancholy expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise the blue Euganean Hills, where Petrarch died; on the north loom the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the stretches of lagoon in every direction lie the islands-now piles of airy architecture that the water seems to float under and bear upon its breast, now

"Sunny spots of greenery,"

with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above their trees; for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater number have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the oncepeaceful shores and challenges all passers with his sharp

"Halt! Wer da!" and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands have been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to keep their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing, empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy.

THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE

(Chapter XIV)

As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a chapter on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock, and whether, if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock is dead; that if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous pantaloons or his Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that he would far rather call out to him, "Ciò Shylock! Bon di! Go piaser vederla "; that if Shylock by any chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise to pay him a pound of his flesh on certain conditions, the honest commissary of police before whom they brought their affair would dismiss them both to the madhouse at San Servolo. In a word, the present social relations of Jew and Christian in this city render the "Merchant of Venice" quite impossible; and the reader, though he will find the Ghetto sufficiently noisome and dirty, will not find an oppressed people there, nor be edified by any of those insults or beatings which it was once a large share of Christian duty to inflict upon the enemies of our faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his Jewish fellow-citizen is destined to some very unpleasant experiences in the next world, but Corpo di Bacco! that is no reason why he should not be friends with him in this. He meets him daily on exchange and at the Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of his conversazioni. If he still despises him—and I think he does, a little he keeps his

1“Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you."

contempt to himself, for the Jew is gathering into his own hands a great part of the trade of the city, and has the power that belongs to wealth. He is educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the last great name in Venetian literature is that of the Jewish historian of the Republic, Romanin. The Jew's political sympathies are invariably patriotic, and he calls himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when rich, in a palace or a fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and lets many others (I must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by the pound of flesh) in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful Ca' Doro now belongs to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most distinguished physician in Venice, occupies the appartamento signorile in the palace of the famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a banker, a manufacturer, a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his intelligence and his probity, which perhaps does not infringe more than that of Italian Catholics. He dresses well,-with that indefinable difference, however, which distinguishes him in everything from a Christian, -and his wife and daughter are fashionable and stylish. They are sometimes, also, very pretty; and I have seen one Jewish lady who might have stepped out of the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age, and been known for Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and delicate, sensitive, high-bred look and bearing-no more western and modern than a lily of Palestine.

The following writers' are representative of our literature in the South,—the old South, with its plantation life, its slaves, and its Creoles: Francis Hopkinson Smith, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and Ruth McEnery Stuart.

3. Francis Hopkinson Smith (1838- ) is a native of Baltimore. He is an artist and a mechanical engineer, as well as an author who ranks with the best of our fiction writers from the South to-day. His Colonel Carter of Cartersville stands a

fair chance of becoming a classic; his short stories are fascinating studies in character types.

MACWHIRTER'S FIREPLACE

(From The Wood Fire in No. 3)

Sandy MacWhirter would have an open fire. He had been brought up on blazing logs and warm hearths, and could not be happy without them. . . .

There was no chimney in No. 3 when he moved inno place really to put one, unless he knocked a hole in the roof nor was there any way of supporting the necessary brickwork.... But trifling obstacles like these never daunted MacWhirter. Lonnegan, a Beaux Arts man, who built the big Opera House, and who also hungered for blazing logs, solved the difficulty.

It was a great day when Mac's fireplace was completed. Everybody crowded in to see it. . .

And the friends that this old fire had; and the way the men loved it despite the liberties they tried to take with it! And they did, at first, take liberties, and of the most exasperating kind to any well-intentioned, law-abiding, and knowledgeable wood fire. Boggs, the animal painter, whose studio lay immediately beneath MacWhirter's, was never, at first, satisfied until he had punched it black in the face; Wharton, who occupied No. 4, across the hall, would insist that each log should be on its head and the kindling grouped about it; while Pitkin, the sculptor, who occupied the basement because of his dirty clay and big chunks of marble, was miserable until he had jammed the back-log so tight against the besmoked chimney that not a breath of air could get between it and the blackened bricks.

But none of these well-meant but inexperienced attacks ever daunted the spirit of this fire. It would splutter a moment with ill-concealed indignation, threatening a dozen times to go out in smoke, and then, all of a sudden a little bubble of laughing flame would break out under one end of a log, and then another, and away it would go roaring up the chimney in a very ecstasy of delight.

Now and then it would talk back; I have heard it many

a time, when Mac and I would be sitting alone before it listening to its chatter.

"Take a seat," it would crackle, "right in front where I can warm you. Sit, too, where you can look into my face and see how ruddy and joyous it is. I'll not bore you; I never bored anybody-never in all my life. I am an endless series of surprises, and I am never twice alike. I can sparkle with merriment, or glow with humor, or roar with laughter, dependent on your mood, or upon mine. Or I can smoulder away all by myself, crooning a low song of the woods-the song your mother loved, your cradle song -so full of content that it will soothe you into forgetfulness. When at last I creep under my gray blanket of ashes and shut my eyes, you, too, will want to sleep-you and I, old friends now with our thousand memories."

Only MacWhirter really understood its many moods. "Alexander MacWhirter, Room No. 3," the signboard read in the hall below-and only MacWhirter could satisfy its wants; and so, after the first few months, no one dared touch it but our host, whose slightest nudge with the tongs was sufficient to kindle it into renewed activity.

It was not long after this that a certain sense of ownership permeated the coterie. They yielded the chimney and its mechanical contrivances to MacWhirter and Lonnegan, but the blaze and its generous warmth belonged to them as much as to Mac. Soon chairs were sent up from the several studios, each member of the half-circle furnishing his own-the most comfortable he owned. Then the mug followed, and the pipe-racks, and soon Sandy MacWhirter's wood fire in No. 3 became the one spot in the building that we all loved and longed for.

And Mac was exactly fashioned for High Priest of just such a Temple of Jollity: Merry-eyed, round-faced, with one and a quarter, perhaps one and a half, of a chin tucked under his old one—a chin though that came from laughter, not from laziness; broad-shouldered, deep-chested, hearty in his voice and words, with the faintest trace just a trace, it was so slight-of his mother-tongue in his speech; whole-souled, spontaneous, unselfish, ready to praise and