friends make a feint of detaining her, also the scribes, and who are held in and belabor the attacking party with great reverence. The deities are conthorn-branches, or smother them in sulted by throwing sticks in the air and showers of flour and wood-ashes. Ar- noting the positions in which they fall, rived at her new home, the bride finds or by burning bones and drawing augua house, horses, cattle, and sheep pro- ries from the marks produced by calcinavided by the groom's family, while her tion. To avert evil influences, feathers own parents send clothes, ornaments, inserted in a split bamboo are put on and corn. The Lolos, it is said, live in the roof of a house, much like the old good stone houses, and have fine, broad horse-shoe on the barn-door in our own roads between their villages. country. When a disaster is threatened, sheep or cattle are slaughtered as a sort of propitiatory sacrifice.

A queer marriage ceremony is reported of some of the tribes, but whether a serious one or only part of the fun of the event does not appear. The parents of the bride place her on an upper branch of some large tree, while the older ladies of the family are perched on the lower branches. The bridegroom has to climb up the trunk for his bride, and she does not become his until he touches her foot, an act which the women endeavor, or profess to endeavor, to prevent, by striking at him and shoving him in all directions.

They have also trial by ordeal in a curious fashion. If anything has been stolen, and the thief has not been discovered, all the people of the place are summoned by the medicine-man and compelled each to masticate a handful of raw rice. When the mess is ejected, a stain of blood on the mouthful betrays the delinquent, as the gums of the guilty are sure to bleed!

The Lolos compare the world to an open hand. The thumb, well stretched out, represents foreigners; the forefinger, themselves; the middle finger, the Mohammedans, the third finger, the Chinese; and the little finger the

The birth of a girl is regarded as a more fortuitous event than the arrival of a boy-proof that the women occupy a high position among the Lolos. Indeed, a woman-chief is not unknown Tartars. They seem to have three among the tribes.

deities Lui-wo, A-pu-ko, and ShuaMr. Baber advises any one who would shê-po-but we are ignorant of the enter the Lolo country to secure a fe- attributes of each. They all dwell in male guide, under whose protection his the sacred mount of the Buddhists, person and property will be held sacred. however, Mount O-mi, which is curious, Such a guide will put on an extra petti-and the greatest of the three is Lui-wo. coat before beginning the journey, and They say that they get woollen cloths if any molestation is threatened, will from Chien-Chang, and other goods take off that garment and spread it sol- from "beyond Thibet" - query, Rusemnly on the ground. There it will sia. They have a tradition of a Euroremain until the outrage has been con-pean who visited them some fifty years doned, and the ground on which it lies ago. This was probably a French is inviolable until the neighboring chiefs missionary. Another Frenchman was have punished the offenders and done captured during a Lolo foray near justice to the convoy. Yung-Shan, in 1860. He recorded his dismal experiences in the "Annales de la Propagation de la Foi." Only he speaks of his captors as Mantzu, and as very rough customers indeed.

The women also take part in battles, but are not assailed by male warriors so long as they do not use cutting weapons.

When a boy is born he is first washed in cold water, and then baptized on the forehead with cow-dung, to make him strong and courageous.

Mr. Baber says that the free-hearted manner of the Lolos is very attractive, and that they are inclined to regard The Lolos are not Buddhists, and it Europeans as distant kinsmen. He is is not easy to classify their religion. It satisfied that a European could travel is dominated by medicine-men, who are | from end to end of Lolodom with per

extend for quite three hundred miles within the area of China proper.

fect security, if only he was furnished which the slave hunts may take place, with the proper credentials. A strict watch is kept all along the frontiers, and all suspicious persons are rigorously excluded.

The Lolos get the blame of many outrages which are really committed by bands of Chinese outlaws which infest | the borders of Lolodom. But they do make periodical forays in a very determined manner. When they project an invasion of Chinese territory, after the manner of the Scottish Borderers, the Black-bones send heralds some months in advance to announce their intention. The Chinese officials never molest these emissaries, as they know that terrible reprisals would follow, but take the hint and remove themselves to a safe dis

tance.

When the time comes -usually in early winter-the Lolo warriors issue forth, cross the Gold River in light coracles all they carry with them—and proceed to lay hands on what goods and chattels they can find. They do not kill anybody who submits and offers to provide a ransom, nor do they make captives of old persons; but young men and women, cattle and salt, they carry off wholesale, and if resistance is offered they destroy all the growing crops. Resistance, however, is seldom offered by the country people, and the Chinese guard are usually like the proverbial policeman when a row occurs.

The Lolos do not use firearms, but crossbows and long, twenty-four foot spears headed with spikes four or five inches long. The prisoners may be ransomed, but the price is a higher one than the ordinary country folk can raise. Mr. Baber met a woman who had been ransomed for the equivalent of five pounds - a terribly large sum in those parts. The captives, as a rule, remain as slaves; and it marks a curious condition of affairs in the great Chinese Empire that, within the nominal boundaries of one of its largest and richest provinces, thousands of its subjects live at the mercy of a nation of slave hunters. The frontiers, at almost any point of

The Lolos certainly possess books, and Mr. Baber was able to procure transcripts of some of their writings. They have not yet been interpreted, we believe; but the characters have been identified as phonetic, and as bearing some affinities to writings found in Sumatra.

It should be mentioned that the term Lé-su, or a variant of it, is frequently found among Indo-China tribes, widely separated from each other by distance and everything else. The Abbé Desgodius refers to a people he calls "Lissou," inhabiting the country immediately to the south of Thibet, speaking a language quite different from the surrounding tribes, and having a very independent character. In the journal of the Sladen Mission there is mention of a people called Lee-saus, who are supposed to be identical with the Lei-su encountered on the Thibetan borders. And a great similarity has been shown between the language of those Lee-saus and the Burmese.

Is it possible that there is any connection between the Lolos and the Burmese tribes of Karens, who have so mysterious a history, and whose legends seem to point almost to a European origin? This is a matter for ethnologists to investigate; but it is clear that a great deal more information is needed about the remarkable inhabitants of Lolodom, of whom we have endeavored to present a sketch from the very scanty materials available.

Mr. Hosie, who encountered some Lolos on his journey in western China, says that the women might, without any stretch of imagination, have been taken for Italian peasant women. He also saw the place, near Yueh-hsi, where, a few years ago, a Chinese army of five thousand men had entered Lolodom to punish the Black-bones and possess the land; but not a man of them ever returned! Truly Lolodom enshrines a great human mystery.

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Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

TO ONE DEAD.

You, who when living, were so daintysweet

All down the grassy glades where Silence broods

Beneath his shroud of golden blazoning;

That even summer suns would seem to Where amid leafy boughs, from spray to glow

With heartier radiance on the path your feet

Might choose to tread, - you, who from long ago,

(From fairy babyhood to those dark days When laughter ceased), have ever loyally spread

Your tender witchery before our gaze,

Do you regret us, dear? you, being dead.

Are there no moments in your calm grave

rest

When you remember earth, and earth's warm love?

Has recollection paled before that best

And highest joy which waited you above?
The sting of memory was ours to bind
Into heart-crosses, but its pain thus fled,
Does it now nestle in your heart, or find
Its piteousness refused? you, being dead.

It would not harm your unity of praise.
Though we have woo'd the blue of April
eyes,

spray,

Falls the first touch of Winter's icy
breath-

The first faint sign of lingering decay —
And smites the ruddy beech with crim-
son death.
Chambers' Journal.
B. G. JOHNS.

MORNING.

THE tide of human life ebbs to and fro,
For night and sleep's forgetfulness are
past,

And toiling men awake to come and go,
Upon the turmoil of a city cast.
Afar from ways that breathe of sordid care,
Of aching hearts, and many a life forlorn
In weary want, I turn my sleepless eyes

To where the maiden Morning's smiles
are fair,

By rippling streams beneath unsullied skies, Where winds come murmuring through the balmy air

Now they are veiled our own we dumbly With sound of angels' wings in Paradise ;

raise

To fix them on the blue of Paradise.
And it might make it easier could we deem
That old familiar names once daily said
Find a hushed echo, like some twice-
dreamed dream;

Ah! for we miss you, dear! you, being
dead.

And still beyond, where blossoms have no

THE DEATH OF SUMMER.

WILD Autumn winds blow chill and drear

Across the cloudy, storm-rent sky, While hill and valley, far and near,

Folded in misty silence lie.

No sound of music fills the air,

No voice of bird along the brake;
Only the wild-fowl's cry, remote and rare,
Among the withered sedges of the lake.

Gone is the glory of the summer noon;
Gone is the tender grace of dawning
light:

The soft, sweet radiance of the rising moon,
The silver silence of the starry night.
Yet, there is splendor in the waning woods,
And Summer dies, as dies a royal king,

TEARS in my heart that weeps,
Like the rain upon the town.
What drowsy languor steeps
In tears my heart that weeps ?

O sweet sound of the rain
On earth and on the roofs !
For a heart's weary pain
O the song of the rain'

Vain tears, vain tears, my heart!
What, none hath done thee wrong?
Tears without reason start
From my disheartened heart.

This is the weariest woe,
O heart, of love and hate
Too weary, not to know
Why thou hast all this woe.

PAUL VERLAINE.

From The Contemporary Review. THE LAST DECADE OF THE LAST CENTURY.

66

IT is just a hundred and one years since a certain undergraduate of St. John's College, Cambridge, by name Wordsworth, took his bachelor's degree and went his way into the world. The studies of the university had not greatly attracted him, at least so as to pursue them in the spirit that wins "marks" and produces "wranglers." “William, you may have heard," writes his sister to her friend, Miss Pollard, in June, 1791, lost the chance (indeed, the certainty) of a fellowship by not combating his inclinations. He gave way to his natural dislike to study so dry as many parts of mathematics; consequently could not succeed at Cambridge. He reads Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, and English, but never opens a mathematical book." And he himself speaks, in a letter to his sister, of his having acquainted his uncle (his mother's brother, the Rev. Dr. Cookson) with his having given up "all thoughts of a fellowship." Only in a general way did mathematics, which in the Procrustean system of the then Cambridge formed the main occupation of the place, excite his interest and admiration :

Yet may we not entirely overlook
The pleasure gathered from the rudiments
Of geometric science. Though advanced
In these enquiries, with regret I speak,
No farther than the threshold, there I found
Both elevation and composed delight;
With Indian awe and wonder, ignorance

pleased

With its own struggles, did I meditate
On the relation those abstractions bear

To Nature's laws, and by what process led,
Those immaterial agents bowed their heads
Duly to serve the mind of earth-born man ;
From star to star, from kindred sphere to
sphere,

From system on to system without end.

More frequently from the same source I
drew

A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense
Of permanent and universal sway,
And paramount belief; there, recognized
A type; for finite natures, of the one
Supreme Existence, the surpassing life

peace

And silence did await upon these thoughts That were a frequent comfort to my youth. (Prelude, Bk. vi.)

So that it was not so much the spirit of these great studies, as the spirit in which they were prosecuted, that discouraged him from taking them up. He felt then as he felt and wrote some years afterwards, that there is no real antagonism between poetry and science. "Poetry," he wrote in the preface to the second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads,"" is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. . . . If the labors of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself." Thus, after all, the future poet's soul may have found some food and sustenance in the Cambridge atmosphere. And his experience may be of some significance if any one should thoroughly investigate the striking fact that so many of our chief poetical geniuses from Spenser to Tennyson have been bred in a university especially devoted to "exact" studies. which Wordsworth's Cambridge life did Probably there are other respects in more for him than he thought — more, at all events, than he acknowledges in that careful analysis he gives in the "Prelude " of his development and growth, and more than any one of his biographers has yet fully ascertained. Still, it remains true that during his residence at Cambridge he had no high opinion of the place, which, indeed, was not then at its best; nor had the place any very high opinion of him. He