THE following work, though it has the form of a novel, yetfor certain singular reasons hardly derserves the name.

I happened to be staying at a country house on the Continent a year or so after the publication of a now celebrated book. That book was the Journal of Marie Bashkirtcheff; and as several of the party then present were reading it, it was not unnatural that it should be continually discussed and alluded to. There was one lady, however—a Countess Z——, a Hungarian—whose interest in it struck me as beingkeener than on ordinary grounds could be accounted for; and whilst sitting with her on a pleasant afternoon in a pavilion by the side of a lake, and talking idly of any triviality that suggested itself, she recurred to the subject so abruptly and with such an air of abstraction, that I felt convinced it was constantly occupying her mind. Her remark was not very striking, and it required no particular answer, so by way of showing her that I was civil enough to be attending, I gave expression to a thought which had often before occurred to me.

"What a pity," I said, "that a woman like Mari Bash-kirtcheff, with such resolute frankness, and such power of self-observation, should have died before her experiences were better worth observing. She often tells us herself that she has nothing in her life to hide. A woman who can say that has not much to reveal. It does not mean merely that she