To see gangs of brawny fellows tearing down walls, ripping off doors, carrying away timbers on their shoulders when a street is in its decaying stage, is to see a most interesting sight.  At the entrance of the street a sign is put up:  “RUE BARREE.”  The front walls of buildings torn away, winding staircases are seen climbing up with all their burden of years upon them and all their secret weaknesses exposed.  Sometimes these stairways are of stone, sometimes of wood:  when the latter, if in a fair state of preservation, they are taken away bodily, to be put up again in some remote quarter of the town.  Shop-windows are offered for sale for like purposes.  At night the scene is made lurid by the glare of triangular lanterns, which throw out their warning red light, and the entrance to the street is carefully guarded.  Gradually the old buildings are taken to pieces and removed, bit by bit.  New walls of creamy stone, with modern windows, handsomely carved cornices, stone piazzas, and the like, are built up.  The street has become widened where it was narrow, and straightened where it was crooked.  The very sidewalks on either side of the new boulevard or avenue are as wide as was the whole of the old street which has now disappeared.  And with the old street the old tenants have disappeared too.  Handsome shops occupy the ground-floors, wealthy citizens live in the richly adorned apartments on the upper floors.  The blousards who hived in the old street have found a nook in some other old street, or they have fled to the suburbs—­the best place for them, as it is for all people of limited resources in all large towns.

WIRT SIKES.

SONNET.

  If thou didst love me for imagined fame,
    Or for some reason bred within thy mind
    By teeming Fancy, till thy sense grew blind,
  And wish and its possession seemed the same,
  Was it my fault that I was not endowed
    With all the virtues of thy paragon—­
    That clearer light did shine my flaws upon,
  And showed the actual presence free from cloud? 
  Ah, no! the fault, if blame there be, was thine. 
    If thou hadst loved me for myself alone,
  Thy love had lent its graces unto mine,
    Until my frailties had to merits grown—­
  Till light, reflected from thy soul divine,
    Had so transfused me that I too had shone.

F.A.  HILLARD.

THREE FEATHERS.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF “A PRINCESS OF THULE.”

CHAPTER XXVI.

A PERILOUS TRUCE.

The very stars in their courses seemed to fight for this young man.

No sooner had Wenna Rosewarne fled to her own room, there to think over in a wild and bewildered way all that had just happened, than her heart smote her sorely.  She had not acted prudently; she had forgotten her self-respect; she ought to have forbidden him to come near her again—­at least until such time as this foolish fancy of his should have passed away and been forgotten.