“Felix d’Aubremel, God does not will that you should die, and I, his servant, am sent to tell you his decree.  You have been cruel and covetous—­you have wished an innocent man’s death, and his death caused that of a multitude of victims to the barbarous passions of a great western nation.  Man’s life must be sacred for every man.  God only can take what he gave.  Live, then, if you would not add a great crime to a great error.  And if forgiveness from one dead can restore in part your strength and courage to endure, Felix, I forgive you.”

The vision vanished.

Felix religiously obeyed the instructions of Li, and consecrated his life by a vow to the relief of human misery wherever he found it.  He devoted Richard Malden’s vast fortune to founding charitable establishments.  Ernestine Montmorot would never consent to see him again.

Two years ago, yielding to an impulse easy to understand, he requested the English consul at Chiusang to make inquiries as to the family of Li, who might perhaps be suffering in poverty.  Nothing more could be discovered than that the gracious sovereign of the Middle Kingdom had confiscated the property of Li’s family, that his wife had died of sorrow, in misery, and that his son, Li, having taken the liberty to complain of the glorious emperor’s severity, suffered death by the bowstring, as is proper and reasonable in all well-governed states.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  MOTHER IS HERE!—­DEIKER.]

MOTHER IS HERE!—­A little fawn in the clutches of a fox bleats loudly for help.  The mother appears quickly on the scene, and Renard retires, foiled and chagrined at the loss of his dinner.  He stays not upon the order of his going, but goes at once.  The artist Deiker is a well-known German painter, whose success with these pictures of animal life ranks him with such men as Beckmann and Hammer, whose names are familiar to the friends of THE ALDINE.

A TROPIC FOREST.

  Trees lifted to the skies their stately heads,
  Tufted with verdure, like depending plumage,
  O’er stems unknotted, waving to the wind: 
  Of these in graceful form, and simple beauty,
  The fruitful cocoa and the fragrant palm
  Excelled the wilding daughters of the wood,
  That stretched unwieldly their enormous arms,
  Clad with luxuriant foliage, from the trunk,
  Like the old eagle feathered to the heel;
  While every fibre, from the lowest root
  To the last leaf upon the topmost twig,
  Was held by common sympathy, diffusing
  Through all the complex frame unconscious life.

—­Montgomery’s Pelican Island.

* * * * *

What makes us like new acquaintances is not so much any weariness of our old ones, or the pleasure of change, as disgust at not being sufficiently admired by those who know us too well, and the hope of being more so by those who do not know so much of us.—­La Rochefoucauld.