‘Mrs Happy Jack,’ said the departing man, ’I’m not afraid of you.  You have got on some way or other for nearly forty years, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t get on some way or other for forty more.  Therefore, so far as you are concerned, my mind is easy.  But, then, you girls—­you poor little inexperienced poppets, who know nothing of the world.  There’s Jane; but then she’s pretty—­really beautiful.  Why, her face is a fortune:  she will of course captivate a rich man; and what more can a father wish?  As for Emily—­I fear Emily, my dear, you’re rather plain than otherwise; but what, I would ask, is beauty?—­fleeting, transitory, skin-deep.  The happiest marriages are those of mutual affection—­not one-sided admiration:  so, on the whole, I should say that my mind is easier about Emily than Jane.  As for Maria, she’s so clever, she can’t but get on.  As a musician, an artist, an authoress, what bright careers are open for her!  While as for you, stupid little Clara, who never could be taught anything—­I very much doubt whether the dunces of this world are not the very happiest people in it—­Yes, Clara; leave to others the vain and empty distinctions of literary renown, which is but a bubble, and be happy in the homely path of obscure but virtuous duty!’

Happy Jack ceased.  There was a pause.  ‘And now,’ he said, ’having provided for my family, I will go to sleep, with a clear conscience and a tranquil mind.’

I said that I always distrusted this legend.  I am happy to say, that even as I write I have proof positive that it is purely a fiction.  I have just had a card put into my hand requesting my presence at a private exhibition of the celebrated Bloomer Family, while an accompanying private note from Jack himself informs me that the ’celebrated and charming Bloomer group—­universally allowed to be the most perfect and interesting representatives of the new regime in costume’—­are no other than the Happy Jacks redivivi—­Mrs J. and the girls donning the transatlantic attire, and Happy Jack himself delivering a lecture upon the vagaries of fashion and the inconsistencies of dress, in a new garment invented by himself, and combining the Roman toga with the Highland kilt.

THE DESERT HOME.[1]

Robinson Crusoe is the parent of a line of fictions, all more or less entertaining; but those of our own day, as might be expected, share largely in the practical spirit of the time, making amusement in some degree the mere menstruum of information.  Following the Swiss Family Robinson, we have here an English Family Robinson, which might as well be called an American Family Robinson; and although ostensibly meant for the holiday recreation of youth, it proves to be a production equally well suited for children of six feet and upwards.  The author is personally familiar with the scenes he describes, and is thus able to give them a verisimilitude which in other circumstances can be attained only by the rarest genius; and notwithstanding the associations, of his last book, the Scalp-hunters, there is only one bloody conflict in the present one fought by animals of the genus Homo.