little thing full of sadness catches my eye, despite the deepening
twilight. It is a yellow-stained photograph hung on the wall in a
simple, wooden frame. It is the young Prince Imperial, who was
killed in Africa a dozen years ago, but is shown here as a mere
child in knee breeches. An odd, but touching, fancy it was of the
Empress Eugenie to place this souvenir of her son, the last of the
Napoleons, in the very room where that other one was born, the
giant who shook the earth....

How strange and startling it will be a century or two hence
for our descendants to turn over the photographs of their
ancestors!... The portraits left by our forefathers, expressive
though they may be, whether painted or engraved, can never
produce in us an impression equally vivid; but photographs are
the very reflections of living beings, fixing their precise
attitudes, their gestures, their most fleeting expressions.
What a curious thing it will be, what an awe-inspiring thing for
future generations to study our faces when we shall have fallen
into the dead past!...--A fragment from Loti's "Book of Pity
and of Death."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

EDWARD EVERETT HALE, clergyman and author, born in Boston in 1822, was
graduated at Harvard in 1839. While a clergyman, he is perhaps best
known to the world as a philanthropist and an author. He has written
short stories, novels, juvenile books, works of travel, essays,
biography, and history, besides giving much time to his pastoral
duties, to preaching, lecturing, and the organization of charities. He
founded the magazine "Old and New," afterward merged in "Scribner's"
(now "The Century"). Two of his short stories, "My Double, and How He
Undid Me," and "The Man Without a Country," are classics.

HENRI ADOLPHE STEPHAN OPPER, known to the world as M. DE BLOWITZ, born
at Blowitz, Bohemia, on December 28, 1825, migrated to France in 1848,
and became engaged as professor of the German language and literature
at the Lycee of Tours. Here he remained till 1860, when he left to
fill, successively, similar posts at Limoges, Poictiers, and
Marseilles. He married the daughter of a paymaster of the French
Marine. It was not till 1871 that he became a naturalized Frenchman,
and, after the French defeat by the Germans, he was a confidant and
emissary of both Gambetta and Thiers. His entrance into journalism was
as the collaborateur of Lawrence Oliphant, the special correspo