invariably taken from other patients who are in an elementary stage."

One of the strangest features of the disease seemed to be the fact that it was not accompanied with any acute pain-indeed, that actual bodily suffering, great or small, was absent.

I ask a patient, "Do you suffer at all—and you-and you?" They all shake their heads, yet mournfully. "No, we have no pain. Only we are always dreadfully hungry and cold." What an unspeakable relief that there is an absence of bodily anguish -yet wait a little and hear what the doctor says. "This insensibility to suffering, however, constitutes both a difficulty and an evil. For example, a leper's bone becomes bruised, crushed, or otherwise injured, because his sensations give him no warning of impending danger. The stump of his arm may come into contact with the fire, or his leg-bone may be pressed against a red-hot plate. Yet at the time he will not be aware of the fact. He is past feeling." Past feeling!-what a miserable degradation, bodily or indeed mentally! It almost seems better that a human being should be writhing under the bitterness of the utmost pain rather than that he should be in a condition of "past feeling."

The doctor assures me it is quite true that their hunger is insatiable, and prompts them to consume any amount of oil or fat of which they can get hold. The rations are unquestionably most liberal, consisting of 11 lb. meat, 1 lb. of bread per patient daily, and other provisions in proportion. No alcoholic drink is issued to a single paticnt in the island, except in the shape of medical comforts, and this allowance is very sparing.

By this time my head has re

ceived all the information which, comparing it to a sponge, it is capable of absorbing at a single administration; so I aid the process of condensation by a trudge over the flat desolate island, gun in hand, and accompanied by a lunatic of a melancholy type of aberration. Nevertheless he brightens at a successful shot, and swears loudly and abusively at failures. Quail are astonishingly abundant, and there are several partridges, rabbits, and huge, vile, but non-poisonous snakes. I notice a dreary, solitary building, constituting the female leper hospital; but for the purposes of this paper, I need not incur the pain of visiting our afflicted sisters in the humiliation of their malady. After my shooting-walk my mind seems again receptive, and I once more make my way to the leper wards, this time unaccompanied. I had received distinct permission, so there is no impropriety in my investigating on my own account, and reporting the result. The result is eminently unfavourable. If any persons in England care to read what I am writing, and if thereby there be effected any alleviation in the woes of a company of most miserable human beings, my satisfaction will indeed be great.

I enter a square, dirty, dismal courtyard, two sides of which are bordered with wards, one of which I enter and ask for a head leper attendant. A sleeper is aroused from his bed; he is fearfully swollen with tubercular leprosy, and though fairly intelligent, it is some time ere I can make him understand my object, for casual visitors are rare indeed. Meanwhile the leper patients, some in bed, some sitting in various parts of the ward, who, with dull apathy, had almost ignored the entrance of a stranger, evince a gleam of languid curiositv.

They listen to my inquiries; first one and then another puts in a rejoinder, and by degrees the conversation becomes. what?- not bright or brisk, but monotonously continuous, like the tolling of a funeral bell. I must, however, say that they gave no sort of utterance to anything like a detail of grievances.

"How long have you been ill ?” -my experience is that the words leprosy" and "lunacy" are by common consent tabooed. "A year," or "two years," or "four years," as the case may be; "but I am a little better now," they fondly try to persuade themselves. "Have you any games?" A shake of the head.

"Any newspapers or books?" Fresh negatives. "There is a library, but we have little benefit from it, and we have no newspapers."

"Shall I send you some?" and for the first time there is a trace of animation in their reply.

Send

"Oh, do-oh, pray do! us anything to read, either in Dutch or English. Send us even tracts. Address them to Stop; we will get you a piece of paper that you may write it down, lest you should forget."

Then I make a tour of the ward. It is of fair but not excellent construction, but so bare and dark, and oh, so sad! Bare utility, moderate cleanliness, but not a vestige of gracious enlivenment, of kindly solicitude, or of effort to provide minor comforts for the sufferers. Not even a book, a newspaper, a picture, or an ornament. No wonder I am more struck with the oppressive silence, with the torpor of their gloomy despair. Yet this is manifestly one of the best wards. I wish to see also the worst, and yonder two crazy buildings promise to correspond to my require

once

ments. Yes, I find human ingenuity could surely scarcely contrive anything more vile and discreditable. Decrepit outside, ruinous within, deficient in the commonest furniture and fittings, fourteen beds are crowded into a totally insufficient space, the miserable rickety bedsteads mere masses of foul rags, and fouler mattresses, on which are stretched patients in the most advanced, helpless stages of the disease, unprovided, so far as I could discover, with ordinary hospital appliances. The atmosphere is only partially fetid by reason of the open door. There is a kind of gipsy fireplace in which a few sticks crackle, and over which some of the lepers are crouching; nay, the very ground is destitute of boards, and consists of bare earth trampled into hollows, over which, as the doctor stated, numbers of large loathsome snakes crawl at night in search of mice. Is this disgraceful cabin a Cape Government hospital, or is it a lazar - house which even the pariahs of the East would scorn to inhabit? I inspected two of these buildings, and, to judge from what I saw and heard, there must be several more. I try to question the inmates; most of them are too near the threshold of death to answer my inquiries intelligently. The majority are half-breeds-in fact I did not see any pure-bred whites-by no means of a high type, not speaking English very glibly; and though they respond with a faint show of satisfaction to the few sentences in Dutch which I can muster, the conversation is very one-sided, so I quit the sickening sight and set to work to question two leper headattendants. attendants. Only by degrees do they become communicative, and then I gather from them various items of information, which are chiefly valuable because I corro

was.

These lepers, through no fault of their own, are cut off from friends and relations, and from all which renders life dear: they are virtually incarcerated in this terrible isle. Is it too much to require that the bitterness of their lot should be alleviated, so far as is practicable, by at least a moderate expenditure of money and labour? At all events, let the foul wards I have described be

instantly demolished. Look at their clothing even-of discreditable quality in the first instance, and quickly worn to mere tatters. Where are the ample washhouses which here, above all places, should be a sine qua non? where the wellordered kitchens, the library, and the reading-room? were the airy, clean, cheerful wards, made brighter with some attempt at gardens, or at least with a neatly kept enclosure where the resources of such employment and amusement as these unhappy outcasts may be susceptible of? where, above all, that solicitude, tenderness, and consolation which would render it less hard for them to die?

Said one of the leper attendants to me ere we parted, in brokon sentences, which may thus be condensed: "Have you come over here to find out something about us? If So, will you not write something in the newspapers explaining how miserable we are? We have nobody to speak for us. I am scarcely at all ill, yet I am compelled to remain here. My wife and children are on the mainland. I have not seen them for years. Indeed I am unhappyal, so unhappy!" and his voice quivered as he clenched his hands in all the despair and abandonment of woe. With some reluctance, I own, and with a glance to ascertain that there were no abrasions on my own skin, I shook hands with this leper on bidding him adieu, partly to see if this sign of friendliness would have any effect on him. He appeared much surprised and softened. I am told-and perhaps the statement is true that these lepers are habitually ungrateful and uninteresting. Be it so.

"Alas! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning."

I

I admit that there are two resident clergymen. I repeat, the doctors cannot enforce a scale of expenditure sufficient to meet requirements. For instance, the lepers seem prone to excessive filthiness. Is this checked by ample facilities for ablution? Not a bit of it: the patients must needs mop their

diseased

IN the autumn of 1884, in the luxurious and artistically furnished salon of a princely Russian family resident at Paris, might have been seen the following picture. Well-screened from draughts and sudden intruders stood two sofas. On one, amid soft, graceful, plush and lace draperies of varying intensities of white, reclined a young woman of twenty-four. A wealth of hair, fair with a golden glow, framed her face, and brought into prominence her sombre eyes (brulés de pensée), full of intellectual life -a life destined to be cut off in one short fortnight by the galloping consumption which had made her its prey. On the other, at full length, lay a man of thirtysix, of almost youthful appearance, but pale with the ashy paleness of the terrible malignant disease whose tortures even his force of will could not always conceal.

The girl, for she still looked more girl than woman, was a young painter standing on the very threshold of the temple of fame-in fact the Marie Bashkirtseff whose picture had a deserved and real success at the Salon that very spring: the young Russian millionaire, who was the friend of the most eminent artists of the day, and who was known in the most exclusive salons of Paris equally for her beauty, artistic dress, ready wit, wide reading, and musicianly gifts. The man was Jules Bastien Lepage. the artist who, fighting his way upwards from the position of lettersorter, had won himself a place in the first rank of French art, thougn his career was but comnienced. Community of interests,

a like intensity of mental life, of penetrating spiritual insight, had drawn these two together in their last days; and, with a glorious vista of possibilities opening before them, they lay talking of art and philosophy, of the reality of things, of the poetry of life; talking and-dying.

"Fini, le tableau de cette année!" such were the words which Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in her diary just a fortnight before her death, despairing of finding strength to finish, for that year, the picture of the "Holy Women at the Tomb of Christ," which, she hoped, was to gain her the medal at the ensuing Salon. Little did she think as she wrote them that the living wordpicture we have quoted above

was

destined far to surpass in pathos any wide-eyed Magdalen, any rock-tomb or Virgin Mother she could paint,-that her diary rather than her pictures would make her European fame.

To introduce one's heroine on her deathbed is, however, a somewhat violent inversion of the natural and conventional order of things. Let us beg pardon, and begin, in a good straightforward fashion, at the very beginning.

Marie Bashkirtseff, then, was the only daughter of a noble Russian house. Soon after her birth, in 1860, quarrels between the Bashkirtseff and Babanine families (her mother was a Babanine) drove her parents apart. Marie was transferred with her mother and her little brother Paul, to the care of her maternal aunt and grandmother, and, baby as she was, seems to have quickly made everybody her willing servant.

we

-

no

We catch a glimpse of her, in those early years, playing the piano to her listening graudinother in a great white-and-gold salon; see the three-year-old baby playing with dolls dressed as kings and queens; we see her, at five years of age, decked in lace and flowers, representing Pepita, and dancing before the assembled household. At ten, she was already weaving day- dreams of future glory and renown pleasant girl-dreams of house and children, but rather the ambition to make a name, to live after death. This is her striking characteristic, her devouring thought almost from babyhood. And everything conspired to nourish this growing egoism. The adoring care of the whole family increased her pride and self-consciousness, while it failed to develop her affections. Religion in that household was mere superstition; the moral atmosphere was impregnated with romanticism. One of her governesses ran off after some affaire de cœur. "She might have said good-bye, and left us quite naturally," says Marie; "but the Slav character ingrafted with French civilisation and romantic literature is an odd concern (ne drôle de machine)." As femme malheureuse this lady immediately adored the little girl who had been confided to her.

"As for me, I returned her adoration from a spirit of pose, already! And my family, credulous and affected (poseuse), thought that her departure would have made me ill; they looked at me compassionately that day, and I think that grandmamma even had a special soup made -a soup adapted to invalids. I felt myself grow quite pale at such a display of feeling. I was a slight weakly child, and not pretty. But that did not hinder everybody from

considering me a being who was absolutely sure to beconie, one day, everything that is most beautiful, brilliant, and magnificent. Maminia

went to a Jew, who told fortunes: You have two children,' he said to her: the boy will be like every one else; the girl will be a star.'

The extract is worth quoting for the admirable illustration it affords of Marie's later style, as well as for the revelation of clean-edged, almost brutal, analysis, combined with continuous, unconquerable striving after theatrical effect. She posed continually-it was her nature to pose; but she was also fundamentally truthful and cleareyed, impatient of superficialities, striving in later years with painful passion to fathom herself; slow in learning that to fathom herself she

must fathom the Infinite. What a picture, too, of her early milieu do these few lines contain! The household (including herself) impregnated with French novels romantic and naturalistic; the child of less than ten considered as a prodigy by her family and by strangers, self-conscious, selfcentred, with no overshadowing intelligence to guide her and develop her on normal lines; finally, the superstition which penetrated her relations and clung even to Marie herself during the whole of her life.

At the age of ten a great exodus took place. Marie, her grandfather, aunt, mother, cousin, brother, doctor, servants, dogs, and endless baggage, left Russia to travel through Europe. By way of Vienna, Baden, Geneva, the caravan found its way to Nice, where, in the beginning of 1873, the family was installed in a villa whose large garden gave on to the Marie Promenade des Anglais. was now twelve, and had begun