not true that I left off loving you reach to thy heart half-way. Max-does I — " she love thee, even a little? will she be good to thee?"

"Max!"

"She would have been my wife, Elsa, if—if I had been able to give her glory. That is over now. I have given up glory for truth's sake, and She did not ask him how, but her eyes brightened.

"For truth's sake? Oh, then, never fear! If she would have been thy wife for glory's sake, now she will be thy wife ten times more.”

"No I know you can't believe a word I say I don't ask you. I don't believe myself - I don't know if I have been mad or a blackguard. Something has been driving me on-not that that's any excuse: I have been under a spell-I am under one now. I only know that you are the best girl in the whole world: that even if I were bound heart and soul to another, I should put you first—always. Though I have done all I could think of to break your heart, I would cut myself in pieces, if that would make you happy. Be happy, Elsa-forget the miserable Max of to-day one who loves thee? for the sake of the Max whom you thought | Maxyou knew long ago. No-never forgive I me, Elsa-but forget me as you would try to forget one whom you despise."

"I forgive you, Max. I always said, even in my happy time, how could I ever be very much to you? I was always fearing that the end would come, and it did come. Such ends always do."

"God bless you, Elsa! Only tell me you are not unhappy, and then

He had followed her to the door of Herr Elias. She entered, and he still followed, so as not to lose her last word. Herr Elias did not seem to be at home, and they were alone.

"Good-bye, Max," she said, "and God bless you always! Stay I hear there is one whom you really love, and who is worthy to be the wife of a great man. Oh, Max, be sure you love her! If she is a fine lady, as they say, she will not be so strong to bear things as me."

"Thou sayest this, Elsa? Thou art content to see me "The husband of

more than

one thou lovest? Of

More than content, oh Max! if only

"Elsa, Elsa! thou lovest me still-and I love thee: listen to me, for heaven's sake, Elsa! I have been mad, base, if you please - witchcraft or no witchcraft, I have been under a wild, drunken, delirious spell. I dare not tell thee what I was about to do! My hand was about to rob death of its laurels ask me not yet to speak of the sin I had in thought already done - when my ear caught the sound of the cathedral-bell as it chimed a quarter to ten."

"Ah! the very moment that I let the mirror fall!"

"I counted every stroke, as if I were concerned with the slightest sight or sound, when suddenly-how can I tell what happened?—I started as one starts from sleep, and asked myself Who art thou?' And I answered-'While Elsa lives, I am Max Brendel: Elsa's Max, while I have a soul to be saved: and I am about to commit a sin that will divide my soul from hers.""

"And then?"

"How canst thou ask, Elsa? The sin remained undone."

She grew pale, but held out her hand.

"One whom I really love?" he asked dreamily, passing his hand over his brow. "One whom I really love? In heaven's name, Elsa, am I awake or sleeping? One who has sent me mad, I believe. If I believed in witchcraft, like Meyer, I should say one who has bewitched me with grey eyes and golden hair. I must believe in "Then, if the thought of Elsa saved witchcraft, Elsa: I was all yours all thee from sin-oh, Max, I must say it thine, till I called upon Satan himself to let the thought of something far better aid me to gain thee-and she came." than Elsa save thee once more. I can "There are no witches, Max- the Herr live without my true Max; but I cannot Pastor says that, so it must be true. Has live unless he is true. If thou art pledged she done you harm?" to one who loves thee, thou art all hers; and to me, thou art not my true Max unless thou art true to her."

"None-none. She is a good woman, Elsa: a great mind and a noble soul. But yet, from the moment I saw her, I was changed."

"You loved her, Max - it was love that made the change. It was her love, not mine, that made thee rich and great, and taught thee how I was not tall enough to

"Elsa! but if I loved-if I love her no more?"

"Thou must learn to love her. If she has given thee all things, even herself, if thou art pledged to her, she only can release thee."

"I did not release thee. I wear thy old and commonest gratitude bound him to ring still. But I release thee now."

"Passed away? Where? How passed | struggles,- one with external opponents, away?"

"Dead, Herr Professor."

XX.

THE heart of Max Brendel, though it had ceased to beat for the woman who represented to him the empress-fancy of his soul, did not, in one single moment, throw off its burden. It was with the sorrow we all feel for those whom we shall never behold again that he looked upon the corpse of the Glass Queen. She had gone away forever into the unknown land whence she had come: she had died out his one dream of genius was dead, which had led him into many joys and many sins, and there remained to him henceforth only the homely love of the mortal woman for the mortal

of the artist's life

man.

"And so ended," said Max Brendel when he first told Elsa the whole story, without gloss or reserve "and so ended

the dream of a charlatan."

She believed every word-lookingglass and all. Had she not broken it with her own hands at the very hour when Max repented and the baroness died?

and one in the cabinet of his king. It is well known that the prince had the utmost difficulty in persuading his master into the war of 1866, into the dethronement of so many "legitimate" princes, into giving up Bohemia - which the king considered had twice been conquered by the Hohenzollerns and into the acceptance of the imperial crown. The king, on great occasions, has always yielded to the genius of his subject, but the struggle has often been severe, and Prince Bismarck, though always loyal, must have chafed fiercely from time to time under a restraint which, by keeping down his natural 3pc and tendency to impulse, and by forcing him to think out every plan, has probably been one element in his success. He has stated at least once that "the conceit of kings is limitless;" he has confessed openly in Parliament that he detests the arrangement of the Prussian ministry, under which every minister deals directly with the sovereign, and the premier has no constitutional supervision over all; he has declared his resolve not to work under a similar system in Germany, and now he appears confessing that he has even in the empire a battle to fight over many details of his administration. He was in 1872 and 1873 chancellor of the empire and head of the foreign office, yet he sent in "reports" to the king, he himself being at Varzin, which are really complaints that he could not remove an ambassador to Paris whom he utterly distrusted. Whether he had grounds for distrusting Count Arnim or not, whether his furious charges were libels, as Count Arnim's friends would say, or are statements necessary to the conduct of serious business, as the chancellor's friends would say, or are, as we should be inclined to think, just objections exaggerated, and so to speak, poisoned, by personal hatred and contempt, will never be known while the emperor lives, and is not our point to-day. What is certain is that the all-powerful chancellor distrusted and hated his most important agent, distrustTHE two memoranda or confidential re-ed him till he suspected him of grave supports to the king just published by Prince pressions of facts, hated him till he acBismarck in the Reichsanzeiger have al-cused him of a character for habitual unmost as much interest for the student of truthfulness, and still was obliged to keep history as for the politician. It has al-him on. He might, no doubt, have sent ways been believed that Prince Bismarck, in his resignation, but then the king like Richelieu, like Stein, like Marl- might have accepted it, and to a man borough, like Sir Robert Walpole, like, brimming with a consciousness of excepperhaps, most of the great statesmen of tional competence for great affairs, and modern Europe, had always to maintain bursting with plans for the future, that two equally difficult and simultaneous risk may well have seemed too great to be

"And art thou happy here in this quiet place, teaching and toiling? Dost thou never envy Adolf Meyer, in all his glory, and think how things might have been? Art thou quite happy, with only thy work and me?"

"Only with thee, Elsa? Only with all the universe!" said Max Brendel. "A short cut to glory, indeed! Thou mayst not believe in witchcraft, but that is the devil's road, all the same. I have more than all the glory I deserve. All comes at last to him who has courage, and hope, and truth, and

"Patience!" said left-handed Elsa.

From The Spectator. PRINCE BISMARCK AND HIS MASTER.

endured. Hohenzollerns are not consti- | and the instinct of the premier in office is tutional emperors, either in fact or by not to allow that man to show himself too law - the German constitution containing successful. If rumour may be trusted, no clause making ministers responsible the Bismarck-Arnim quarrel exists in Rusonly to Parliament - and the emperor sia between Prince Gortschakoff and might not always bear with resignations General Ignatieff, ambassador at Constanintended to limit his prerogative. At all tinople, and the policy of both is constantevents, without resignation there was no ly affected by the necessity each feels of removing Count Arnim, and the great not putting the other too much in the chancellor admits himself to have been as right. Ignatieff can neither coincide with annoyed, and limited, and overstrained by the chancellor nor disobey him - for the difficulties of the imperial closet, as either course would leave the chancellor ever Richelieu was by the still unexplained master of the field- and Gortschakoff character of Louis XIII., who, like the can neither support his ambassador nor Emperor William, had the faculty of rec- remove him, for either course might bring ognizing men. He has, as he murmurs, him to St. Petersburg as the emperor's "actually to compete " with Count Arnim adlatus. Germany is not an autocracy, for the confidence of his sovereign. That but the emperor, partly from his legal pothe prince is over-jealous, over-suspicious, sition, partly from the traditionary respect and does not quite understand the char-paid to him by all Prussians, and partly acter of his sovereign, who we take to be from his own force of character, which is a man quite incapable of making a mis- much greater than his intellectual insight take as to the comparative value of the into affairs, holds a position which rentwo men, though not disinclined to retain ders his favour all-important even to instruments whom the chancellor dreads, Prince Bismarck, and makes victory in is little to the purpose. The fact re- his closet at least as essential and exmains, that the German chancellor felt hausting as victory in Parliament is to a himself hampered, to the extent of threat- British premier. The full advantages of ening to resign, by a trouble which never personal government are not reaped exbecame patent to the public. cept in the rare cases in which the man with hereditary rights is also the man most competent to govern. In Germany they are not reaped at all, except in those extreme cases in which the sovereign, feeling the momentary superiority of his man of genius, effaces himself, and accepts for the time the role of his own premier's chief administrator. In ordinary times, the situation only produces collisions in which the man of genius, even if not beaten, finds his strength wasted; or, as Prince Bismarck in this case has done, voluntarily wastes it himself on what is no better than an intrigue. He has not the resource of the statesman in a free country of flinging himself openly on Parliament, and is compelled to seek his support indirectly by bills, such as the present one for the modification of the penal code. No doubt he is seeking it, and it is this, we imagine, which the National Liberals have seen, and which is the cause of the great effect produced on them by the publication of the reports. They think that Prince Bismarck is fighting, consciously or unconsciously, their battle, that he is maintaining the power of the removable premier against that of the irremovable sovereign, and are disposed to let him strengthen his own hands in his own way,- that is, to enable him to prosecute a diplomatist for a disobedience

The incident brings out in the strongest light one immense executive embarrassment, which exists in all those despotisms or "strong monarchies" which are supposed to work in all executive departments so smoothly. If the monarch is not himself his own prime minister, the premier under an "independent" monarch has to encounter a difficulty at least as great and absorbing as that of conciliating or convincing Parliament. He has to retain his ascendancy over a sovereign who may not have quite the same objects, who is necessarily his inferior in political genius, and who is bound by his position to keep his eye steadily fixed on men who may be fit on a vacancy for the premiership. When such a man appears, the monarch must protect him, or must leave himself virtually without alternative premiers, that is, must surrender his own independence to the "necessary" premier of the hour. This protection inspires jealousy, and suspicion once excited, the course of government is at once impeded by a palace-struggle scarcely to be distinguished from an intrigue. In Russia, where the czar is really absolute, and can dismiss a chancellor by a nod, the personal struggle is a grand difficulty of government, and frequently affects the policy of the State. The czar must have his alternative man,

on a large scale. No one then would ever have dreamed of proposing it. But, as we all know, Germany has just now tried the experiment on a great scale. She is buying gold, and selling off her silver. And in consequence silver is cheaper than it has ever been before.

which the emperor might overlook. They are purchasing a temporary victory at a terrible price that of destroying the independence and frankness of the German diplomatic service - but still their course becomes partially intelligible. What remains unexplained, and we suspect inexplicable, is the dread which a man so ex- Probably, if there were gold enough for ceptional as the prince, so full of con- all the world, it would be best that there fidence in himself, and so popular with should be only a single standard of value the people, evidently feels of a rival who, throughout the world, and that one - gold. whatever his powers, has no hold on the But this is impossible. Some have doubtcountry, and who palpably lacks the dis-ed whether there is gold enough even for cretion which is the necessary armour for such a war.

WHEN the great gold discoveries were made in Australia and California most people expected that there would be a more or less rapid fall in the value of gold as compared with silver. But, as a matter of fact, the effect has been the reverse. The value of silver as compared with gold was 59d. 3 far. per oz, or as I to 15.7 in 1849; it now is 54d. 3 far. or as 1 to 17.1. Not only what the best judges expected has not happened, but the very contrary of it has happened.

the nations which now intend to use it; and there certainly is not enough for all the world. Happily, the East has always been a country which had much silver, and for whose purposes silver was quite sufficient. The transactions of the East are small in comparison with those of the West, and therefore a bulky paying medium is not so inconvenient there as it would be here. Since economical history has been written silver has been always sent from Europe to China, India, and the richer parts of the East, and never more so than in our own time. The payments of England in silver to India during the cotton famine were probably the greatest cash payments ever made in so short a time by one country to another. There is, therefore, in the end a certain market for the silver displaced from Europe; it will ultimately go, as the rest has gone, to the East, where it is the ancient and the best-attainable paying medium.

And this has not been the result of any collateral cause; it is the direct consequence of the gold discoveries themselves. But for the moment there is a difficulty The effect of these discoveries has been in disposing of silver. There is no new suda great improvement in the currencies of den demand for it in the East. The case is the world, which, without them, would not not like that of the cotton famine. Then have been possible. The countries of we had incurred a large debt to India, and great commerce and large transactions we had to pay it in the only currency require a more valuable medium of ex- which she would take. We had to find change, bulk for bulk, than countries of an immense quantity of silver on a sudpetty trade and minor transactions. The den, and France-owing to the peculiar labour of paying 1,000,000l. in sovereigns is operation of her double standard-found only a tenth of that of paying it in rupees, it for us. But now there is no such debt; and therefore, where millions have to be the present problem is not to find the silpaid sovereigns are a ten times better cur-ver, but to find the use for the silver. rency than rupees. Gold is much the And this is a slower process. best currency for rich nations of large trade, though silver does well enough, and is in some respects most suitable, for poor nations of little trade. But thirty years ago it would not have been possible for the nations of great commerce to have adopted this best currency. There would not have been gold enough obtainable. The supply from the mines was then barely sufficient to maintain the existing gold currencies; it would have been entirely insufficient for establishing new currencies

Sooner or later, however, the ordinary laws that govern foreign exchanges will do it for us. The consequence of the low value of silver is that the rate of exchange is now Is. 9d. I far. per rupee (or less), the lowest or almost the lowest ever known. And this operates as a direct discouragement to ship goods to India. These goods are paid for in rupees, and when the merchant wants to bring home those rupees to England he finds that they do not go so far as they used to do. He has to pay much