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what obstacles time and usage have made in old
countries, where what we call “ wrongs” and “ abuses ”
are remnants of past days, but now hardened into
barriers which only revolutions can make a breach in,

Something of this I said as I turned over the un-
interesting pages of the “ History” given me to
examine them upon.

As I expected, its very incomplete teachings had
left only unfair, vague ideas.

The young girl who had spoken of the past as not
necessary to us, was so bright and clever that she was
worth making explanation to. I asked her why she
considered queens (as such) cruel, and she gave
fluently Catherine of Medici, and the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, and “ Bloody” Mary (poor, unhappy
Mary!) and Catherine of Russia, and — Marie Antoi-
nette — quite as though they did not differ.

I saw at once how I could interest her and make
her feel there were two sides to this, as to all things.
Of course she knew, and believed —for was it not
printed in a school-book ?—that stupid story which
has survived a century, and which is given as justify-
ing the wrath of the pullering poor of Paris, You all
know it.

The Queen asks the cause of some tumult.

“Your Majesty, the people are ungovernable be-
cause they cannot get bread.”

“What !
then ?”

On this I told them of Marie Antoinette in her
own home, as Wraxall’s and Mozart’s memoirs and
other such dispassionate early sources shew her; a
wholesome, frolicksome young girl, submissive even to
childishness to an unusually firm-natured mother who
trained her and her sisters in womanly and simple
habits; for royal Austrian life always, to-day as in
the day of Maria Theresa, is extraordinarily domestic
and sensible.

At fifteen this young girl was married, or rather
given in exchange to France. She was merely the
seal on a contract, and no more care taken of her
feelings then nor for seven years after she reached
Paris, than if she had been just the wax of a State
seal. It is all painted in that scene on the island in
that river of which one bank was German and one
French, and where she was met by her new attend-
ants, who parted her — forever — from every person
and even everything that had belonged with her Ger-
man life, Not even a garment was left upon her that
had come from her home.

No bread? Why do they not eat pastry,

MY ARIZONA CLASS.

But disrobed thoroughly, she was dressed anew in
garments of entirely French make, and taken by
strangers into a country strange and unfriendly to.
her. ’

We who look back can see close to this the last
scene in that life.

Once more the French have taken from her every-
thing that was hers; friends, husband, children ; even
her clothing. And we see the beautiful woman, “the
daughter of the Czsars,” borrowing a black gown of
woollen, from the jailer’s wife, and making a bit of
muslin into the widow’s cap with which to cover her
hair — still thick and young, but gray from agony; ~
the Queen of France, the daughter of the Empress of
Austria, sewing and making ready through the night
to go decently covered in the morning to have her
head cut off. The hands Mozart had guided on the
piano, in her happy girl-home, were tied behind her
back, and no way left her to steady herself as she was
jolted in a springless cart over the cobble stones of
old Paris to the guillotine.

Even her enemiés admit that she met her impris-
onment, as well as her death, with quiet dignity and
piety. .

Of this nothing was told. Nothing was said to
shew that long before her birth the cruel misrule of
France was creating the revolution which made her
one of its victims. But that foolish story was there in
full, when a little knowledge exposes its foolishness.

féte is not pastry, but.dough, In Europe, where
bread is so precious that governments regulate the
baker’s business, it is a serious matter to bake bread.
In French and German countries, perhaps in others,
but there I have seen it, the floor of the bake-oven is
lined with a layer of dough, made from inferior flour,
a carpet-dough, to moderate the heat and give to the
loaves a golden, thick and brittle crust. This makes
a coarse, unleavened flour-cake which is always given
away to the very poor, and which has its established
name, “la pate du pauvre.”

The Queen in her German home training must
have know this; her question — if she ever asked it —
would shew knowledge of the care of the poor as well
as knowledge of how bread was baked:

“Ts there zothing for the poor; not even the dough
that lines the oven? (pas méme la pate?)”

Florence Nightingale says that a disappointment in
love does not qualify a girl to become a hospital nurse..
Nor does the marriage ceremony qualify even the
happiest girl to become a good housewife.