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. 20, 1862.] A tolerably good table it was indispensable to maintain, on account of Jan, and that choice eater, Master Cheese: but how they had to pinch in the matter of dress, they alone knew. Sibylla also knew, and she read arightly the drooping of their faces.

“Never mind, Deborah; cheer up, Amilly. It is only for a time. Ere very long I shall be leaving you again.”

“Surely not for Australia!” returned Deborah, the hint startling her.

“Australia? Well, I am not sure that it will be quite so far,” answered Sibylla, in a little spirit of mischief. And, in the bright prospect of the future, she forgot past and present grievances, turned her laughing blue eyes upon her sisters, and, to their great scandal, began to waltz round and round the room.

turning over the pages of some illuminated missals in the Paris Bibliothêque Impériale, on the margins may be observed what are technically called by French artists babouinées. In the manuscripts referred to, these margins are, like the text, illuminated and covered with rich arabesques, through and about which apes and monkeys run, jump, drag struggling geese by the necks, rattle tambourines, fling chestnuts at each other and huge acorns at lazy-looking swine, or plunge, kick, and cut a thousand capers with apparently as much zest as children just let loose from school play leap-frog or twirl themselves round a swinging-pole. These curious and very antique developments of art may be regarded as an inadvertent record of a striking feature of mediæval life, which few chroniclers thought worthy their attention. The childhood of Christendom had, by virtue of its own irresistible tendencies and the high authority of the Church, its “Fêtes Babouinées.” During the middle ages the populace were permitted by the ecclesiastical powers to ape in the most apish manner the mysteries of religion, or, after long periods of sustained devotion, to run into all the excesses produced by ignorance and a violent but natural re-action. The old streets of the coronation town of Rheims, could they be called on to bear out this assertion, would tell that two centuries before the battle of Herrings, and as many after, they saw every Easter Monday parading through them a file of canons, each dragging after him, by a hay-rope fastened to its tail, a salt-fish, such as they all dined on during Lent. Drummers accompanied this procession, as well as choristers and the most wealthy of the burghers, all of whom sacrificed to Bacchus and the god of gluttony in the town-hall an hour before noon. At Metz the clergy, on St. George’s Day, sallied forth en masse from the convents or confraternity houses, pulling after them a huge dragon, into the mouth of which all the pastrycooks desirous of doing a good deed stuffed their best cakes and sweetmeats made of honey; for this happened before beet-root sugar was invented, or Columbus had discovered the West Indies. All their dainties passed into a capacious sack beneath the monster’s throat, and at twelve o’clock the fathers despatched them in their refectory, served as a dessert.

At Evreux there was on Rogation Sunday the “Fête des Cornards.” On that occasion the priests turned their surplices inside out, and then both they and the townspeople took to squirting water at each other from various utensils made expressly for the occasion. Leap-frog and divers other sports of a similar nature succeeded, as well as fencing with the feet, an accomplishment in which the French excel every other nation as much as they do in making ragouts, millinery, false jewellery, and artificial flowers.

The traditions of the ancient bourgs as well as the illuminated missals are all unanimous in saying that no festival was more delightful, because of its buffooneries, than Christmas. The most austere churchmen of the middle ages to be found between the English Channel and the Pyrennean mountains were in the habit of saying,—“Sous la minorité du Dauphin du Ciel on pouvait tout permettre.” In those days of strong nerves and coarse tastes and habits, “permitting everything” implied a state of things that would greatly shock the more delicately organised nerves of the present generation. The “Christmas of the Olden Time,” no matter how much poets may rave about it, or painters strive to idealise it, could not be now revived without finding itself an unwelcome visitor, even though it should make its appearance but once in the twelvemonths.

In the French towns we are pretty certain, from authentic sources, that half the women who chattered round the cradle exhibited in the churches were in a state of furious excitement when they did so. Monsieur Lahure, in his “Antiquities of Picardy,” declares that on one Christmas Day the Amiens women tore each other’s caps, and exchanged words that modern fishwomen might blush to hear, being severally desirous for a baby of their own to be placed in the cradle and adored by the angels, shepherds, and wise men. At Beaugency, about the Christmas of 1603, the village maidens did not display greater amiability when, after quarrelling with each other, they united to revile some of their compeers whom the abbé had selected to personify the angels of the Nativity. At Rouen, in the year 1568, a riot broke out because one of the magi seized an angel by the throat, for the purpose of giving her a kiss, and when doing so crumpled a starched and elaborately-worked ruff which she wore, called a gorgette. This drew down not only the beauty’s wrath, but also the anger of fully half-a-dozen lovers, which made the “Road to Bethlehem” the scene of a faction-fight.

But of all the festivals of the Middle Ages, the Festival of Madmen was the most curious. In England and Scotland it was called the “Feast of Misrule and Unreason;” in France, where it was most celebrated, as “La Fête des Fous.” Antiquarians have failed to trace its origin. They say, however, that it was widely observed so early as the ninth century, and that, at its annual return, Charlemagne allowed his priests and courtiers to give themselves up to every folly that entered their heads. It was, in all probability a