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England mother is always an irreparable loss to her children, but in the case of Eugene and Roswell Field she was almost replaced by another New England woman, a niece of their father, Miss Mary French, of Amherst, Mass. She took these motherless boys to her heart and home, in a New England village, where, in a pure and healthy almospherc, in a community of sound principles and good habits, in a household of love and virtue, they passed the years until they entered upon the plane of practical life when their education was completed. Eugene Field married a wife, and under the kindly nurture of her love his heart blossomed into song and he became the poet of Western childhood and Western life.

The author of " Casey's tabble dote " will be remembered with the author of the "Jumping frog of Calaveras," and as long as the memory of Lincoln and Gettysburg survives, there will be children who will re peat stanzas from " Love songs of child hood," and " With trumpet and drum." And when, in the coming years, good, sweet, pure-souled women repeat, and ask who wrote : — "A dying mother gave to you Her child, a many years ago. How in your gracious touch he grew, You know, dear patient heart, you know."

there will be no New England woman who will not be able to answer, "They were writ ten by Eugene Field!"

THE CASE OF SHYLOCK. By GEORGE H. WESTLEY. IT appears that I have been getting our good friend Shakespeare into trouble. In one of my articles I had occasion to mention " the very clever manner in which Portia saved Antonio his pound of flesh." Taking this as a sort of text for his remarks, Your Disgusted Layman delivers himself emphatically of the opinion that Shake speare was not even " the little end of noth ing of a lawyer." And this is the way he sustains his point. "Just think," he says, "of a lawyer coming any such shallow wrig gle as Portia's to get a man off! If that dodge was tried before Judge, he would say, ' Oh, Rats! Send a member of the Bar here to try this case,' and would hunt out 'Public Policy' or some such club to knock out Shylock with." It seems to me that if your Disgusted Layman had looked a little more closely into the matter about which he writes, and applied a little more logic to his considera

tion of it, he would at least have avoided that unpleasant and undesirable condition of mind expressed in his signature. I think it will be admitted at the outset that in considering the legal aspects of the Shylock case, the question which should be asked is not what Judge This or Judge That would decide in the matter; not how mod ern laws and lawyers would deal with it; but whether or not it was possible for such a judgment as Portia's to have been given under the ancient laws of Venice. Now it is a well known fact that Shake speare did not invent the plot of "The Mer chant of Venice," but adapted it from one or two old stories. Warton tells us that the main part of the play was founded upon the ballad of " Gernutus the Jew." Capell ascribes it to a tale written by Fiorentino. Whichever is right, we find in both ballad and tale, as in the play, the litigants, the bond, the pound of flesh, and the " shallow