agrees to attempt the task; and takes for her subject a tale she has heard related the previous evening, at a neighbouring farm-house. She calls it _François le Champi_, but her critic cavils at the very title. _Champi_, he says, is not French. George Sand quotes Montaigne, to prove the contrary, although the dictionary declares the word out of date. A _champi_ is a foundling, or child abandoned in the fields, the derivation being from _champ_. And having thus justified her hero's cognomen, she at once introduces him, at the tender age of six years, boarded by the parish with Zabella, an old woman who dwells in a hovel, and lives on the produce of a few goats and fowls that find subsistence on the common. Madeleine Blanchet, the pretty and very young wife of the miller of Cornouer, takes compassion on the poor infant, and finds means to supply him, unknown to her brutal husband and cross mother-in-law, with food and raiment. The child grows into a comely lad, gentle, intelligent, and right-hearted, and devotedly attached to Madeleine. He enters the service of the miller, a rough dissipated fellow, given up to the fascinations of a loose widow, Madame Sévère, a sort of rural Delilah, who tries to seduce the handsome Champi, and, failing of success, instils jealousy into the ear of the miller, who drives François from his house. The young man finds occupation in a distant village, and returns to the mill of Cornouer only when its master is dead and Madeleine on a bed of sickness, to rescue his benefactress from grasping creditors, by means of a sum of money his unknown father has transmitted to him. George Sand makes every woman in the book fall in love with the Champi; but he repulses all, save one, and that one never dreams of loving him otherwise than as a mother. At last one of the fair ones who would fain have gained his heart, generously reveals to him, what he himself has difficulty in believing, that he is in love with Madeleine Blanchet; and, further, compassionating his timidity, undertakes to break the ice to the pretty widow. It requires a talent like that of George Sand to give an air of probability to all this. There are at most but a dozen years' difference between Madeleine and the Champi, but the reader has been so much accustomed to look upon them in the light of mother and son, that he is somewhat startled on finding the boy of nineteen enamoured of the woman of thirty. The love-passages, however, are managed with Madame Sand's usual skill. As a picture of peasant life, the book yields internal evidence of fidelity. The granddaughter of the farmer-general of Berri has called up the memories of her youthful days, passed in happy liberty upon the sunny banks of Indre, and of the years of connubial discontent that went heavily by in her husband's Aquitanian castle, when country rides and the study of Nature's book were her chief resources. It was from this castle of Nohant that the Baroness Dudevant fled, now nearly twenty