SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF GEORGE SAND.—The recent unveiling of George Sand's statue at La Châtre has set people thinking about her afresh. At no time since “Indiana” and “Lelia” first revealed the existence of a new writer of transcendent power, has her place in French literature, and her influence on the social problems of the time, and the question whether her artistic creations will or will not live, been canvassed with more energy than during the past few weeks. Some personal recollections of George Sand given by Mrs. Ellis, the authoress of “Sylvestra,” may therefore be of interest: “Above twenty years ago,” writes Mrs. Ellis, “I spent three days in a French hotel (at Tours) with George Sand, without knowing who she was. She puzzled me all the time, and had in person something of the same effect on me that her character—attractive and repulsive—has still. She sat opposite me at a narrow _table d'hôte_—a tall, large, strongly-built woman, with features in proportion to her size. Her eyes were fine, but her force of appearance was rather physical than intellectual. It must have been the brain beneath the strong features which teased me as it did, to make out to myself who she could be. She was mature, but in no decline of force, massive, grave, and restful, with nothing Gallic about her. The dark hair, eyes, and tint might have belonged to Italy or Spain, quite as well as to France, and the bearing, better. Her dress might have been called 'dowdy.' It was of the type of the travelling Englishwoman, as French eyes see it, rather than French. I think her 'robe' was brown, which did not become her at all. Crimson would have suited her. She wore an ugly, large-brimmed, straw hat, with broad lace falling over the brim, at a time when Frenchwomen had hardly begun to wear hats, and—if my memory does not err—she wore it at dinner. Her companion was an elderly and feeble man, seemingly more than seventy. There was nothing in the appearance of the couple (viewing them as married folk) unlike that of many other French pairs, when, as is so often the case, the man 'ranges' himself at forty by the side of a young lady of half his years. My perplexing neighbor understood what I said to my husband in English, and offered me some little courteous attentions. There was no real speech between us. If I had known it was George Sand, I believe that I should not have spoken more, as I had not long before read some unpleasing remarks in her autobiography on the way in which she was annoyed by '_les Anglaises_,' and on the '_étranges sifflements_' which they introduced into the fine French tongue! She and I were the only two women in the hotel who ever went into a sort of reading-room adjoining the house to look at the newspapers. I had nearly settled with myself that she was a lady country squire, such as I used to see drive into Tours on market days, when one morning, on going, as I used to do, to the Imperial