wild flowers as sweet as those that made Persephone forsake the plain of Enna; maidens as fair as the five beautiful virgins after whom Zeuxis painted his _Helen_; grasshoppers as loudly chirping as the "cricket" that saved the prize to Eunomus; and, high in the transparent air, the stars at which Pythagoras gazed straining his ears to catch their eternal harmonies. [Footnote 1: In classical Greek, [Greek: machaira].] FOLK SONGS OF PROVENCE. On a day in the late autumn it happened to me to be standing at a window looking down into an untidy back street at Avignon. It was a way of getting through the hours between a busy morning and a busy evening--hours which did not seem inclined to go. If ever man be tempted to upbraid the slowness of the flight of time, it is surely in the vacant intervals of travel. The prospect at the window could hardly be called enlivening; by-and-by, however, the dulness of the outlook was lessened a little. The sounds of a powerful and not unmusical voice came along the street; people hastened to their doors, and in a minute or so a young lame man made his appearance. He was singing Provencal songs. Here was the last of the troubadours! If it needed some imagination to see in this humble minstrel the representative of the courtly adepts in the gay science, still his relationship to them was not purely fanciful. The itinerant singer used to be the troubadour of the poor. No doubt his more illustrious brother grudged him the name. "I am astonished," said Giraud Riquier to Alfonso of Aragon, "that folks confound the troubadours with those ignorant and uncouth persons who, as soon as they can play some screeching instrument, go through the streets asking alms and singing before a vile rabble;" and Alfonso answered that in future the noble appellation of "joglaria" should be granted no longer to mountebanks who went about with dancing dogs, goats, monkeys, or puppets, imitating the song of birds, or for a meagre pittance singing before people of base extraction, but that they should be called "bufos," as in Lombardy. Giraud Riquier was not benevolently inclined when he embodied in verse his protest and the King's endorsement of it; yet his words now lend an ancient dignity to the class they were meant to bring into contempt. The lame young man at Avignon had no dancing dogs, nor did he mimic the song of birds--an art still practised with wonderful skill in Italy.[1] He helped out his entertainment by another device, one suitable to an age which reads; he sold printed songs, and he presented "letters." If you bought two sous' worth of songs you were entitled to a "letter." It has to be explained that "letters" form a kind of fortune-telling, very popular in Provence. A number of small scraps of paper are attached to a ring; you pull off one at hazard, and on it you find a full account of the fate reserved to you. Nothing more simple. As to the songs, loose sheets containing