A few months ago England, more especially the part thereof contiguous to royal Windsor, was thrown into consternation by the report that a box had been discovered, sunk just below water-mark in the Thames, attached by a string to a tree, and containing a number of keys, which were believed to belong to doors leading to the royal jewel-coffers. The nine days' wonder which this intelligence, naturally enough, produced, has since had a curious explanation. They were not keys of the royal apartments at all, but Eton keys, the fruits of the kleptic propensities of an unfortunate Eton boy, who--like a very distinguished and noble member of Mr. Disraeli's cabinet, who is said even now not to be able to resist the temptation offered at cabinet councils by "Dizzy's" green kid gloves--had already paid the penalty for similar offences by being sent away. A most extraordinary instance of this propensity occurred a few years ago at a very wealthy nobleman's house in the north of England. During a visit there a lady's diamonds disappeared. There was great and general consternation, and the detective police were summoned from London. The jewels were subsequently discovered in a closet attached to the noble host's dressing-room. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. Round my House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Boston: Roberts Brothers. The time has at last come when Englishmen and Americans seem disposed to study the character of the French people with some care and to judge it with impartiality. The overthrow of its military power did less to lower the nation in the eyes of foreigners than its subsequent course has done to raise it; and now that it is fairly entering on a new career in a mood and under auspices that cannot but awaken the strongest hopes, we have probably seen the last of the typical Frenchman of the Anglo-Saxon imagination--a being capable of the most frantic actions and incapable of a serious thought, a compound of frivolity and ferocity, the fit subject and facile instrument of a despotism that knew how to gratify his vanity while restraining his mad ebullitions. Among the excuses that might be offered for such misconceptions is the dearth of information in the literature of France itself in regard to the life and habits of the general mass of the population. In these days it is to novels that we chiefly go for pictures of character and manners, and French novels are almost exclusively devoted to pictures of Parisian manners. Balzac, it is true, has given us delineations of provincial life; but the delineations of Balzac are often more enigmatical than the problems of real life, and even if we could always accept the portraitures they give us as undistorted, they generally presuppose a knowledge on the part of the reader on those points on which the foreigner is most apt to be ignorant. In any case, we shall be best instructed by a writer