The mayor took them, and longing only to see the outside of the door, pretended to look through them, his little heart going pit-a-pat within him. "They seem to be in order," he assented, feebly. "I need not trouble you further, citizens. I came here under a misapprehension, I find, and I wish you a good journey." He knew, as he backed out, that he was cutting a poor figure. He would fain have made a more dignified retreat. But before these men, fugitives and outlaws as they were, he felt, though he was Mayor of Carbaix, almost as small a man as did Michel Tellier. These were the men of the Revolution. They had bearded nobles and pulled down kings. There was Barbaroux, who had grappled with Marat; and Petion, the Mayor of the Bastille. The little Mayor of Carbaix knew greatness when he saw it. He turned tail, and hurried back to his fireside, his body-guard not a whit behind him. Five minutes later the men he feared and envied came out also, and went their way, passing in single file into the darkness which brooded over the great monolith; beginning, brave hearts, another of the few stages which still lay between them and the guillotine. Then in the cottage there remained only Michel and Jeanne. She sat by the dying embers, silent, and lost in thought. He leaned against the wall, his eyes roving ceaselessly, but always when his gaze met hers it fell. Barbaroux had conquered him. It was not until Jeanne had risen to close the door, and he was alone, that he wrung his hands, and muttered: "Five crowns! Five crowns gone and wasted!" "HUMAN DOCUMENTS." Facing this pastel, in an opposite corner of the room, another little thing full of sadness catches my eye, despite the deepening twilight. It is a yellow-stained photograph hung on the wall in a simple, wooden frame. It is the young Prince Imperial, who was killed in Africa a dozen years ago, but is shown here as a mere child in knee breeches. An odd, but touching, fancy it was of the Empress Eugenie to place this souvenir of her son, the last of the Napoleons, in the very room where that other one was born, the giant who shook the earth.... How strange and startling it will be a century or two hence for our descendants to turn over the photographs of their ancestors!... The portraits left by our forefathers, expressive though they may be, whether painted or engraved, can never produce in us an impression equally vivid; but photographs are the very reflections of living beings, fixing their precise attitudes, their gestures, their most fleeting expressions. What a curious thing it will be, what an awe-inspiring thing for future generations to study our faces when we shall have fallen into the dead past!...--A fragment from Loti's "Book of Pity and of Death." BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.