In this connection, and as a commentary on “The Attack on the Windmill,” we may commend the three short papers appended to this story to the earnest attention of readers. Nothing on the subject has been written more picturesque, nor, in its simple way, more poignant, than the chain of reminiscences called “Three Wars.” Whether Louis and Julien existed under those forms, or whether the episodes which they illustrate are fictitious, matters little or nothing. The brothers are natural enough, delightful enough, to belong to the world of fiction, and if their story is, in the historical sense, true, it is one of those rare instances in which fact is better than fancy. The crisis under which the timid Julien, having learned the death of his spirited martial brother, is not broken down, but merely frozen into a cold soldierly passion, and spends the remainder of the campaign--he, the poet, the nestler by the fireside, the timid club-man--in watching behind hedges for Prussians to shoot or stab, is one of the most extraordinary and most interesting that a novelist has ever tried to describe. And the light that it throws on war as a disturber of the moral nature, as a dynamitic force exploding in the midst of an elaborately co-related society, is unsurpassed, even by the studies which Count Lyof Tolstoi has made in a similar direction. It is unsurpassed, because it is essentially without prejudice. It admits the discomfort, the horrible vexation and shame of war, and it tears aside the conventional purple and tinsel of it; but at the same time it admits, not without a sigh, that even this clumsy artifice may be the only one available for the cleansing of the people. IV. In 1883, M. Zola published a third volume of short stories, under the title of the opening one, _Le Capitaine Burle_. This collection contains the delicate series of brief semi-autobiographical essays called “Aux Champs,” little studies of past impression, touched with a charm which is almost kindred to that of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s memories. With this exception, the volume consists of four short stories, and of a set of little death-bed anecdotes, called “Comment on Meurt.” This latter is hardly in the writer’s best style, and suffers by suggesting the immeasurably finer and deeper studies of the same kind which the genius of Tolstoi has elaborated. Of these little sketches of death, one alone, that of Madame Rousseau, the stationer’s wife, is quite of the best class. This is an excellent episode from the sort of Parisian life which M. Zola seems to understand best, the lower middle class, the small and active shopkeeper, who just contrives to be respectable and no more. The others seem to be invented rather than observed.