* * * * * As they crossed Beacon Street a beggar boy stepped up to them, and in piping tones of want asked the lady for alms. She glanced for a moment into his face with a blank look of negation on her own, and with a sort of comprehensive intake of his dirt and rags she gathered her skirts about her and passed through the turnpike and down the steps to the Common. But her companion lingered behind, and presently joined her, half dragging the boy by his tattered sleeve. “Come here, Miss Lorillard, and look at the boy. I want to know if this isn’t beauty?” She turned and looked into the boy’s face, as her companion held it up to the light between his two hands. The extraordinary and perfect beauty of his features seized upon her in a sort of wonderment. Where had she ever seen such a face before?--And her memory swept through the galleries of Europe. In none of them. How was it she had not noticed it at first? The dirt? It was incomparable--it seemed superhuman in its sweetness and beauty, its appeal, and its glow of divinity. God’s hand was plainly set in that face. “This is the boy,” said the young man, laconically, watching her expression. “Come along.” And linking his arm in that of the ragged youngster, the trio sauntered along with the fashionable throng coming out of the matinees. [Illustration] “Get out of my way, you ugly little sweep,” said one woman, elbowing the boy off the pavement; and the men pushed him hither and thither. The fashionable women looked right through the ragged urchin and his evidently dubious companions, as if they were glass, and their gaze seemed to bite like frost. Not one woman remarked the surpassing loveliness of the boy’s perfect face. At the corner of the Common the young man sent the boy about his business. “Who is he, and what does all this mean?” “That is Adonis--the one-time victor of Venus. He fell upon evil days when clothes made the king, and rags the knave.” WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE. LIFE. I sometimes think life is but a see-saw board, with hope at one end and despair at the other. First hope goes up, and despair goes down, and then it reverses. There seems to be no break in the steady rise and fall. We live on, clinging to the belief that hope will outbalance despair, but it does not, and men come and men go, and life still teeters away. JOSEPH ANDREWS CONE. A SONNET FOR POETS.