"ART. 12. All debts, both public and private, which have been created before the expiration of the first thirty days that follow the promulgation of the present law, shall be payable in the same money in which they may have been contracted. The debts that are contracted after the thirty days from the promulgation of this law shall be payable in the new coins, as follows:

"The gold coins shall be a legal instrument for the payment of any sums whatever. It is established, nevertheless, that until the coins created by the present law are coined and ready for circulation, the public and private debts, including fiscal and municipal taxes, may be payable in current silver money, which shall be received at a rate of fiftyfive cents of the gold dollar for each Mexican silver dollar or current silver in actual circulation.

"This rate of fifty-five cents is established so long as the Mexican dollar is quoted in the market of New York at forty-eight cents, as at present; but in case there is a fall, or other fluctuation, the Contaduria General of Finance shall fix daily the rate of exchange for the payment of fiscal duties."

Another class of difficulties arising from a change of prices to a gold basis can be worked out only by individuals for themselves. The laborer, for instance, now gets sixty or seventy-five cents a day in Mexican silver. How much should he get of the new money, which will buy twice as much? It is evident that the laborer starts out with the initial advantage. The presumption is that he will ask for the same number of cents for his daily wages, and it will hardly be likely that the daily stipend can be cut down to thirty or forty cents in gold, although that would buy as much as the old wages. It is not easy

to obtain labor; hence workingmen can demand and secure most of the advance. This makes clear why the masses of people generally favored a gold standard. And it makes clear, also, why sugar-planters and large employers of labor would naturally oppose the reform. These classes, moreover, had to pay an export duty of twenty-five cents per hundred pounds; if this remained, and gold payments were established, it doubled the duties. And here there was a good deal of friction, resulting in a compromise, by which duties in general were reduced in percentage, until the actual level was about that established before the serious fall in silver. Importers and exporters had been gaining in recent years, as silver fell, by the lessened burden of duties, while the revenues of the state had been in that proportion diminishing. The modifications in the new tariff rates were, therefore, in the nature of a restoration of the original status.

It might be asked, finally, How are the means to be found to furnish the new coinage? The first burden must fall, of course, on the revenues; but, as must have been seen, the sums taken from the revenues to pay for the coinage would be only in the nature of an advance. Since the new coinage system provided a profit to the government, it could not be in any sense a burden upon the revenues. Not only did the country

get relief from what was crushing trade, not only was exchange prevented from fluctuation, not only was the credit of the country and the value of its bonds increased, but the government gained a large profit on the seigniorage, while the country was enabled to go on quietly using silver in its retail transactions. The scheme is simple and compact. Its merits, whatever they are, arise from following correct monetary principles.

J. Laurence Laughlin.

BEFORE me lies a large black-edged German faire part, which reads as fol

lows:

It has pleased Almighty God to call to himself our beloved grandmother, great-grandmother, mother-in-law, aunt, and grandaunt,

JEMIMA BARONESS TAUTPHEUS,

Born Montgomery,
Widow of Royal Chamberlain and Minis-
terial Counsellor,

Who this night, at half past one o'clock, after long suffering, was called away from this earthly life in the eighty-sixth year of her age. Munich, Modena, Naples, Dublin, Landshut, November 12, 1893.

RICHARD BARON TAUTPHEUS, K. B. Kämmerer and Oberst Lieutenant. In the name of the mourners. The body will be taken to Unterwassen bei Marquardstein, and there, on the 15th of November, interred in the family vault.

Long before I had the honor and pleasure of the personal acquaintance of the Baroness Tautphous, I knew, through mutual friends, a great deal about her, -about her method of work, her tastes, her daily life in those Bavarian Alps which she loved so well, and has so well described. I knew even the arrangement of the morning-room in which she usually wrote, when at Schloss Marquardstein, and which, situated in one of the towers of the castle, and overhanging a grim precipice and wild mountain valley, was a véritable nid d'aigle, so my informant said.

When, some years ago, I went to Munich to spend the winter, I counted upon seeing Madame de Tautphous as a matter of course, so that it was a great disappointment to me to hear that she had withdrawn absolutely from society, had given up her old apartment, and had taken another in one of the new suburbs of Munich, in order to be at a distance from the court and the court circle, and to be free to indulge her grief (she was

then a widow) in solitude. Her oldest friends did not see her in those days, or saw her but very rarely, and her seclusion was deeply regretted. One of these friends, Fräulein von P————, a retired maid of honor, who had had many interesting experiences in her long life (she was then eighty), was full of anecdote and reminiscence, and had much to tell of Madame de Tautphous, of the beauty and grace for which she had been remarkable in her youth, of the immense admiration she had excited at court and in the court circle during the two winters preceding her marriage, and of the strenuous opposition made to that marriage by her English relatives. This opposition had its origin, as Fräulein von P― said, not in any objection to Baron Tautphoeus himself, who was a good and honorable man, as well as a nobleman and a gentleman, but rather in the feeling that a woman endowed with so many advantages-birth, beauty, accomplishments, and rare gifts - ought to have made a more brilliant alliance. The marriage, however, proved a very happy one, and for forty-eight years she lived such a peaceful life as falls to the lot of few; then sorrow came upon her as an armed man, and in one fortnight she lost her husband and her son.

This son (the only child she ever had) was for years ambassador from Bavaria to the Vatican. He married an Italian lady (the Baroness Sonnino), by whom he had two daughters, who were very young girls at the time of their father's death, and all that remained to their grandmother of the shipwreck of her earthly hopes.

When I was in Munich, a year and a half had passed since these deep sorrows. The younger Madame de Tautphoeus had married again, but the elder still lived in retirement, and barred her

door to the outer world. The Fates, however, were kind to me, kind to my lifelong love of her, and some weeks later she sent for me to come and see her. She lived then in an apartment in the Weissenburger Strasse, a remote and very uninteresting quarter of the town. Within, her apartment was pretty and elegant, arranged with much taste, and kept with the most scrupulous neatness. She usually sat on a sofa near a western window, and close by, on the wall at right angles to the sofa, hung a portrait of her in her beautiful youth. It represented her in a ball dress of white satin, her dark chestnut hair falling in rich ringlets on each side of her lovely face. Not every woman of seventyeight could bear such proximity, but Madame de Tautphous had no reason to fear it; she was still delightful of aspect, and in looking at her one only felt that the beauty of her old age differed in kind, but not in degree, from that of her youth. It may not be amiss to quote here her own unflattering portrait of herself in the Initials: "A. Z. was a pale, dark-haired person, neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither handsome nor ugly."

Now, at seventy-eight, she was slight and graceful, and she looked petite, but I do not think she was below the middle height. She always dressed in black, black silk usually, with a lace cap, and all the appointments of her toilet were delicate and dainty, but with nothing salient that I can now recall. Her voice was soft and pleasant, her smile sweet, her manner singularly graceful and gentle, and both in looks and bearing she seemed much younger than her real age. All her childhood and early youth had been passed among clever and brilliant people, and she spoke with peculiar pleasure of her visits to her relatives the Edgeworths, and said that "cousin Maria was one of the most interesting people that it was possible to know."

More than once, as she talked of the

past; of all she had seen, heard, read; of her delight in intellectual society, in art, in music, in the splendor of the great world, and of her equally great, if not greater delight in her mountain solitude, and in the society of those peasants she so well described, more than once, as her eyes sparkled, and her cheek glowed, and she looked almost like a young woman, I wondered if she had not (all unconsciously, of course, for she was the least self-conscious of women) described herself in describing Nora, that most fascinating of her heroines.

The Initials was written some time after her marriage, and the incident described in the first chapter, the delivery to the wrong person of the note prudently written "in general terms," and with equal prudence signed only with initials, was literally true. I think she said that Hamilton was one of Lord Bloomfield's sons. But only the situations were true. Hamilton, indeed, was her own creation, and so was Hildegarde, and the Mr. Bloomfield in question, though he lodged with a bourgeois German family, and frequently amused Madame de Tautphous with their doings, did not marry one of the daughters. She implied that Hildegarde was one of her favorite creations, and I told her that I had often heard it said, both in Austria and Bavaria, that Hildegarde, though a possible character, was not possible amid such surroundings; in fact, that the bourgeoisie could not have produced her. Madame de Tautphous laughed at this, and said that it was an old objection to Hildegarde, and that she herself must confess to having no close personal acquaintance with the Munich bourgeoisie, but that c'était plus fort qu'elle. "The truth is," she added, "Hildegarde was real to me, and real in just such a home. I had to place her there."

The Initials was begun, and a great part of it written, during a winter she and her husband spent in the Bavarian highlands. She used to read each chap

ter aloud to her husband as she finished it, and he admired "with all his heart." When she had written five or six chapters, she decided to "try to publish it," and as soon as the book was done she sent it to London. It was immediately accepted by the publisher to whom it was submitted; and it is fortunate that she hit upon so competent a judge, because she said very emphatically that her character was peculiar in some respects, and that, had the book been refused, she would never again have tried to publish it, and in all probability would never have written anything else. Happily, the publisher she had chosen was endowed not only with excellent taste, but with much promptitude in action. The Initials appeared very speedily, and the immense admiration which it excited was a source of great pleasure to her husband and herself, and, with a little smile of satisfaction, "to my people in England as well."

She said that when she began Cyrilla, she had not intended to make the story so tragic, but that the minor key deepened with her own interest in her work, and she then decided to give it "a deep er motive" than that of the Initials; even when half through the book, the manner of Rupert's death was not clear to her, or whether he or Cyrilla should die first. A famous trial for murder, however, which at that time profoundly interested the German public, supplied her with the "situation" she lacked, and the fate of the innocent victim approved itself to her mind as that appointed for Rupert. From that time the end of the story lay spread out before her," inexorable as destiny;" she could not hold her hand. Apropos of this, I told her that, a few months before, I had read an account of the trial to which she alluded, in a book which contained a collection of famous criminal trials, and that the compiler mentioned that when the volume went to press (thirty-five years after the trial had taken place) the original of Zorndorff

was still alive and still in the fortress of Spandau, to which he had been condemned for life; and after a little calculation we found that he might even then be living, and working out a punishment than which none was ever more deserved.

The day we talked so long about Cyrilla, I happened to say that I thought Rupert von Adlerkron at once the most heroic and most lovable of modern imaginary heroes. "But," I added, laughing, "you have much to answer for in putting forth such an impossibly delightful ideal. How many girls must have fallen hopelessly in love with Rupert; and you know that conscience must make you say,

your

with Iago, 'There is no such man!'” She smiled and shook her head, and answered that she had known " one man, at least, who was as good as Rupert." I saw her glance at a miniature which hung on the wall, above the sofa on which we were sitting, and a moment afterward she took it down and put it into my hand. It was an oval picture, and represented an officer in Bavarian uniform, with brown hair and mustache, and beautiful dark blue eyes. I knew it was her husband's portrait, and ventured to say that I had always imagined he must have been something like Rupert.

"Well," she answered, with a sad smile, "in his courage, and the equability and brightness of his temperament, he was like Rupert. he was like Rupert. In the forty-eight years we lived together, I never had an angry word from him." Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. "If he had lived, this would have been the golden wedding day," she said, in the lowest possible voice.

for this was that he had been besieged with letters protesting against the tragic fate of the lovers, and entreating that they might be married and live happy ever after. "Rather unwillingly," Madame de Tautphous made the desired changes; but I think she said that the Cyrilla with the happy ending ran through only one edition. I have never been able to procure a copy of this edition.

Once, when we were talking about Quits, I told her that I had spent part of the preceding October in Partenkirchen with my two little girls; that we went to all Nora's haunts; that we sat beside the spring where Torp proposed to her; and were so imbued with the spirit of the place that, in writing to my son, who was then at school in England, I found myself saying, "We went to Nora's lodging to-day," etc.

Madame de Tautphous listened to this rhapsody in silence, and when I had quite finished, said calmly, "But it is not there at all, you know."

"Oh!" I exclaimed, in deep disappointment. "Do you mean to say that Partenkirchen is not the scene of Quits?"

"Not at all the scene," she answered, smiling. "I know that the general public has decided that it is, but I do not know why."

"But at least," I urged, "at least, Arthur Nixon was buried in the churchyard in Partenkirchen? It corresponds in every respect to your description!"

"Not more than half a dozen other graveyards which I know equally well," she rejoined. "I know the Bavarian Alps and the Tyrol well, and I had many places in my mind when I wrote Quits."

"But surely," I persisted, being, absurdly enough, unwilling entirely to give up Partenkirchen, "surely you must admit that Partenkirchen looks as if it were the village in which Nora lodged? Really, nothing is wanting."

Where, then, is the lake?" she asked, with a little laugh.

And I was forced to confess myself beaten, and to describe our fruitless. search for the lake, much to her amusement.

We afterward talked long about Quits, and she told me that the character of Torp was a favorite bit of work; that she had taken great pains with it, as she wished to produce a typical Englishman of the best class, with all his fine qualities, and the defects inseparable from these qualities; and the most charming arch smile lit up her face as she said, “I must think that I succeeded with Torp, for after Quits was published I had several very angry letters from some English cousins of mine, any one of whom might have sat (with some slight changes) for the portrait of Torp, and every one of them reproached me in no measured terms for putting a fellow into a book.' So you see they fitted the cap upon them

selves."

She also spoke with deep feeling of the intelligent appreciation accorded her work by Americans, and of the pleasure and encouragement which it had afforded her to have such a vast and sympathetic audience; and she added that in former years, while at her summer residence (Schloss Marquardstein, near Salzburg), she used to have frequent visits from Americans, who were all so thoroughly up in her books that it was impossible not to feel "encouraged as well as flattered." Her husband greatly enjoyed these visits. He had evidently been very proud as well as fond of his brilliant and famous wife, and she laughed as she spoke of one visit in particular, of which he had done the honors in an original fashion.

One morning, not many years after the publication of Quits, two very pretty American girls, accompanied by their governess, presented themselves at Schloss Marquardstein. If I recollect aright, they were not furnished with letters of introduction, but they were so charming that they carried the entrance