dreadfully put out about it, and take away her girls the first thing. It's a foolish lark, as they call it. Better say no more about it, you know." The Dean seemed a little irresolute, but Miss Cooke had a good deal of the Puritan in the cause of propriety and decorum. She would saw off the branch, even though she herself was seated upon it. "It cannot be compromised," she said, trembling with agitation, "even though I have to shut up my school. As the matter stands, Miss Cross seems to be guilty, but Miss Phoebe Dawson infinitely more guilty. If there is any indulgence to be extended, it should be to Miss Cross, who has come forward honourably to prevent another being punished." Here Mrs. Dawson gathered her lace shawl about her, and said, angrily, "I could not believe you would be so ridiculous. If you will not hear common sense, you must put up with the consequences. I shall take care not to have my child disgraced before the world. Tomorrow is your field-day, or your exhibition-day, or whatever you call it--" "We can't help parents being offended," said Miss Cooke, now beginning to take the matter into her own hands; "I must do my duty. For the last time, you have now an opportunity of clearing yourself, Miss Dawson. I conjure you, in Heaven's name, speak out and tell the truth!" "I did it all for her," said Phoebe. "That's all I can say, if you kill me. Oh, it is shocking to accuse me in this way! How could I help his turning over to me? I so pitied her; and she was so anxious to get away from this place; and this was the only opportunity that offered." The Dean shook his head. "Oh, worse and worse! Now you throw it on the school! The letter, you see, unfortunately, does not fit with your explanation. There is no use trying these subterfuges. I fear it is too plain that, with your volatile character, you could not resist the foolish satisfaction of drawing away an admirer from another. I think we had better end the matter at once, and save further prevarication or falsehood." Thus it was that Phoebe was tried and found guilty before an overwhelming weight of evidence. There stood her former friend Adelaide, with a cold and hostile look in her face. Phoebe waited helplessly for sentence, when the gaze of Adelaide, fixed on her with what seemed denly inspired her. cold satisfaction, sudShe cried out: "I see it now! I see it all! This is revenge. I am sure of it. I have offended her in some way, and she has confessed all this, only to put me more in the wrong, and she knows that I cannot explain it. If there was only some one to ask her questions-to take my part-I can't do it myself At this unexpected dramatic burst, every one looked at each other. Even Adelaide was discomposed. Phoebe's mother, faithful as a gallant hen defending her chicken, fluttered forward: "Yes, yes, my child," she cried, "you are right. Just look at that girl's face; she has some spite or grudge against her. Anyone can see it. Suppose the man did desert her, who can blame him? It's only natural. I leave it to anyone: which of the two is most attractive?" So blunt a way of resolving the matter might have caused less excited bystanders to smile. The Dean shook his head. That sort of judgment of Paris would hardly do. Adelaide glanced from one to the other with scorn and defiance. The more she was thus baited, the more some lurking, almost devilish, spirit of no surrender was asserting itself. "The innocent! the poor innocent!" she said. "She is welcome to that help of being prettier and, perhaps, more artful. You may make the best of it for her. You, sir, will do me justice? I say, again, here are the facts: the letter, and her ways, and tricks-all underhand, mind, and unknown to me. Keep steadily to that, sir. You are judge here, and I call on you to do justice, as a minister of the Church, of which you are a deserving pillar." This phrase of Shylock's might almost seem to have been a sneer; but Adelaide spoke with gravity and earnestness. The Dean was never so perplexed, and even harassed, in his life, not even at the memorable period when he had a turbulent and defiant curate, called Bolton, before him, who had nearly been his death. "I declare," he said, "I don't know what to do among them all." At this moment entered the lictor Corbett, with a card, which she laid down before the Dean : "He's come in a chaise from the Red Lion, and says he wants to see Miss Cooke particularly." "Oh, she can't see people now!" said "Oh, this is the person, then?" said the Dean, adding, half to himself, "fons et origo, hem- Well, I see no objection. Anything that will help us to an issue." Mind, though," said Adelaide, "that even if he support what she says, that is not conclusive. They were both engaged in this double dealing, and are likely to support each other. You must consider that.' "Oh, nonsense!" said the Dean. "Why, you black-hearted girl," said Mrs. Dawson, "you are full of venom, and spite, and hatred, and ill-will. I tell you what," added the sensible lady, "you go and talk to him, Mr. Dean, and see what he has to say. You know the world. He'd only laugh at us, if he was brought into a room full of women like this." "A very proper suggestion," said the Dean; and he rose up and left the room. Adelaide Cross remained standing in the same attitude, but looking with some disquietude to the door. The absence was not long. In two or three minutes the Dean returned, entering hurriedly. "It is all cleared up," he said, resuming his seat; "this unexpected testimony has helped us. The young man has spoken to me with very great propriety. He entirely exculpates Miss Dawson; he declares that she was all through acting for her friend. He confessed to me, with the greatest frankness, that he found himself attracted by Miss Phoebe, but that it was not until the last moment that she learned that she was the object of his attentions. He has fairly enough admitted to me that he has done very, very wrong. I am glad, very glad, that this painful case has taken such a turn." Adelaide was still unmoved. But she said slowly, and with her old scorn: "A lawyer would tell you that this evidence is of no value. It is merely the statement of one guilty person trying to screen the other." "Oh! for shame!" said the Dean, rising. "I can't listen to this sort of thing. I declare you are too bad. I'm afraid that you will turn out discreditably 66 I!" said Adelaide, with infinite scorn. "Who gave you leave, pray, to utter prophecies about my life? What authority have you over me, or, for that matter, any one here? You dare not speak that way to your parsons-or, for that matter, even to your wife "God bless me ! Is she mad?" gasped the Dean, clutching the handles of his arm-chair. "But, of course," went on Adelaide, "to a poor, friendless, outcast girl like me, you can be overbearing enough. Your feeble mind is well fitted to settle things of this kind among women. Men laugh at you!" "Stop, stop!" said Miss Cooke, in horror; "take her out of the room." The Dean, perfectly aghast, could only murmur, "Take her away-she is mad! Where are we? God bless me ! " And Miss Emma Cooke and the other lictor advanced and removed the prisoner. "I fear that wretched girl will come to a bad end," said he, after a pause. "Well, let me see; we have done with this business now. Miss Cooke, I think you may now be satisfied, and act accordingly. Miss Dawson has been indiscreet, but she is entirely acquitted of the serious charge." "It is too shocking," said the head of the house, much moved. "We were near committing a terrible injustice. Oh! that girl, on whom we have lavished such motherly kindness, to behave in such a fashion! But Phoebe, my child, you have been very foolish and indiscreet, and I hope it will be a lesson to you." แ Indeed, indeed, it will," said Phoebe, all in a flutter, like a prisoner whom the jury has just acquitted. "I'll do anything everything "My poor Phoebe," said her mother, fondly; "such a way to treat you. There is not an ounce of harm in her. She has too much spirit, that is all." "Very well, very well," said the Dean, who was much put out by the insults he had received, "that will do now. you must take care in future. there is nothing more to be done." Yes, Then, So the court broke up. But he never forgave either Miss Cooke, or the school, or Phoebe: the former he always spoke of as "a foolish, indiscreet old woman, that didn't know how to manage girls." Adelaide was ordered into confinement for the day, until it was settled what could be done with her. A most embarrassing question-for it was easy to send for a chaise from the Red Lion, and put her and her trunks in it, but where that carriage was to take her was the question. She had no friends or relations known. TRUFFLES. of TRUFFLES, like caviare, are things which many talk who never saw or tasted them. And, even of those who have been lucky enough to sit down to a turkey stuffed with them, we fancy the majority have no notion how they grow or where they come from. Housekeepers, of course, know that they come in tins or capsuled bottles, from shops like Fortnum and Mason's, or Crosse and Blackwell's, and that they are about the dearest thing that can be had in the way of flavouring. But their knowledge usually ends there. People brought up in Wiltshire or Sussex may possibly, if they were given to chatting with the labouring men, have heard the tradition-for it is now little more than a tradition-of truffle-hunting, with dogs specially trained for the purpose, in the oak-coppices on the edge of the Weald, or in the broad woods that stretch from Longleat to Bruton. You may still meet an old smock-frocked fellow who knows all about truffles, and who remembers the time when people used to think they could make money by seeking for them. But the attempt has almost died out in England; and now certain parts of France are almost the only hunting-grounds where this strange underground mushroom is sought. ploughing" (North Africa was then the granary of Rome); "we shan't complain if you send us truffles enough." But these were the terfez, a poor kind of thing, needing to be spiced up itself, instead of being used to give an indescribably delicate flavour to that which is cooked with it. In the dark ages, cookery died out like many other classical arts. Men went back to the old Homeric roast and boiled. The tradition of truffles was only kept alive in the books of Avicenna and the other Arabian physicians. But with the revival of letters came the revival of cookery as a fine art. Men read about underground tubers in the Greek and Roman writers, from Theophrastus downwards; and so they began digging and cooking. There were rival popes in those days, and they were rivals in gastronomy, as well as in other things. Avignon and Rome vied with one another, not only in eloquent anathemas, but in elegant entertainments. Provence, too, the merry land of troubadours, was also a land of good cheer; nor was the court of Burgundy, enriched by its wealthy Flemish subjects, at all behind in the matter of dainty fare. In 1438, John the Good, then holding court in Brabant, paid six livres eight sols to Jehan Chapponel, "pour don quant nagaires il apporta à M. le duc des truffes de Bourgogne." A little later, in Pope Nicholas the Fifth's day, the cookerybook of Cælius, a Roman epicure of the time of Trojan, was found in some abbey library. This was loud in praise of truffles, "daughters of the earth, and the gods; and no doubt the publication of it made them still more popular among the scholars of the Renaissance. But, though popes and Italian princes ate truffles; though As with other benefactors of the human Platina, and Ciccarelli, and Matthioli race, oblivion has been the lot of him who wrote about them; though Savonarola discovered the real truffle-"black diamond denounced them, urging men to beware of of modern gastronomy," as an enthusiastic them for fear of God, if not for fear Frenchman calls it. There is a white of colic and strangury, Southern France truffle, a poor tasteless sham, which grows has always been their chosen home. The abundantly in the sands of North Africa black truffle (the most highly flavoured) and Syria. This terfez, as it is called, grows in Provence, in Poitou, in Southern much used still by Arabs and Syrians, Dauphiné, &c., more abundantly than was well known in Greek and Roman elsewhere; it does, indeed, grow northkitchens. Some, indeed, go so far as to ward, but so sparingly that the whole think that the "mandrakes" which Reu- produce of the Forest of Vincennes, for ben found, and brought to Leah, and which instance, used to be leased, about half a Rachel longed for, were terfez. However century ago, for between three and four this may be, the truffle-trade was so im- pounds. Truffle-eating took a grand start portant in Juvenal's time, that in one of in the days of the Regency-days of his satires he says: "Don't trouble your-"petits soupers,' "those anticipations of selves, you Libyans, to do any more our late dinners. Read about them in Brillat-Savarin, the delightful historian inventions for which the world is still and anecdotist of the culinary art; to read waiting. Rather more than a hundred him is almost as good as eating them years ago, Bradley, who thought that sautées (as they ought to be) in cham- truffles might be profitably grown in pagne-in which state they are as different England, planted them as one does potafrom the dry things used in England to toes, and the same plan was tried about flavour poultry, as the wit which drops the same time in Germany and North fresh from a brilliant talker's mouth, is Italy. No doubt truffles did come where from the stale jokes of a jest-book. truffles were sown, but not in sufficient numbers, or with sufficient certainty, to make it worth while to cultivate them in that fashion. There are truffles and truffles. Our native species is what the French call the summer truffle, light inside, and with far fainter smell than the black truffle. Naturalists sum up almost a score of different kinds, some of them merely flavourless lumps of leather; but the king of all is the black truffle-skin as dark as jet and covered with big warts; inside reddish or violet-black, marbled with light veins. Its smell is indescribable; there is something of lily-of-the-valley, something of decayed leaves, the slightest soupçon of musk, and a very great deal of truffle itself. Taste it in a Perigordpie; or, better still, if you are wintering in the South of France, get a turkey stuffed with fresh truffles, and you will know more than pages of writing could teach you. Pliny, that great compiler of old women's stories, calls the truffle a vitium terræ, something wrong with the ground, which forms the truffle by getting lumped into a hard mass; and he thinks to prove this by telling a story of some Roman general in Spain, who nearly had his front teeth pulled out, by getting them tightly fixed in a denarius, which was inside one of the truffles that he was eating. "How could the coin have got there," asks the sapient naturalist, "unless the thing was just a lump of hardened earth ?" Plutarch looked on them as a sort of "thunder-bolt;" he says, the four elements go to the making of them-earth, air, water, and the electric fire. He may be so far right, that all the mushroom tribe are highly nitrogenous, and that in thunder weather a great deal of nitrate of ammonia is generated. More modern theories have been that the truffles are, like oak-apples and the "robin red breast" of the dog-rose, the work of some gall-insect. We shall see that there The truffle, then, is an underground is a truffle-fly; there is also a truffle-beetle; fungus, remotely connected, therefore, but neither of them has anything to do with that strange freak of nature the with the production of truffles. Others earth-star (geaster hygrometricus), which have thought that they were mere excres- is sometimes found in England, and which cences on the roots of the trees under used to be sold at a seedsman's in Cornwhich they are mostly found, and have, hill as "the Persian everlasting rose.' therefore, wounded the said roots as the I remember, when a school-boy, often Chinese are said to wound oysters to make flattening my nose against the pane, and them form pearls. Mushrooms, however, reading how this marvellous rose, when they are, and nothing else, i.e., vegetables put into water, would expand, and then of that large class which is called crypto- shrivel up again when dry. I only lately gamous, because its members hide more found out that the said rose is nothing or less completely their arrangements for but this subterranean fungus, whose reproducing their species. How ferns are outer coating splits into a number of really propagated has only just been dis-rays which, when damp, lie back like covered; and how truffles grow is still a mystery. Do they grow from spores microscopic seeds thrown off from the tuber? Or have they, like the fungi which grow above ground, a mycelium-a network of soft threads forming a kind of root, and capable, under favourable conditions, of throwing up a fresh crop? This mycelium preserves the germs of life for a very long time; it is the vital part of those queer-looking cakes called mushroomspawn; but truffle-spawn is one of those the petals of a flower, but, when dried, close tightly round the central lump. The object of this strange power of expansion and contraction is, that the fungus may work itself up to the surface. The truffle has no such power of coming to the front; if not found out and dug up, it ripens and rots away. The French generally use a pig in truffle-hunting. Such lean, long-legged swine! No wonder your French friends jokingly call them porcs de course (racing pigs) and cochons-levriers (greyhound pigs). The ancients, using the terfez which grows in sandy soil, and is, therefore, easily discoverable, needed neither pigs nor dogs; but the pig was in use, both in France and Italy, quite early in the middle ages. An old writer says that people noticed that both the wild boars and also the pigs, that were turned in to eat the acorns, now and then went truffle-hunting on their own account; and so they got the idea of making their instinct useful. In the old times they used to put a strap round the pig's neckas the Chinese do round the necks of their fishing-cormorants-to prevent him from swallowing the precious tuber; but now, the animals are so well trained that, when they have rooted out the truffle, they never touch it, but hold up their intelligent snouts for a bit of bread or a handful of acorns. It is the oddest sight in the world to see a Provençal peasant plodding about in an oak copse, a lean sow following him like a dog, and "making a point" wherever her nose tells her that what her master wants is underneath. Dogs are used in some parts of France, chiefly in the Burgundy truffle-country, where they mostly hunt the summer-truffle. A well-trained dog costs four pounds. They train him by putting a truffle into a box full of holes, burying it, and making the dog dig it out, always rewarding him for his "find" with a tid-bit of some kind. The breed is Italian; and, during the truffle - mania, about the middle of the last century, it was introduced into England, Poland, and several parts of Germany. Many of the small German highmightinesses and grand-serenities fancied truffle-hunting would be great fun, and paid heavily for the dogs, whom the dutiful chroniclers of their little greatness call, in their ponderous Latin, "canes tuberariovenatici." Sussex shepherd's dogs have often been very sagacious truffle-hunters. But, where you have to get your bread by truffles, the pig seems the most useful ally. He can dig much better than the dog in hard, stony ground. The dog gets sooner tired; his feet grow sore; and he's sure to stray after game, if there be any. In Provence the special home of the trufflethe only people who use dogs are the truffle-poachers, of whom there are a great many. I once heard of a man who used to take both pig and dog: the pig began the digging, and then the dog finished it; and, taking the truffle in his mouth, laid it at his master's feet. Human noses are seldom sharp enough to scent out the buried treasure; though there is a story of a sickly boy who kept himself and his mother by marking truffles for his neighbours. Of course, some truffles grow so near the surface that they make a little crack in the ground, which catches the eye of the "hunter." This is called in Provençal, hunting à l'escarto (by the mark). Another plan is carefully to poke down a thin iron rod where you fancy that the dying away of the grass may be caused by the truffle underneath having stolen all the nourishment. Your rod meets something hard; it may be a truffle, or it may be only a pebble. The last method is to watch where the truffiefly settles or keeps fluttering about; you are pretty sure to find what you want, if you mark that spot and dig down. The most interesting truffle market is at Apt, a little town in the South of Vaucluse, in the very centre of the artificial truffle-grounds of which I shall speak by-and-by. Here, from the middle of November to the end of March, every Saturday, there is a crowd, and a din of chattering tongues, and a swaying among the blue blouses, such as you could not match out of France; while, if it be wet, the "Place aux truffes " looks like a chopping sea of brown, and red, and green, and blue waves, as the mass of umbrellas tosses up and down. Such higgling, too, as if life and death depended on a centime! "Marchander" is certainly a French weakness; and there's plenty of it here to make us certain that, in spite of difference of language, the Provençal is a thorough Frenchman. The language is the tongue of the troubadours, which Mistral, and Jasmin, the barber poet, brought, not many years ago, to new life. A sort of Spanish-Italian, it is so unlike ordinary French, that among Provençals a tolerably fluent foreigner may actually pass for a Frenchman. Some men who are proud of their French are always desperately annoyed when, after they have been showing off, comes the quiet remark, made, perhaps, by a bagman or small shop-keeper in a Norman town, "Monsieur est étranger." If these touchy persons go to Provence they will be spared that annoyance at any rate. Well, the higgling goes on. Rich peasant-proprietors bring out their stock, and battle manfully to keep up the price. Poor women, who have trudged in from leagues away with eight or ten little truffles tied up in the corner of a handkerchief, will sometimes stand all day, on the cold |