OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

IRISH AGENTS.

The Irish papers mentioned a few months ago the death of Mr. Stuart Trench, whose Realities of Irish Life excited so much attention three years ago. Mr. Trench was the most eminent of a class of men peculiar to Ireland, and growing out of the unfortunate condition of that country. He was an agent, which means overlooker and manager of the estates of absentee landlords.

In England, except on very extensive properties, landlords do not employ an agent of this sort, and even where they do his duties are of a very different character. There the landlords, being nearly always in the country, if not on their estates, look after their business themselves, and have merely an overlooker, who does not occupy the position of a gentleman, to superintend and report to them what may be needful, whilst the rents are collected by a solicitor. This is the case in Scotland also.

But in Ireland this would never do. Even where the landlord is resident he almost always has an agent, to save himself the great trouble which would otherwise be entailed on him, while to the non-resident an agent is imperatively necessary.

Most Irish property is still subdivided into very small farms, and this is in itself a source of constant trouble. The tenants get into arrear or become hopelessly insolvent: they very often refuse to quit their holdings nevertheless, and have to be coaxed, bought or turned out, as the case may be; which several processes have to be accomplished by the agent. Then he is compelled to see in many cases that they don't exhaust the land by a repetition of the same crops, and in fact to superintend, either by himself or his sub-agents, in a hundred ways which would never be necessary in England, where the farms are large and their holders of a different class.

He also represents the landlord socially, and is frequently the great man of the district, duly invested with magisterial and other county offices. The office of agent has therefore in Ireland had a high social standing, and agencies are eagerly sought by the younger sons of gentlemen, and even noblemen.

There are three or four estates whose agencies are regarded as special prizes, and of these Mr. Trench held one, the marquis of Lansdowne's. That nobleman—who is descended from the ancient Fitzmaurices, earls of Kerry, and the celebrated savant Mr. William Petty, who first surveyed Ireland, and took the opportunity of helping himself pretty freely to some very nice "tit-bits" as "refreshers" by the way—has a very extensive property in Queens county and the wild maritime county of Kerry, in which his ancestors were in bygone days a sort of kings.

Probably Lord Lansdowne's agency was worth to Mr. Trench quite $5000 a year, equal in Kerry, where living is still very cheap, to $15,000 in New York City; and he had two or three other agencies in addition.

On the smaller properties the agent is usually paid five per cent., on the large by fixed salary. The best agency of all is that of Lord Pembroke, who owns the most valuable portion of Dublin and a great deal of adjoining land.

When the duties and risks of an agent are considered, he can by no means be regarded as highly paid. Very many agents have lost their lives, and others are exposed to continual danger. They are sometimes harsh, tyrannical and overbearing, but far less so now, when railroad, press and telegraph let light in upon all parts of the country, than formerly, when they were left to themselves, and as long as the rents were duly paid no heed was taken of their operations.

To do an agent's work well great firmness and knowledge of the Irish character is required, and in some districts in the West a knowledge of the Irish language is very desirable and absolutely requisite.

When an agency becomes vacant a proprietor receives innumerable applications for the vacant office, often from persons ludicrously ignorant of its duties. Thus, some time ago a seeker of such an office accompanied his application—he was a retired army officer—by a sketch of a sort of watch-tower whence he proposed to watch the tenantry, and fire upon them as occasion required! With few exceptions the agents on large estates are gentlemen bred to the business, whose fathers have been agents, and have thus early become initiated into the mysteries of the office.

Many Irish landlords are, and still more used to be, very much in the hands of their agents, of whom they have borrowed money, and further depend on for support in elections. Instances are by no means wanting of men now holding high rank as country gentlemen whose fathers and grandfathers grew rich out of estates confided to them to manage by negligent, reckless landlords, who gradually fell completely into the meshes of their managers.

RANDOM BIOGRAPHIES.

Julius Cæsar. An ancient Roman of celebrity. He advertised to the effect that he had rather be first at Rome than second in a small village. He was a man of great muscular strength. Upon one occasion he threw an entire army across the Rubicon. A general named Pompey met him in what was called the "tented field," but Pompey couldn't hold a Roman candle to Julius. We are assured upon the authority of Patrick Henry that "Cæsar had his Brutus." The unbiased reader of history, however, will conclude that, on the contrary, Brutus rather had Cæsar. This Brutus never struck me as an unpleasant man to meet, but he did Cæsar. After addressing a few oral remarks to Brutus in the Latin language, Cæsar expired. His subsequent career ceases to be interesting.

John Paul Jones. An American naval commander who sailed the seas during the Revolution, with indistinct notions about gold lace or what he should fly at the main. He was fond of fighting. He would frequently break off in the middle of a dinner to go on deck and whip a British frigate. Perhaps he didn't care much about his meals. If so, he must have been a good boarder.

Lucrezia Borgia. Daughter of old Mr. Borgia, a wealthy Italian gentleman. Lucrezia was one of the first ladies of her time. Beautiful beyond description, of brilliant and fascinating manners, she created an unmistakable sensation. It was a burning sensation. Society doted upon her. Afterward it anti-doted.

Benjamin Franklin. A philosopher and statesman. When a boy he associated himself with the development of the tallow-chandlery interest, and invented the Boston dip. He was lightning on some things, also a printer. He won distinction as the original Poor Richard, though he could not have been by any means so poor a Richard as McKean Buchanan used to be. Although born in Boston and living in Philadelphia, he yet managed to surmount both obstacles, and to achieve considerable note in his day. They show you the note in Independence Hall.

Mark Twain. A humorous writer of the nineteenth century. As yet, I have not had the honor of his acquaintance, but when I do meet him I shall say something jocose. I know I shall. I have it. My plan will be to inveigle him into going over a ferry to "see a man." As we pass up the slip on the other side, I shall draw out my flask, impromptu-like, with the invitation, "Mark, my dear fellow, won't you take something?" He will decline, of course, or else he isn't the humorist I take him for. I shall then consider it my duty to urge him. Fixing my eye steadily upon him, so he can understand that I am terribly in earnest, I shall proceed to apostrophize that genial victim as follows:

Then I presume we shall go and "see a man."

Christopher Columbus. The man who discovered America two points off the port-bow. One day, in his garden, he observed an apple falling from its tree, whereupon a conviction flashed suddenly through his mind that the earth was round. By breaking the bottom of an egg and making it stand on end at the dinner-table, he demonstrated that he could sail due west and in course of time arrive at another hemisphere. He started a line of emigrant packets from Palos, Spain, and landed at Philadelphia, where he walked up Market street with a loaf of bread under each arm. The simple-hearted natives took him out to see their new Park. On his second voyage Columbus was barbarously murdered at the Sandwich Islands, or rather he would have been but for the intervention of Pocahontas, a lovely maiden romantically fond of distressed travelers. After this little incident he went West, where his intrepidity and masterly financial talent displayed itself in the success with which he acquired land and tobacco without paying for them. As the savages had no railroad of which they could make him president, they ostracized him—sent him to the island of St. Helena. But the spirit of discovery refused to be quenched, and the next year we find him landing at Plymouth Rock in a blinding snow-storm. It was here that he shot an apple from his son's head. To this universal genius are we indebted also for the exploration of the sources of the Nile, and for an unintelligible but correspondingly valuable scientific report of a visit to the valley of the Yellowstone. He took no side in our late unhappy war; but during the Revolution he penetrated with a handful of the garde mobile into the mountain-fastnesses of Minnesota, where he won that splendid series of victories which, beginning with Guilford Court-house, terminated in the glorious storming of Chapultepec. Ferdinand and Isabella rewarded him with chains. Genoa, his native city, gave him a statue, and Boston has named in his honor one of her proudest avenues. One day he rushed naked from the bath, exclaiming, "Eureka!" and the presumption is that he was right. He afterward explained himself by saying that he cared not who made the laws of a people, so long as he furnished their ballots. Columbus was cruelly put to death by order of Richard III. of England, and as he walked to the scaffold he exclaimed to the throng that stood around him, "The world moves." The drums struck up to drown his words. Smiling at this little by-play, he adjusted his crimson mantle about him and laid his head upon the block. He then drank off the cup of hemlock with philosophic composure. This great man's life (which, by the way, was not insured) teaches the beautiful moral lesson that an excess of virtue is apt to be followed by a redundancy of happiness, and that he who would secure the felicity of to-day must disdain alike the evanescent shadows of yesterday and the intangible adumbrations of the morrow.

S. Y.

THE CRIES OF THE MARCHANDS.

The other morning I was lying quietly in bed, waiting for the bonne to fetch my café noir, when a most extraordinary sound caught my ear. The cries of Paris marchands early in the morning are curious enough usually, but this one exceeded in quaintness all that I had heard since my arrival. Between the words "Chante, chante, Adrienne!" a horrible braying broke forth, resounding through our quiet faubourg in a manner which brought many a bonnet de nuit to the windows. I got up to see what was the matter.

"Chante, chante, Adrienne!" re-echoed again over the smooth asphalte.

By this time a crowd of gamins—the gamins are always up, no matter how early—had gathered in the middle of the street around the object of the disturbance. It was a marchand of vegetables in a greasy blouse, leading an ass. There was a huge pannier on the ass's back full of kitchen vegetables, which the marchand was crying and praising to our sleepy faubourg. With an economy worthy of Silhouette, the scamp had taught Adrienne—for that was the beast's name—to bray every time he said "Pommes de terre, de terre—terre!" As often as he said this, or "Chante, Adrienne, chante!" Adrienne would switch her tail and chante lugubriously, setting the whole neighborhood in commotion. So adroitly had he trained the creature—with her thigh-bones sticking in peaks through her hide, and a visage of preternatural solemnity—that when her master but lifted his finger Adrienne would go through her part with admirable gravity, thus helping her lord to get his daily bread. I laughed till the bonne came with my coffee, and was glad to see the pannier gradually emptying as the grotesque procession defiled through our street, with a rear-guard of exhilarated urchins poking at poor meek Adrienne in a manner the most méchant. And so on they went till the peasant and his invaluable assistant were quite out of hearing.

There is no end to the originality of the Parisians. If you but go to a kiosque to get a Figaro, the white-capped marchande has something clever to say. The rain, the air, the clouds, the sun are full of esprit for her—are to her banques de France, upon which she has an unlimited credit—credit fonder, if you will, credit mobilier, or what not. The conducteur who stands behind his omnibus and obligingly helps you in, says Merci! with an accent so exquisite that it is like wit or poetry or music, utterly throwing you into despair after your months and months of travail and dozens and dozens of louis lavished on incompetent professors.

"Pronounce that for me, please," said I one day to a gentleman who had just spoken some word whose secret of pronunciation I had been trying to filch for weeks—some delicate little jewel of a word, faint as a perfume, expressive as only a tiny Parisian word can be—and he did so in the politest manner in the world, adding some little witticism which I do not recall. Whereupon I went home and instantly dismissed my "professor."

But to return to our theme, the cries of the marchands. It would take a pen like Balzac's, as curiously versatile, as observant, as full of individual ink, to catch all the shades of these odd utterances. You may recollect as you lay in your sweet English bed in London, just as the fog was lifting over the great city early in the morning, the distinct individuality of the voices which, although you did not see their owners, told each its story of sunrise thrift and industry as it cried to you the early peas or the wood or the melons of the season. You may remember, too, how perplexing, how fantastic, many of those cries were, making it impossible for you to understand what they meant, or why a wood-huckster, for example, should give vent to such lachrymose sentimentality in vending his fagots. But quite different is the Paris marchand. With a physiognomy of voice—if the expression be pardoned—quite as marked as the cockney's, what he says is yet perfectly clear, often shrewd, gay, cynical, sometimes even spiced with jocularity, as if it were pure fun to get a living, and the world were all a holiday.

Some years ago a marchand was in the habit of visiting our neighborhood whose specialty it was to vend baguettes, or small rods for beating carpets, tapestry and padded furniture. His cry was—"Voilà des baguettes! Battez vos meubles, battez vos tapis, battez vos femmes pour un sou!"

It is said that as this gay chiffonnier went one morning by the fish-markets uttering this jocose cry, a squad of those formidable poissardes, the fishwomen of Paris, got after him, and administered a sound thrashing with his own baguettes. Such is the vengeance of the French-woman!

But there is a curious pathos in many of these cries—queer searching tones which go to the heart and set one thinking; tones that come again in times of revolution, and gather into the terrible roar of the Commune. I sometimes wonder if they ever sell anything, those strange sad voices of the early morning struggling up from the street. They are the voices of Humanity on its mighty errand of bread and meat. Some dozen or so traverse our quarter through the day—some of feeble old women, full of sharp complaint; some of strong, quick-stepping men; some of little children with faint modest voices, as if unused to the cruel work of getting a living. It is these poor people who walk from Montmartre to Passy in the morning, and in the evening fish for drowned dogs or pick up corks along the canal of the Porte St. Martin. For a dog it is said they get a franc or two, and corks go at a few sous a hundred.

Such is an inkling of the life-histories wafted through our summer windows by the voices of the street. Well, the sun is brilliant, the Champs are crowded with the world, the jewelers of the Palais Royal are driving a thriving trade, the great boulevards are margined by long lines of absinthe drinkers. Who cares? Only it is a little disagreeable in the early morning to have one's sleep broken by the pathos of life. Let us sleep well on our wine, and dine to-morrow at the Grand Hotel. We shall forget the misery of these patient voices which visit us with their prayer for subsistence every day.

G. F.

THE ANGEL HUSSAR.

I think some of the best talks I have had in my life have been with chance companions on whom I have happened in the course of a roving life—sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes in the railroad-car or steamboat, and not unfrequently in the smoking-room of a hotel.

If you have ever been in Dublin, you know Dawson street, and in Dawson street the Hibernian Hotel. I am not prepared to endorse all the arrangements of that hostelry, nor indeed of any other in that part of the United Kingdom called Ireland: I have suffered too much in them. Still, I will say that the Hibernian is to be praised for a really comfortable and handsome smoking-room, containing easy-chairs deservedly so called, and a capital collection of standard novels. One raw evening in the spring of 1871 I sauntered in, and found some gentlemanlike-looking fellows there, who proved pleasant company, and presently a remarkably distingué-looking young man, with an unmistakably military cut, came in and sat down near me. We fell to talking. He was quartered at the Curragh, and was up in Dublin en route for the Newmarket spring meeting. He told me that he made some £700 a year by the turf. "I've a cousin, you see, who is a great sporting man, and thus I'm 'in with a stable,' and get put up to tips," he said. "But for this the turf would be a very poor thing to dabble in." And this led to a talk about officers' lives and their money-affairs. "Oh," he said, "you've no notion of the number who go to utter grief. Why now, I'll tell you what happened to me last season in London. I was asked to go down and dine with some fellows at Richmond; and being awfully late, I rushed out of the club and hailed the first hansom I could see with a likely horse in Pall Mall. I scarcely looked at the man, but said, 'Now I want to get down to the Star and Garter by eight: go a good pace and I'll pay you for it.' Well, he had a stunning good horse, and we rattled away at a fine rate; and when I got out I was putting the money into his hand, when he said, 'Don't you know me, B——?' I looked up in amazement, and in another moment recognized a man whom I had known in India as the greatest swell in the —— Hussars, the smartest cavalry corps in the service, and who, on account of his splendid face and figure, went by the sobriquet of 'the Angel Hussar.'

"Well, it gave me quite a shock. 'Good Heavens, H——!' I said, 'what in the world does this mean?' 'Mean, old fellow? It means that I'd not a farthing in the world, and didn't want to starve. It's all my own cursed folly. I've made my bed, and must lie on it.' I pressed a couple of sovereigns into his hand, and made him promise to call on me next day. He came and gave me the details of his descent, the old story of course—wine and its alliterative concomitant, conjoined with utter recklessness." "Well, and could you help him?" "I'm glad to say I could. I got him the place of stud-groom to a nobleman in the south of Ireland: he's turned over a new leaf, is perfectly steady, and doing as well as possible."

NOTES.

There is an old story that Augustus, being once asked by a veteran soldier for his aid in a lawsuit, told the petitioner to go to a certain advocate. "Ah," replied the soldier, "it was not by proxy that I served you at Actium!" So struck, continues the tradition, was Augustus with this response, that he personally took charge of the soldier's cause, and gained it for him. Possibly it may be on the theory that his subjects "do not serve him by proxy" when he needs their services that the Austrian kaiser even to this day holds personal audiences with his people regarding their private desires or grievances. Evidently traditional, this custom is so singular as to merit a more general notice than it habitually receives: indeed, its existence might be doubted by the foreign reader, did not a Hungarian journal, Der Osten, furnish a detailed description of it. The only prerequisite to an audience would seem to be the lodging of the subject's name and rank with one of the emperor's secretaries, who thereupon appoints the day and hour for his appearance at the palace. If the emperor has been long absent from Vienna, his next audience-day is always a trying one, as the waiting-room is then crowded with hundreds of both sexes, and all ranks and ages. They are in ordinary dress, too, so that the imperial ante-chamber presents a motley and picturesque scene—the gold-broidered coat of the minister of state and the brilliant uniform of the army mingling with the citizen's plain frock, with the Tyrolean or Styrian hunter's jacket, with the bunda of the Hungarian, with the long, fur lined linen overcoat of the Polish peasant; while the rustling silks of the elegant city lady are side by side with the plain woolen skirt of the farmer's wife. Each of these in regular turn, as written on the list from which he calls them, a staff-officer ushers into the emperor's study. There the petitioner states his case. The emperor listens without interruption, then receives the written statements and documents, sometimes asks a question, but generally dismisses the visitor with a simple formula of assurance that a decision will be duly rendered. There is evidently much form in the matter, as if it were but the empty perpetuation of some ancient ceremony designed to show that the monarch is the father of all his people, and hence is personally interested in their individual troubles. But yet it appears that the emperor does listen to the harangues, for he is occasionally known to affix his initials to some documents; which act is always interpreted as a good sign, it being equivalent to a special recommendation to the secretaries, indicating that primâ facie the cause has seemed to the sovereign to be just. However, the precaution of a written statement is always taken, because it would be impossible for him to remember all the oral explanations. Only a few weeks after each of these audiences the suitors are individually notified of the result. The emperor's sense of etiquette does not allow him to give any sign of impatience during the interview, though some of the visitors are as long-winded and importunate as Mark Twain pretends to have been at one of President Grant's receptions. The emperor answers the German, Hungarian, Tzech, Croat or Italian each in the suitor's own tongue. It is quite possible that in the preliminary registry of the names and condition of suitors care is taken that the emperor shall not be subjected to too great annoyance from any abuse of this curious and interesting privilege.

Among the canonizations of the past few months a notable place must be assigned to that of the beatified Benoît Labre. That he was faithful in doctrine needs hardly be said, but it was his manner of life which procured him this posthumous honor, in order that those who read of his career may rank him among those saints who, as in Tickell's line, have both "taught and led the way to heaven," and may seek to imitate his example. The decree of canonization, in reciting his characteristic virtues, says that though of very honorable birth, yet, scorning earthly things as dross, he clothed himself in rags, and ate and drank only what chanty gave him. His shelter was the Coliseum or the doorways or desert places of Rome. He washed not, neither did he yield to the effeminacy of the comb; his hair and nails grew to what length Nature wished: in short (for some of the additional details are better fancied than described), he so utterly neglected his person that he became an object of avoidance to many or all. But his neglected body was after death placed under a glass shrine in the church of the Madonna del Monti. The decree calls upon others to follow the example of the blessed Benoît, or at least as far as the measure of spiritual strength in each will allow; but we apprehend that many will modestly confess that the peculiar virtues of the saint are inimitable.