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The doctor has, with some difficulty, reduced by a large percentage the deaths in childbirth. When he started practice it was the custom to couch the expectant mother upon the filthiest materials which could be found in the house, or even in the stables. It needed all his arts to dissuade the peasant from this custom. But in spite of the fact that the French country doctor's main practice consists in hygiene and midwifery, Dr Saggebou's true enthusiasm is not in medicine. He has the surgeon's instinctive contempt for pottering about the human organism; his is the reductio method, though petty surgery has his more especial interest. Once he set a boy's leg in the street before the Sestrol's Hôtel; it is a further point of his character that he refused fees for the operation. "That peasant gave me loaves of bread during the war, good bread, when decent flour was unobtainable," he said to us.

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away nearly thirty visitors seek- home-stone walls and tile ing rooms this summer. floors exude a dankness even during the drought; the beds are often built into the walls or under the staircases, and are surrounded by curtains, so that though the baker ventures to open his windows a crack, he smothers himself in his cupboard or his tent of a bed. The beasts of the house-pigs and chickens-live in the cellars, from whence their effluvia penetrate persuasively. How can the baker conquer his instinctive fear of nocturnal air? We who slept frankly with windows flung wide were the object of incessant remonstrance from our hosts and from other well-disposed persons. I don't believe that even the doctor himself slept with the windows open. It is extraordinary how pig-headed humanity is against commonsense in any branch of advancement; how it has resisted common-sense in medicine, politics, education, and even in humanity; how we laugh at our ancestors for the commonsense they have resisted; and how our descendants will laugh at us for the common-sense we resist in our turn.

But he will use no magic, and in some cases the patient leaves him for a more mysterious practician. The baker, for instance, visits a young doctor in Francheville, one who brandishes electricity, X-rays, and threats of radium against his tubercles. But how can magic cure the baker under the conditions in which he lives? Dr Saggebou sees clearly that the man is doomed in the present circumstances. The baker lives in a typical N

But the peasants still demand magic in their medicines as they demand it in their religion; indeed, a little farther to the southward, in Spain, an incantation to a saint is often held as more efficacious than the science of the doctor, as maybe with some Spanish doctors it is. We have already instanced Madame Sestrol's firm belief that Lourdes held the

trol had a jest-well in his manner-that once a sufferer had been hurried to Père "Chestnuts" for cure, but that, having discovered where the burn was, he declined to operate. The man had sat down upon a red-hot poker.

The Church is connected in magic with medicine even more closely than in this competition between the curative properties of saintly vows and materia medica. There is a series of quack medicines offered to the public under the signature of the abbé so-and-so, or the abbé this-and-that. Why abbés should be considered enlightened in medicine has only one explanation, the magical one,

major merit in the curing of with invariable success. SesRaymond, and we had a further example very soon after our arrival. Monsieur Sestrol told us how he had been cured of rheumatism. The illness was so bad that he could scarcely move, far less work. Doctors had practised on him without giving relief. By chance he heard of some wise woman who had a miraculous cure. He was hoisted into a cart, was driven to her house, bargained with her for her recipe, and actually paid her fifty francs -a large sum before the warfor the prescription. He says that he concocted the potion according to instruction, drank it—“ il fallut avoir l'estomac fort pour avaler ça,"-and in three days was cured. He had afterwards given the prescription to the nuns, so he said, and with it they had cured numberless persons. He could not remember the ingredients, except the first instruction, which offers a clue to the nature of the whole, Take one litre of water, and boil it until it is reduced to half the quantity."

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He also said that one could prevent a burn from blistering if immediately after the accident one breathed upon the injured part, making the sign of the cross at the same time. The old father of Monsieur "Chestnuts," who had had some local reputation as an amateur magician, averred that he had done this several times

which embraces both Church and doctor. There is a famous abbé quack in Toulouse who, although he has been condemned several times by the French courts to prison, still continues to hold the faith of and to gull the peasants.

Probably in in exasperation against these priestly incursions into his profession, Dr Saggebou is a virulent anticlerical. The Church retorts upon him by confounding anticlerical and anti-Christian in the minds of the faithful; and so the more devout of the peasants cling to the services · of the other doctor, who, though having the virtues of devotion, is admittedly less able than the loquacious ex-mayor.

(To be continued.)

VOL. CCXVI.-NO. MCCCIX.

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ANNE, LADY HALKETT.

BY L. M. CUMMING

To the women of the seventeenth century we owe much illuminating knowledge of an age remarkable for its complexity and its rich individuality, and much of that sense of intimacy which fills the pages of dead history with a glow of present life and gives poignancy to the lyrics of the time, with their echoes of pain and prison and parting.

There is Lucy Hutchinson, the peerless Puritan, whose learning and sane judgment, combined with high moral principle, give her narrative of Puritan life an austere dignity which is sweeter and more wholesome than the spirit which usually distinguishes the annals of Puritanism; on the Royalist side there is Lady Fanshawe, whose Diary is, above all, another expression of wifely devotion; and the three Margarets, two of them on the King's side -Margaret Lucas, Duchess of Newcastle, whose bizarre personality and Royalist activity retrieve from dulness that parade of learning and virtue and literary zeal which made her the target of flattery and derision; sweet Margaret Godolphin, unstained by Court life, who, shortly after her marriage to a future Prime Minister, faded out of life, and was commemorated by her affectionate mentor, John Evelyn; and,

most vital of the three, Margaret Fell, who, as the wife of a north-country squire, was converted by George Fox, and faced the rigours of imprisonment for her faith, and, for her efforts on behalf of Quakers everywhere, was known as the Mother of Quakerism even before her marriage to George Fox. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne have charmed many by their tender womanliness and quiet romance; and the Diary of Lady Anne Clifford, the imposing embodiment of the traditions of a dying age, has very recently brought to our knowledge another of this company of eminent women.

To all these vivid figures there is still one to add, Anne Murray, who is little known even to scholars, but who deserves a lasting place in the affections of all Caroline enthusiasts and the many who revel in intimacy with living personalities of bygone days. Her life was eventful, with the interest of a rapidly moving novel, and her character was refreshingly many-sided. She mingled piety, at once strenuously contemplative and systematically practical, with no mean measure of learning, and especially of medical lore, and yet contrived to indulge wholeheartedly in complicated romantic experiences, in which strict

virtue went hand in hand with startling unconvention- tutor, and later secretary, to

hand James VI., and became first

ality. She was strong-minded and a woman of action from her early years, destined for real adventure in all its picturesque trappings, and she had a fertile pen. She left many volumes of manuscript, chiefly consisting of meditations on sacred themes, one or two of which were actually printed; but her literary ability is shown at its best in her lively Autobiography, which has the arresting quality of a genuine page from life, and combines the revelation of personality with perhaps a more diffused interest than the pages of any of her contemporaries. It is written in good narrative style, with a swiftness of pace which sometimes leaves strict syntax panting behind, but never mars the telling of the story; and, considering the voluminous piety of the lady, it is almost incredibly free from moralising and weighty ornament. It is pre-eminently a story, and there is little analysis of character or detailed account of what now are historical events; for it was not written for publication, and therefore presupposed in the reader that knowledge of people and incidents which would be natural to contemporaries.

Anne Murray was of Scottish descent, but accounted herself an Englishwoman. Her father, Thomas Murray, who was a Murray of Woodend and related to the Tullibardine family, went to England with

Prince Charles. He was made Master of Sherburne Hospital in Durham, but fell into temporary disgrace, and was imprisoned in the Tower. He was, however, soon restored to favour, and made the first lay Provost of Eton in 1622, and this office remained in the tenure of his widow for a year after his death in 1623. He was an honest man of Puritan leanings and poetic aspiration, and his wife, Jane Drummond of Blair, who came of the Perth family, was a lady of spirit, apparently with a good deal of the schoolmistress in her composition, which was suitably recognised at Court by her appointment at two different periods as governess to the Duke of York and Princess Elizabeth in place of her cousin, the Countess of Roxburgh.

She was left a

widow with five sons, two of them at least in close attendance at Court, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Anne. Elizabeth married a son of Sir Adam Newton, a learned Scot, who was tutor and secretary to Henry, Prince of Wales, and after his death treasurer to Prince Charles, and secretary to the Council of the Marches of Wales. Like Thomas Murray, he was given a position of some importance hitherto held by a cleric, being made Dean of Durham. His son, Sir Henry Newton, was a kindly and much-loved gentleman. renowned far and wide for his

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charity to the poor and his generosity to distressed cavaliers. He was in a literary set and a friend of Evelyn, and his literary associates were increased by the marriage of his niece, Dorothy Enyon, to Thomas Stanley, whose Eschylus' and 'History of Philosophy' retained for long their pre-eminence, and whose poems are now attracting some interest. Sir Henry Newton was very friendly with the Stanleys and their numerous poetic friends, and was actively interested in Stanley's literary projects.

Though Elizabeth was soon happily and satisfactorily settled, Anne was but a child, and her education lay in her mother's very competent hands. She was not the grave womanchild that Lucy Apsley was. She had a passionate temper, which was moderated largely by an intense veneration for the Bible, which her nurse utilised to subdue her violent moods; but she early developed a philosophical outlook, which stood her in good stead in later life.

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tendance at Church o'clock in the morning in the summer and six o'clock in the winter." Recreation, however, was not forgotten, and, duly chaperoned, she indulged cheerfully in seeing plays and walking in the Spring Garden; and it is typical of the development of her strong-minded character that, although fundamentally conventional in outlook, she says: "I was the first proposed and practised it, for three or four of us going together without any man, and every one paying for themselves by giving the money to the footman who waited on us, and he gave it to the playhouse. And this I did first upon hearing some gentlemen telling what ladies they had waited on to plays, and how much it cost them, upon which I resolved none should say the same of me.” This sensible proceeding was the forerunner of much in her life that bespoke courage and decision, exercised as much in every-day life as in the urgencies of days to come.

Though they had a house in St Martin's Lane, much time was spent at the Newton's Kentish estate of Charlton. The Civil War began, and Sir Henry Newton attended the King to Oxford, and raised a troop of horse for the Royalist army; and when his estate was sequestrated, his wife had to live at Charlton on a fraction of their income. The Charlton household consisted of Lady Newton, young and sympathetic, and her children, her

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