ised internal adjuncts of gastric juice, liver, pancreas, and so forth ad infinitum.

It is just the same, analogically, with the reproductive function. At first it is diffused over all the body alike, so that every bit cut off from any part can grow equally into a complete organism; but as evolution progresses it is found more convenient in the higher plants and animals to specialise reproduction in certain organs, which produce particular little offsets (eggs or seeds, as we call them); and these offsets grow out, in turn, into fresh individuals. But the reason they do so is simply this-Every unspecialised fragment of the original individual is potentially capable, as at first, of growing out, by pure interaction of its molecular forces, into a new organism essentially identical in every way with the old one. That this is the true explanation of the case we can see at once from the fact that many plants and animals retain to this day two separate and distinct modes of reproduction, one of them primitive and general, the other developed and specialised.

I have only to add that the explanation of reproduction here roughly set forth is, in its main essence, identical with that put forward by Mr. Herbert Spencer, though with certain modifications due to myself, and certain simplifications rendered necessary for the tastes and knowledge of the general reader.

GRANT ALLEN.

I

THE WOMAN'S ROSE.

"And I saw that the women also held each other's hands."-DREAMS.

HAVE an old brown carved box; the lid is broken and tied

with a string. In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, and a little picture which hung over my brother's bed when we were children, and other things as small. I have in it a rose. Other women also have such boxes where they keep such trifles, but no one has my rose.

When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in woman flickers, and her present is an agony to me, and her future a despair, the scent of that dead rose, withered for twelve years, comes back to me. I know there will be spring; as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.

There were other flowers in the box once; a bunch of white acacia flowers, gathered by the strong hand of a man, as we passed down a village street on a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops fell on us from the leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made mildew marks on the paper I folded them in. After many years I threw them away. There is nothing of them left in the box now, but a faint, strong smell of dried acacia, that recalls that sultry summer afternoon; but the rose is in the box still.

It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days' journey from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of men. A few were married, and had their wives and children, but most were single. There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen, fair, and rather

fully-fleshed; she had large dreamy blue eyes, and wavy light hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled; then her face broke into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The hotel-keeper may have had a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them. She reigned alone. All the men worshipped her. She was the only woman they had to think of. They talked of her on the "stoep," at the market, at the hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she bowed to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front door; they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when they dared. Partly, there was something noble and heroic in this devotion of men to the best woman they knew; partly there was something natural in it, that these men, shut off from the world, should pour at the feet of one woman the worship that otherwise would have been given to twenty; and partly, there was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had raised her little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of twenty of them.

Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so pretty as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and I was new, and she was old-they all forsook her and followed me. They worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked of. Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know it was simply a fashion, which one man had set, and the rest followed unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I despised them. The mother heart had not swelled in me yet; I did not know all men were my children, as the large woman knows when her heart is grown. I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like a child with a new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not caring against what. I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were curious creatures, who liked me, I

could never tell why.

Only one thing took from

Only one thing took from my pleasure; I

could not bear that they had deserted her for me. I liked her great

dreamy blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl; when I saw her sitting among men, she seemed to me much too good to be among them; I would have given all their compliments if she would once have smiled at me as she smiled at them, with all her face breaking into radiance, with her dimples and flashing teeth. But I knew it never could be; I felt sure she hated me; that she wished I was dead; that she wished I had never come to the village. She did not know, when we went out riding, and a man who had always ridden beside her came to ride beside me, that I sent him away; that once when a man thought to win my favour by ridiculing her slow drawl before me I turned on him so fiercely that he never dared come before me again. I knew she knew that at the hotel men had made a bet as to which was the prettier, she or I, and had asked each man who came in, and that the one who had staked on me won. I hated them for it, but I would not let her see that I cared about what she felt towards me.

She and I never spoke to each other.

If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on; when we shook hands we did so silently, and did not look at each other. But I thought she felt my presence in a room just as I felt hers.

At last the time for my going came. I was to leave the next day. Someone I knew gave a party in my honour, to which all the village was invited.

Now it was midwinter; there was nothing in the gardens but a few dahlias and chrysanthemums, and I suppose that for two hundred miles round there was not a rose to be bought for love or money. Only in the garden of a friend of mine, in a sunny corner between the oven and the brick wall, there was a rose tree growing which had on it one bud. It was white. It had been promised to the girl to wear at the party.

The evening came; when I arrived and went to the waitingroom, to take off my mantle, I found the girl already there. She was dressed in a pure white dress, with her great white arms and shoulders showing, her bright hair glittering in the candle-light, and the white rose fastened at her breast. She looked like a queen. I said "Good-evening," and turned away quickly to the glass to arrange my old black scarf across my old black dress.

Then I felt a hand touch my hair.

"Stand still," she said.

I looked in the glass. She had taken the white rose from her breast, and was fastening it in my hair.

"How nice dark hair is; it sets off flowers so." She stepped back and looked at it. "It looks much better there!"

I turned round and looked at her.
"You are so beautiful to me," I said.

"Y-e-s," she said, slowly; "I'm glad.”
We stood looking at each other.

Then they came in and swept us away. All the evening we did not come near to each other. Only once, as she passed, she smiled

at me.

The next morning I left the town.

I never saw her again.

Years after I heard she had married and gone to America; it may or may not be so--but the rose is in the box still.

OLIVE SCHREINER.