Collins darted away to despatch the message, and returning presently with the pale ale, uncorked it dexterously, and stood at the side-board, serenely indifferent.

"And what kind of person was this—this Mademoiselle de Sainte Aulaire, Collins?" I asked, leisurely bisecting a partridge.

"Can't say, sir, indeed. Lady kept her veil down."

"Humph! Tall or short, Collins?"

"Rather tall, sir."

"Young?"

"Haven't an idea, sir. Voice very pleasant, though."

A pleasant voice has always a certain attraction for me. Hortense's voice was exquisite—rich and low, and somewhat deeper than the voices of most women.

I took up the card again. Mademoiselle de Sainte Aulaire! Where had I heard that name?

"She said nothing of the nature of her business, I suppose, Collins?"

"Nothing at all, sir. Dear me, sir, I beg pardon for not mentioning it before; but there's been a messenger over from the White Horse, since the lady left, to know if you were yet home."

"Then she is in haste?"

"Very uncommon haste, I should say, sir," replied Collins, deliberately.

I pushed back the untasted dish, and rose directly.

"You should have told me this before," I said, hastily.

"But—but surely, sir, you will dine—"

"I will wait for nothing," I interrupted. "I'll go at once. Had I known the lady's business was urgent, I would not have delayed a moment."

Collins cast a mournful glance at the table, and sighed respect fully. Before he had recovered from his amazement, I was half way to the inn.

The White Horse was now the leading hostelry of Saxonholme. The old Red Lion was no more. Its former host and hostess were dead; a brewery occupied its site; and the White Horse was kept by a portly Boniface, who had been head-waiter under the extinct dynasty. But there had been many changes in Saxonholme since my boyish days, and this was one of the least among them.

I was shown into the best sitting-room, preceded by a smart waiter in a white neckcloth. At a glance I took in all the bearings of the scene—the table with its untasted dessert; the shaded lamp; the closed curtains of red damask; the thoughtful figure in the easy chair. Although the weather was yet warm, a fire blazed in the grate; but the windows were open behind the crimson curtains, and the evening air stole gently in. It was like stepping into a picture by Gerard Dow, so closed, so glowing, so rich in color.

"Mr. Arbuthnot," said the smart waiter, flinging the door very wide open, and lingering to see what might follow.

The lady rose slowly, bowed, waved her hand towards a chair at some distance from her own, and resumed her seat. The waiter reluctantly left the room.

"I had not intended, sir, to give you the trouble of coming here," said Mademoiselle de Sainte Aulaire, using her fan as a handscreen, and speaking in a low, and, as it seemed to me, a somewhat constrained voice. I could not see her face, but something in the accent made my heart leap.

"Pray do not name it, madam," I said. "It is nothing."

She bent her head, as if thanking me, and went on:—

"I have come to this place," she said, "in order to prosecute certain inquiries which are of great importance to myself. May I ask if you are a native of Saxonholme?"

"I am."

"Were you here in the year 18—?"

"I was."

"Will you give me leave to test your memory respecting some events that took place about that time?"

"By all means."

Mademoiselle de Sainte Aulaire thanked me with a gesture, withdrew her chair still farther from the radius of the lamp and the tire, and said:—

"I must entreat your patience if I first weary you with one or two particulars of my family history,"

"Madam, I listen."

During the brief pause that ensued, I tried vainly to distinguish something more of her features. I could only trace the outline of a slight and graceful figure, the contour of a very slender hand, and the ample folds of a dark silk dress.

At length, in a low, sweet voice, she began:—

"Not to impose upon you any dull genealogical details," she said, "I will begin by telling you that the Sainte Aulaires are an ancient French family of Bearnais extraction, and that my grandfather was the last Marquis who bore the title. Holding large possessions in the comtat of Venaissin (a district which now forms part of the department of Vaucluse) and other demesnes at Montlhery, in the province of the Ile de France—-"

"At Montlhery!" I exclaimed, suddenly recovering the lost link in my memory.

"The Sainte Aulaires," continued the lady, without pausing to notice my interruption, "were sufficiently wealthy to keep up their social position, and to contract alliances with many of the best families in the south of France. Towards the early part of the reign of Louis XIII. they began to be conspicuous at court, and continued to reside in and near Paris up to the period of the Revolution. Marshals of France, Envoys, and Ministers of State during a period of nearly a century and a half, the Sainte Aulaires had enjoyed too many honors not to be among the first of those who fell in the Reign of Terror. My grandfather, who, as I have already said, was the last Marquis bearing the title, was seized with his wife and daughter at his Chateau near Montlhery in the spring-time of 1793, and carried to La Force. Thence, after a mock trial, they were all three conveyed to execution, and publicly guillotined on the sixth of June in the same year. Do you follow me?"

"Perfectly."

"One survivor, however, remained in the person of Charles Armand, Prevot de Sainte Aulaire, only son of the Marquis, then a youth of seventeen years of age, and pursuing his studies in the seclusion of an old family seat in Vaucluse. He fled into Italy. In the meantime, his inheritance was confiscated; and the last representative of the race, reduced to exile and beggary, assumed another name. It were idle to attempt to map out his life through the years that followed. He wandered from land to land; lived none knew how; became a tutor, a miniature-painter, a volunteer at Naples under General Pepe, a teacher of languages in London, corrector of the press to a publishing house in Brussels—everything or anything, in short, by which he could honorably earn his bread. During these years of toil and poverty, he married. The lady was an orphan, of Scotch extraction, poor and proud as himself, and governess in a school near Brussels. She died in the third year of their union, and left him with one little daughter. This child became henceforth his only care and happiness. While she was yet a mere infant, he placed her in the school where her mother had been teacher. There she remained, first as pupil, by-and-by as governess, for more than sixteen years. The child was called by an old family name that had been her grandmother's and her great-grandmother's in the high and palmy days of the Sainte Aulaires—Hortense."

"Hortense!" I cried, rising from my chair.

"It is not an uncommon name," said the lady. "Does it surprise you?"

"I—I beg your pardon, madam," I stammered, resuming my seat. "I once had a dear friend of that name. Pray, go on."

"For ten years the refugee contrived to keep his little Hortense in the safe and pleasant shelter of her Flemish home. He led a wandering life, no one knew where; and earned his money, no one knew how. Travel-worn and careworn, he was prematurely aged, and at fifty might well have been mistaken for a man of sixty-five or seventy. Poor and broken as he was, however, Monsieur de Sainte Aulaire was every inch a gentleman of the old school; and his little girl was proud of him, when he came to the school to see her. This, however, was very seldom—never oftener than twice or three times in the year. When she saw him for the last time, Hortense was about thirteen years of age. He looked paler, and thinner, and poorer than ever; and when he bade her farewell, it was as if under the presentiment that they might meet no more. He then told her, for the first time, something of his story, and left with her at parting a small coffer containing his decorations, a few trinkets that had been his mother's, and his sword—the badge of his nobility."

The lady's voice faltered. I neither spoke nor stirred, but sat like a man of stone.

Then she went on again:—

"The father never came again. The child, finding herself after a certain length of time thrown upon the charity of her former instructors, was glad to become under-teacher in their school. The rest of her history may be told in a few words. From under-teacher she became head-teacher, and at eighteen passed as governess into a private family. At twenty she removed to Paris, and set foot for the first time in the land of her fathers. All was now changed in France. The Bourbons reigned again, and her father, had he reappeared, might have reclaimed his lost estates. She sought him far and near. She employed agents to discover him. She could not believe that he was dead. To be once again clasped in his arms—to bring him back to his native country—-to see him resume his name and station—this was the bright dream of her life. To accomplish these things she labored in many ways, teaching and writing; for Hortense also was proud—too proud to put forward an unsupported claim. For with her father were lost the title-deeds and papers that might have made the daughter wealthy, and she had no means of proving her identity. Still she labored heartily, lived poorly, and earned enough to push her inquiries far and wide—even to journey hither and thither, whenever she fancied, alas! that a clue had been found. Twice she travelled into Switzerland, and once into Italy, but always in vain. The exile had too well concealed, even from her, his sobriquet and his calling, and Hortense at last grew weary of failure. One fact, however, she succeeded in discovering, and only one—namely, that her father had, many years before, made some attempt to establish his claims to the estates, but that he had failed for want either of sufficient proof, or of means to carry on the proces. Of even this circumstance only a meagre law-record remained, and she could succeed in learning no more. Since then, a claim has been advanced by a remote branch of the Sainte Aulaire family, and the cause is, even now, in course of litigation."

She paused, as if fatigued by so long talking; but, seeing me about to speak, prevented me with a gesture of the hand, and resumed:—

"Hortense de Ste. Aulaire continued to live in Paris for nearly five years, at the end of which time she left it to seek out the members of her mother's family. Finding them kindly disposed towards her, she took up her abode amongst them in the calm seclusion of a remote Scotch town. There, even there, she still hoped, still employed agents; still yearned to discover, if not her father, at least her father's grave. Several years passed thus. She continued to earn a modest subsistence by her pen, till at length the death of one of those Scotch relatives left her mistress of a small inheritance. Money was welcome, since it enabled her to pursue her task with renewed vigor. She searched farther and deeper. A trivial circumstance eagerly followed up brought a train of other circumstances to light. She discovered that her father had assumed a certain name; she found that the bearer of this name was a wandering man, a conjuror by trade; she pursued the vague traces of his progress from town to town, from county to county, sometimes losing, sometimes regaining the scattered links. Sir, he was my father—I am that Hortense. I have spent my life seeking him—I have lived for this one hope. I have traced his footsteps here to Saxonholme, and here the last clue fails. If you know anything—if you can remember anything—-"

Calm and collected as she had been at first, she was trembling now, and her voice died away in sobs. The firelight fell upon her face—upon the face of my lost love!

I also was profoundly agitated.

"Hortense," I said, "do you not know, that he who stood beside your father in his last hour, and he who so loved you years ago, are one and the same? Alas! why did you not tell me these things long since?"

"Did you stand beside my father's deathbed?" she asked brokenly.

"I did."

She clasped her hands over her eyes and shuddered, as if beneath the pressure of a great physical pain.

"O God!" she murmured, "so many years of denial and suffering! so many years of darkness that might have been dispelled by a word!"

We were both silent for a long time. Then I told her all that I remembered of her father; how he came to Saxonholme—how he fell ill—how he died, and was buried. It was a melancholy recital; painful for me to relate—painful for her to hear—and interrupted over and over again by questions and tears, and bursts of unavailing sorrow.

"We will visit his grave to-morrow," I said, when all was told.

She bent her head.

"To-morrow, then," said she, "I end the pilgrimage of years."

"And—and afterwards?" I faltered.

"Afterwards? Alas! friend, when the hopes of years fall suddenly to dust and ashes, one feels as if there were no future to follow?"

"It is true," I said gloomily. "I know it too well."

"You know it?" she exclaimed, looking up.

"I know it, Hortense. There was a moment in which all the hope, and the fulness, and the glory of my life went down at a blow. Have you not heard of ships that have gone to the bottom in fair weather, suddenly, with all sail set, and every hand on board?"

She looked at me with a strange earnestness in her eyes, and sighed heavily.

"What have you been doing all this time, fellow-student?" she asked, after a pause.

The old name sounded very sweet upon her lips!

"I? Alas!—nothing."

"But you are a surgeon, are you not?"

"No. I never even went up for examination. I gave up all idea of medicine as a profession when my father died."

"What are you, then?"

"An idler upon the great highway—a book-dreamer—a library fixture."

Hortense looked at me thoughtfully, with her cheek resting on her hand.

"Have you done nothing but read and dream?"

"Not quite. I have travelled."

"With what object?"

"A purely personal one. I was alone and unhappy, and—"

"And fancied that purposeless wandering was better for you than healthy labor. Well, you have travelled, and you have read books. What more?"

"Nothing more, except—"

"Except what?"

I chanced to have one of the papers in my pocket, and so drew it out, and placed it before her.

"I have been a rhymer as well as a dreamer," I said, shyly. "Perhaps the rhymes grew out of the dreams, as the dreams themselves grew out of something else which has been underlying my life this many a year. At all events I have hewn a few of them into shape, and trusted them to paper and type—and here is a critique which came to me this morning with some three or four others."

She took the paper with a smile half of wonder, half of kindness, and, glancing quickly through it, said:—

"This is well. This is very well. I must read the book. Will you lend it to me?"

"I will give it to you," I replied; "if I can give you that which is already yours."

"Already mine?"

"Yes, as the poet in me, however worthless, is all and only yours! Do you suppose, Hortense, that I have ever ceased to love you? As my songs are born of my sorrow, so my sorrow was born of my love; and love, and sorrow, and song, such as they are, are of your making."

"Hush!" she said, with something of her old gay indifference. "Your literary sins must not be charged upon me, fellow-student! I have enough of my own to answer for. Besides, I am not going to acquit you so easily. Granted that you have written a little book of poetry—what then? Have you done nothing else? Nothing active? Nothing manly? Nothing useful?"

"If by usefulness and activity you mean manual labor, I certainly have neither felled a tree, nor ploughed a field, nor hammered a horse-shoe. I have lived by thought alone."

"Then I fear you have lived a very idle life," said Hortense, smiling. "Are you married?"

"Married!" I echoed, indignantly. "How can you ask the question?"

"You are not a magistrate?"

"Certainly not."

"In short, then, you are perfectly useless. You play no part, domestic or public. You serve neither the state nor the community. You are a mere cypher—a make-weight in the social scale—an article of no value to any one except the owner."

"Not even the latter, mademoiselle," I replied, bitterly. "It is long since I have ceased to value my own life."

She smiled again, but her eyes this time were full of tears.

"Nay," said she, softly, "am I not the owner?"

* * * * *

Great joys at first affect us like great griefs. We are stunned by them, and know not how deep they are till the night comes with its solemn stillness, and we are alone with our own hearts. Then comes the season of thankfulness, and wonder and joy. Then our souls rise up within us, and chant a hymn of praise; and the great vault of Heaven is as the roof of a mighty cathedral studded with mosaics of golden stars, and the night winds join in with the bass of their mighty organ-pipes; and the poplars rustle, like the leaves of the hymn-books in the hands of the congregation.

So it was with me that evening when I went forth into the quiet fields where the summer moon was shining, and knew that Hortense was mine at last—mine now and for ever. Overjoyed and restless, I wandered about for hours. I could not go home. I felt I must breathe the open air of the hills, and tread the dewy grass, and sing my hymn of praise and thanksgiving after my own fashion. At length, as the dawning light came widening up the east, I turned my steps homewards, and before the sun had risen above the farthest pine-ridge, I was sleeping the sweetest sleep that had been mine for years.

The conjuror's grave was green with grass and purple with wild thyme when Hortense knelt beside it, and there consummated the weary pilgrimage of half a life. The sapling willow had spread its arms above him in a pleasant canopy, leaning farther and reaching higher, year by year,

"And lo! the twig to which they laid his head had now become a tree!"

Hortense found nothing of her father but this grave. Papers and title-deeds there were none.

I well remembered the anxious search made thirteen years ago, when not even a card was found to indicate the whereabouts of his friends or family. Not to lose the vestige of a chance, we pushed inquiry farther; but in vain. Our rector, now a very old man, remembered nothing of the wandering lecturer. Mine host and hostess of the Red Lion were both dead. The Red Lion itself had disappeared, and become a thing of tradition. All was lost and forgotten; and of all her hereditary wealth, station, and honors, Hortense de Sainte Aulaire retained nothing but her father's sword and her ancestral name.

—Not even the latter for many weeks, O discerning reader! for before the golden harvest was gathered in, we two were wedded.



CHAPTER LVI.

BRINGETH THIS TRUE STORY TO AN END.

Ye who have traced the pilgrim to the scene Which is his last, if in your memories dwell A thought that once was his, if on ye swell A single recollection, not in vain He wore his sandal shoon and scallop-shell.

BYRON.

Having related the story of my life as it happened, incident by incident, and brought it down to that point at which stories are wont to end, I find that I have little to add respecting others. My narrative from first to last has been purely personal. The one love of my life was Hortense—the one friend of my life, Oscar Dalrymple. The catalogue of my acquaintances would scarcely number so many names as I have fingers on one hand. The two first are still mine; the latter, having been brought forward only in so far as they re-acted upon my feelings or modified my experiences, have become, for the most part, mere memories, and so vanish, ghost-like, from the page. Franz Mueller is studying in Rome, having carried off a prize at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, which entitles him to three years at the Villa Medici, that Ultima Thule of the French art-student's ambition. I hear that he is as full of whim and jest as ever, and the very life of the Cafe Greco. May I some day hear his pleasant laugh again! Dr. Cheron, I believe, is still practising in Paris; and Monsieur de Simoncourt, I have no doubt, continues to exercise the profession of Chevalier d'Industrie, with such failures and successes as are incidental to that career.

As for my early amourettes, they have disappeared from my path as utterly as though they had never crossed it. Of Madame de Marignan, I have neither heard, nor desired to hear, more. Even Josephine's pretty face is fast fading from my memory. It is ever thus with the transient passions of our premiere jeunesse. We believe in them for the moment, and waste laughter and tears, chaplets and sackcloth, upon them. Presently the delusion passes; the earnest heart within us is awakened; and we know that till now we have been mere actors in "a masquerade of dreams." The chaplets were woven of artificial flowers. The funeral was a mock funeral—the banquet a stage feast of painted fruits and empty goblets! Alas! we cannot undo that foolish past. We may only hope to blot it out with after records of high, and wise, and tender things. Thus it is that the young man's heart is like the precious palimpsest of old. He first of all defiles it with idle anacreontics in praise of love and wine; but, erasing these by-and-by with his own pious hand, he writes it over afresh with chronicles of a pure and holy passion, and dedicates it to the fair saint of all his orisons.

Dalrymple and his wife are now settled in Italy, having purchased a villa in the neighborhood of Spezzia, where they live in great retirement. In their choice of such retirement they are influenced by more than one good reason. In the first place, the death of the Vicomte de Caylus was an event likely to be productive of many unpleasant consequences to one who had deprived the French government of so distinguished an officer. In the next, Dalrymple is a poor man, and his wife is no longer rich; so that Italy agrees with their means as well as with their tastes. Lastly, they love each other so well that they never weary of their solitude, nor care to barter away their blue Italian skies and solemn pine-woods for the glittering unrest of society.

Fascinated by Dalrymple's description of his villa and the life he led in it, Hortense and I made up our minds some few weeks after our marriage, to visit that part of Italy—perhaps, in case we were much pleased with it, to settle there, for at least a few years. So I prepared once more to leave my father's house; this time to let it, for I knew that I should never live in it again.

It took some weeks to clear the old place out. The thing was necessary; yet I felt as if it were a kind of sacrilege. To disturb the old dust upon the library-shelves and select such books as I cared to keep; to sort and destroy all kinds of hoarded papers; to ransack desks that had never been unlocked since the hands that last closed them were laid to rest for ever, constituted my share of the work. Hortense superintended the rest. As for the household goods, we resolved to keep nothing, save a few old family portraits and my father's plate, some of which had descended to us through two or three centuries.

While yet in this unsettled state, with the house all in confusion and the time appointed for our journey drawing nearer and nearer day by day, a strange thing happened.

At the end of the garden, encroaching partly upon a corner of it, and opening into the lane that bounded it on the other side of the hedge, stood the stable belonging to the house.

It had been put to no use since my father's time, and was now so thoroughly out of repair that I resolved to have it pulled down and rebuilt before letting it to strangers. In the meantime, I went down there one morning with a workman before the work of demolition was begun.

We had some difficulty to get in, for the lock and hinges were rusted, and the floor within was choked with fallen rubbish. At length we forced an entrance. I thought I had never seen a more dreary interior. My father's old chaise was yet standing there, with both wheels off. The mouldy harness was dropping to pieces on the walls. The beams were festooned with cobwebs. The very ladder leading to the loft above was so rotten that I scarcely dared trust to it for a footing.

Having trusted to it, however, I found myself in a still more ruinous and dreary hole. The posts supporting the roof were insecure; the tiles were all displaced overhead; and the rafters showed black and bare against the sky in many places. In one corner lay a heap of mouldy straw, and at the farther end, seen dimly through the darkness, a pile of old lumber, and—by Heaven! the pagoda-canopy of many colors, and the little Chevalier's Conjuring Table!

I could scarcely believe my eyes. My poor Hortense! Here, at last, were some relics of her father; but found in how strange a place, and by how strange a chance!

I had them dragged out into the light, all mildewed and cob-webbed as they were; whereupon an army of spiders rushed out in every direction, a bat rose up, shrieking, and whirled in blind circles overhead. In a corner of the pagoda we found an empty bird's-nest. The table was small, and could be got out without much difficulty; so I helped the workman to carry it down the ladder, and sending it on before me to the house, sauntered back through the glancing shadows of the acacia-leaves, musing upon the way in which these long-forgotten things had been brought to light, and wondering how they came to be stored away in my own stable.

"Do you know anything about it, Collins?" I said, coming up suddenly behind him in the hall.

"About what, sir?" asked that respectable servant, looking round with some perplexity, as if in search of the nominative.

I pointed to the table, now being carried into the dismantled dining-room.

Collins smiled—he had a remarkably civil, apologetic way of smiling behind his hand, as if it were a yawn or a liberty.

"Oh, sir," said he, "don't you remember? To be sure, you were quite a young gentleman at that time—but—-"

"But what?" I interrupted, impatiently.

"Why, sir, that table once belonged to a poor little conjuring chap who called himself Almond Pudding, and died...."

I checked him with a gesture.

"I know all that," I said, hastily. "I remember it perfectly; but how came the things into my stable?"

"Your respected father and my honored master, sir, had them conveyed there when the Red Lion was sold off," said Collins, with a sidelong glance at the dining-room door. "He was of opinion, sir, that they might some day identify the poor man to his relatives, in case of inquiry."

I heard the sound of a suppressed sob, and, brushing past him without another word, went in and closed the door.

"My own Hortense!" I said, taking her into my arms. "My wife!"

Pale and tearful, she lifted her face from my shoulder, and pointed to the table.

"I know what it is," she faltered. "You need not tell me. My heart tells me!"

I led her to a chair, and explained how and where it had been found. I even told her of the little empty nest from which the young birds had long since flown away. In this tiny incident there was something pathetic that soothed her; so, presently, when she left off weeping, we examined the table together.

It was a quaint, fragile, ricketty thing, with slender twisted legs of black wood, and a cloth-covered top that had once been green, but now retained no vestige of its original color. This cloth top was covered with slender slits of various shapes and sizes, round, square, sexagonal, and so forth, which, being pressed with the finger, fell inwards and disclosed little hiding-places sunk in the well of the table; but which, as soon as the pressure was removed, flew up again by means of concealed springs, and closed as neatly as before.

"This is strange," said Hortense, peering into one of the recesses. "I have found something in the table! Look—it is a watch!"

I snatched it from her, and carried it to the window. Blackened and discolored as it was, I recognised it instantly.

It was my own watch—my own watch of which I was so boyishly vain years and years ago, and which I had lost so unaccountably on the night of the Chevalier's performance! There were my initials engraved on the back, amid a forest of flourishes, and there on the dial was that identical little Cupid with the cornucopia of flowers, which I once thought such a miracle of workmanship! Alas! what a mighty march old Time had stolen upon me, while that little watch was standing still!

"Oh, Heaven!—oh, husband!"

Startled from my reverie more by the tone than the words, I turned and saw Hortense with a packet of papers in her hand—old, yellow, dusty papers, tied together with a piece of black ribbon.

"I found them there—there—there!" she faltered, pointing to a drawer in the table which I now saw for the first time. "I chanced to press that little knob, and the drawer flew out. Oh, my dear father!—see, Basil, here are his patents of nobility—here is the certificate of my birth—here are the title-deeds of the manor of Sainte Aulaire! This alone was wanted to complete our happiness!"

"We will keep the table, Hortense, all our lives!" I explained, when the first agitation was past.

"As sacredly," replied she, "as it kept this precious secret!"

* * * * *

My task is done. Here on my desk lies the piled-up manuscript which has been my companion through so many pleasant hours. Those hours are over now. I may lay down my pen, and put aside the whispering vine-leaves from my casement, and lean out into the sweet Italian afternoon, as idly as though I wore to the climate and the manner born.

The world to-day is only half awake. The little white town, crouched down by the "beached margent" of the bay, winks with its glittering windows and dozes in the sunshine. The very cicalas are silent. The fishermen's barques, with their wing-like sails all folded to rest, rock lazily at anchor, like sea-birds asleep. The cork-trees nod languidly to each other; and not even yonder far-away marble peaks are more motionless than that cloud which hangs like a white banner in the sky. Hush! I can almost believe that I hear the drowsy washing of the tide against the ruined tower on the beach.

And this is the bay of Spezzia—the lovely, treacherous bay of Spezzia, where our English Shelley lost his gentle life! How blue those cruel waters are to-day! Bluer, by Heaven! than the sky, with scarce a ripple setting to the shore.

We are very happy in our remote Italian home. It stands high upon a hill-side, and looks down over a slope of silvery olives to the sea. Vineyard and orange grove, white town, blue bay, and amber sands lie mapped out beneath our feet. Not a felucca "to Spezzia bound from Cape Circella" can sail past without our observation.

"Not a sun can die, nor yet be born, unseen By dwellers at my villa."

Nay, from this very window, one might almost pitch an orange into the empty vettura standing in the courtyard of the Croce di Malta!

Then we have a garden—a wild, uncultured place, where figs and lemons, olives "blackening sullen ripe," and prickly aloes flourish in rank profusion, side by side; and a loggia, where we sit at twilight drinking our Chianti wine and listening to the nightingales; and a study looking out on the bay through a trellis of vine-leaves, where we read and write together, surrounded by our books. Here, also, just opposite my desk, hangs Mueller's copy of that portrait of the Marquise de Sainte Aulaire, which I once gave to Hortense, and which is now my own again. How often I pause upon the unturned page, how often lay my pen aside, to look from the painting to the dear, living face beneath it! For there she sits, day after day, my wife! my poet! with the side-light falling on her hair, and the warm sea-breezes stirring the soft folds of her dress. Sometimes she lifts her eyes, those wondrous eyes, luminous from within "with the light of the rising soul"—and then we talk awhile of our work, or of our love, believing ever that

"Our work shall still be better for our love, And still our love be sweeter for our work."

Perhaps the original of that same painting in the study may yet be ours some day, with the old chateau in which it hangs, and all the broad lands belonging thereunto. Our claim has been put forward some time now, and our lawyers are confident of success. Shall we be happier, if that success is ours? Can rank add one grace, or wealth one pleasure, to a life which is already so perfect? I think not, and there are moments when I almost wish that we may never have it in our power to test the question.

But stay! the hours fly past. The sun is low, and the tender Italian twilight will soon close in. Then, when the moon rises, we shall sail out upon the bay in our own tiny felucca; or perhaps go down through the town to that white villa gleaming out above the dark tops of yonder cypresses, and spend some pleasant hours with Dalrymple and his wife. They, too, are very happy; but their happiness is of an older date than ours, and tends to other ends. They have bought lands in the neighborhood, which they cultivate; and they have children whom they adore. To educate these little ones for the wide world lying beyond that blue bay and the far-off mountains, is the one joy, the one care of their lives. Truly has it been said that

"A happy family Is but an earlier heaven."

THE END.