of the brightest and gayest of flowers, and with palings painted of fanci ful colours. All along the rivers and canals there were little painted houses, with gay pavilions and balconies with fanciful carved railings overhanging the water, and stages of flower-pots arranged in them. Sometimes a stout Dutch frow with full, white spotless sleeves, manycoloured substantial petticoats, gold buckles in her shoes, and a great white cap with a kind of gold band round her head, sat knitting there; or sometimes a Dutchman in trunk hose was fishing there. We saw them all, for we had entered a barge or trekschuyt, towed by horses on the bank, a great flat-bottomed thing, that perfectly held our carriage. Thus we were to go by the canals to the Hague, and no words can describe the strange silence and tranquillity of our motion along the still waters.

My sister and her nurse, who had so often cried out against both the noisiness and the dirtiness of poor France, might well be satisfied now. They said they had never seen anything approaching to it in England. It was more like being shut up in a china closet than anything else, and it seemed as if the people were all dumb, or dead, as we passed through those silent villages, while the great windmills along the banks kept waving their huge arms in silence, till Annora declared she felt she must scream presently, or ride a tilt with them like Don Quixote.

And all the time, as we came nearer and nearer, our hearts sank more and more, as we wondered in what state we should find our dear brother, and whether we should find him at all.

(To be continued.)

POVERINA.

(Translated from the French of the Princess Olga Cantacuzène by A. M. CHRISTIE.) CHAPTER X.

'WE'LL go out and amuse ourselves to-day, Rosina. We'll go to the races, the lottery, and the cathedral.'

It was the day of the festival of the Volto Santo, and all Lucca and its neighbourhood were in Sunday attire. Neri had no idea of not doing as all the rest of the world did. Rosina followed him obediently.

Her life now was one of privation and misery; her natural gaiety and light-heartedness had given place to the anxious care for daily bread which absorbs every other thought. She had been refused work at the factory-all the places being filled up-and with great difficulty she had succeeded in procuring a supply of hemp and flax which she spun from morning to night and from night to morning. Neri never came in except to eat the meagre repast which she prepared for him daily; he spent his time either in the streets, begging and picking up cigar ends, or else in the tavern, smoking and devouring socialist pamphlets. On this day, however, Rosina said to herself that she must shake off the melancholy which had settled on her, and make an effort to join in the general rejoicing. It was in vain, however, that she tried; a crushing weight lay heavy on her breast; the chaplet of beads she carried on her arm seemed like lead, and the fan, without which no Lucchese peasant-woman would dare to show herself in church, served only to hide her tears.

When, however, she found herself in the magnificent cathedral, with its dazzling blaze of light, and all the glittering reflections of cloth of gold and silk hangings, and when she penetrated into the mysterious little monument in which is preserved the venerated relic of the Lucchese people a great figure of Christ carved in cedar, and buried under a blaze of diamonds-her sadness began gradually to give way to feelings of admiration and enthusiasm. The bishop advanced majestically, surrounded by the canons in their cloaks of ermine; the ceremony began, and all at once the music of the orchestra burst forth with sonorous grandeur under the noble arches. Then a chorus of human voices responded to the instruments, rising, swelling, like the sound of a hurricane, and then dying off again in a harmonious whisper. Then was heard a voice which sent a sort of shiver through the congregation; all heads were turned in the same direction, all eyes fixed on the same point of the chancel. It was a tenor voice, fresh, pure,

flexible, but, above all, tender and thrilling-one of those voices which, at once, disarm criticism, for they appeal to the chord of sentiment which lies at the bottom of every human soul.

Rosina had unconsciously fallen on her knees. All troubles were for the time forgotten; the present had ceased to exist for her, with its anguish, its misery, its bitter disillusions. She was in Paradise, she was floating on a sea of light, shining angels were flying around her and singing: 'We have taken pity on you, poverina, you shall weep no longer; come and be with us; here we love each other always, and no one is ever deceived. Come to us, and we will lead you to the Madonna who is seated on a golden throne and clad in a robe woven of rays of stars; come, and you will grow like unto us.' She was listening with half-closed eyes and a smile of painful ecstasy on her half-opened lips, and tears were streaming down her white cheeks and falling on her folded hands.

Rosina,' said Neri, we must go away now-everybody is going out, you see. Padre Romano has finished singing.'

She started as if she had been awakened out of a sleep.

'Padre Romano?' she exclaimed, in a half-whisper, 'the son of the landlady at Santa Maria? Was it he who was singing? Oh, Neri, and I actually dared to sing before him!'

'And you will sing before many others besides him,' said Neri, with a significant look.

They made their way through the gay and animated crowd gathered round the entrance to the cathedral, which was blocked up with vendors of caramels, cakes, bells made of terra cotta, and chaplets. Rosina followed on without a word, still absorbed in her beautiful dream, and did not even question him when she saw him stop at the door of a house. He rang the bell, and putting on a swaggering manner, said to the servant who answered it—

'The Director of the Musical Institute?'

The servant eyed him suspiciously, and replied: 'He's not at home; and Saturday's the day for giving alms.'

'Go and tell him that the young woman he heard sing at Viareggio wants to speak to him,' said Neri, with superb assurance.

Just at this moment the director and the impresario came up together they were returning from the cathedral.

Ah, ah! there's my prima donna!' said the Frenchman. 'I'll leave the diplomacy business to you; you promised to manage it for me. I will wait for the monk.'

The director took Neri and Rosina into his sitting-room. Rosina, not understanding what he wanted with her, answered all his questions with nervous timidity. 'What was her age? Where was she born? Could she read? Did she know the notes of the scale?' Her answers were invariably in the negative.

What could they be meaning to do with her? Neri and the

director walked away to another part of the room, and carried on a short dialogue in undertones; then Neri came back with sparkling eyes and an animated countenance.

'Rosina,' he said, 'I was not deceiving you when I told you that some day we should be rich, and that you should have a carriage and as much gold as ever you liked. These gentlemen are going to be so kind as to take charge of you and teach you to read and sing.'

'Thank you,' was all she said; then, colouring up suddenly: 'And you?' she asked.

'Oh, I shall stay here and wait till you come back, for these gentlemen are going to take you away with them, and you will have to stay away two or three years. After that we shall be rich, and need never be separated again.'

She seemed to hear

Rosina opened her eyes wide with terror. again the harmonious voice of Padre Romano saying to her, as he had said before on the road to Santa Maria: If you listen to people who tell you that you may grow rich by singing, you will be lost!' she thought of the angels who had spoken to her while she was hearing that same voice breathing out its touching melody.

Then

'Neri,' she said at length, when I was married to you, the priest told us, didn't he, that nothing in the world ought ever to part us?' 'Don't talk nonsense,' cried Neri, impatiently. 'Don't you every day of your life see husbands leaving their wives to go and earn money in America? The only difference in our case is that it is you who will leave me, in order that we may become rich-that's all. You're not going to be such a fool as to refuse, I suppose?'

She hesitated awhile.

'When I went up the hill with you to your father's,' she said, in a low voice, and with suppressed emotion, 'you told me that you could no longer go on living alone-that you should kill yourself if I did not stay with you-and I stayed.' She smiled a broken-hearted smile. 'You seem now to have learnt to do without me, Neri!'

He took both her hands in his with the caressing and demonstrative tenderness of an Italian.

'Don't you see, my beloved, that I am sacrificing myself for your sake? You don't seem to understand that it's a fortune that's being offered you. A few years of patience, and then you'll be as rich as a queen, as elegant as a duchess, and we shall never have to leave each other again; everybody will envy us, and we shall be as happy

'We might have been happy in the mountain if you had liked,' and she sighed wearily.

He grew impatient.

'You see that the gentlemen are waiting for your answer. Any other woman as poor and wretched as you would have been wild with delight at such a proposal. Perhaps you don't know that we must

both die of hunger if you don't accept it. I insist on your doing so! Do you hear?'

At this instant the door was noiselessly pushed ajar, and the benign, placid face of Padre Romano was seen looking in.

'You sent for me, Mr. Director,' he said, without coming into the room. 'I beg your pardon if I am disturbing you: you seem to be engaged?'

Rosina gave a cry of joy, and, rushing up to the monk, fell on her knees before him, exclaiming―

'Padre Romano, what am I to do? Tell me, and I will obey you.' The monk looked around him in bewilderment, at a loss to understand what was going on.

'Ah! you don't recognise me,' said Rosina. 'I am the young shepherdess you met at Santa Maria and took back to the strega of Vicopelago-a long, long time ago.'

Padre Romano surveyed her a moment in silence, then sighed, and said

And what are you doing here, my daughter?'

'They want to carry me off,' she said, in an agitated manner, 'and teach me to sing,' and she pointed to the impresario and the director.

'Ah!' said Padre Romano, 'what I feared has come to pass. And young man, is he your brother?'

this

'No, he's my husband.'

'And what does he say about it?' 'He wishes me to go.'

'And you yourself?'

'I will do whatever you tell me.'

Padre Romano took out his snuff-box, and turning to the impresario, 'It was you, sir, I think, who did me the honour to send for me. Will you take a pinch? I can guess what you want. You've heard me just now singing in the cathedral. Well, I've got a voice that isn't bad, I know. God gave it me, sir, and it's no fault or merit of mine. You've come to offer me-I beg your pardon, sir, but how much do you intend to offer me?'

'Sixty thousand francs at the outset,' said the impresario, taken aback by the monk's downrightness.

'Sixty thousand?-bravo! That's ten thousand more than the director of San Carlo offered me; this shows that my voice is not beginning to fall off yet. I was getting a little anxious about one of my higher notes; however, it seems it was not so bad. Do you hear, my daughter?' turning to Rosina, this gentleman offers me sixty thousand francs to sing at his theatre-sixty thousand francs! You know that my mother is old and anything but rich, dear soul! One doesn't make a fortune out of shepherds, as you know, I dare say, better than I. To earn this money that's offered me, I've only got to