mind that he was not strong enough to play out the part he had tried to accept for himself; and Ida, angry with Honeywood, for the first time in her life, thought that if he had grown to dislike her, he might at least try to be amiable, seeing he had persuaded her to accompany him on this travel. Lisbeth loudly lamented that she had gone to bed without discovering that her couch was placed the wrong way, and that, crossed by the electric currents, she had been torn by nervous excitement the whole night through. Finding her bed too heavy to move, she had abandoned it, and lain upon the tiles, and was suffering in consequence from a pain in her back and a stiffness in her temper.

Kevin's good humour, which had made a struggle to leave his own pain outside the door, unconsciously rubbed a little of the edges off this awkward group of three, and after breakfast the party sallied out to explore the city.

"Dear Lisbeth, where are you going with all your clothes ?" said Ida, seeing the old lady appear attired in the most extraordinary amount of wearing apparel.

"Do you think I am going to leave them in the hotel to be stolen? Thank you, baroness, I am not a rich woman like you."

"But, Lisbeth-two gowns, two cloaks! This is the month of August, and in Italy you will find it is warm.’

"I know I shall be miserable."

If you will not leave off some of the clothing, perhaps you had better wait indoors till the cool of the evening."

"What, baroness! have I died ten deaths with fright on the Alps only to sit in a hotel? Am I, a woman, to leave Verona without seeing Juliet's balcony ?"

This sudden claim upon Juliet, made with a flourish of an exceedingly Gamp-like umbrella, had so grotesque an effect, that after all the party set out with smiles. Juliet's balcony was found serving as a railing on which linen was spread out to dry, and the person who hung over it, scolding into the courtyard below, was much more like Lisbeth than Juliet. Lisbeth could not get over her disappoint

ment.

"And this is Verona!" she said. "Such narrow streets, such dingy old houses! To think of anyone who has seen Munich ever caring to come here! And this is a piazza, is it? Well, I shouldn't have thought of crossing the Alps to see a crowd of women sitting under white cotton umbrellas selling fruit. The palaces of the great lords? They don't look like my idea of palaces-blocked into a town with all the common people round them. And their tombs-I call it a tempting of Providence to build tombs up to the sky instead of laying the people modestly down in their graves."

Her companions gazed spell-bound on the tombs in spite of her complaints, the wonderful tabernacle raised to the proud Scaligeri,

within almost a stone's throw of the palace where successively they held court and made their home. There in the Piazza dei Signori they lived and ruled; here as if in the next chamber, they lie in death. An extraordinary Gothic pile of the richest beauty, crusted over with sculpture and guarded and ornamented by screens of wrought metal, the tombs of the Scaligeri present an entirely unique appearance, startling and enchanting to the beauty-loving eye. One over another the rich piles of stone-work soar against the blue, having their roots, along with an ancient church, in a lonely and deserted graveyard. There is a magnificent weirdness about the conception of the whole thing, and a barbaric splendour that takes away one's breath.

"Who were these wonderful Scaligeri ?" asked Ida.

"They were the great lords of Verona in the middle ages," said Honeywood. "The first was a mere soldier of fortune, elected by people weary of the rule of a tyrant. He was called by a strange name, Mastino della Scala, the Mastiff of the Ladder; and wherever he went he carried this extraordinary ladder, which, by the way, always reminds me of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. He passed it on to his descendants along with his canine name, and you may see the dog and the ladder repeated all over these tombs. Mastiffs support each sarcophagus, and the ladder is everywhere; as indeed it is everywhere over Verona: see it woven into these wrought-metal screens."

"What a curious startling design runs through these tombs!" said Ida. "Below the solemn sepulchre with its reposing figure and the dark hollow of its Gothic arch; above the soaring pinnacle bearing a proud horse and rider aloft in the blue. The sharp contrast strikes one indescribably. One seems confronted by restless spirits that will not lie in death; and having broken the bonds of the tomb, still dominate arrogantly the city that once bowed at their feet."

"It always seems to me pathetic," said Kevin, "that a painful lie, one of those lies that never get unearthed, is walled up in these sumptuous graves. You see this monument, the most splendid of all? It is that of Can Signorio; and he is said to have murdered the brother whose tomb is next to his: but dates prove the story grounded on a mistake. The people will tell you that Can Signorio died early stricken by a disease which fell on him in punishment of the fratricide, and they will not part with their tradition. There lie the brothers between whom such cruel malice has been put by a mere freakish blunder. Near neighbours, they sleep in their splendour; and aloft yonder they ride, like troopers in single file, following to some ærial battle in the blue. Each soul, locked within its own stone prison-house; have they ever come to an understanding while the stars have gone wheeling round their heads in the course of the ages?"

"With all their extraordinary and fantastic beauty," said Honeywood, "a strange blight has fallen on the neighbourhood of these

wonderful tombs. By a strange fatality this graveyard round their base is now set apart for the burial of criminals. It seems as if that lie you speak of had wrought inward and made an evil thing of the entire place, attracting the wicked to its centre."

"I feel your idea deeply," said Kevin. "Hark! how near to us is the hum of life, and yet how deserted, how isolated are these shrines of death!

"I begin to feel sick with gloom," said Ida; "for pity's sake, come away back into the sunshine."

"Before we go, look well at the resting-place of Cangrande" said Honeywood, "for you will find marks of him wherever you go in Verona. He was the greatest of this sovereign race. His monument forms the entrance to the church behind. See, the door opens within the columns that support his sarcophagus. The tomb is in three stages: first the lower columns; then the sarcophagus, supported by great dogs, and bearing the sleeping lord, who even in his death-robes. is girt with the sword of state. His shield is decorated with the famous ladder, and the mastiff's head crests his helmet. The third stage rises fifty feet aloft, and ends in a pyramid, bearing on its pinnacle the statue of the full-armed warrior on his war-horse. His, as being the entrance of the church, is the most central monument, though it is not so sumptuous in sculptured ornament as that of Can Signorio, surrounded by his warrior saints."

"I have seen enough of it," said Ida; "I want now to hear the children laughing in the streets."

Kevin smiled at hearing her speak like this, and glanced for sympathy at Honeywood; but his friend walked with his eyes moodily on the ground.

UP AND ROUND MONT BLANC.

BY NATHANAEL COLGAN.

II.-UP MONT BLANC (continued.)

WE were now in undisputed possession of the cabane on the Grands Mulets. The cabane, a wooden shed built on a partly artificial ledge, far up on the lowest of the Grands Mulets rocks, is divided into four compartments, two bedrooms with two beds each, a small kitchen, and a smaller den, at once wood-house, lumber-room, and guides' bed-chamber. There are two doorways to the cabane, one in the flank, looking down on the Glacier des Bossons, another at the upper end, opening towards the snow-fields of Mont Blanc and the great mass of the Dôme du Goûté. The whole structure, which, modest as it looks, must have cost a vast amount of labour to build, at a height of 10,000 feet above sea-level, with materials carried up 5,000 feet, across difficult glaciers, is surrounded on three sides by a narrow rock platform, guarded, not unnecessarily, by a wooden rail; for the rocks are in places quite perpendicular. The back of the cabane is the rock of the Grands Mulets, sheeted with boards, and the sloping wooden roof a continuation of the shelving cliff above.

Dinner was ordered for six o'clock that evening; and while it was in preparation by Couttet's deputy, a brisk, apple-faced woman of about fifty years of age, we lounged round the platform outside, and with map and compass strove to name the sharp peaks rising up in the distance. I was already smitten with an intense longing to reach the top of Mont Blanc. Here I was, half-way up the mountain, on the very threshold of a world of new experiences, physiological, meteorological and aesthetical; the summit, by rare good fortune, was quite free of cloud, and the weather gave promise of a fine day on the morrow. Could I not devise some plan of making the rest of the ascent from the cabane? could Alexandre be induced to take me up alone, in defiance of the Chamouni regulations requiring each traveller to take at least one guide and one porter? I put it to Alexandre forthwith; but he respectfully, yet firmly, refused to have anything to do with a plan which might have cost both of us our necks, and would certainly have caused Alexandre to be cast out from the communion of guides. From the Englishmen's quarter I had no better hopes of success; they were determined to make the ascent without a guide, so I could not offer to join them with Alexandre; neither could I ask them to let me join them alone, at the risk of bringing their enterprise to grief through my utter want of experience in mountaineering above