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was now the word)-all was well. Fra Battista had been quietly ridded the very next morning unfrocked he took the way of the Brenner and the mountains, and Veronese history knows nothing further certainly of him. It is thought he may have got so far as Prague, where at any rate a perfervid preacher called Baptist von Bern was burnt for heresy in the year 1389 spreader of anabaptistical doctrines he was, Gospels of the Spirit, Philadelphianism, and what not. Everything settled down to routine: Can Signorio to tyranny and coquetting with Gian Galeazzo of Milan (who finally swallowed him up); the bishop to accommodating the claims of God, the Pope, and his temporal lord, to those of salvation and his stomach; and in like manner did every person in this narrative after his kind.

Then on a bright morning in early September old Baldassare came limping up the Ponte Navi with his pack on his back, paused a minute on the bridge, as his habit was, to look down on the busy laundresses by the water, spat twice, and so doing was observed, threw a cracked "Buon' giorno, La Testolina!" over the side, and went on his slow way to the Via Stella.

It was still very early, but not so early that Vanna was not in her shop - door sewing and crooning to the baby on her lap. She heard his step the moment he rounded the bottom corner of the street, blushed prettily from neck to

temples, caught up the child, and went out to meet her lord. Standing before him in her cool cotton gown, there was no sun in the dusky place but what her halo of hair made, no warmth but that of her welcoming mouth. Half shyly she stopped, holding up the baby for him to see: it was not for her to make advances, you must understand; but it needed no magic to make one believe that what a man's wife should be to a man that was young Madonna Vanna to her rag-picker. Baldassare blinked and tried to look harassed; the next minute he had pinched Vanna's cheek. She put the baby into his wiry old arms— a very right move of hers.

"Eh, bambinaccio," he muttered, highly pleased, "it is good to see thee! So thou art come out to meet thy old dad-thou and thy little rogue of a mother? Come, the pair of ye, and see what my pack has in store." The baby crowed and bubbled,

Vanna nested her arm closer to his ribs, and the trio went into the house.

A keen shot from one eye sufficed to assure the old fellow that as well as a little beauty he had a domestic treasure to wife. The house was as fresh as her cheeks, as trim as her shape. "Now the saints be good to this city of Verona," said he, "as to me they have proved not amiss." This was great praise from Baldassare; his generosity gave it point. From his pack came a pair of earrings,

wagging, tinkling affairs of

silver and coral; next some to be told. As La Testolina portentous pins, shining globes like prickly pears; a coral and bells for Master Niccolà, and a scaldino of pierced brass for the adornment of the house. "Thank you, Baldassare," said Vanna to her blinking old master; then she kissed him. Before she knew where she was, before she could say "Già!" he put his arm round her and whispered in her ear. Then she clung to him, sobbing, laughing, breathing short; and the rest it were profanation to report.

Verona rubbed its eyes as it came out yawning to its daily work. There was the open shop, ever the first in the street; there the padrone; there, by the manger of Bethlehem, were the padrona and the baby, whom they had last seen huddling from their stones. Vanna wore her colours that morning; she was rosy like the dawn, she was smiling, she had very bright eyes. But there was a happy greeting for man or wife who looked her way; and when La Testolina came peering to behold the discomfiture of Baldassare, Vanna's gay looks found her out, and "Buon' giorno, La Testolina," came as cheerfully from her as it had come from her husband on the bridge. All the little woman could do was to squat upon the threshold at her friend's feet and pretend that she was troubled with palpitations.

The crowning proof remains

(who blazed the story abroad)
is reported to have said, you
might have drummed the
guard out with her heart-
beats. Vanna, by way of
weaning her baby, it seems,
was tempting him with gob-
bets of peach from a wine-
glass. She bit a corner from
the peach and tendered it in
her lips to the youngster on
her lap. The baby (a vigor-
ous child) made a snap at it
like a trout at a fly, and a
gulp so soon as he had it.
The peach was hard, the mor-
sel had many corners,-went
down bristling, as it
Cola had his first stomach-
ache, was hurt, was miserable,
prepared to howl. At that mo-
ment La Testolina happened to
look at him: she stared, she
gasped, she reeled against the
door-post.

were.

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ΑΝΝΟ DOMINI.

ANNO DOMINI, most fashionable of all the complaints that affect frail human nature, unsurmountable, inextirpable fate of the unloved of the gods! we may try to disguise you, we may temporarily delude ourselves and others into fancying that you have not touched us yet, but in our heart of hearts we are painfully conscious of your presence all the same. And even if the freshness of the spring of the year giving us a new lease of animal spirits, or the warmth of the summer sun relaxing our stiffened joints, cause us to forget your existence for a while, the 'World'—"this," as Mr Slurk would say, "is popularity"—or, worse degradation, the 'Sportsman,' not only wishes us many happy returns of the day, but with brutal and unnecessary candour blazons forth the intelligence that we were born on such and such a day of a very remote year.

Of course we fully recognise the fact that Anno Domini is essentially a masculine complaint. Any man with his wits about him knows more or less accurately how old each one of his male associates is. There are so many obvious ways of finding out, and friends are so cordially frank in the matter of betraying what they know, that for a male being to lie about his age is simply futile. But only women, or here and there a man to whom nature has imparted some of the foibles of the weaker sex, take the trouble to search

out the ages of their sisters in Debrett; and when by any chance one of the fair sex does SO far commit herself as to inscribe the year of her birth in our child's birthday-book, we accept the statement rather as a figure of speech than as a matter of fact. Even old-world Solomon, not at all times nor in all matters wholly complimentary to the fair sex, is careful to attribute that mortality "which befalleth beasts to the sons rather than to the daughters of men. We can well believe that the great sage, as husband of seven hundred wives, had learnt to measure his words on the delicate question of the age of womankind. From a more modern source we have, however, been given to know that woman, "lovely woman," has a chartered right to be inaccurate, if it so pleases her, in statements as regards her age. For have we not been informed on the best authority in the worldthat, we mean, of the lady who for some years past has kindly poured out our tea in the morning-that when an expectant cook writes herself down as thirty years old, she really means that she is on the shady side of forty?

"But," we meekly inquired, "how old are they really, when they call themselves forty?"

"Oh, they never do that," was the answer, "or if they do, it means any age between fifty and a hundred,"

We quite understood; for "forty" we must read "aged," and must handicap accordingly. We cannot for the moment recall whether sixty or seventy was Anthony Trollope's "Fixed Period" for retirement into his necropolis; but clearly thirty is the fixed period for self-respecting cooks and other domestic

servants.

In the absence of any incriminating evidence to the contrary, a slight inaccuracy as to dates may be held excusable, and, after all, curiosity on the part of a male being as to the number of years during which his fair vis-à-vis at the dinnertable may have graced the world with her presence is wholly impertinent and almost savours of sacrilege. Let the over - curious wight recall the fate of Peeping Tom, and the ignominy that pursued the intruder of the wrong sex who attempted to penetrate the mystery that shrouded the worship of Bona Dea.

"Women, gentlemen," said the enthusiastic Mr Snodgrass, "are the great props and comforts of our existence." The right-minded man will echo the Pickwickian's sentiments, and think of woman as possessing many of the attributes of Anacreon's cicala, as "honoured by mortals, loved by the gods, shrill-voiced, unaffected by age, untouched by pain, almost divine."

Let it be prefaced, then, that in our remarks about Anno Domini we shall in no way refer to the fair sex, whom we prefer to regard as enjoying an

absolute immunity from such a reproach.

But how does Anno Domini affect those of our own sex? In ways sundry and divers! Some of us accept the inevitable with a good grace, others again resentfully. Men we have met who, wishing to be old men long, have in demeanour and all outward semblance become old men so early in life that they would almost have us imagine that they have realised Nicodemus's suggestion, and were born into the world at a mature age. Others are so preternaturally juvenile in their tastes, habits, and conversation, that we are sorely tempted to believe that grey hair is covering an infantile brain. "In much wisdom," the Preacher tells us, "is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

If, as in all charity we will hope, the converse of these propositions holds good, then in what an elysium of their own creation must a fair proportion of our elderly neighbours have been living! It would be difficult to imagine that Angelo Cyrus Bantam, "a charming young man of not much more than fifty, whose features were contracted into a perpetual smile," had ever burnt the midnight oil in the pursuit of scientific discovery. "If," as a great thinker once said, "the wisest of our race often reserve the average stock of folly to be all expended upon some one flagrant absurdity," there are others who seem con

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Why, I do it again and again.' But we need not borrow instances of these apparent inconsistencies from the pages of fiction. In the history of our own country there have been many men in high places who have lived their lives and done their work before Anno Domini had got a fair grip of them. Others, again, whose opportunity has come at the eleventh hour, have shown qualities of statesmanship, or generalship, for which not even their most intimate friends would have given them credit. If, on the one hand, it is almost impossible to realise the fact that the younger Pitt was ever a "whining schoolboy," much less an infant at all, the marvellous vitality and the exuberant enthusiasm of a late eminent statesman would have seemed to preclude the idea that he was really and truly born when George III. was king, and was sent to school about the time that 'Maga' was short-coated.

But now, with all due deference to the false quantity, "Paullo minora canamus, or, in plain English, let us leave history

we

and fiction alone and see how far the presence of Anno Domini affects the comfort of ourselves, and of our friends and acquaintances. But whereas we shrink from inflicting upon the readers of 'Maga' a new series of Annals of an Uneventful Life, and acquit them of any desire to wade through a description of our personal relations with our cousins and our aunts, we will try to be as little egotistical as possible. So then of ourselves we will briefly say that if we were not exactly born either in the consulship of Plancus or before the battle of Waterloo, we plead guilty to baldness, unaccompanied, trust, by unseemly juvenility; and that while young enough to enjoy a walk after partridges or a cricket-match, we are old enough to feel unconscionably stiff in the evening afterwards, yet foolish enough to repeat the experiment on the following day if the chance is given to us. Disclaiming the idea that we may be stigmatised like Falstaff as a "Veteran Vice," a "Grey Iniquity," we still think that "an occasional jolly bout, if not carried to excess, improves society," and still feel that we, like other men, are "put into good humour by it," and that "when the good wine does its office, the song, the jest, the speech has a better effect"; and if on the following morning we wake with the suspicion of a headache, we will not ungratefully charge the same wholly to the account of Anno Domini.

Few of us, we fancy, regard

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