declining till the cases were not more than seven or eight a-day, the last reports showed between forty and fifty. Many houses are tenantless, and the keys deposited at the police by the Zouaves or gendarmes till some one be found to substantiate a claim to the property of the dead. No shops are open, no business transacted; an ominous silence reigns over the once cheerful town. It used to seem like entering into new life when the traveller's carriage rattled in at the Porta Romana, and he came upon the busy existence and active cheerful doings of the season of villeggiatura in Albano. It seems now but a dreary continuation of the long road over the desolate Campagna which leads up to it from Rome.

"G. M.

"P.S.-I have not alluded to one or two points which seem inevitable to such visitations: that, for instance, of the vultures which hover about the place, lying in wait for prey, for they were not worse in Albano than in other places under the ban of Providence. Many medical men of intelligence have been there engaged in the care of patients, but few, indeed, who have taken up the cause con amore. On the contrary, they do harm by their cowardice. Looking at the patient as if through a telescope, they stretch out their fingers, having already stretched out their bodies to the utmost, barely venturing to touch the pulse of the sufferer. I owe it to truth to mention that the priests have signalised themselves in watching to the last by many a bedside."

Nothing can add to the effect of such a simple and heartrending tale. Some of the details, especially one of those just touched on in the postscript, appal the reader beyond all words. The wild processions with their flickering torches and barefooted penitents winding along the sharp and painful causeway the kneeling crowds at the

dim shrines with those cries for mercy, which all who know that people will be able to realise to themselves, have still a pathos of helpless terror in them which is human. But the horror of the wilder bands that followed, most dreadful of all the vicissitudes of insane panic-the revellers who, like the drunken sailors in a lost ship, would at least drown their own consciousness of misery—is scarcely less awful than the dread suggestion of the vultures about the place. The sight of those foul birds alone, the frightful hint to the imagination given by their presence, the dreadful calm of the statement that they were "no worse there than in other places," makes the mind sick with horror. Such was the scene enacted in the month just past, in one of the fairest of earthly landscapes, a spot associated with everything that is bright and pleasant to so many. The villeggiatura of 1867 will long be remembered in the little city, and with terrible reason. Since then the scourge has abated-" ceased entirely," say the last accountsbut leaving what gaps, what terrors, what recollections behind it! The plague in London, and the plague in Milan, and the plague in Florence, have all been described to us in the words of Genius; but a hand unpractised is capable of setting beside them an almost equally impressive picture, truth in its intense reality having a force above art.

The fate of Cardinal Altieri has, as is natural, been received by some with exaggerated plaudits and lamentations, by others with the usual revulsion of cynicism and opposition to what other people say. Our sympathetic and liberalminded press, after recording his heroism and martyrdom one day, declares the next that it must be an extraordinary thing for a bishop to do his duty, or his act would not be regarded as anything out of the way. But the fact is that, except parish doctors and parish priests

now and then, who do the deed very quietly without knowing it, but few people nowadays die for the sake of their fellow-creatures; and it is still true that greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend. He might have done it moderately, taken his dinner, and put on his shoes, say our comfortable critics. But then, as it happened, this bishop was one of the same race as those who shrieked Grazia at the dimlylighted shrines, and danced wildly through the lurid streets when the bonfires blazed at the street-corners, and the carts went by with the dead. Moderation had no existence in the region or the moment, as indeed it has not in these quarters at any moment. The Italian prelate perhaps was not sorry, in a time so out of joint, to prove by the sacrifice of his own life that the life and soul of old still existed in the Church of Carlo Borromeo and Francis Xavier. In such crises, amid such calamities, it is rarely, very rarely, the priest who fails, and most rarely of all the Catholic priest, who, according to his own belief, carries salvation to his penitent in his sacred pyx. A Protestant clergyman has a less urgent impulsion to the deathbed of the dying, but still Protestant clergymen seldom fail. It is the doctors and the priests who do it with us. It was the priests and the soldiers at Albano. Everybody, or almost everybody, of the educated as well as uneducated classes, yielded to the panic. Nobles, gentlefolks, artisans, all rushed forth in an indiscriminate crowdlast height of human cowardice and weakness. The healers of men's bodies fled too, carrying with them all hope of human help, and the strongest incentive to courage and exertion. But the poor priests stood fast, and even the poor monks, the burly Franciscans, who lounge in the sun about the convent walls, and the proud scarlet cardinal, who never moves without lackeys behind him. The bishop's

bare feet, we think ourselves, would do little to appease the wrath of God;" but what is done according to a man's light and character and nation, especially when sealed by the sacrifice of his life, is not an offering to be sneered at. And the soldiers did not bear a high character about. There are men among them who wear our Crimean medal, and a finer brogue was never heard than might be heard about the slopes of Tusculum, when the reckless, picturesque band of Free Lances were quartered thereabouts. But when trouble came the lawless rose to the occasion. If the Pope's cause is sinking (which we doubt) it was an unhoped-for piece of good fortune on his part to be thus enriched by the sacrifice of Cardinal Altieri, and the devotion of the Zouave troop.

It is hard to believe that such a scene can have happened in our own day-that only yesterday, so to speak, little more than a month ago, those bonfires were flaming about the streets, those tapers burning in the death-chambers, those wild cries rending the air, those vultures hovering over the plaguestricken town. Other places, many in our own country, have been visited with similar calamity; but rarely, thank Heaven, does similar wild outburst of human selfishness and terror fall into the common placid tenor of modern life. Honour, meanwhile, to those who have kept their post

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Ir was the beginning of September, as we have said, and the course of individual history slid aside as it were for the moment, and lost itself in the general web. Brownlows became full of people-friends of Jack's, friends of Mr Brownlow, even friends of Sara-for ladies came of course to break the monotony of the shooting-party-and in the press of occupation personal matters had to be put aside. Mr Brownlow himself almost forgot, except by moments when the thought came upon him with a certain thrill of excitement, that the six weeks were gliding noiselessly on, and that soon his deliverance would come. As for Sara, she did not forget the agitating little scene in which she had been only a passive actor, but which had woven a kind of subtle link between her and the man who had spoken to her in the voice of real passion. The sound of it had scared and perplexed her at first, and it had roused her to a sense of the real difference, as well as the real affinities, between them; but whatever she might feel, the fact remained that there was a link between thema link which she could no more break than the Queen could a something that defied all denial or contradiction. She might never see him again, but -he loved her. When a girl is fancy-free, there is no greater charm; and Sara was, or had been, entirely fancy-free, and was more liable than most girls to this attraction. When the people around her were stupid or tiresome, as to be sure the best of people are sometimes, her thoughts would make a sudden gleam like lightning upon the man who had said he would

never see her face again. Perhaps he might have proved tiresome too, had he gone out in the morning with his gun, and come home tired to dinner; but he was absent; and there are times when the absent have the best of it, notwithstanding all proverbs. She was much occupied, and by times sufficiently well amused at home, and did not feel it in the least necessary to summon Powys to her side; but still the thought of him came in now and then, and gave an additional zest to her other luxuries. It was a supreme odour and incense offered up to her, as he had thought it would be-a flower which she set her pretty foot upon, and the fragrance of which came up poignant and sweet to her delicate nostril. If anybody had said as much to Sara it would have roused her almost to fury; but still such were the facts of the case.

Jack, for his part, was less excusable if he was negligent; and he was rather negligent just then, in the first fervour of the partridges, it must be allowed-not that he cared a straw for the ladies of the party, and their accomplishments, and their pretty dresses, and their wiles, as poor Pamela believed in her heart. Apart from Pamela Jack was a stoic, and wasted not a thought on womankind; but when a man is shooting all day, and is surrounded by a party of fellows who have to be dined and entertained in the evening, and is, besides, quite confident in his mind that the little maiden who awaits him has no other seductive voice to whisper in her ear, he may be pardoned for a little carelessness or unpunctuality at least Jack thought he ought to be pardoned,

which comes very much to the same thing. Thus the partridges, if they did not affect the affairs of state, as do their Highland brethren the grouse, at least had an influence upon the affairs of Brownlows, and put a stop, as it were, to the undivided action of its private history for the time.

It was during this interval that the carrier's cart once more deposited a passenger on the Brownlows road. She did not get down at the gate, which, she already knew, was a step calculated to bring upon her the eyes of the population, but was set down at a little distance, and came in noiselessly, as became her mission. It was a September afternoon, close and sultry. The sky was a whitish blue, pale with the blaze that penetrated and filled it. The trees looked parched and dusty where they overhung the road. The whole landscape round Brownlows beyond the line of these dusty trees was yellow with stubble, for the land was rich, and there had been a heavy crop. The fields were reaped, and the kindly fruits of earth gathered in, and there seemed no particular need for all that blaze of sunshine. But the sun blazed all the same, and the pedestrian stole slowly on, casting a long oblique shadow across the road. Everything was sleepy and still. Old Betty's door and windows were open, but the heat was so great as to quench even curiosity; or perhaps it was only that the stranger's step was very stealthy, and until it suddenly fell upon a treacherous knot of gravel, which dispersed under her weight and made a noise, had given no sign of its approach. Betty came languidly to her door when she heard this sound, but she went in again and dropped back into her doze upon her big chair when she saw it was but the slow and toiling figure of a poor woman, no way attractive to curiosity. "Some poor body a-going to Dewsbury," she said to herself; and thus Nancy stole on unnoticed.

The blind was down in the parlour window of Mrs Swayne's neighbour, and her door closed, and Mrs Swayne herself was out of the way for the moment, seeing to the boiling of the afternoon kettle. Nancy crept in, passing like a vision across Mrs Preston's open window. Her step made no appreciable sound even in the sleepy stillness of the house, and the sole preface they had to her appearance in the parlour was a shadow of something black which crossed the light, and the softest visionary tap at the door. Then the old woman stood suddenly before the mother and the daughter, who were sitting together dull enough. Mrs Preston was still poorly, and disturbed in her mind. And as for Pamela, poor child, it was a trying moment for her. As from a watch-tower, she could see what was going on at Brownlows, and knew that they were amusing themselves, and had all kinds of pleasant parties, in which Jack, who was hers and no other woman's, took the chief part; and that amid all these diversions he had no time to come to see her though she bad the only right to him, and that other girls were by, better born, better mannered, better dressed, and more charming than her simple self. Would it be his fault if he were fickle? How could he help being fickle with attractions so much greater around him? This was how Pamela was thinking as she sat by the sofa on which her mother lay. It was not weather for much exertion, and in the peculiar position of affairs, it was painful for these two to run the risk of meeting anybody from Brownlows; therefore they did not go out except furtively now and then at night, and sat all day in the house, and brooded, and were not very cheerful. Every laugh she heard sounding down the avenue, every carriage that drove out of or into the gates, every stray bit of gossip about the doings at the great house, and the luncheon parties at the

cover-side, and the new arrivals, sounded to poor little Pamela like an injury. She had meant to be so happy, and she was not happy. Only the sound of the guns was a little comfort to her. To be sure when he was shooting he was still amusing himself away from her; but at the same time he was not near the fatal beauties whom every evening Pamela felt in her heart he must be talking to, and smil ing upon, and growing bewitched by. Such was the tenor of her thoughts as she sat by the sofa working, when old Nancy came in so suddenly at the door.

Pamela sprang up from her seat. Her nerves were out of order, and even her temper, poor child! and all her delicate organisation set on edge. "It is her again! and oh, what do you want?" said Pamela, with a little shriek. As for Mrs Preston, she too sat bolt upright on the sofa, and started, not without a certain fright, at the sudden apparition. 'Nancy Christian!" she said, clasping her hands together" Nancy Christian! Is this you?"

66

Yes, it's me," said Nancy; "I said I would come, and here I am, and I've a deal to say. If you don't mind, I'll take a chair, for it's a long way walking in this heat, all the way from Masterton." This she said without a blush, though she had been set down not fifty yards off from the carrier's cart.

"Sit down," said Mrs Preston, anxiously, herself rising from the sofa. "It is not often I lie down," (though this was almost as much a fiction as Nancy's), "but the heat gets the better of one. I remember your name as long as I remember anything; I always hoped you would come back. Pamela, if there is anything that Nancy would like after her long walk

"A cup of tea is all as I care for," said Nancy. "It's a many years since we've met, and you've changed, ma'am," she added, with a cordiality that was warmer than

her sincerity; "but I could allays see as it was you."

"I have reason to be changed," said Mrs Preston. "I was young when you saw me last, and now I'm an old woman. I've had many troubles. I've had a hard fight with the world, and I've lost all my children but this one. She's a good child, but she can't stand in the place of all that I've lost And oh, Nancy Christian, you're a woman that can tell me about my poor old mother. Many a thought I have had of her, and often often it seemed a judgment that my children should be taken from me. If you could but tell me she forgave me before she died!"

The

Nancy made no direct answer to this appeal, but she looked at Pamela, and then at her mother, with a significant gesture. two old women had their world to go back into of which the young creature knew nothing, and where there were many things which might not bear her inspection; while she, on the other hand, was absorbed in her own new world, and scarcely heard or noticed what they were saying. She stood between them in her youth, unaware of the look they exchanged, unaware that she was in the way of their confidences-thinking, in fact, nothing of much importance in the world except what might be going on in the great house over the way.

Pamela," said Mrs Preston, "go and see about the tea, and run out to the garden, dear, and get a breath of air; for I have a deal to ask, and Nancy has a deal to tell me; and there will be no one passing at this time of the day."

"If they were all passing it would not matter to me," said Pamela, and she sighed, and put down her languid work, and went away to make the tea. But she did not go out to the garden; though she said it did not matter, it did matter mightily. She went up-stairs to the window and sat down behind the curtain, and fixed her hungry