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transparent orb of many colored composite. Besides the wellknown rainbow colors, every blending of light known to the manufacturers of India and of France was there to be seen on one spot and in one glance of the eye.

Far out in the bay, where the plain sea-green recalled one to familiarity, the hundreds of cleanly kept fishing smacks standing to what must there have been a smart breeze, though here all was still as in Eden on the first evening, lent an interest to the picture, which made it simply and superbly perfect.

Moran reclined under the trifling shade of a young olive and asked Ada to be seated near him. "I have long wished you here," he said, "and for the sole purpose of telling you how very, very much I love and think of you, Miss Ada. This place I picked out when I first saw it as the spot where I would address my sweetheart, and after long waiting on my part, and much travel on hers, the hour and the woman have come," relieving his choked throat with a smile as he ran into this sudden transposition of Meg Merrilies. His smile rallied Ada into begging that he would talk about something else.

"I don't want you to make love to me-now." said the pretty face. "Wait till we get back to dear old Virginia and I'll give you a sweetheart," but his hand was already stroking her great mass of yellow hair just where it parted above the dark eyebrows as she uttered these words. The hair was really carefully combed and the large Lyons hat which lay in her lap had not in leaving the head released more than one stray fillet, but this he cunningly contrived to manipulate as if it were guilty of a gross rebellion against the coiffure, and the precious time thus gained served to rally his beating heart to a fresh charge and in the end to imperial victory.

"I am a sad dog, as I very well know," he went on, "but for all that there is something good in me which the world has need of, and you better than any one else can bring it out, and I pray you do it." His tone was quite tender now, and his finely shaped white hand had left the bending head to stroke with a delicate touch the rising bloom of her cheek.

There was a proud sense of conquest beginning to steal through every fibre of his being, as his eyes devoured the folds of her throat and the shapely stoop of her shoulder weighed over by the mass of hair which was now fallen in real disorder. He essayed to move her as yet yielding cheek nearer to his hot lips which hungered for some signal to send to the heart; but without wholly withdrawing herself she said, speaking for the first time with any great emotion, but with decided firmness, "Not now, not now! That may be after awhile but not now!" Though a little abashed, his respect became the greater for her self-command as he saw how well guarded were the outworks of her suspicious pride. "Say but only this then," he continued, can you in any degree return my love for you? I will give you any time in which to make answer."

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She was wholly free from his slightest touch now, and quite herself as she said almost soliloquizing, "I loved you before I ever saw you, when I heard Cornelia talk about you as her sweetheart at our boarding-school. I am prouder now than ever of you, and am perfectly willing to trust you with my life, but let us talk of this again. I am nervous now, and it is time brother Robert and the guide were back. Please don't look as if anything had happened. I will go straight on down to the station house," she added as she rose and moved in that direction, "and will await your own and Robert's coming in the sitting-room. See me up this bank," she said, giving him a hand, "I will not be afraid of brigands till you join me," and in this remark her natural self came back, but there was a gladder light in her eyes than had ever been there before, for the great fountain of womanly feeling had been stirred for the first time to its depth, and she divined in part her capacity for love.

On that evening's train to Naples he manoeuvred to have Ada sit beside her brother, while in the same compartment, but facing the guide, he talked very interestedly of what he had missed by not going to see the débris, which he doubted not would yield

when sifted greater marvels than anything yet taken from the buried city.

There was a happy glow about him all the evening, very noticeable to Mrs. Manso, when he paid his usual call after the drive, and his bed-time prayer was said with as pure and cleansed a heart as ever throbbed in the breast of his sainted dead mother.

The next day's train took the Cleburnes to Rome, and ere Moran could join them in the eternal city, Mr. Robert was cabled to come home on very pressing business.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE EUROPEAN EPISODE ENDS.

Wherefore

This love business of Moran's has tangled us. should time and space be given to the emotions, which are wholly personal to a young man's heart? It is a trifling subject at best, this thing of love. Millions indulge in it. It wrecks those lives which, disappointed in winning the crown of their chase, are unable to see anything beyond. There is to all of us a certain point where we become tired, where we pray the load may drop from us, where we become conscious of the vast gap which lies between our ambitions and our accomplishments.

There is enough of this novel written. It is time the curtain was rung down, the lights snuffed and these poor puppets of ours boxed and labelled for the use of some worse showmen than ourself who will follow us. We mean the critics. They can always work on a small stock of raw material. Happy, happy men! How they straddle this little earth of ours, and yell for a new measurement of its diameter. Mocking birds are they, who listen to all the sounds given by the groves, and tu-whit and tu-whoo them. Solemn owls, some of them, who

if they were a mind to tell could have bettered this and saved a catastrophe there, and made on the whole a really artistic de

nouement.

I remember them and agree with them, that there is enough of this story written. My Johnson has not survived the sale of Thrale's brewery, the death of Savage, the alterations in Grub street, the passing away of "dear Goldy," but it is meet that this Boswell should suppress him now and here. The 19th is not a century to be in love with Boswells.

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Give us a fresh dip, is the constant cry. 'Rowland, the Rowdy," and the "Bloody Barber of the Bowery," savor best of rushing life, and there is no time on railroad trains making forty miles an hour for a pork packer who is crazy for a telegram at the next station, giving a quotation in guts, to read your notions as to who was to blame ten years ago for the failure of reconstruction.

Count in Hayes and go on with the progress of this blessed country. There is money to be made West, and bless your soul there is no time to discuss the South and its pleas.

What is the use of a Bourbon, Fate says, if it be not to smite hip and thigh, the progeny of the pork packers. A pheasant breeder is tolerated in so good a country as England-a country blessed with copper and coal, tin and iron, epsom salts and the gulf stream; but who can abide the rule of manure-makers? who will submit to a slavery, imposed not by strength, but by a low ten cent cunning? Not Moran, at least, who, at length awakening from a long fool's dream of Yankeeizing his country in order to prove himself a good Union man, now sees his errors and repents them like a man.

Oh this parchment business of Government, and traffic in constitutions, what a shekel-yielding farce it is to the players! How the new feudal lords of Erie and Harlem, Lake Shore, and the Pennsylvania, the various Pacifics and Air Lines innumerable, laugh at the travesty, while they fashion a new act of legislation to overturn an old court decision. Kind, gentle, sweet fools, ye people, continue to vote and to worship! Who shall prevent you? The negroes? They don't know how. The

Scandinavian and the chap from Hesse Darmstadt whose granddaddy Washington woke up too soon one morning at Trenton, and whose self-imposed slavery the proud Pitt put to the world in such words of shame as blister now that a century has gone, are they to negative your wishes? God forbid that the krauteater should refuse the money of the Puritan or fail to accord him homage.

But the Bourbon, what of him? He is at last vindicated by results. Seward and Chase, and Sumner and Stanton, and poor overly advertised Greeley, are gone, and their works do not live after them. They and their fellows have made a more pitiable show in the job of humbling, than even Bismarck did in his loud-voiced proclamations over the French Nineveh. But for you, loyal lovers of the principles which moved the first Rebellion here, and through this country, France; and through France, the world;—what words are good enough to say in print your praises to the children now learning to read? That you are brave? The world knows that lesson by heart. It is written in the battle mounds of half a continent.

That you are wise? Who else could hold as you have done a race in subjection, planted originally in your midst for purposes of "gayneful pillage," and when the gain ceased were excited to throat-cutting by the children of the first sellers-children who sing "John Brown's body " as a National anthem.

To this degree of rebellion had one thoroughly reconstructed Southern white youth in the enjoyment of office, and greatly petted by all loyal men, arrived in January, 1875.

He had feared such a visitation of conscience would overtake him whenever he had allowed himself to discuss politics, even casually, with a Southern woman; but his studied avoidance of such society for years past had put off the day of self-reckoning.

But Grant's dispersion of the Louisiana Legislature in the month and year of January, 1875, changed Saul to Paul. There could be no further mincing of matters. It was habeas corpus and English history against a little office and his hatred towards some local Democratic politicians.

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