I not do as much for Frank's? I will. I'll find him, if I search the house, — and tell him all, though I never dare to look him in the face again, and Aunt Pen sends me home to-morrow."

Full of zeal and courage, Debby caught up her hat and ran down the steps, but, as she saw Frank Evan coming up the path, a sudden panic fell upon her, and she could only stand mutely waiting his approach.

It is asserted that Love is blind; and on the strength of that popular delusion novel heroes and heroines go blundering through three volumes of despair with the plain truth directly under their absurd noses: but in real life this theory is not supported; for to a living man the countenance of a loving woman is more eloquent than any language, more trustworthy than a world of proverbs, more beautiful than the sweetest lovelay ever sung.

Frank looked at Debby, and “all her heart stood up in her eyes," as she stretched her hands to him, though her lips only whispered very low,

"Forgive me, and let me say the 'Yes' I should have said so long ago."

Had she required any assurance of her lover's truth, or any reward for her own, she would have found it in the change that dawned so swiftly in his face, smoothing the lines upon his forehead, lighting the gloom of his eye, stirring his firm lips with a sudden tremor, and making his touch as soft as it was strong. For a moment both stood very still, while Debby's tears streamed down like summer rain; then Frank drew her into the green shadow of the grove, and its peace soothed her like a mother's voice, till she looked up smiling with a shy delight her glance had never known before. The slant sunbeams dropped a benediction on their heads, the robins peeped, and the cedars whispered, but no rumor of what further passed ever went beyond the precincts of the wood; for such hours are sacred,

and Nature guards the first blossoms of a human love as tenderly as she nurses May-flowers underneath the leaves.

Mrs. Carroll had retired to her bed with a nervous headache, leaving Debby to the watch and ward of friendly Mrs. Earle, who performed her office finely by letting her charge entirely alone. In her dreams Aunt Pen was just imbibing a copious draught of Champagne at the wedding-breakfast of her niece, "Mrs. Joseph Leavenworth," when she was roused by the bride elect, who passed through the room with a lamp and a shawl in her hand.

"What time is it, and where are you going, dear?" she asked, dozily wondering if the carriage for the wedding-tour was at the door so soon.

"It's only nine, and I am going for a sail, Aunt Pen."

As Debby spoke, the light flashed full into her face, and a sudden thought into Mrs. Carroll's mind. She rose up from her pillow, looking as stately in her nightcap as Maria Theresa is said to have done in like unassuming head-gear.

"Something has happened, Dora! What have you done? What have you said? I insist upon knowing immediately," she demanded, with somewhat startling brevity.

"I have said 'No' to Mr. Leavenworth and 'Yes' to Mr. Evan; and I should like to go home to-morrow, if you please," was the equally concise reply.

Mrs. Carroll fell flat in her bed, and lay there stiff and rigid as Morlena Kenwigs. Debby gently drew the curtains, and stole away, leaving Aunt Pen's wrath to effervesce before morning.

The moon was hanging luminous and large on the horizon's edge, sending shafts of light before her till the melancholy ocean seemed to smile, and along that shining pathway happy Debby and her lover floated into that new world where all things seem divine.

WILL any of our artists ever give us, on canvas, a good, rattling, saucy shower? There is room in it for a rare handling of the brush :— the vague, indistinguishable line of hills, (as I see them today,) the wild scud of gray, with fine gray lines, slanted by the wind, and trending eagerly downward, -the swift, petulant dash into the little pools of the highway, making fairy bubbles that break as soon as they form, the land smoking with excess of moisture,—and the pelted leaves all wincing and shining and adrip.

-

I know no painter who has so well succeeded in putting a wet sky into his pictures as Turner; and in this I judge him by the literal chiaroscuro of engraving. In proof of it, I take down from my shelf his "Rivers of France": a book over which I have spent a great many pleasant hours, and idle ones too, if it be idle to travel leagues at the turning of a page, and to see hill-sides spotty with vineyards, and great bridges wallowing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of Honfleur putting to sea. There are skies, as I said, in some of these pictures which make a man instinctively think of his umbrella, or of his distance from home: no actual rain-drift stretching from them, but such unmistakable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little parallel wisps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a provident farmer order every scythe out of the field.

In the "Chair of Gargantua," on which my eye falls, as I turn over the pages, an actual thunder-storm is breaking. The scene is somewhere upon the Lower Seine. From the middle of the left of the picture the lofty river-bank stretches far across, forming all the background; its extreme distance hidden by a bold thrust of the right bank, which juts into the picture just far enough to shelter a

white village, which lies gleaming upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground lies the river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming down the stream. Over the left spur of the bank, and over the meeting of the banks, it broods black as night. Through a little rift there is a glimpse of serene sky, from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges and angles of a few cliffs upon the farther shore. All the rest is heavily shadowed. The edges of the coming tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know that a fierce wind is driving the black billows on; yet all the water under the lee of the shores is as tranquil as a dream; a white sail, near to the white village, hangs slouchingly to the mast: but in the foreground the tempest has already caught the water; a tall lugger is scudding and careening under it as if mad; the crews of three fishermen's boats, that toss on the vexed water, are making a confused rush to shorten sail, and you may almost fancy that you hear their outcries sweeping down the wind. In the middle scene, a little steamer is floating tranquilly on water which is yet calm; and a column of smoke piling up from its tall chimney rises for a space placidly enough, until the wind catches and whisks it before the storm. I would wager ten to one, upon the mere proof in the picture, that the fishermen and the washerwomen in the foreground will be drenched within an hour.

From the Upper Loire it is easy to slip into the branching valleys which sidle away from it far down into the country of the Auvergne. Turner does not go there, indeed; the more 's the pity; but I do, since it is the most attractive region rurally (Brittany perhaps excepted) in all France. The valleys are green, the brooks are frequent, the rivers are tortuous, the mountains are high, and luxuriant walnut-trees embower the roads. It was near to Moulins, on the way hither, through the pleasant Bourbonnois, that Tristram Shandy met with the poor, half-crazed Maria, piping her evening service to the Virgin.

And at that thought I must do no less than pull down my "Tristram Shandy," (on which the dust of years has accumulated,) and read again that tender story of the lorn maiden, with her attendant goat, and her hair caught up in a silken fillet, and her shepherd's pipe, from which she pours out a low, plaintive wail upon the evening air.

It is not a little singular that a British author should have supplied the only Arcadian resident of all this Arcadian region. The Abbé Delille was, indeed, born hereabout, within sight of the bold Puy de Dome, and within marketing-distance of the beautiful Clermont. But there is little that is Arcadian, in freshness very or simplicity, in either the "Gardens" or the other verse of Delille.

Out of his own mouth (the little greenbacked book, my boy) I will condemn him :

"Ce n'est plus cette simple et rustique déesse Qui suit ses vieilles lois; c'est une enchanteresse

Qui, la baguette en main, par des hardis tra

vaux

Fait naître des aspects et des trésors nou

veaux,

Compose un sol plus riche et des races plus belles,

Fertilise les monts, dompte les rocs rebelles."

The baguette of Delille is no shepherd's crook; it has more the fashion of a drumstick, baguette de tambour.

If I follow on southward to Provence,

It is smooth reading, and is attributed to Bertrand de Born,* who lived in the time when even the lion-hearted King Richard turned his brawny fingers to the luting of a song. Let us listen:

"The beautiful spring delights me well,

When flowers and leaves are growing; And it pleases my heart to hear the swell Of the birds' sweet chorus flowing

In the echoing wood;

And I love to see, all scattered around,
Pavilions and tents on the martial ground;

And my spirit finds it good
To see, on the level plains beyond,
Gay knights and steeds caparisoned."

And tell the lord of 'Yes and No'
That peace already too long hath been!"

I am on my way to Italy, (it may as well be confessed,) where I had fully intended to open my rainy day's work; but Turner has kept me, and then Auvergne, and then the brisk battle-song of a Troubadour.

When I was upon the Cajano farm of Lorenzo the Magnificent, during my last "spell of wet," it was uncourteous not to refer to the pleasant commemorative poem of" Ambra," which Lorenzo himself wrote, and which, whatever may be said against the conception and conduct of it, shows in its opening stanzas that the great Medici was as appreciative of rural images fir-boughs with loaded snows, thick cypresses in which late birds lurked, sharp-leaved junipers, and sturdy pines fighting the wind- -as ever he had been of antique jewels, or of the rhythm of such as Politiano. And if I have spok

en slightingly of this latter poet, it was only in contrast with Virgil, and in view of his strained Latinity. When he is himself, and wraps his fancies only in his own sparkling Tuscan, we forget his classic frigidities, and his quarrels with Madonna Clarice, and are willing to confess that no

⚫ I cannot forbear taking a bit of margin to print the closing stanzas of the original, which carry the clash of sabres in their very sound.

"Ie us dic que tan no m' a sabor

Manjars ni beure ni dormir,
Cum a quant aug cridar: A lor!
D' ambas las partz; et aug agnir
Cavals voitz per l'ombratge,
Et aug cridar: Aidatz! Aidatz!
E vei cazer per los fossatz

Paucs e grans per l' erbatge,
E vei los mortz que pels costatz
An los tronsons outre passatz.

pen of his time was dipped with such a relishing gusto into the colors of the hyacinths and trembling pansies, and into all the blandishments of a gushing and wanton spring.*

But classical affectation was the fash

ion of that day. A certain Bolognese noble, Berò by name, wrote ten Latin books on rural affairs: Tiraboschi says he never saw them; neither have I. Another scholar, Pietro da Barga, who astonished his teachers by his wonderful proficiency at the age of twelve, and who was afterward guest of the French ambassador in Venice, wrote a poem on rural matters, to which, with an exaggerated classicism, he gave the Greek name of " Cynegeticon"; and about the same time Giuseppe Voltolina composed three books on kitchenout of sympathy with their topics: I gardening. I name these writers only it would involve a long journey and would not advise the reading of them: scrupulous search to find them, through I know not what out-of-the-way libraries; and if found, no essentially new facts or theories could be counted on which are not covered by the treatise of Crescenzi. The Pisans or Venetians may possibly have introduced a few new plants from the East; the example of the Medici may have suggested some improvements in the arrangement of forcing - houses, or the outlay of villas; but in all that regarded general husbandry, Crescenzi was still the man.

I linger about this period, and the writers of this time, because I snuff here and there among them the perfume of a country bouquet, which carries the odor of the fields with it, and transports me to the "empurpled hill-sides" of Tuscany. Shall I name Sannazaro, with his " Arcadia"?. a dead book now, or " Amyntas," who, before he is tall enough to steal apples from the lowest boughs, (so sings Tasso,) plunges head and ears in love with Sylvia, the fine daughter of Montano, who has a store of cattle, "richissimo d'armenti"?

* See Wm. Parr Greswell's Memoirs of Politiano, with translations.