actual life, as in the novels, is taken up with the whim called love and the penny-dip or lottery called matrimony. She had, she realized, been talking nearly all that day of little else than men since she set out for Schawfield in the morning; there seemed to be something in the air to bring the subject ever uppermost.

"What time do you expect your mistress in the morning?" asked Mrs. Powrie when they had the room to themselves again, and the other reddened, with a spitfire sparkle of the eyes.

"Mistress!" she repeated, 'I don't have any; I'm Miss Skene's companion."

"I hope she pays you decently forfor your company," retorted Mrs. Powrie dryly, clearing her throat. "It used to be always 'my maid' and 'my lady' in my days, and I'm afraid, at my age, I'll never learn the difference."

"There's a great deal of difference, all the same," said Miss Colquhoun, "and I'm a Radical-right down Radical! I learned it from my father, and a poem I got at school, called Goldsmith's 'Deserted Vilage.' And a bit from Burns--"

"Yon dreadful man! I canna stand him! What a carry-on!" interjected Mrs. Powrie.

"A maid sells herself, body and soul, for thirty pounds a-year or less to a mistress who can bully her; I have too much temper and conceit of myself for that; I condescend to be Miss Skene's companion-it's an art; and reserve the right to be to be cheeky," and she smiled delightfully, the spitfire quenched in a flood of humorous selfsatisfaction. "I'm not an angel, but I'm just as good a woman as herself. I don't know French, like her, but she doesn't know how to cut a bodice; if I'm not so expensively dressed I'm at least as healthy and a good deal happier. Happy! I'm as happy as the

day's long! And as outspoken as a sparrow!"

"Dear! dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Powrie, "it's not in the housekeeper's room you should be at all, but in the diningroom."

"No, thank you!" retorted Miss Colquhoun with emphasis. "I never like to be in any company where my presence would make it ill at ease. I was always one who liked a congenial air, and I never could sit to be patronized and hold my tongue."

"You would never make Sir Andrew ill at ease," said Mrs. Powrie, "though you might make Miss Amelia; he takes folks as he takes his meat-the first that comes along, and an appetite for anything that's wholesome."

"Why, that's just me!" cried Miss Colquhoun, and then she qualified it. "Unless they happen to be downright fools!"

"That's where you're more particular than Sir Andrew! There's not many fools he can't put up with for a little-only the very vicious. He thought the world of my poor Peter. 'If there were no fools,' he says, 'how would wise men get a living?' There's something in it, Miss-What did you say, now, your first name was?"

"I didn't say," replied the other with a smile. "But it's-Penelope," and she blushed.

"Penelope," repeated Mrs. Powrie, in a tone surprised and almost disapproving. "Tuts! what a pity! It'sit's so foreign! Give me a plain Scotch name like Kate or Margaret; I'm Agnes myself. But Penelope!-what in the world did they give you a name like that for?"

"You may well ask! My father got it in a book; he's a clergyman." "Oh, ho! Indeed!" said Mrs. Powrie, with a new respectful tone, "I didn't know. The very best young ladies are so independent nowadays. I had a girl below me a year ago who

could play a lot of tunes on the piano. I'm sure it's greatly to your credit, Miss Colquhoun. A daughter of the manse!"

"Penelope," corrected Miss Grace Skene's companion. "Just let it be Penelope, if you don't mind, or simply Pen. The pen, you know, is mightier than the sword: that's father's joke. I can't help being a minister's daughter. I wish to heaven I wasn't. Far too much is expected for the stipend. I'm sorry I mentioned it. Say nothing about the manse. After all, it was a tiny one-United Presbyterian. And I quite agree with you-Penelope is ridiculous. A girl in my position might as well be called Cleopatra. Even Miss Skene thought it was presumptuous when she heard it first: I saw it in her face."

"I hope you're comfortable with your -with Miss Skene," said Miss Powrie. "Some of those madams are pernicketty.

"Oh, she's as pernicketty as most, and as short in the temper as myself. That's how we get on so well-for I'm pernicketty in many ways. We understand each other; that's one blessing. I couldn't put up with her for a single day if she did not make allowances, as she expects me to make for her. I'm older than she is, and I hope I'm every bit as sensible."

"If ever a girl should have a man of her own, it's you!" said Mrs. Powrie, genuinely admiring.

"There we are! Back to the men again!" exclaimed Penelope impatiently. "I'm sick of the subject. Let us talk of rocks or crochet-patterns, hens or ducks or dogs."

Mrs. Powrie winced. "Not dogs!" she entreated. "Don't mention dogs to me: I canna abide the wretches."

"At least they're better than men, for they never contradict you," said Penelope.

"My man never contradicted me: he

just paid no attention. It's worse."

"I can't stand contradiction myself, and yet, do you know, I love it," confessed Penelope, in the very spirit of the thing itself. "The man who drove me here to-night, I quite forgot to tell you, he was the most contrary overbearing man I ever met. It was not exactly in his words, but in his manner. He spoke to me as if I were a silly school-girl. You know how you feel when you think there's someone laughing up their sleeve at you, and still with a sober face and quite respectful."

"If Sir Andrew had a wiselike sense of what's becoming to a gentleman of his estate," said Mrs. Powrie impatiently, "he would have a carriage of his own and not depend on Mrs. Nish's shandry-dan. Who was the man who drove you?"

"Tom Dunn," replied Penelope, and the housekeper seemed surprised.

"Poh!" she exclaimed. "Tam Dunn! If he had the impudence to contradict you"

"But it wasn't impudence," Penelope corrected her, more eagerly, as it seemed, than there was any need for. "He was really very nice about it; and he knows his Shorter Catechism."

"I'm surprised to hear it! I would have thought he was further on in the book of comic songs than in the Catechism; and I doubt he has been drinking. For ordinar', Tam Dunn's a man in mortal fear of women since the shoemaker's daughter nearly had him. I thought it was a curious thing he should drive away and leave you standing there without so much as offering to carry in your baggage, for he knows he's always sure of some refreshment. What set you on the Shorter Catechism? It's a long time till the Fast." "A question of predestination," said Penelope,-"free will, rather; it's a thing he seemed to have considered."

"I was sure of it! Drink!" said Mrs.

Powrie with conviction. "When the men hereabouts have more than's good for them, they start to argy-bargy on the fundamentals. Sir Andrew laughs at them."

"Not-not at the fundamentals?" said the minister's daughter, somewhat shocked.

"No, but at their argument about them. I think he has as much respect for the fundamentals as Dr. Cleghorn has, if they could only agree on what they are. It's one of the things I was always willing to leave the men to settle. A silly-like thing for Mrs. Nish to send a man deboshed to drive you on a night like this!"

"But there was nothing wrong with the man, my dear Mrs. Powrie," Penelope assured her, showing signs that the suggestion was displeasing to her. "He behaved like a perfect gentleman: indeed I am surprised that such a man should be driving horses."

"Tam Dunn!" said Mrs. Powrie, shaking her head incredulously. “Don't tell me! It's easily seen it was in the dark you saw him.

"You think there isn't much difference between a gentleman and a postboy in the dark?” inquired Penelope.

"Nobody would think of such a thing except Sir Andrew," answered Mrs. Powrie. "All men are alike when swimming, and in their mothers' laps.' he says to Miss Amelia. I wish myself they were all like Captain—all like Sir Andrew. He never bothers his head about original sin, predestination, or effectual calling. Still, Dr. Cleghorn says there's not a truer Christian in the parish. He's droll-I admit he's a little droll. There was aye a queer bit in the family. "There's daft folk, there's wise folk, and there's Schaws,' is a saying hereabout. It doesn't mean half-and-between, remember, but that the Schaws always went their own gait, and had no guile."

The housekeper was started on a

theme she had crocheted into many a yard of lace. It was a vastly different conception of the baronet Penelope got from her from that she had gathered from her driver earlier in the evening. She listened to the panegyric of attributes and graces that as often met her disapproval as her approbation, but she offered no word of criticism. It seemed as if, for Mrs. Powrie, all the virtues that were absent in the silly sex in general were concentrated in her master.

Tired from her long day's journey, Penelope failed at last to clench her teeth upon a yawn. The front door banged; there was a rustle of skirts, and they heard the voice of Norah humming an air as she followed Miss Amelia to the parlor.

"He's out for his smoke. Miss Grant will read till bedtime, and Miss Amelia will doze as usual," explained Mrs. Powrie. "You're dreadfully tired, I see; I'll light you to your room."

They crossed the hall, whose hanging lamp and a flicker from the fire illumined walls that were sparsely furnished with a few family pictures, some trophies of arms and the forest. Penelope glanced around, indifferent, unimpressed. The housekeeper guessed her thought.

"It's very simple," she remarked in undertones. "Fancy Farm, you know, is only the dower-house. If you saw the house itself at Whitfarland! You could put this whole flat in the hall of it. All oak, dark as a kirk, and crowded with antiquities. A terrible house to keep clean, I assure you! I liked the grandeur of it, but it left me very little time for fancy-work. Sir Andrew has taken only a few of the pictures over. These"-and she indicated two portraits flanking a trophy of swords-"are Sir George and Sir Andrew-the present baronet's

grandfather."

Penelope looked at the painted fig

ures bullioned and girt with swords, turning their backs with unconcern on stormy seas where frigates grap pled under wreaths of smoke and cloud-Cutlass Primus with a foot upon a cannon trunnion, Secundus with his spy-glass thrust below his arm; both of them deliberately portentous, stout, and pompous. "And this one?" she inquired, turning to a smaller, more pacific canvas, where the seaman, little more than a lad, in a lieutenant's uniform, stood against a lichened cromlech with a trailing branch of cherry-blossom in his hand.

"That," said Mrs. Powrie, "is the master: that is Sir Andrew."

"I like the look of him!" said Penelope. "So natural and unaffected! Tom Dunn might very well have been more generous in his description." "Tam Dunn's a gowk!" said Mrs. Powrie.

Blackwood's Magazine.

"The flowers look a little odd in the hands of a naval officer," suggested Penelope.

"Do you think so?" asked the housekeeper. "Yes, I daresay that is so. I used to think them out of place myself at first, but now I feel, someway, they're very natural. And these are their swords; Sir Andrew's is at Schawfield somewhere: he would never have it on a wall since he hadn't a bloody story to hang up with it, he says."

Left alone in her room, Penelope undressed, said her prayers a little sleepily, blew out her candle, and drew her window-curtains back that she might get the first of the morning sun. The garden, bathed in moonlight, looked reclusive, visionary; Sir Andrew, wrapped in a boat-cloak, paced the snowy walk as on a quarterdeck.

Once again, after long centuries, the Capitol of Rome is the scene of a Triumph. A long array of chained captives follows the victor's car. It is a motley procession. Tyranny, Oppression, Foreign Domination, Ignorance, Superstition, Priestcraft-all these are represented among the ranks of the vanquished; and who shall say that they are not more glorious trophies of victory than any which graced the Triumph of a Cæsar?

But the Capitol is witnessing a scene of far deeper import than the triumphal progress of an individual. It is assisting at the national triumph of a race. Together with the whole of the civilized world it is looking down on the celebration, not of one victorious campaign only, but of a series of hardly fought battles waged for more than

half a century against well-nigh overpowering forces both external and internal. That the victory is not yet entirely complete in no way detracts from its significance; for none who have carefully watched the progress of the long fight, and who have marked the ground already won, can have any doubts as to its ultimate issue.

The events which led to the making of Italy, and the process of that making, are too well known to readers of the National Review to need any recapitulation in these pages. The object of the present writer is rather to recall to their attention some particulars of the immense task which devolved upon the modern Italians in consequence of the successful transformation of the heterogeneous group of States and peoples-which sixty years

ago enabled an Austrian politician to refer to Italy as being merely a geographical expression-into a united Monarchy, and a people inspired by national aims and interests.

As one who has lived in Italy for many years, and lived, too, not the life of the average Englishman when in foreign parts who, to quote Thackeray, carries with him his pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces, cayenne peppers and other wares, but in close touch with the everyday life of its people, I confess to sometimes feeling not a little indignant at the injustice with which my compatriots who visit the country for a few weeks or months are apt to treat it. I often wonder if they realize, even to the most superficial degree, the true significance of what they see all around them, and whether they have the remotest conception of what has been accomplished in Italy in the course of the last fifty years. Now, it is extremely easy to make unfavorable comparisons between a human organization which has been in working order for several centuries, and which has had well-nigh a thousand years in which to perfect its machinery, and one which has but little over half a century of practical existence. Nevertheless, it is such a comparison which, albeit unconsciously, English people are too prone to make when they declaim against the shortcomings of the Italians in matters relating to everyday life. They forget that if Rome was not built in a day, neither was England; and they do not reflect that it is entirely unfair, and not a little absurd, to judge a people that has fifty years of national life by the standards rightly appertaining to a people which lives under an organization that has needed nearly twenty times as long a period to attain to its actual development. This neglect of proportion, if I may so call it, on the part of their foreign critics, certainly does not add to the value of

these criticisms in the eyes of Italians. It merely arouses that bitterness which all unjust criticism is apt to excite. Moreover, it is an exceedingly rare and difficult thing for an Anglo-Saxon justly to criticize Latin initiative, in whatever direction that initiative may lie. The starting-point is absolutely different; though perhaps the goal may be more or less identical. The truth is that only by, so to speak, getting outside his Anglo-Saxon temperament can an Englishman hope to form a fair and unprejudiced judgment of Latin methods, and this psychical feat is, I fear, the very last which the average AngloSaxon can be induced even to attempt.

Let us glance at the social conditions of Italy when the Italians were at last free to place the coping-stone on the edifice they had raised, and to make Rome the capital of the United Kingdom. The quarter of a century immediately preceding that moment had, of necessity, been devoted to a life struggle with foreign foes settled in their midst. Yet, even during a period when the forces, physical and moral, of the newly formed nation were required to expel foreign domination, and the chances of ultimate success were more than doubtful, much was being done in anticipation; and by the time the ill-acquired temporal sovereignty of the Papacy fell, and the chief internal foe to Italian liberty and progress was, if not rendered impotent, at all events effectually muzzled, much had been given to Italy by the extraordinary energy of her liberators, seconded by the self-sacrifice of her sons. Railways, considerable concessions to the principles of Free Trade, which in those days was certainly a greater boon to a nation than it has become under altered circumstances, new and enlightened civil and penal codes, local government, protection against priestly persecutions and extortions. free education-these are only some of