with drooping head, with hands clasped. and pressed upon her breast, as if to keep some grief from bursting it. Her heavy burden leaned against the wall. It was a sight to break your heart.

In this Italy of the poor, woman seems doomed to both of the curses of Paradise, and when she has shed the sweat of her brow side by side with man, all day long, in the hot, hard field, he makes her his beast of burden on the journey home. Here comes another contadina, picking her way carefully down the path, loaded like a haycart, with grass and branches on her head, while the man trudges behind with only the sickle. In the quarries, men trim the stone, while their wives and sisters are marching off with the broad, thick slabs. upon their heads, showing the heavy strain. in every movement of ankle, hip and shoulder. One day a lady sent her piano from the Londra to a villa about a mile away. The procession was Italy in allegory-three girls, straight, fine-built, steadying on their heads the heavy instrument, and their older brother following, with the cloth flung across his arm.

We enter the chapel, and find the poor, tawdry altar furnished with a hundred little offerings of gratitude; among them, the rude picture of Giovanni's story-the woman in dress of full maroon, with heels in air, sprawling into the well, and above her, Our Lady of the Borgo, sitting stiff in white robe and veil and gorgeous crown, one hand gripping a scepter and the other touching daintily the woman's foot.

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A COLORED print of this celebrated beauty was struck off about twenty years ago, and you may find a fly-blown copy of it in every log-hut or unpainted pineboard farm-house in the mountains of North Carolina. Her eyes, blue as delft, and her stiff flaxen curls beam down on you from among the bunches of dried herbs, the strings of red pepper, the rolls of white wool ready for spinning, on the wall, surrounded by half-sheets of brown paper, or of the "Buncombe County Gazette," pasted like herself where they can hide the larger cracks. She is flanked by a

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Giovanni's simple faith is that of wellnigh all the good folk of the region round about. Madonna sits exalted in her skyblue and paper-gilt niche, on the walls of the groves, with inscriptions of adoration or prayer,-Madonna in Assumption, Madonna Immaculata, Madonna of Consolation, Madonna of Sorrow, by the home door, the garden gate, in the bed

room.

But England and Geneva are slowly weakening that delusion which "worships. the creature more than the Creator." Not a few shrines now are empty, not a few images left weather-beaten and broken, that, on my first visit, twenty years ago, were adorned every day with new flowers and wreaths. I remember a little chapel up among the olives, then bright and pretty, and full of votive offerings. Now, the altar is covered by a table, with its three surviving legs in the air; donkey paniers lean against its steps, and an old saddle sprawls upon the chancel

floor.

This spectacle means more than the decay of the owner's faith. It proves utter indifference in a community which would have resented it, twenty years ago, as a public insult. On a headland of the shore, is a column once devoted to the Virgin. The niche is now empty as a skull, and the column is doing brave service on the windy height, by holding up the wires of the telegraph. Twenty years ago the sacrilege would have roused the peasantry to acts of murder. Si muove!

cut of General P. G. T. Beauregard, C. S. A., and a photograph of your host's oldest son, also in the uniform of the C. S. A.-this last in a frame, with a bit of evergreen above it. If you are curious enough to look in the big Bible on the chest of drawers in the mother's room, you shall find in faded ink the record of the boys birth, and below, fresh and black, the fatal word "Chattanooga word "Chattanooga" or "Chickamauga,' and afterwards, carefully written, and misspelled-"In the Hope of a blessed immortality." They are a devout people, above all things, these mountaineers; God

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Civil Service bill, and the position of the white and negro towards each other, in the fullest, frankest fashion. You tell yourself as you turn into bed that there is a weight of practical sense in what he says, and presently, (kept awake by fleas and the howling of the dogs below,) wish that the other side of the story had had such clear and moderate expounders before the war. You are sure of one thing-that you have never fallen before among such people as the Rose and her kinsfolk, men or women, who took life with such easy, lazy good humor, who carried their opinions, their joys and woes so out of doors, or who in their every day habit recognized the people who on earth do dwell as one great family party, whose privilege it was to be helpful and friendly together. Trying to reconcile this with your ancient doctrines concerning slave owners and Legrees, you fall asleep, the Rose forming a bewildering, alluring center to the kindly little drama.

With the new day these trivial perplexities renew themselves. You closely observe the colored boy who waits upon the Colonel at breakfast, or the saucy-looking mulatto maid behind the Rose's chair, for any sign of arrogance or chagrin on the part of white or black, at their change of position, but find none. Whatever may be the condition of affairs in South Carolina or Georgia, here both parties have accepted the situation with the passive good humor peculiar to them. The Rose, it is true, rates her maid, but now, in her piping compassionate tone, assures you that the "pooh cre-etures" are utterly unaable to care for themselves: that Papa assures her the ra-ace must become extinct out of slavery: Papa says there is no real civilization for any of the colored races; the Indian will always be a wild animal, the negro a domestic animal. "It's terribly sad, is it not?" pinning a bud of pink laurel coquettishly in her bosom.

"ef she was Nawth, and eahnin' twelve dollahs a month instid uv five, she could make somethin' uv hersef." That something can be made of themselves is the point wherein they differ from the Colonel and his daughter.

But if you chance to talk to one of these domestic animals you find their shrewd intelligence far in advance of the same class of servants in the North, white or black. You cannot make any animal the object of a bitter struggle for years without educating him at least in regard to his importance and chances. The boy behind the Colonel's chair confides to you his plan of "buyin' a small place in de Fall, a few acres of mountain pastur', and makin' somethin' uv hisse'f."

Rose's maid thinks
Rose's maid thinks

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Another puzzling observation you make, which is, that the Rose, unlike her Northern sister, is totally unconcerned to "keep up appearances. The Colonel, in old times, was wont at this season to visit the White Sulphur Springs in state, with a superb display of equipages and servants. The Rose's mother blazed in diamonds and Parisian dresses. She herself, then a bud of five summers, dainty in costly embroidery and lace, her hair flying free, and her white feet bare, looked as if born to command. She does not pretend to command now; there is no effort to hide the lack of jewels by cheap finery, or to conceal the patched furniture, table-linen, or cracked mirrors that fill the scrambling, unpainted, unthrifty house. She tells youthe Colonel tells you a dozen times a day with high composure and complacency, that "this part of Nawth Caholina is much impohvehished by the waw-as you see," and there is an end of it. When they will cease to enjoy their tattered garments as badges of honorable warfare, and try to earn whole ones, is difficult to decide. The Rose's cousin in Virginia, a more delicate, cleverer girl, is teaching in Richmond. Rose has no thought of any such selfsacrifice her father refuses loftily to sell the black walnut timber on his mountain land to a dealer from Chicago at a large profit. "The pine he may have for nothing, but I cannot see the cream of our Southern produce carried any longer to the Nawth. Let the black walnuts stand. My grand-children may be able to use them."

But you shall not hear from him, nor any man or woman of his class in this region, a bitter or unkindly mention of the war. There is not a hand which is not ready to give you a cheerful, sincere welcome. Rose's sister (who was the Rose in 1862 and '63) used to keep watch from her chamber window upon the house of a poor farmer, whose sons were Union men hiding in the mountains for three years. It was she who saw these boys stealing home to see their old mother one night, and who sent word to the home-guard. When she heard the shots an hour after, and the terrified negroes rushed in to tell her that the men, her neighbors all her life, lay dead

outside the very door, she coolly bade them go help to bury them, as though it had been dogs or mountain boomers she spoke of.

She is a fair, plump, tender-voiced woman now, with half a dozen soft-eyed, well-bred children crowding about her. She stops at the farm-house for a bit of kindly gossip with the mother of the dead boys whenever she passes it, and when the old woman is sick makes her nice little dishes, for she stays with her at night, leaving her baby to the nurse. When you tell her of any call of suffering in the North, Chicago fire, or Pittsburgh flood, the quick tears rush to her eyes, and her portemonnaie (very thin and limp) is out.

Then you bethink yourself of a certain gentle cousin of yours in Boston or Philadelphia, who would not see a mouse harmed without pity, but whose patriotic zeal against the rebels ten years ago was bitter and murderous beyond that of men; and you close the matter with the usual masculine reflection on woman as an insolvable problem. Meanwhile, you find a broken cannon in the Blue Ridge passes, green, inch-deep with moss, while the gray squirrel hides its winter store of nuts in it, and pass a chubby-cheeked boy whistling ast he pastures his cows on the plain of Manassas, and think reverently of the great Healer at work for us all, beneath Time and Nature.

You wish when you turn northward, and leave the mountains rising behind you, range on range, that you could bring the Rose and these ready-witted, warm-hearted cousins of yours closer together, and fancy

that the effect would be wholesome both upon themselves and the generation to come after them.

You do not find when you have gone back to the North that you forget the Rose as you have forgotten so many brilliant women from Boston or New York, women, too, who wore the cordon bleu in the ranks of intellect or fashion. When you fall to speculating (as a young fellow will over his cigar now and then) about marriage, and a home, you find yourself going back to this girl with her sweet voice and decisive little nod presiding over the coffee-urn and cups at breakfast. The inevitable biscuit, honey, and fried chicken, at which you used to swear inwardly, make part now of the home-like picture, and it is well if Rose, whom none of her neighbors would call more than a pleasant girl," does not rise before you as an alluring mountain nymph, hedged in and veiled by her own glittering streams and pink laurel.

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If you would choose to go back and win her, however, you will find it is no nymph whom you have taken to wife, but one of the most real and practical of American women. Her table will be noted for its choice dishes, if her house be not tidy; she will be always posted in the fashions, if not in the politics of the day. You may be sure that she will receive your friends with the gracious courtesy of a thoroughbred lady, but that she will elope with none of them, and that, while she may not instruct her daughters in either science or art, she will teach them to love God and honor their husbands.