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garden by railings that, in this summer season, are thickly garlanded with clustering roses and the graceful foliage of the wisteria, soon to be crowned for the second time by scented wreaths of lilac-blossoms. Then turning in by the porter's lodge under the arcade, we climb one of the steepest stairs in Florence, and have time to lose our breath before being stopped by a tall iron gate beyond which more stairs await us, and which is our frontier fortress. And, to add to its defensive appearance, there is a small opening in the wall above through which the garrison may ascertain whether friends or foes are ringing the modern substitute for the horn of the middle ages. But as the gate closes behind us, and the door at the head of the stairs is opened, we have a glimpse of Dante's Florence, for we see three slender towers in a gracious group beyond intervening groups and gardens.

These are Arnolfo's Tower, its smaller rival of the Bargello, and the spired belfry of the Badia. The marbled mass of the Duomo hides from us all save one corner of Giotto's Campanile, and quite shuts out the lovely hill of Bellosguardo. Going out into the long balcony that stretches from wing to wing of this southern front, we look over the garden where huge magnolias hold up to us their creamy chalices of scent, and great South American firs sweep the lawn near the camellia-hedge with their trailing branches. Close to our farthest window a tall tulip-tree stands almost within reach, and covered with pale, red-flecked flowers about which foraging parties of bees are ever circling. Beneath is the arcade where Tito Melema showed his stolen gems to Bartolommeo Scala, and brought his learning to bear on that bitter strife

of epigrams in which the fat historian had just been worsted by Politian.

Farther off to the west is a stalwart stonepine, which even in Scala's time must have been of long growth, and our one western window looks down on a soft, green lawn dotted with azaleas and inclosed by a grove of lofty trees. And, climbing another and still steeper flight of stairs, we come out on a turreted terrace, from which we can see half Tuscany. The city lies before us against its background of southern hills; Fiesole is behind us; to the east we look away to the Falterona, Vallambrosa, and the Arezzo Mountains; to the northwest we have the chain of the Pistojan Apennines; to the southwest the translucent Carrara Peaks are visible. Trees and gardens fill the foreground; beyond are towers and domes and cypress-streaked hillsides dotted with numerous villas. All day the landscape quivers with white heat, mists, or soft blue haze. Toward evening these clear away, and sky and hills rival each other in glorious tints found nowhere but on Nature's palette. By day swallows cry sweetly in their circling flights; by night nightingales raise their voices in the Gherardesca thickets; the chin-owl gently hoots his little joys and troubles; the screech-owl perches on a neighboring roof and gives out his dismal note; frogs innumerable babble and trill and croak in all the pieces of water; fire-flies flash among the trees like falling fragments of the stars gleaming overhead; and only now and then a rattle of wheels and passing shouts in the quiet street remind us that we are not in the country, but within half a mile of the noisy heart of the city of Florence. LINDA VILLARI.

WHEN

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AUTHORS OF "THE GOLDEN BUTTERFLY," "BY CELIA'S ARBOR," ETC.

CHAPTER VII.

THE DAY AFTER.

HEN Anthony Hamblin rashly jumped at the conclusion that by effacing himself he could remove all trouble at one stroke and enable everybody else to live happy ever after, he calculated on that one trouble alone. Now, the

network of human miseries is so artfully constructed, that when you have got rid of the most pressing and troublesome by some clever coupde-main, you find you have only opened the door to other unsuspected causes of suffering. The earth is like that island seen by Lucian, which was planted everywhere with knives, swords, daggers, pikes, lances, and spears, so that the wretched inhabitants constantly spiked, lacerated, gashed, and ripped open their unlucky skins. Na

ture is always ready to stick in her knife in some place where we least expect it. At any rate, to run away never helps: assume rather a bold front, and buy a pennyworth of court-plaster. As every copy-book which has room on the text-hand page says, "Temerity dismays the Foe."

Yet it seems so easy simply to run away. Fighting is troublesome and exciting. It requires physical activity; it prevents the solid enjoyment of meals it interrupts the calm flow of ideas; it makes a Christian man angry, inclined to evil thought, and harsh speech, and desire of revenge. You run away, and there is no troublesome fight at all. To be sure, you may find that your self-respect has been left on the field of battle. In Mr. Hamblin's case that would not matter, because there was not going to be an Anthony Hamblin any more. There are, too, so many situations in life when flight would seem desirable: when you have got so clogged and bemired with debts that there is no help but in a complete change of identity; when you have done something, and it is going to be found out; when you have got into a mess of a domestic kind, and are threatened with a breach-of-promise case; when you are let out of prison; when your conscience-this case is very, very rare-smites you for having given your relations so much trouble, and you resolve that they shall have heard the last of you, lent their last five-pound note to you, written the last letter of remonstrance, appeal, and indignation, and forgiven you for the last, the four hundred and ninetieth time; when you find that you have been on a wrong tack-another rare case-and have advocated mischievous and mistaken doctrines; when you find that your marriage has proved a failure, and that the poor woman tied to you would be certainly happier as a widow, and perhaps happier with another man; when you consider how detestable a father, husband, brother, son, cousin, and distant relation you have been, and how very satisfactory it would be to the whole family to put on mourning for you. "He is gone, poor fellow; but one can not feel otherwise than relieved. When a man is irreclaimable, he is better-under the sod." You would hear this said, being in reality alive, although hidden away.

It is possible to multiply such cases indefinitely. There are, indeed, many men, of my own personal acquaintance, who may perhaps take a hint, should they read these pages, and consider how much better it would be for every body if they were only as good as dead. I believe, indeed, that there must be whole townships, with gay billiard-saloons, churches, and daily papers, somewhere in the States, in which all the inhabitants are men who have disappeared.

There is somewhere a subterranean population, so to speak, of buried folk; they are ghosts in the flesh; they are cousins, brothers, uncles, nephews, long since mourned as dead, now gambling and drinking under new names. Some day I will visit such a place and get their secrets. out of the men over Bourbon whisky, under promise of inviolable secrecy. In England there are no such townships of refuge; but Alsatia exists, and has always existed. It used to be somewhere about Blackfriars-it is now, I believe, somewhere east of Thames Tunnel. The unburied dead-those who have generously disappeared-when they do not go to America, take refuge in the vast, unexplored, monotonous EastEnd. Here all alike live and die in a gray and sunless obscurity; here a man may pass a hundred years forgotten and unsuspected.

Mr. Hamblin never returned to claim his great-coat. The policeman waited; as long as she could, the girl waited too, attracted by the singular fascination of a coat which in all probability belonged to a drowned man. Presently the Humane Society's officer, Harris, came back, his work of dragging and rescuing over for the present; then the girl went away, and the two men waited. The scared and terrified skaters had all left the ice.

The afternoon came on; policemen and officers were still at their posts; the banks were crowded with those who came to gaze on the gap in the ice, the sudden grave of so many; the early evening closed in—but Mr. Hamblin appeared not.

When Harris carried back his tent to the office of the Society, and his day's work was done, he, with the policeman, made their way to Clapham Common, and delivered up the coat and told their story.

It was then nearly six o'clock. Reporters had already got hold of lists, so far as they could be arrived at. One or two had learned from Harris that the owner of the coat, by which he kept so steady a watch, was a great City magnate, chief partner in the well-known firm of "Anthony Hamblin & Company"; and in the later editions of the evening papers it was rumored that Mr. Anthony Hamblin was among the missing. Yet no word of this report went down to the house in Clapham Common, where Alison, wondering a little why her father had not kept his appointment on the Mount Pond, sat in quiet happiness, expecting no evil, and dreaming of Gilbert Yorke.

When the two men came to the house in the evening, they were like unto Joseph's brethren when they brought with them their false pièce de conviction, inasmuch as they bore a coat, saying,

This have we found; know now whether it be to seek one with Stephen. What was it he thy father's coat or no."

Surely, surely, had her father thought of Alison's grief and terror, he would have spared her the cruel blow. Had he thought of. her long watches in the night, of her agony, her hoping against hope, he might have found some better way.

And yet, he might have said: "Suffering is better than shame. What are the tears of a night, of a week, of a season, compared to the wound which never heals, the scar which can not be hidden, the mantle of disgrace which must be worn like the canvas suit of a life-long convict-till death brings an end?”

When the coat came, they sent messengers and inquiries everywhere. Mr. Hamblin had not been to the City; his partners had not seen him at all that day; he had kept none of his appoint

ments.

On Sunday morning, when messages came from all quarters to ask whether Mr. Hamblin had returned, there were no news of him; but Miss Hamblin was like a wild thing, they reported, for grief and anxiety, and Mrs. Cridland could do nothing to ease or soothe her.

The latest editions of the evening papers added to the first brief account of the accident lists of the drowned, as accurately as could be obtained. Among them was the name of Mr. Anthony Hamblin.

"It is greatly feared," said the "Globe," "that among those who have met a sudden end in this dreadful disaster is Mr. Anthony Hamblin, senior partner in the house of Anthony Hamblin & Company, of Great St. Simon Apostle, City. The unfortunate gentleman was last seen and spoken to by an officer of the Royal Humane Society-Harris by name-to whom he was well known as a liberal supporter of the institution. Mr. Hamblin expressed his intention of going on the ice for an hour, and intrusted to the man's care a heavy overcoat. He had skates with him. This was about half an hour before the breaking of the ice. He did not return for his coat. As yet, the body has not been identified among those recovered. We learn by telegram that he had not up to six o'clock returned to his residence on Clapham Common. Mr. Hamblin, who was greatly respected in private life, was a widower, and leaves one daughter."

Stephen Hamblin had been in his chambers all the afternoon, waiting for his brother, who did not keep the appointment. He was anxious to see Anthony for one or two special reasons of his own, connected with that shortness of cash we have already alluded to. It was not usual with Anthony to miss an engagement, nor was it, on the other hand, a common thing with him

wanted to talk about? There could surely be no unpleasantness about past and future advances; that was altogether unlike Anthony. Some slight anxiety, however, weighed on the mind of the younger brother. He had a foreshadowing of something disagreeable. So that it was almost with a sense of relief that at half past five he gave up the hope of seeing Anthony, and resolved to wait for him no longer.

Stephen went to the reading-room of his club. There was no one in the place whom he knew. All along the streets he had heard the boys shouting as they brandished their papers: Dreadful accident on the Serpentine! List of the drowned!"

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Things like domestic calamities, national misfortunes, or the affairs of other nations, troubled Stephen very little. He had not the curiosity to buy an evening paper: at the club he had not the curiosity to look at one. He sat by the fire, with a French novel in his hand, one of a school which is now unhappily coming to the front. The author was determined on being more than realistic; he would spare the reader nothing; he invented details. Stephen had read and fully realized all the dreadfulness of a low and small workshop crammed with work-girls; he had read their talk; he saw them before him in all their squalor; he was beginning to think that the other sex had better never have been invented, when the clock struck seven, and he remembered that his luncheon had been scanty and early. He threw away the novel, which he never afterward finished, took an evening paper, and descended to the dining-room. There is one thing about a good dinner which I do not remember to have seen noticed anywhere-it demands a fitting successor; you can not, without doing a violence to the best and most gastric impulses of our humanity, follow up a great and glorious dinner by a common steak. Stephen, though he did not put his thought into words, felt this. He ordered a little purée, a red mullet, a cutlet, and a golden plover. He said he would take a bottle of champagne, Heidsieck—a bottle, not a pint. And then, while the soup was being brought, he sat down and began the evening's news.

He threw down the paper with an oath. "Always my cursed luck!" he said. “Just when I wanted him worse than ever."

Some men have been known to shed tears at hearing of a brother's sudden death; some have instinctively considered how the calamity would affect his widow and children. Stephen and a certain American boy (he, on learning that his father was drowned, lamented that his own pocket-knife was gone with him) are the only two of whom I have heard that they immediate

ly thought of their personal and selfish interests. Some feeling of regret might have been looked for, some expression of sorrow for a brother who had done so much for him. But there was none. He scowled at the paper; he brooded over the news. It spoiled his dinner, took the sparkle out of his champagne, the flavor out of the plover. When he had finished he walked quickly to his chambers in Pall Mall, packed up some things, and drove to Clapham Common. The partners were there; Gilbert Yorke was there; they were looking in each other's faces, dismayed. Mrs. Cridland was somewhere weeping with Alison; the boy was standing by the fire in the study, ready to run wherever he might be sent, awed and tearful.

"Stephen," said Augustus, taking him by the hand, "I am glad you are come. This is your place in the present dreadful anxiety."

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“Yes,” he said, loudly and defiantly. "Tell Miss Hamblin, Charles "—this to the footmanor better, Mrs. Cridland, that I have arrived.— Yes, Augustus, this is my place, with my niece. I shall remain here for her protection."

No one went to bed in the Hamblin household. Alison walked up and down all night, starting at the merest sound, rushing to the door as if she thought she heard the sound of wheels. With her watched Mrs. Cridland and the boy. Stephen sat in the study. He had no thought of sleep; his mind was strangely agitated; from time to time he took a glass of brandy-and-water; and as the night went on, when the hands of the clock pointed to those small hours when, if a man be awake, his conscience tells him all the real truth about the past, and his terrors preach most of the possible truth about the future, his despondency became so extreme that he could not bear to sit still.

When, at length, the long winter's night was over, and the slow dawn appeared, Stephen began to take a little comfort.

"He must," he said, "have left me something. He would not give everything to that girl. He could not leave me absolutely dependent on her whims."

In the kitchen sat the servants, watching in silence. If one of the younger maids dropped off, she was awakened by the others and accused, in whispers, of betraying a hard and unfeeling nature.

At eight Harris came and saw Stephen. "There's eight-and-twenty bodies," he said, "waiting identification, but not one like Mr. Hamblin."

"What do you think?" asked Stephen.

"What is a man to think?" replied the man. "It was a cold day. If Mr. Hamblin did not go down with the rest, why didn't he come back for

the coat? The body will be recovered, likely, to-day."

But it was not.

The news was heard by Mr. Alderney Codd at eight o'clock, as he was sitting among a circle of friends at a certain tavern near Fleet Street. They were as yet only beginning their whiskyand-water, and the night was young. Generally the conversation on Saturday nights turned on various projects of ambitious financing, histories of coups which had been made, and of others, much grander, which had been missed. It is always so: the things in which we fail are ever so much greater than the things in which we succeed. Yet it gives a feeling of superiority to have missed an event greater than any that has fallen in the way of your friends.

When Alderney Codd had partly recovered the first shock of the sad news he became at once the hero of the evening. He proceeded to relate, with many digressions and dramatic touches which seemed to brighten the situation, how, only the very night before, he had borrowed of his cousin Anthony Hamblin that very coat, fur-lined, wondrous, which now, an object of veneration, hung upon the wall before them for all eyes to see. He said that he was tempted to retain that coat in memory of the lender, and as a special mark of his cousin's affection and esteem for him. He gave free scope to his imagination in discoursing on the greatness of the Hamblin family and on his own connection with the cousinhood. And he naturally assumed additional importance as a possible, nay, a probable, legatee. It was later-in fact, next morning, when the glow of the whisky-and-water had departed-that honest Alderney reflected with sadness on his own personal loss, not only of a kind friend, but of a ready lender. And it was with a heart unfeignedly sad that he walked over to Clapham, and watched awhile with Stephen.

There was another man, more deeply interested in the event than either, who read the news with a strange feeling of coldness, as if he were indeed dead. This was Anthony himself. He had taken a cheap lodging over a small coffeehouse in the Commercial Road, and saw the news in the Sunday morning paper, while eating the richly-flavored egg and dubious butter which they brought him for breakfast. He had already so changed himself in appearance, by cutting off his beard and presenting smoothness of chin and cheek to the eyes of mankind, that it would have been difficult for his nearest friends to recognize him. It is a moot question among gentlemen of the burglaring and other professions which require ready disguise, whether the bearded man who shaves, or the smooth man who puts on a

false beard, has the better chance. I think the feeling is in favor of the former. As regards Anthony Hamblin, he added, for greater security, a pair of green spectacles. Instead of his usual hat he had a billycock, and instead of a frock-coat he wore a nondescript garment of the pea-jacket kind, only longer, such as might have. been sported by a racing-man or a publican of broad views. There was not in all Scotland Yard a single officer able to recognize him without close scrutiny.

He read the paragraph in the paper with great care and attention. Then he laid it down, and began to consider.

After breakfast he went to the bedroom which was his for the day, and considered again. Yet there was nothing to consider about, so far as Alison was concerned, because the coup was struck. "What was done," he said to himself, "could not be undone." Yet, with regard to himself, there was ample ground for meditation. He had not provided for the step. He had little money with him, only the three or four pounds which a man may generally carry in his pocket; he had drawn no check, and it was now too late. In addition to his little purse, he possessed, he reflected, his diamond studs, his one ring, his gold shirt-links, and his watch and chain. The watch alone had cost him four-and-twenty guineas. But, after the proceeds of all these gauds were spent, what was he to do next?

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Madam," the lawyer interrupted, "no doubt -no doubt; but death has removed your victim. Heaven has interfered. Your instrumentality is no longer required. As for this claim, it becomes a money-matter. Leave it as such with me; and I will present it, at proper time and place, to the deceased gentleman's executors."

"So that they will know him—as he was, in his real light?"

"Undoubtedly; they will know all that I tell them-all that I have learned from you. If your claim be disputed, we can then seek a remedy in an action at law."

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So that then all the world would know?"

"All the world," he echoed. "In that case, which is not at all likely to happen, all the world

Anything, except one thing. He would never would know." return home.

Another person heard the news, but not until Monday, because that person, who was Rachel Nethersole, never dreamed of the iniquity of looking at a Sunday paper.

Rachel Nethersole went away. She retired to her house at Newbury, where she resumed the exercises peculiar to her sect, and tried to feel satisfied with the result of her instrumentality.

But she was not. She was profoundly disShe was deeply disappointed-not so much satisfied; she had looked for nothing less than shocked as disappointed.

"I told him," she said to the faithful servant who followed her to the modern Babylon, "that I was compelled-being an Instrument-to follow him to his death or to his ruin. I little thought but the judgments are swift-that his death was so near. I imagined"—she sighed plaintively, as if she meant that she hoped-"that it was his ruin which was imminent. We are purblind mortals; and yet he warned me, being so near his end, when men are sometimes granted a vision of the future, that if I continued to pursue the case I should entail consequences the nature of which I little dreamed of. Such consequences came as he little dreamed of. What a pity!"

She sniffed violently and with temper. How ever, at the hour appointed, she repaired to her lawyer.

"I should like," she said, to his intense astonishment "I should like the warrant for the

going to the police-courts and crying: "Your dead man, whose virtues you extol, was a common cheat and forger. Here are the proofs. Had it not been for his death, I should have had him arrested on this criminal charge." And now she was told that she could do nothing-nothing at all; and the world would go on ascribing virtues to this citizen cut off so suddenly. Her home, which for three months had been glorified, so to speak, by the lurid light of coming revenge, was dull and quiet now that light had gone out of it: her daily life had lost its excitement, and was monotonous. The old pleasures pleased no more.

She had been so certain of revenge; she had, with her own eyes, gloated over her enemy as she announced to him the things which were to befall him; and now-and now, to think that he had escaped her clutches by an accident which had never entered into her calculations! Why, if John of Leyden had hanged himself, or John

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