A woman, whose husband was away coral fishing on the African coast, was worried by the visits of a big black cat, which repeatedly made its way into her house by night. At last, in a fit of exasperation, she pelted the animal with stones and broke one of its legs. When her husband returned to Capri he walked lame, and told his wife it was her fault. Why had she broken his leg when he came to see her in the shape of a cat?

Save to hasty tourists, content to do the sights between their steamers, the artist colony of Capri must always be one of its main attractions. Indeed, the influence of

popularity before the rise of the realistic school, worked for many seasons in his Capri home. The Capri subjects of Jean Benner and Edouard Sain are well known in the Paris Salon, and the second named artist owns a house and studio on the quiet heights of Anacapri.

The Nestor of the artist colony is Mr. J. Talmage White, who has been established on the island since 1861. He owns several studios at Valentino, the western end of the ridge on which the town of Capri is situated. One of these is occupied by his son, Mr. Albert Garibaldi White; another by the

the island on modern painting would be an interesting chapter in the history of art. We have only to look in at Pagano's hotel to find the pictured records of generations of painters from various parts of the world. There are many studios on the island, and England and France are specially well represented. Sir Frederic Leighton is an old habitué, frequently returning to sketch; and some of his most delightful heads and landscape studies are of Capri birth. Mrs. Anderson is an old resident, and Mr. Walter Maclaren has also had a studio there for many years. The French painter, Hamon, whose dreamy poetic works had an European

well-known American painter, Mr. C. C. Coleman, who has decorated it with exquisite taste. Mr. White's studio is a place of pleasant memories as the rendezvous of the art world of Capri, and its fascinations are increased by a fine collection of majolica and antiquities, Damascus tiles, Japanese stuffs. curios, and weapons. It is a most picturesque interior; its great north window commands a glorious view over the bay and Vesuvius, with Mrs. Anderson's cypresses and garden trees in the foreground, while the eastern window frames a glowing vignette of sea and shore towards Salerno and the distant

point of Licosa. Mr. White always has

several oil pictures in different stages of progress, and portfolios of water-colour drawings and studies stand temptingly open. Not a little might be said regarding these works did not relationship to their owner seal my lips. But I may say that I am indebted to Mr. White's intimate knowledge of the island for many details of its manners and customs. His long residence, too, has brought him some droll experiences, for Capri would seem to be a favourite resort of eccentrics.

What can we think of the earnest amateur who prowled through the studios turning all the pictures upside down and buying a few that pleased him in that position? We all know the tale of the Englishman Thorold, who, straying to the island for a single day, remained in it forty years, but the German who was driven from the Quisisana hotel by the coarse table manners of the British, and their habit of putting their knives in their mouths, is a less familiar character. This same German, during one of his first strolls in Capri, saw a beautiful girl in the old costume of the island bending over the edge of a frightful precipice. Hurriedly advancing, the kind man, in his best German-Italian, besought her to leave the dangerous spot. But the girl would not stir, only sadly shook her head.

"Lofely maid!" cried the German, "why do you despair? Are there no men more in the world, that you, so charming, so handsome, should weary of life? For, yes! I know your purpose, you seek to die!" Trembling with emotion the girl turned her head aside. "Come," urged the German, don't, pray don't do it!"

At this the girl turned her streaming eyes full upon him, and starting up suddenly, answered, "The signore is right, I will not do it."

The German went away rejoicing; he had saved the poor creature's life. But the next day chancing to pass the spot, he was thunderstruck by again finding the same girl in the same attitude. He was about to seize her arm, when a loud voice behind bim said,

fresh breezes temper the midday heat, and in winter the climate is delightfully equal. Delicate folk may enjoy a southern aspect, sheltered from every breath of north wind, among the olives of Quisisana, though the island has few conveniences or resources for those who are seriously ill, and the dust wind from Africa is often very trying in early winter. Spring, as everywhere in the south, is a brief season of delight. One day the fruit trees are still bare, cold blasts blow across from the snow-capped peaks of the mainland, the next you behold sea and rocks through a pink haze of almond and peach blossom, and hosts of wild flowers open their eyes to the warmth. It is as sudden a transformation as the Primavera of Botticelli. The sun blazes with tremendous strength, the air is thin and pure, and all the effects are marvellously delicate.

But for long walks and scrambles-and who can be in Capri without longing to scramble ?-late autumn is the best time. It is then that you mount the summit of Monte Solaro, and look beyond jewelled islands and jewelled sea, right away to the Roman mountains, then that you scale rocks and win your way by narrow ledges round the crags of Tragara, clinging with hand and foot to the rough limestone, and scarcely daring to give a glance to the blue depths of water a thousand feet below. It is then you find energy to explore the caves and grottoes, the Roman and mediæval remains, castle and monastery. And the spell of the island grows daily stronger; you cannot bid it good-bye. On our first visit it needed an eruption of Vesuvius to tear us away. It was a most dramatic finale to the Capri idyll. A rain of ashes fell on the island and lay many inches thick on the windowsills. We were choked and blinded by the fine impalpable dust, the air was murky as a London fog! The dull, dark sea rose against the rocks in long, oily swells, there were thunderous booms from the distant mountain. Torre del Greco was shattered by earthquake, and at night the new twin craters on the flank of Vesuvius gleamed like monster owl's eyes across the sea. So Vesuvius

There was an artist at his easel behind a big rock. The German walked on.

At all seasons of the year Capri is a pleasant resort. Even in July and August

day saw us embarked for Naples in a small rowing-boat. A few yards from shore, and where was our beautiful island? It was gone, vanished, lost in the dense cloud of ashes!

LINDA VILLARI.

I Do not think that the travellers on the Bath road, whether posting or coaching, knew much about "The horrible and mysterious crime," which Macaulay mentions, and which has made Littlecote Hall and Wild Darrell notorious, till Scott told the story to the general world in a fine foot-note to Rokeby; for Evelyn-to take one exampleon his journey to Wiltshire, in 1654, passes the place with the remark that it "is a noble seat, park, and river," which is perfectly true, but not much to the point; and Pepys -to take another-on Tuesday, June 16th, 1668, after paying the reckoning at the Hart at Marlborough-"148. 6d. ; and servants 2s.; poor 1s.; set out and passing through a good part of this county of Wiltshire saw a good house of Alexander Popham's," and with that passes on to Newbury, where he dined, and heard that song of the old courtier of Queene Elizabeth, and how "he was changed at the coming in of the king," which pleased him so mightily, and to which I have already referred. Now we expect nothing but pragmatical practicalness from the delightful Samuel, but to call Wild Darrell's haunted home "a good house of Alexander Popham's," is really to touch bottom in an outrage on the eternal fitness of things. Worse however remains behind. One might at least

be led to expect mention of a romantic legend from a literary lady; but Miss Burney, on her journey to Bath in 1780 with Mrs. Thrale, viewed Littlecote's storied towers unmoved, that is to say if she saw them at all, and was not looking out of the other window of the post-chaise; at all events she makes no mention of there being such a place in Europe, or her Diary, though she tells us that she slept at Maidenhead the first night, Speen Hill the second, the third at Devizes, and dwells on the Bear Inn there at great length-where we will join her in a quarter of an hour.

Meanwhile it is not for me to pass with such travelled indifference the scene of that wild story of Elizabethan crime and mystery, which reads even in these practical times like some page of horror torn out of Sheridan Le Fanu, and to which that great magician of the world fantastical could alone have given fit form and colour. Summoned by his eerie genius, with what terrible vividness would each incident, each actor in the buried infamy, rise from the dead! The whole story would pass before us under a ghostly, shimmering, ghoul-like glamour the midwife at Shefford, a village seven miles off, waked in the dead of night, with a promise of high pay for her office on condition that she should be blindfolded! the headlong ride through the wild weather behind the silent

heavy boot till it was cinders! then the trembling departure of the pale spectator of the hideous scene, blindfolded as she had come, aghast, speechless, carrying a heavy bribe with her as the price of guilty silence, but carrying also a piece of the curtain which she had cut out of the bed-all this scene of horror how the author of The Dragon Volant would have described it for us! And all this horror is history!

The original deposition made on her deathbed by the midwife, whose name was Mrs. Barnes, and committed to writing by Mr. Bridges, magistrate of Great Shefford is in existence to this day, and is proof beyond cavil. It is from this point that rumour begins. That rumour, backed in

my opinion by damning circumstance, has for two

hundred years con

nected the tragedy

called Wild Darrell, then its proprietor. It is alleged that the midwife's depositions set justice on the murderer's track, and that the fitting of the piece of curtain which Mrs. Barnes had taken away with her into a rent found in the curtain of the Haunted Room at Littlecote, marked the scene of the murder. Wild Darrell was tried for his life, but escaped by bribing the officers of the law with the reversion of his large estates. But so runs the rumour-the memory of his crime pursued him. He was haunted by ghastly spectres which he tried to forget in wild excesses, but which no seas of claret would lay. Finally as he was riding recklessly down the steep downs, with the scene of his atrocity in sight, at headlong speed, the reins loose, his body swaying in the saddle, pale, wild-eyed, unkempt, the very picture of debauched and guilty recklessness, tearing from the Furies of the past,that past confronted him. The apparition of a babe burning in a flame barred his path. The horse reared violently at the supernatural sight. Darrell was as violently thrown, and the wicked neck, which had escaped the halter by a bribe, was broken at last as it deserved to be. The stile is

still shown by the country people where the wretched, haunted man met his fate; the spectres of the pale huntsman and his hounds often cross their simple paths in the gloaming of summer evenings when the downs loom gray and ghostly-or did cross them, rather, before School Boards, the franchise, the abolition of the smock frock, and the general improvement of everything on and off the earth, banished such inspiriting sights for ever. Wild Darrell is remembered but as a name now, and as a name for all that is wicked.

And yet not quite so if we are to

From a Drawing by HERBERT RAILTON.

judge from a recent publication; in point of fact "not at all so by any means no more," as the South Sea Islanders say when they have eaten a Wesleyan missionary. For we live in an age of the rehabilitation of condemned reputations, and a generation which has learnt from a German professor that Tiberius was an amiable potentate, and not a fourteen-bottle man, and from an English historian that Henry the Eighth was a confirmed theological student for whom women's society offered no charm, will not raise their eyebrows even when Mr. Hubert Hall tells them, in his delightful Society in the Elizabethan Age, (Sonnenschein & Co.) that Wild Darrell, far from being the monster that rumour and