so golden bubble followed golden bubble. All the little girls with floating hair or yellow braids ran after them, with hands lifted high to catch them before they burst, and the least maids wept because the taller ones caught more than they.

Young merchant Hugh stood watching, with his hand upon his chin.

"T is a strange sight," he murmured to himself. "Jugglers enow have I seen in the East, and many of their devices have I learned, but I have seen naught like this."

Then he turned to his betrothed.

"Dost know the trick, Blanche?" he asked, but when he saw her face he knew that there was somewhat amiss with his words. All awed was she, and in her eyes was the look of one who had seen a vision; and, glancing about, he saw that the other women and maids wore the same expression. He came home pondering, having noted the shower of coin that had fallen into the Necromancer's hat; nor could he understand, for he gave ever good measure for the gold that was given him. Also he was sore troubled, for his betrothed had no words for him, only looks of high disdain.

"Well, daughter," said the old merchant as the two came in, "what saith the prophet to-day?"

"Oh!" cried the maiden, "all was wonderful and full of beauty. Each day is his discourse more marvelous than yesterday's."

"But what was it all about?" he asked, laying his hand upon her hair, for he was tender of her.

"How could I presume to tell?" she asked, with a grieved red lip. ""T was too wonderful to put into words;" and she swept from the room, with no glance for her lover.

Young merchant Hugh, to whom the very rushes on which the maiden stepped were dear because of his great speechless love, gazed after her, jealous of the look upon her face, and cruelly wounded by

her scorn.

"I will find out the trick," said the

young man to himself, between set teeth; and he was one who ever made good his words.

Now the maiden Blanche was glad when her lover begged to go forth with her the next day and the next, at two

P. M.

"Mayhap he may learn something of this wondrous speech," she said wistfully, thinking to herself that it would be sweet to be wooed in violet words and words of the color of gold. When he bent shyly to kiss her before they went, with lips that trembled for the great love they might not say, she drew stiffly back, nor would she thereafter permit touch or caress, and much she spoke of the joy of a maiden's life that would leave time free for thought; yet she took him gladly with her for a week of days. Ever he listened, as one spellbound, nor once removed his glance from the Necromancer's face; and he was keen of eye, and wont in traffic to detect word or look of fraud, and he saw what no one else had seen.

"I have it!" he cried, and he slapped his fist upon the palm of his left hand. "Those be bags of many-colored words that he hath with him, and he but sucks them up and breathes them forth."

That day he sent his sweetheart home with Dame Cartelet, that lived hard by, and was as besotted as she on the man with the magic words; then he went and lay in wait in the street through which the Necromancer passed each day in going home; and as he waited, he turned back his velvet cuffs, and felt lovingly of the muscle of shoulder and arm. So it was not long before a tall man in drab went running through the narrow streets on the outskirts of the town, crying and wringing his hands, and the rattling bags of rose color, and purple, and gold were gone from his neck.

"Oh, my vocabulary!" he wailed. "Oh, my bags, my bags, my bags! What am I but a man undone without my bag of adjectives!"

The dogs and the children that ran at his heels did not understand, nor did

smith and weaver as they stood in their doorways.

"Oh, my other bag, my bag of epithets, of polysyllabic epithets!" cried the fugitive as he ran.

A squealing pig joined the chase, and the men children and maid children who ran after laughed aloud. The women who watched from lattice or stone doorstep were of those who, by means of ten skillfully selected adjectives from the rose-colored bag, and a dozen golden epithets from the bag of yellow, had been made to gape and quiver with the sense of the birth of new truth, yet they failed to recognize the juggler, for iridescent mist and ruddy vapor had vanished from his head and shoulders, and they saw naught save a lean and ugly man fleeing under a gray sky; and, hearing, they yet did not understand, his cry of deep dismay.

"Oh, my exclamation points, my lost exclamation points! Oh, my pet hiatus that laid all low when nothing else would avail!"—and so he passed out of their sight, and out of the city of Marmorante.

At the Sign of the Red Dragon that afternoon young merchant Hugh was closely locked in his room. Behind great iron bolts he sat upon a three-legged stool, and worked with the colored, rattling bags.

66

""T is well that men have devised this thing," he said, holding a mirror before his face, as he sucked air from the bag of rose; "else could I not see if all goes well." And his heart was well-nigh bursting with joy when he saw that the breath of his mouth was even as the breath of the Necromancer upon the air. Then he slipped downstairs and begged for a cup of ale, and as the maid served him in the kitchen he blew out a whiff from the bag of gold, and of a sudden her face became as the faces of the women who stood in the market-place under the spell of the juggler, and Hugh was glad.

The next day he hid the bags in a neckerchief of fine silk, and went to the house of his sweetheart, asking to see her; but

when she came it was with a face set and cold, and she paused with the great oaken table between them.

"Hugh," she said, unsmiling, "I have been thinking."

""T is foolish work for a woman," he answered stoutly.

"That which thou dost say but confirms my thought," she answered, still more coldly. "We cannot be wed; waking and sleeping have I considered this matter, and thus have I resolved."

"Now, why?" cried honest Hugh bluntly.

"We have so little in common," said Blanche.

"Thou shalt have all," he stammered, forgetting, in his hurt, the magic bags. "Why, 't is for thee I send forth all my ships. I will be but thy pensioner."

A shadow of pain passed over the maiden's face.

"I mean not goods nor possessions, nor any manner of vulgar things; 't is of mind and soul I speak, and ours be far apart."

"My goods be not vulgar!" cried young merchant Hugh. "Rare silks and cloths from the East have I, and purest pearls, for thy white throat. No common thing is there in all my store."

Then the little foot of Blanche tapped impatiently on the stone floor.

""T is of no avail that I try to make thee understand! I say there be depths in my nature that thou mayst not satisfy; also am I full busy this morning and must beg to be excused," - and with that she drew open the heavy oaken door, leaving him in the long room as one dazed.

Then he bethought him of his bags, and drew them out too late, taking a whiff from each as a sob rose in his throat. Suddenly the fair hair of Blanche appeared again in the doorway, and she smiled as a stranger upon him.

"I forgot to say that I wish thee all manner of good, and great prosperity," she said amiably.

Then out of Hugh's mouth came a purple speech, and a speech of the color

of gold; and little iridescent mists floated through the air, while a rose-colored bubble rested for a moment on the white eyelids of the maiden. The dull-paneled room was as the breaking of a rainbow; yet all he had said was, "Wilt not wed me, Blanche?" But he said it in rose color and purple and gold.

"What have I done?" cried the maiden sorrowfully; and he rejoiced to see that the look upon her face was as it had been when she had listened to the Necromancer's philosophies and faiths.

Then he turned and smiled, saying: "I love thee, Blanche," and he spoke in the juggler's speech, which made a glory on the maiden's hair, and about her gown of green. With outstretched hands she came toward him, and she laid her head upon his breast, smiling up at him.

"I was mad but now, Hugh," she breathed. "Our two souls be but one." "Wilt come with me to the marketplace this afternoon?" he asked.

"Nay," sighed the maiden. "I care not for the market-place, for I am happy here, where I have found my home."

"I speak there," he said bluffly, "at two P. M."

"Thou!" and the maiden's laughter rang out like the touch of silver bells, "and of what?"

"Of phases of occult thought," he answered gravely.

"Ay," cried Blanche, and she raised her face to kiss him. "Ay, Hugh, be sure that I shall be there when thou dost talk philosophies."

The young merchant was good as his word, and that afternoon he stood in the market-place upon a counter, rattling the juggler's bags as he waited. As before, men, women, and maidens came, by tens, by twenties, by hundreds, till there was no spot where he could look without meeting a pair of wistful eyes.

"It looks to be but plain Hugh, the merchant," whispered one to another.

"Hath he undertaken to sell his wares here?" asked one.

"He hath choice pearls," whispered a

maiden who was not yet wholly given over to occult thought.

But Hugh had begun to speak, and faces of wonder were lifted to him, for he was strong of lung, and the breath from the magic bags went farther than ever before.

"Our friend the Necromancer is indisposed, and I must take his place,” he began. “Like him, I have chosen a theme from the depths of human thought; and now, hear! hear! hear!"

Then eloquence poured forth from the man's lips so fast, so full a stream, that the very welkin was rose-tinted, and a great rainbow seemed to overspread the sky. Gray clouds above the tallest spires broke into tints of opal, and all the air shaded into the violet and purple of exclamation points, and of the pet hiatus, which was hard to work, but came well off. Golden glory haunted carven door and window, and words of flame crept around the tracery of arch and gable. Women sobbed for very joy; others wrote madly on their tablets; maidens gasped with red lips slightly opened; never, during the whole lecture season, had come so big a wind from out the bags, and honest Hugh blushed with mingled shame and triumph when he saw the face of his betrothed, for it wore the look of one who had seen the white vision of naked truth.

Following the fashion of the Necromancer, he had taken a maxim, and had dressed it up so that men knew it not, and so that it came forth as revelation. All that he had said from the first to the last was the truth that he knew best: "Honesty is the best policy;" but this was the way in which he had said it, with constantly shifting color:

"Glory awaits the equable! All-hails are the portion of him, who, unswerving, with eyes upon the path ahead, with lofty head erect, perambulates his chosen path through this world's tangled wilderness, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, though golden cohorts beckon. The goal is for the upright feet. The crown waits. . . . What matter if the

victor be sobbing and breathless, so that he be conqueror?" (Observe the hiatus.) "So saith golden-tongued Plato; so saith heavy-browed Aristotle of persuasive speech; so saith Aulus Gellius, withdrawn in his inner truth, and his brother, Currant Gellius, whose essence clings; so say the holy fathers, subtle Basil, myriadminded Chrysostom; so saith the copybook."

When the speech was over, and the bags hidden away, Hugh bore as best he might the tears and the congratulations of the women, their murmured plaudits, and inspired looks.

""T is the first time I have ever failed to give honest measure," he said shamefacedly to himself, as they flocked about him.

That night, as he sat with the maiden and her father, he spoke of departing on the morrow with a ship that would sail for Morocco to be gone many months, and his sweetheart came to him, creeping into his arms.

"Say them again," she pleaded, "say again the words thou didst speak this morning, that I may have them with me when thou art far away."

"Far in illimitable recesses of time and of space," he began shamefacedly, "before phenomena existed, thy bodiless soul and mine met and mingled as

one

"Where hast learned that jargon, Hugh?" asked the old merchant, with a loud guffaw.

"Hush!" said Hugh, with loving hands upon the maiden's ears so that she might not hear. "All is fair in love, father!"

But Hugh was still an honest merchant, and never in his long and happy life did he use the stolen vocabulary in bargaining, or to gain dishonest advantage in trade. Only, when the face of Blanche, his wife, grew sad, he would take out the colored bags, which he kept secretly locked in an iron chest, and then the old smiles would come back to her beautiful

"I must go, little one," he answered, smoothing her fair hair. "Men sit not ever by the fire to hear tabby purr."

wherewith she regarded her husband, as the mist of purple, and the flecks of rose color, and the bubbles of gold, fell on hair and eye and ear.

I CANNOT say that I have ever wholly admired that famous apostrophe of Robert Browning's to Italy which begins with the alliterative line,

"O woman-country, wooed not wed!" There is a flaw in taste somewhere, a touch of commonness about it, from which the far more impassioned sonnet of Filicaja,

"Italia Italia, O tu, cui feo la sorte
Dono infelice di bellezza!" etc.

is entirely free.

But poets will be poets, and critics captious, and whatever be the nature of Italy's perennial appeal to the affections of the more highly developed human creature, whether sensual, spiritual, intellectual, or a fiery mixture of the three, there can be no question about the reality of the spell. It is as old as recorded time, and shows no sign of decay. The shadow of that great name embraces the globe; the lure of the fleeting land (Italiam fugientem) pursued by the Trojan exiles is as potent as ever; and the making of many books about Italy will probably go on while the world endures.

1 A Short History of Italy. By HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1905.

A Short History of Venice. By WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER. London and New York: The Macmillan Co. 1905.

Salve Venezia: Gleanings from Venetian History. By FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD. London and New York: The Macmillan Co. 1905.

With Shelley in Italy. By ANNA BENESON MACMAHAN. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. 1905.

The Florence of Landor. By LILIAN WHITING. Boston Little, Brown & Co. 1905.

Dante the Wayfarer. By CHRISTOPHER HARE. New York: Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons. 1905.

The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary. BY VERNON LEE. London: John Lane. New York: John Lane Company. 1906.

It happens that the year just past was unusually prolific in what may be described without disparagement as popular books, upon the inexhaustible theme. Those we have now to consider may conveniently be divided into two classes: condensed compendia, or manuals of general history, and essays in description, often admirably illustrated, of which two or three, like Shelley in Italy and The Florence of Landor, aim at novelty by the endeavor to see the unrivaled spectacle of Italy, through the eyes of some one or other of its more illustrious lovers in the past.

It is a pleasure promptly to assign the first place in our first class to A Short History of Italy, by Henry Dwight Sedgwick. Mr. Sedgwick has done an exceedingly difficult thing better than it was ever done -in English, at least - before, and about as well, one may venture to affirm, as it ever can be done. His essays in miscellaneous literary criticism, collected and published in a book some two years ago, were so keen, clever, fairminded, and sweet-tempered, as to inspire good hope that a genuine light of humane letters had once more been kindled among us. But the essays were of curiously unequal merit, and the best of them, though so good, were certainly no better than those astonishingly brilliant and original studies in a few of the greatest writers by another of the younger Harvard men, John J. Chapman, of which the exhilarating promise has not yet been redeemed.

Mr. Sedgwick, on the contrary, has gone straight on to take his higher degree, and has won it summa cum laude. It is a fine thing, and not given to all, to "know the greatest when we see it;" to salute with appropriate homage, devout and yet intelligent, some transcendent individual reputation. It is another and much rarer