Mary hung her head, and had no answer ready.

'I will try to remember it another time,' she said at last. 'But-' 'But what?'

'Everyone has not capabilities of noble thoughts and deeds such as you have shown me here-have they?'

'Can you measure the grace of God, Mary, so that you can say they have not?'

Mary was silent.

'If not in this life,' said the Spirit, then it may be in another.

"Delayed it may be through more lives yet,

Through worlds they will traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, and much to forget,

Ere the time be come-"

But by the time the Spirit of Christmas began to quote Browning, he was really getting almost too metaphysical for Mary; and looking up at him, she saw, to her surprise, that he was growing a little dim. She was terribly afraid he would vanish altogether.

'Oh, Spirit,' she said, 'you said you would let me see your face before you went!'

'No, Mary,' he said. 'One night's vision will not make your eyes strong enough to see my face; I have put you into the way of strengthening them for yourself, but it is only by practice that they will be enabled to pierce the veil of the commonplace, and to see the real beauty which lies concealed within.'

'Then shall I never see you again?' said Mary sadly.

'Yes. Some day-when I hope your eyes will have grown bright and piercing as an eagle's-I shall come to you without a veil upon my face, and you will see the perfect beauty of my countenance. And the vision will not be a transient one, but it will remain with you for ever.'

And so saying, the Spirit vanished; and Mary, looking up, saw that she was in bed, and her back-hair glass was lying upon the little table by her side, and the bells were ringing for Christmas morning.

'How very curious!' she said. And so strong was the impression of her dream, that she took up her back-hair glass and looked into it, hoping to see in it the lecture-room, or the hospital ward, or the besieged town; but all she saw in it was her own sleepy face. And at that moment the maid entered, saying, 'Please 's Mary, it's half-past seven o'clock.'

So Mary sprang out of bed, and dressed, and came down to give her father and mother a merry Christmas greeting before the rest had appeared. And whether it was that the Spirit of Christmas had opened her eyes, or for any other reason, I cannot say; but she thought this morning how sweet and gentle her mother's face was, and how strong and kindly her father's. And when the children came down, more

boisterous than ever with Christmas fun, she did not snub them, nor feel disposed to wish them at the Other end of Nowhere, as was sometimes the case; but she looked with quite a new love and admiration at Lizzie's practicalness, Tom's sharpness, Ben's bluntness-she even appreciated poor little Susan's hard struggle against her peevish fretfulness, which she had never noticed before.

And then, when they went together to the green-decked church, it was with quite a new feeling of fellowship that she looked upon Mr. and Mrs. Brown-though the latter had got on a blue silk dress and a purple bonnet—and the two old Miss Heaths, and Miss Maxton, and Mr. and Mrs. Collinson-for Mr. Collinson had just got back in time for church, with the good news that the reported typhus epidemic was only one isolated case, imported from elsewhere, and not likely to spread. And the Christmas text seemed to preach itself at her from under the east window—'Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,' as she thought Who had gathered up in Himself the whole of heroic capabilities and heroic deeds, to bestow them upon His weak and 'commonplace' brethren—in the light of Whose love no human soul may ever be thought 'common or unclean.'

This is a grave end for my light story; so I will only say that Mary Fisher keeps her back-hair glass as a memorial of her Christmas dream, and that her eyes have grown much stronger already, so that she can discern beauty in many things and people which were once only 'commonplace.' And I am inclined to think that under the process she has grown much less 'commonplace' herself.

M. B.

POPULAR STREET MUSIC IN ROME.

Essay how harmony can grief control,
And powers of sound prevail upon the soul.
Often our seers and poets have confess'd
That music's force can tame the furious beast;
Can make the wolf and foaming boar restrain
Their rage, the lion drop his crested mane:
Are we indeed less savage yet than these?
Then music sure may human griefs appease!

On one visit to Rome my apartment was taken for me in a palazzo in the very centre of the city. The casement of a large back room which happened to suit me most conveniently as a bed-room gave on to a very narrow vicolo, inhabited by a population of the most unmixed Roman type; in favour of the études de moeurs it afforded, I excused its olfactory offences; indeed, an application to the obliging President of the Rione produced an immediate amelioration in the regularity of

its sweeping, and I had, on the whole, little to complain of on that score. The snatches of wild discord, and the long nasal inflictions my former experience had alone afforded of popular Italian singing, had very much prejudiced me against it. In this vicolo I gained a more varied and intimate acquaintance with it, and received a lastingly favourable impression of its cadences.

I must own the apprenticeship cost me not a little. There was an industrious cobbler, blithe, mattutinal, and vocally inclined as the lark, who used to bore me terribly with the productions of his inexhaustible repertory. So loud, so constant, so resolute in utterance, so marked in cadence, were his songs, that they must ever ring in my memory; I never put on my boots without thinking I still hear his rolling carol:

Ah chi vò lo zoccolaro
Lo scarpino chi lo vò?
Non carri vanno lo paro
Ma chiù poco ne' li dò.
A chi bella vò pare'
Zoccolaro, zoccolè, zoccolè!

Si quarcuno fà l'ammore
S'accatasse chisti ica;
Ca non fanno mai rommore
E non scetano a mammà
Gui pericolo non n'è

Zoccolaro, zoccolè, zoccolè! *

Many a time I have felt inclined to hurry on some rapid deshabille, and like the Englishman in the amusing French vaudeville, offer any amount of pecuniary compensation 'si voo ploo chanty; but I took warning by the denouement of the comedy, which ends in the son of St. Crispin bringing back our countryman's purse before the day was out, and reclaiming the freedom and lightness of heart which he shared as his birthright with the fowls of heaven, and which could not be bartered for gold.

Time hardens one to all endurances. A French priest of my acquaintance was trying one day to 'persuade' a Paris gamin into orderly. conduct, by St. Paul's principle of teaching him of 'the terrors of the Lord.' 'If you cannot endure a little restraint now, my child,' he argued, 'how will you support those dreadful pains? Ma foi!' retorted the incorrigible urchin, dans une quinzaine je m'y habituerai bien !' -I shall get used to it in a fortnight. And just so I found, that after a fortnight of this purgatory more or less patiently tolerated, I could

* Zoccolaro means primarily only a wooden-patten maker, but is often used familiarly for any shoemaker. Thus it runs:-'Oh, who wants the shoemaker? My little boots, who wants them? I sell the pair cheap enough; but for less than my price I don't give them. Does anyone want to look nice, here's your shoemaker! Does anyone want to go courting, Let him buy some of these 'ere; For with these he can walk without noise; And no danger of rousing mamma. shoemaker!'

Here's your

PART 36.

sleep through the earlier hours of the concert undisturbed, and later, listen with positive pleasure for the recurrence of certain melodies, the most rhythmical or the most lively or the most pathetic of his store, which I had learnt to value. Their turn came round as surely as the tunes of a musical snuff-box, and while I waited for them, I acquired an ear for the measures of the others. And they ceased not, morning nor afternoon, unless when he uttered an Evviva!' or 6 Padrona!' as a pretty

neighbour passed.

In a stable, next to his-he had neither shed nor stall, nor was there a portone spacious enough to afford him shelter, as affected by most of his craft in Rome, so I must say-his place, his chair, lived a little countrified vehicle, to which two small round dappled ponies were harnessed every morning, while the cobbler was gone into the neighbouring caffè for his colazione (a tumbler of wine or of coffee, according to fancy.) As the stallino brushed down the evenly-paired little creatures, and dressed them up in their brass-studded gear, or interrupted the too constant greetings of the thick-wooled and equally round-limbed sheep who shared their stable, he used to replace the English stable-boy's 'sis-s-s-s' with a verse, monotonous, perhaps, in its perpetual repetition, yet cheering in its merry jingle, and evidently pleasant to the brutes under his care. Lively brutes they were, and it was not unusual to see the whole trio at regular gambols; the sheep was a sturdy fellow, and knew how to hold his own, and would put a whole troop of children to flight when they attempted to infringe his dignity.

The block of building at right-angles, on my left, consisted for half its height of a blank wall-in order to guarantee the apartment I occupied from being overlooked-pierced only by a file of those unglazed gaping arched openings with which most Roman stair-cases are lighted; picturesque enough are the suggestive vistas of receding arches, effects of light and shade, and peeps of Madonna shrines they frequently reveal. Through these I could, of course, from their situation, see nothing; but, every morning, as I was making my late toilet, there toiled up past them an aged priest, returning from saying the early Mass which enabled him 'to eat a piece of bread,' to his lonely garret, where he had probably long since known no other luxury than the dole of snuff the present benevolent Pontiff thoughtfully allows to every such poverty-stricken priest. His habit was time-worn and weather-stained, his skin withered, his form bent, his eyes dim, and his breath failed him as he climbed from step to step. Then he would wait to rest, and lean out on the windowsill of each landing. If the sun shone, and the air was exhilarating, there often came over him some memory of the days when he took a salient part in the solemn offices of religion. That he would do no more on earth, yet had not his voice altogether forgot her cunning; and when his breath came back, he would, with strong efforts to steady the wavering of weakness and emotion, intone, in accents low and sweet, some ancient chant, such as he may once have had to lead in choir. I

could never catch the words, nor recognize the melody; but it was one that might well move to tears, so exceeding plaintive was its pathos.

*

On the other side of the street lived a young girl who seemed destined to more than the usual share of this world's sorrow. She was not endowed with any of those natural gifts which nature has bestowed so abundantly in her neighbourhood. There was nothing to excite one's interest in her but her hard lot. I have seen her slink out for the 'spese, uncombed and unwashed, her unmended crinolineless gown draggling in the puddles of the unpaved alley; but I never saw her tidied up for a festa, when all in Rome are gay; I never saw father or brother cross her threshold; but a singularly forbidding mother, who looked as if she could be very vicious, would sometimes put her grizzled shaggy head-which, from long want of dressing, had much resemblance to a Skye terrier's-out of window, and as she let her basket down with a string for a bajoc's worth of salad from the fruit-stall beneath, querulously call her squalid offspring from her gossip-‘Giudi-i-i-i-ta !'‡ (I shall never forget that shrill, long-sustained 'i') was the name. And at the dread appeal the woe-begone child might be seen hasting home with terror-directed steps. One other opportunity I had of observing my Cinderella's dull life, and that was when she came to the window to add her contribution to the universal stringing up of washed linen, with which Rome is fringed within and without. What it all consists of is a perpetual mystery, yet so omnipresent is it, that I doubt if one would recognize the place if deprived of this trimming-certainly not without the long narrow streamers which serve for-swaddling bands!' The various modes of hanging these things out, and arranging them, require a separate study.

In the present instance this, like everything in my Cinderella's abode, was badly organized, and the rods of cane and cords, which are generally governed with exceeding dexterity, seemed in a state of chronic rebellion. At the thickest of her difficulty the shaggy head of the mother (I suppose she was a step-mother) would suddenly protrude itself through the casement, succeeded by a pair of brawny arms, and, with a passionate tug, the half-rinsed garments would be sent flapping through the air.

What has all this to do with music, it may be asked. Little, so far. Cinderella seemed most unmusical. She never sang, never even hummed; yet there was music even for her! There were nights when, rather late be it confessed, namely, about the hour of shutting up the liquoristas,‡ a Bacchic procession would pause beneath her lattice, and greet her with uproarious rapture. One has often had to use Velletri § as a beverage in the campagna, and one often wonders how men can get drunk upon it. Perhaps they never do in the English sense of the word, yet that a hilarious condition, such as we see given to the fauns and satyrs of

*

Marketing.

+ Spirit shops.

† Bajocco, halfpenny.

Judith.

§ The strongest of the wines of the country.