whether you want James Sugden to marry Anne, or Anne to marry Reginald, or what you want. If I could marry my brother Harry it would set everything right at once, because I could leave the property to Tom after his death; but then I can't marry Harry, and besides, after this despatch box business he will never speak to me again. I see nothing for it but for Tom to marry Anne. She is a good deal younger than he is, and has a bad temper. If that could be brought about it would set everything right."

"But he is her uncle," suggested Kriegsthurm, aghast.

"Lor' bless me, so he is," replied the Princess. "How funny that I should not have thought of it before! I hope we shall get out of this business without some one accidentally marrying his grandmother. There is only one thing more that I have to say, which is this: that I most positively refuse to marry any body whatever, even if it were to save the Silcote property from the hammer. I had quite enough of that with my sainted Massimo."

"But, your Highness"

"He and his Signora Frangipanni indeed. Yes. Oh, quite so. The little doll. Frangipanni was a gentleman: and he believes to this day that I instigated Massimo both to the political villany and to the other worse villany. It is you, Kriegsthurm, who have torn my character to tatters, and compromised my name with your plots, until I am left all alone, a miserable and silly old woman!"

"Is she of?" thought Kriegsthurm, for she had raised her tone so high in uttering the last paragraph that the nearest sentry challenged. She was not "off." She began crying, and modulated her tone.

"Madame is safer here than elsewhere," said Kriegsthurm again. "She will remember the fearfully traitorous conduct of her late husband to the Italian cause in 1849. She will remember that she has rendered it impossible for her to go to England in the face of her brother's vengeance, and impossible to go to Italy in the face of the vengeance of the Italian

"I think you had better leave me," she said. "I am getting nervous. There, go. I will have no harm done to the boy, but do the best you can for Tom. Are you angry with me? You know that I have always loved you, and been a faithful friend to you. Don't be angry with me."

Kriegsthurm was a great scoundrel, but then he was a most good-natured man. Many who knew a very great deal about him said that he was a goodhearted man. Probably his heart had very little to do with his actions. Most likely, lying inside that enormous chest, it was a very healthy heart, with the blood clicking steadily through it as true. as a time-piece. In spite of his villanies and plots and scoundrelisms, he had some suspicion of what is called a "good heart." If one had said that some part of the man's brain was benevolent, and was expressed on his ferociously jolly great face, one might be nearer the truth. Anyhow, there was benevolence and gratitude in the man somewhere, for he knelt down before the foolish old Princess, took her hand in his, kissed it, bowed to her, and sped away towards his interview with Boginsky, leaving her drying her tears and looking towards the French and Austrian graves over at Aspern.

CHAPTER XLIV.

NOT MUCH TO HIS ADVANTAGE.

"THAT is a very noble woman," said Kriegsthurm, as he half walked, half trotted along. "She is worth the whole lot of 'em put together. She is a fool, like the rest of her family, but she is to my mind the best of them. She complains that she has got puzzled about the family plot suppose I were to complicate it further by marrying her? No, that wouldn't do. In the first place she wouldn't have me, and in the second place we should all be in Bedlam as soon as the old man died, trying to find out our different relationships. That young

cub, Sugden, might turn out to be my grandmother in the mêlée. She has managed to turn my brains upside down; they must be getting older than they were, or she would never have addled them like this. If I can get a thousand a year from Colonel Silcote, this is my last plot; for my wits are failing me. I have debauched my logical powers and my power of examining evidence by going in for that wretched spiritualist business, the only piece of real charlatanism I ever did in my life. It has not paid, and I may say myself, as a very long-headed rascal, that charlatanism never does pay in the long run. The money comes too easy and too quick to stay by you. You put other folks off their heads, but then you put yourself off too. You cannot succeed unless you put yourself off your head and make yourself believe in it. And so you get to think that the fools are not fools, and, even if they are, that the crop will last for ever. And so you debauch your soul about your money matters, and spend when you ought to be saving.

"It is the same with conspiracies," he was going on, when he came sharp round the corner on to the place of meeting with Boginsky, and there was Boginsky waiting for him: who, when he saw him, burst out laughing.

"What in the name of goodness," said Kriesthurm, laughing in his turn, "brings you into this wasp's nest ?"

"Revolutionary business, my dear," said Boginsky. "We, in London, thought that, as all the troops were being poured south, there might be a chance for us. We thought that a democratic rising in Vienna, in the rear of the army, just when they were hammer-and-tongs at it with the French, would produce a most unforeseen complication; and we live by complication and confusion, as you know."

"Now for a thorough-going fool give me a thorough-going democrat," said Kriegsthurm, impatiently. "Do you think that, if you had any chance, I should not have known of it? Do you see on which side I am? Austria will be beaten certainly, but in spite of

that I have declared against the circles."

"I gave up all hopes the moment I saw it," said Boginsky.

"And how is your precious scheme working?"

"Well! you know better than I can tell you," said Boginsky. "It will not work at all. The committees won't look at us. They say that the demolition of the fortifications has changed the chances utterly. I came here expecting to head a revolt, and all the employment I can find is a very dirty job."

"And what may that be?" said Kriegsthurm.

"To watch you, my dear, and, if I can catch you alone and unarmed--as you are now; in a private place-like this; in the dead of night with no witnesses-as now; to assassinate you. Which I am of course going to do this very instant, with this very American revolver. Therefore go down on your knees, and say your prayers at once."

Kriegsthurm laughed pleasantly. "You have got among bad company, then."

"I have. The old breed of democrats is dying out, and are replaced by men who disgrace the name, like these fellows. These fellows are Orsinists to a man. And what is worse, they have forgotten, or learnt to vilipend, the great names of the movement: Garibaldi, Kossuth, Mazzini, Manin, ay, and Boginsky, are sneered at by them as halfhearted men. These men, who sit, and plot, and drink, laugh at us who rose for the cause, and were taken redhanded. They proposed this business to me as a proof of my sincerity. I need not say that I accepted their offer with avidity, lest some more unscrupulous democrat among them might take it in hand. You are in great danger here."

"I thank you, Boginsky. You are a gentleman. You yourself are in very great danger here. I think, from an answer he gave me to-night, that Tom Silcote has seen you, and if he saw you again might denounce you to-morrow. I must get you out of this place."

"You must, indeed, and yourself also."

"We will let that be; for the present, you are the first person to be considered. Are you poor?"

"I have absolutely nothing. I have nothing to eat. I have no clothes but what I stand in. Was there ever a democrat of my sort who was rich? And I have no passport. As for passing the lines into Italy, that is entirely impossible. I could get northward, but I have no money."

"You shall have money and passport if you will do something for me."

"Your money is Austrian, and I will not touch it."

"You can pay it back."

Well; Jesuit! What is it then?" "There is a young English artist, one Sugden, now at Prague."

"Well! Do you wish me to murder him for you?"

"I wish to heaven you would. It is so terribly unlucky, you're being a gentleman and a man of honour."

"Not unlucky for you, is it?" said Boginsky.

"I am not sure of that," said Kriegsthurm, "I am getting so sick of the whole business, and more particularly of the Silcote complication, that I almost wish you had followed the instructions of the democratic committee, and put a bullet into me. I don't ask you to murder him. Will you meet him, and involve him in some of your confounded democratic conspiracies?"

"Teach him the beauty of democracy?" said Boginsky.

"Exactly," said Kriegsthurm. "Let him be seen in your sweet company before you make your own escape. In

troduce him to the lower democratic circles, such as those of Vienna, who employed you to assassinate me. Excite his brain about the matter (he is as big a fool as you, I am given to understand). Show him the whole beauty of extreme democracy on Austrian soil; do you understand?"

"I see," said Boginsky. promise him thoroughly?"

"Com

"Ex-actly, once more," said Kriegsthurm. "He can't come to any harm, you know. He is an English subject.

They would send the British fleet into the Danube sooner than allow one of his pretty curls to be disarranged. Will you teach this noble young heart the beauties of Continental democracy?"

"Certainly," said Boginsky. "Where shall I meet you to get the money and the passport?"

Kriegsthurm made the appointment, and the night swallowed up Boginsky.

Kriegsthurm's brains had been so very much upset by his interview with the Princess, that he felt little inclined to go home to bed without having arrived at some conclusion or another. "These Silcotes," he said to himself, "would addle the brains of a Cavour. And I am not the man I was. That Boginsky will do nothing, you know. I must have this cub of a boy out of the way somehow; hang him! I wish he was dead. If the young brute were only dead, one could see one's way," he added aloud.

A sentinel, to whom he was quite close in his reverie, challenged.

"Silcote," cried Kriegsthurm savagely. "What says he?" said the sentinel. "Stand!"

"Novara! Novara! dummer kopf," replied Kriegsthurm, testily. "Is he deaf?"

May the, &c. confound this most immoral city," said Kriegsthurm. "If I was only once well out of it! Now, who in the name of confusion will this turn out to be? Knock him over, sentry, if he don't advance. I am Kriegsthurm of the police."

"He is coming," said the sentry, with his finger still on the trigger, covering the advancing man. "Ah! here he is.. You are now responsible for him, sir."

There crept into the light of the lamp which hung above the sentry's box a very handsome beardless youth,

of possibly twenty. The face of him was oval, the chin end of the oval being very long and narrow, the mouth wellshaped but large, and wreathed up at the corners into a continual smile, the splendid eyes not showing so much as they might have done from under the lowered eyebrows, nose long, complexion brown, hair black and curling, gait graceful but obsequious. A young gentleman from the Papal States, of the radical persuasion, rather shabbily dressed.

Kriegsthurm was round and loud with him in Italian, and ended by arresting him formally before the sentry, and marching him off into the darkness.

THE new world, the world of nature, in her larger, coarser, Continental form, first broke on our old friend James's mind at the Drachenfels, that first outwork of the great European mountains. The great steel-grey river, sweeping round the crags and the vineyards, and winding away into the folded hills, gave him noble promise of the more glorious land. which lay behind. It is as common as Brighton now, but remember what it was to you when you were as young and as fresh as James.

It satisfied his genial, "jolly," young soul. "Let us," he said to the quiet, apathetic Reginald, "make a lingering meal of all this. Let us dawdle up this beautiful river to the Alps, and study every inch of it, until we have traced it to its cradle. Then we will descend on Italy, and take it."

Reginald cared little, so long as he was in James's company; and so they dawdled up the river bank, from right to left, sketching, painting, bathing, learning their German, and singing. They got enamoured of the German student life, and essayed to imitate it, with more or less success. They were both, like all St. Mary's boys, pretty well

trained as singers, and James had a singularly fine voice. From their quaint training they had both got to be as free from any kind of conventionality as any German could possibly wish; and in a very short time they grew quite as demonstrative of their emotions as any German of them all. They were a great success among those Rhine people. The handsome, genial, vivacious James, with his really admirable, though uneducated, painting, his capital and correct drawing, his splendid singing, his unfailing good humour, his intense kindliness of disposition, was of course a success; in spite of his, as yet, bad German. He was, and is, a really fine fellow, who would succeed anywhere, from California to Constantinople. But the quieter Reginald was a greater. He painted infinitely worse, he sang worse, he talked less, than James; but the Rhine people believed in him more. When James had dazzled, and possibly puzzled, them, they would turn to the silent Reginald, after all, and wish to know his opinion, believing, from his comparative silence, that he was the wiser; and Reginald, who had been hoping that James had exhausted the subject, knowing nothing of the matter in hand, would do his best, and be oracular and vague, which pleased them immensely.

So these two happy boys went up and down and to and fro in this early spring, as free as birds, as happy as birds. The snow was not off the HöheAcht when they first heard of the Eifel country. They must go, of course, at once, and went from Coblentz; though the ice was still floating down the Moselle, and navigation was impossible. They walked up that wonderful river side to Treves, in slush and mud; enjoying themselves immensely, and making themselves remembered to this day by some of the people in whose houses they stayed.

Reginald mildly asked James on their journey whether he called this going to Italy to study art. But James said in reply, "Let me see the Porta Nigra,, Reggy, and I will fly south as true as a

swallow." And Reginald laughed, and trod on with him through the mud, until they had seen the Porta Nigra.

They got to Treves so early in the season that there had been a slight whisk of snow just as they entered the town, and, pushing through the narrow streets, they came face to face with the object of their pilgrimage, a vast black mass of (as it appears) the first century, just now with every one of the capitals of the hundred columns piled one above another, silvered with snow.

"Did you ever see anything like this?" said James, after a few minutes.

"No, nor dreamt of it," said Reginald. "We did right in coming here. In future, you shall lead and I will follow."

So they headed back to the dear old Rhine, through the volcanic country, looking by their way on lakes hundreds of fathoms deep, blue from their depth as the great ocean, yet lying in great hollows among smooth shortgrassed downs, where the sheep were feeding and the lambs were crying. And they saw an eagle, and a wolf, and a wild boar just killed; and, having looked in on the Apollinaris Kirche, they quietly descended on Andernach.

Here they met a very old friend of a fortnight's standing. They had made a halt at Bonn of a few days, and had struck up a friendship, which was to be more than life-long, with several students there. The students among whom they had accidentally fallen were of course democratic. The "Cross party at Bonn is as exclusive as Pickwater. Happy-go-lucky James and Reginald, after a fortnight's examination of the question, were quite prepared to be convinced that hereditary governors were a mere temporary stopgap between the feudalism of the past and the democracy of the future. They did little more than bargain for Queen Victoria: at whose name the students took off their caps. As for the Prince of Wales, they gave him up. Among these terrible young gentlemen (who turn out the gentlest of beings as soon

as they have a place and get married) they had come to the conclusion that Queen Victoria was the last crowned head which would be allowed to exist on the continent of Europe, and that she was only permitted to exist in consequence of her virtues as mother, wife, and woman.

Then there was the business of the map of Europe again. These students had settled that, among other things (much in the style of that Paris map of 1860, which was in great repute among the prudhommes-has the man who made it committed suicide yet?), England was to have Egypt, but not to be allowed any further territory in Europe, being too overwhelmingly powerful; Alsace to a united Germany; and all that sort of thing: but always England to be served first, and bought, and kept from interfering. Or again she was to interfere and arouse democracy, nationality, and what not for they believed in her power then. Now that the Cross party have won, what is the use of bringing up old democratic nonsense?

Only our two boys believed in all this. And one of the loudest democratic talkers of Bonn, under a cloud about a duel, met them at Andernach.

This youth was more of a geographical than a political radical. The form of government you might choose to adopt was a mere insignificant matter of detail to his enlarged and statesmanlike mind. So long as you restored absorbed nationalities, he was ready to congratulate Ireland or Poland in reverting to their original form of government. This young man walked up and down the street with our two friends for an hour or so, talking the most frantic nonsense about the Italian business not unwatched.

At length they all three agreed that refreshment was necessary, and the German boy, cocking his cap over his eye, and breaking out with"Mihi sit propositum

In taberna mori ;'

led them to a little gasthaus, taking care to inform them that the landlord's