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these statues and those of the Transalpine churches.
Italian sculptors seemed to possess some secret by which they
could make the marble live. Some half-dozen of priests, with
red copes (I presume it was a martyr's day, for on such days.
the Church's dress is red), ranged in a pew near the altar,
were singing psalms. Whether the good men were thinking
of their dinner, I knew not; but they yawned portentously,
wrung their hands with an air of helplessness, and looked at
us as if they half expected that we would volunteer to do duty
for an hour or so in their stead. A bishop chanting his
psalter under the groined roof of cathedral, and a covenanter
praying in his hill-side cave, would form an admirable picture
of two very different styles of devotion. There were some
dozen of old women on the floor, whom the mixed motive of
saying their prayers and picking up a chance alms seemed
to have drawn thither. From the Duomo we went to the
King's palace. We walked through a suit of splendid apart-
ments, though not quite accordant in their style of ornament
and comfort with our English ideas. The floor and roof were
of rich and beautiful mosaics; the walls were adorned with the
more memorable battles of the Sardinian nation; and the fur-
niture was minutely and elaborately inlaid with mother-of-
pearl. Three rooms more particularly attracted my attention.
The first contained the throne of the kings of Savoy,—a gilded
chair, under a crimson canopy, and surrounded by a gilt rail-
ing. I thought, as I gazed upon it, how often the power of
that throne had lain heavily upon the Waldenses. The
other room contained the bed on which King Charles Albert
died. It is yet in my readers' recollection, that Charles Al-
bert died at Oporto; but the whole furniture of the room in
which he breathed his last was transported, together with his
ashes, to Turin.
It was an affecting sight. There it stood,

poor

huddled into a corner,-a poor bed of coverlet, such as a Spanish peasant might s of deal drawers; and a few of the necess chamber. The third room contained the Its windows opened sweetly upon the palace, where the first ray, as it slants d crest of the Alps into the valley of the Po foliage of the mulberry and the orange. some six or eight books, among which Psalms of David. "It is very fine," said m glancing up at the gilded canopy and silk bed, and poking his hand at the same time furnishings, "but nothing but blankets can able."

From the palace we passed to the Museur pictures, statues, coins stamped with the effi lived thousands of years ago, and papyrus par with the hieroglyphics of old Egypt, and which it has required ages to collect, as it describe. Not the least interesting sight th Egypt, cats, ibises, fish, monkeys, heads of all lying in their original swathings. I loo these divinities, but could detect no differe god-cat of Egypt and the cats of our day. W re-animate one of them, and make it free of o the god would be mistaken for an ordinary own kind, pelted and worried by mischievous as other cats are. I do not know that a m Turin has any very good ground for taunting a priest with his cat-worship. If it is impossible ference betwixt a cat which is simply a cat, a is a god, it is just as impossible to tell the differ

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bread-wafer which is simply bread, and a bread-wafer which is the flesh and blood, the soul and divinity, of Christ.

Seeing in Egypt the gods died, it will not surprise the reader that in Egypt men should die. And there they lay, the brown sons and daughters of Mizraim, side by side with their gods, wrapt with them in the same stoney, dreamless slumber. One mummy struck me much. It lay in a stone sarcophagus, the same in which the hands of wife or child mayhap had placed it; and there it had slept on undisturbed through all the changes and hubbub of four thousand years. Over the face was drawn a thin cloth, through which the features could be seen not indistinctly. Now, thought I, I shall hear all about old Egypt. Perhaps this man has seen Joseph, or talked with Jacob, or witnessed the wonders of the exodus. Come, tell me your name or profession, or some of the strange events of your history. Did you don the mail-coat of the warrior, or the white robe of the priest? Did you till the ground, and live on garlic; or were you owner of a princely estate, and wont to sit on your house-top of evenings, enjoying the delicious twilight, and the soft flow of the Nile? Come now, tell me all. The door of a departed world seemed about to open.

I felt as

if standing on its threshold, and looking in upon the shadowy forms that peopled it. But ah! these lips spoke not. With the Rosetta stone as the key, I could compel the granite slabs and the brown worn parchments around me to give up their secrets. But where was the key that could open that breast, and read the secrets locked up in it?

And this form had still a living owner! This awoke a train of thought yet more solemn. Who, what, and where is he? Anxious as I had been to have the door of that mysterious past in which he had lived opened to me, I was yet more anxious to look into that more mysterious and awful future

four thousand years? Did the ages seem it but as a few days since he left the earth to the dark curtain, but there was no op which I could see into the world beyond. draw the veil aside but for a moment? unlifted age after age, concealing, with its all that mortals would most like to kn myriads have passed within, but not one h voice, or look, or sign, to those they left behi never before did they conceal thought or w Do they not still think of us? Do they Would they softly speak to us if they co divides them? Ah! how silent are the dea

Close by the great highway into Italy li the Vaudois." One might pass them witho their near presence, or that he was treading up so near to the world are they, and yet so c from it. Ascend the little hill on the south low with your eye the great wall of the Al the plain on the north. There, in the west, a from where you stand, is a tall pyramidal-s towering high above the other summits. Tha which rises like a heaven-erected beacon, to to the traveller the land of the Waldenses, a with its solemn voice, to turn aside and see "the bush burned and was not consumed." a short, a very short visit to these valleys, t rope has no more sacred soil. But first let us of the bulwarks which an all-wise Providence our day around a Church and people whose of the great living miracles of the world.

1

e

The revolutions which swept over Italy in 1848 were the knell of the other Italian States, but to Piedmont they were the trumpet of liberty. No man living can satisfactorily explain why the same event should have operated so disasterously for the one, and so beneficially for the other. No reason can be found in the condition of the country itself: the thing is inexplicable on ordinary principles; and the more intelligent Piedmontese at this day speak of it as a miracle. But so is the fact. Piedmont is a constitutional kingdom; and I went with M. Malan, himself a Waldensian, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, to see the hall where their Parliament sits. A spacious flight of steps conducts to a noble hall, in form an ellipse, and surmounted by a dome. At one end of the ellipse hangs a portrait of the President, and underneath is his richly gilt chair, with a crimson-covered table before it. Right in front of the Speaker's chair, on a lower level, is placed the tribune, which much resembles the precentor's desk in a Scottish church. The tribune is occupied only when a Minister makes a Ministerial declaration, or a Convener of a Committee gives in his Report. An open space divides the tribune from the seats of the members. These last run all round the hall, in concentric rows of benches, also covered with crimson. "There, on the right," said M. Malan, "sit

the priest party.
In the front are the Ministerial members;
on the left is my seat. There is an extreme left to which I do
not belong: I have not passed the constitutional line. This
lower tier of galleries is for the conductors of the press and
the diplomatic corps; this higher gallery is for ladies and mi-
litary men.
We are 204 members in all. We have a mem-
ber for every twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Our popula-
tion is four millions and a half. Our House of Peers contains