A SONG FOR THE RAGGED SCHOOLS. To work, to work! ye good and wise, Let "ragged" scholars grace your schools, Ere Christian children can arise, They must be trained by Christian rules. We ask no fragrance from the bud Where canker-vermin feeds and reigns, We seek no health-pulse in the blood, Where poison runneth in the veins. And can we hope that harvest fruits, In living bosoms can be grown, That palms and vines will fix their roots, Where only briars have been sown? Man trains his hound with watchful care, Before he trusts him in the chase; Man keeps his steed on fitting fare, Before he tries him in the race; And yet he thinks the human soul, A meagre, fierce and untaught thing, Shall heed the written Law's control, And soar on Reason's steady wing. Oh, they who aid not by their gold, Or voice, or deed, the helpless ones, They who with reckless brain withhold Truth's sunshine from our lowly sons; Shell they be blameless-when the guilt Dare we condemn the hearts we leave Shall we send forth the poor and stark, To ride out every tempest breeze? Shall we with dim short-sighted eyes, Look on their forms of kindred clay, And dare to trample and despise Our sharers in a "judgment day?" Oh, narrow, blind, and witless preachers! To work, to work! with hope and joy, To work, to work! ye rich and wise, Let "ragged" children claim your care, Till those who yield Crime's jackal cries, Have learned the tones of peace and prayer. ELIZA COOK. DIAMOND DUST. PRIDE, jealousy, the love of argument, the disdain of guidance, rivet on a panoply against truth more eagerly assumed by the strong than by the feeble. EXAGGERATION is not only one form of falsehood, it is one of its worst forms, since the swollen and con. tagious body gains admission by walking in upon healthy legs. MEN should labour zealously for the community, strenuously for their friends, and sufficiently for themselves. CICERO was distinguished from almost all great men of whom we know much, by one negative virtue, so rare, that human nature blushes while it is announced-he had no enemy! SORROWS are the pulses of spiritual life; after each bcat we pause, only that we may gather strength for the next. On the everlasting tables of conscience and memory is engraven whatever we have done, or wished, or attempted, or neglected to do. THE truest love is the truest benevolence; it acquires an infinite patience out of the very excess of its suffering, and is content to merge its egotism in the idea of the beloved object. He that does not know this, does not know what love is, whatever he may know of passion. TRUE merit, like the light of the glow-worm, shines conspicuous to all except the object which emits it. To raise, and then to disappoint reasonable expectations, is a degree of cruelty which no terms of indignation can sufficiently reprobate. ONE of the evils of ignorance is, that we often sin and suffer the punishment without being aware that we are sinning, and that it is in our power to escape the suffering by avoiding the sin. TRIFLING people are sometimes useful, unconsciously and unintentionally. A hangman sells to a ragman the Imaterials on which a Homer is printed. OLD trees in their living state are, the only things that money cannot command. Rivers leave their beds, run into cities, and traverse mountains for it; obelisks and arches, palaces and temples, amphitheatres and pyramids, rise up like exhalations at its bidding; even the free spirit of man, the only great thing on earth, crouches and cowers in its presence it passes away and vanishes before venerable trees. WIT is the lightning of the mind, reason the sunshine, and the reflection the moonlight; for as the bright orb of the night owes its lustre to the sun, so does reflection owe its existence to reason. ... ONE servant too much makes all the rest idle. IT is astonishing with what facility our feelings accommodate themselves to our situations, and catch their tone from surrounding objects. REAL life frequently loses its brilliancy to such a degree that one is many a time forced to polish it up again with the varnish of fiction. THERE is a shyness, the offspring of refined sensibility, which is often mistaken for pride; and there is a forward and designing familiarity which frequently wins the applause of those who become its destined victims. THERE is no folly equal to that of throwing away friendship in a world where friendship is so rare. Printed and Published for the Proprietor, by JoHN OWEN CLARKE, (of No. 9, Hemingford Terrace, East, in the Parish of St. Mary, Islington, in the County of Middlesex) at his Printing Office, No. 3, Raquet Court, Fleet Street, in the Parish of St. Bride, in the City of London. Saturday, September 1, 1849. RECEPTION OF NEW TRUTHS. THE naturally strong Conservative feeling of man is never more strikingly displayed than on the occasion of the promulgation of a New Truth in the world. It comes before the public quite friendless; often for a long time it stands in a miserable minority of one. It struggles hard to gain a footing; is jostled about rudely, jeered, despised, and ridiculed; and its promulgator is perhaps characterized as a quack, an impostor, or a maniac. If the new truth is calculated to interfere rudely with the gains of any established class, then woe to the man who has ushered it into life; let him then be fully prepared to encounter the hardest possible measure of calumny, abuse, and persecution. [PRICE 14d. future age will be disposed very much to question our enlightenment for ever having resisted or doubted them. Posterity, however, only very slowly comes up with the Thinker or Discoverer; and generally, it is not till he is dead, that full justice is done to the purity of his motives, or the philanthropy of his designs. Galileo's discovery of the motion of the earth was felt to be an awful innovation on the old convictions of men. He had the daring audacity, this man of science, in opposition to the long-received dogma, that the earth stood still, to allege that the earth moved and revolved on its axis. The then-existing notion was, that the world was limited to this "dim spot which men call earth," with its twinkling stars set about it only as so many little ornaments to please the eyes of the ant-like humanities moving on its surface. Galileo dared to conceive and to prove, that this orb was but as a mere speck in the creation of God, and that the utmost verge of man's The majority, however, do not feel quite so strongly as this. They are passive compared with the others. Walter Savage Landor's description of the Critics' re-imagination was but the threshold of His works. He ception of a New Book, not inaptly applies to them :"They rise slowly up to it, like carp in a pond when food is thrown among them; some of which carp snatch suddenly at a morsel, and swallow it; others touch it gently with their barbe, pass deliberately by, and leave it; others wriggle and rub against it more disdainfully; others, in sober truth, know not what to make of it, swim round and round it, eye it on the sunny side, eye it on the shady; approach it, question it, shoulder it, flap it with the tail, turn it over, look askance at it, take a pea-shell or a worm instead of it, and plunge again their contented heads into the comfortable mud. After some seasons the same food will suit their stomachs better." Such persons are generally satisfied to be led and influenced by those whom they are accustomed to follow in such matters; and the question they ask is similar to that which was once put on the distinguished occasion of the promulgation of a great New Truth in the world: "Have any of the rulers or the Pharisees believed it?" If the answer is "No," then they have generally no more to say to it, and go on contentedly in their old way till greater light reaches them. It is somewhat humiliating to look back to the period at which some of the great truths, now universally recognised to be true, were ushered into the world, and to note the reception which they met with; nor is the retrospect altogether without its instruction to even a comparatively enlightened age. The truths to which we refer are now so clear and demonstrable, that we are disposed to look upon him as a fanatic or ignoramus who would venture to doubt them. And yet there are, from time to time, other new truths coming up, meeting with the same obstructions and denunciations; truths which have not yet been able to overcome the obstinate adherence of the mass of mankind to that which is established; but, in reference to which, probably some was thrown into a dungeon for his heterodoxy; but the truth could not be stifled. "Still it moves" was Galileo's inmost conviction. And, thanks to the progress of thought, the sublime heterodoxy of Galileo is now one of the accepted triumphs of human intellect, one of the most glorious victories of science and Truth. Still nearer to our own day, the truths of geology, now acknowledged as such by all enlightened men, were tabooed as dangerously heterodox, because they were not supposed to tally with the views which were accustomed to be held and taught. Supposed," we say-for the most learned and religious men, of all sections of the Church, are now at one on this point; and we have such teachers as Dr. Buckland and Dr. Pye Smith, now occupied in eloquently enforcing the new truths of geology. Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World was one of the issues of Galileo's thought. He promulgated his theory of the existence of a western continent, and how was it received? It was "rejected as the dream of a chimerical projector." Columbus was, however, fully possessed by his idea, and wandered about from court to court for many years, for help to carry out his idea. At last he succeeded by the aid of a monk and a doctor; his expedition sailed, and the New Truth was established. Every body then cried, "How easy! surely, no one could have doubted it!" So did the courtiers also observe, when Columbus showed them how an egg could be made to stand upon its end! Dr. Harvey's promulgation of the true circulation of the blood was received with shouts of derision by his contemporaries. They had been taught that the arteries carried air, not blood; and the New Truth was an overthrow of all their pre-conceived notions, which was not to be borne. He was lampooned and satirized; lost his practice; and was disowned by his medical brethren. It was a dangerous and subversive doctrine, which must be put down! And yet the NEW TRUTH was fully established in its own good time. Dr. Jenner's discovery of Vaccination, by means of which the fearful scourge of small-pox has almost been banished from civilized countries, was received with equal scorn. The proposal was scouted, without hesitation or thought, and Jenner was made a mark for all wits to shoot at. He was about to bestialize the human race, by introducing into their system the matter taken from the pustules on the cow's udder! He could scarcely live through all the fury and indignation that were heaped upon him. After promulgating his views in a modest and argumentative style, he set off to London to exhibit his process of vaccination to the faculty; but, after remaining there for two months, he could not get a single medical man to test its efficacy. Yet he had the courage to go onward; and he finally succeeded in establishing the New Truth. How we smile at all this now! And yet it is just as possible that we may be treating new views of the present day in an equally irrational manner. It is not quite half a century since Sir Walter Scott, in one of the Quarterly Reviews, pronounced the scheme of lighting towns by means of gas to be so fanatical, that the man who proposed it was only fit for the restraints of a lunatic asylum. At a still later date, when it was proposed to lay down a line of railway from Manchester to Liverpool, an eminent engineer pronounced that "no man in his senses would attempt a railroad over Chat Moss." William Grey, one of the first writers on the advantages of a system of railway communication, was thought to be insane by his friends, and his proposals were generally scouted as altogether absurd. Even as late as 1825, the Quarterly Review, in an article on the proposed Woolwich Railway, said, "What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate. We will back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum. We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which we entirely agree with Mr. Silvestre is as great as can be ventured on with safety." The short commentary on this is, that the mail trains on the Great Western Railway now travel regularly and safely at the rate of sixty miles an hour. Brindley's project of carrying canals across valleys upon lofty aqueducts, was equally laughed at by engineers and scientific men. One of these, on being called in to consult with Brindley in reference to the aqueduct across the Irwell, at Manchester, shook his head, and remarked, that "he had often heard of castles in the air, but never before was shown where any of them were to be erected." But Brindley, though originally a common millwright, and so unlettered that he could do no more than write his own name, had got possession of an idea; and the Duke of Bridgewater having faith in his genius, he was encouraged to proceed in spite of the sneers of scientific men, so the aqueduct was built, and spans the Irwell to this day. But perhaps the most interesting case of all is that of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-ship. As early as the year 1793, he communicated his invention to Lord Stanhope, in the hope that the English Government would enable him to carry his discovery into effect. But it was not till the year 1807 that he finally succeeded by the aid of an American minister, Mr. Livingstone. While his boat was building at New York, it was the object of sneers, contempt, and ridicule. "As I had occasion," says Mr. Fulton, in his own narrative of the event, "to pass daily to and from the building-yard while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered, unknown, near the idle groups of strangers gathering in little circles, and The boat, heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh rose at my expense, the dry jest, the wise calculation of losses and expenditure, the dull, but endless repetition, of the Fulton Folly.' Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish, cross my path." At length the boat was built, launched, and the first experiment of its steaming powers was to be made. There were abundant predictions of failure, of course. however, moved away from the shore, then the machinery came to a stand, for it was yet far from perfect. "To the silence of the preceding moment," continues Mr. Fulton, "now succeeded murmurs of discontent and agitation, and whispers and shrugs. I could hear distinctly repeated, 'I told you so-it is a foolish schemeI wish we were well out of it.' I elevated myself on a platform, and stated that I knew not what was the matter; but if they would be quiet, and indulge me for half an hour, I would either go on or abandon the voyage. I went below, and discovered that a slight maladjustment was the cause. It was obviated. boat went on; we left New York; we passed through the highlands! we reached Albany! Yet, even then, imagination superseded the force of fact. It was doubted if it could be done again, or if it could be made, in any case, of any great value." The The admirable invention of the electric telegraph has also forced itself on the public notice and approval, in spite of great indifference and hostility on the part of public men. Mr. Rowland constructed his first electric telegraph at Hammersmith, in 1816, and shortly after he urged it on the notice of the Government. Mr. Barrow, who was Secretary to the Admiralty, replied, "that telegraphs of any kind were then wholly unnecessary, and that no other than the one now in use would be adopted." "I felt," says Mr. Rowland, "very little disappointment, and not a shadow of resentment on the occasion, because every one knows that telegraphs have long been very great bores at the Admiralty." New Truths on all other subjects, moral as well as physical, have had similar difficulties to contend with on their introduction. The proposal to abolish punishment by death for petty offences, was resisted in England for nearly 300 years. Sir Thomas More, who, as early as the year 1520, questioned the policy of putting men to death for petty thefts, &c., was at once fallen upon vociferously by all the lawyer class, who declared that any milder mode of punishment would "endanger the whole nation." The proposal to abolish military flogging has throughout been met with strenuous opposition by the officers of the army and navy. When it was proposed to limit the number of lashes to 1,000, they predicted insubordination, anarchy, and confusion. The number has, however, since been reduced to 50 lashes, in obedience to the opinion of the public, not military men ; and no such consequences have ensued as were predicted. In like manner, Captain Maconochie's proved success in the treatment of criminals at Norfolk Island, on the mark system, obtains no acceptance with the Inspectors of Prisons, who have reported against its adoption. It needs little discerning power to perceive that public opinion will soon shoot ahead of these gentlemen, and compel them to adopt more rational methods of treating criminals than those still prevalent. The proposal to treat lunatics on the mild system was long resisted by professional men in like manner, but has at last been established in spite of all sneering and opposition. Discouraging though these facts be, they are not to be wondered at. The opposition to new views must be regarded as altogether human, natural, and inevitable. The conservative feeling is useful, unless carried, as it often is, to the extent of inveterate prejudice and bigoted adherence to what is. It is proper that we should hold by the old, until the new has been proved to be the better. ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL. Only, let all new views have a fair hearing, and be tested, not so much by existing notions of things, as by their own intrinsic truth and worth. There always will be a strong conservative party to prevent their too sudden adoption. Among such are always to be found the more aged "that no man members of society. Goethe has said, receives a new idea, at variance with his pre-conceived notions, after forty." This is, probably, putting the case rather too strong; but, generally speaking, it will be found correct. You will very rarely find a medical man, for instance, beyond forty, ready to take up with new modes of treating disease, no matter how sufficient are the facts produced in its favour; nor old lawyers ready to advocate ameliorations in the criminal code-the most stubborn opponents of such measures having invariably Then, been the old lawyers in the House of Lords. the general mass of men will be found on the side of the old and established notions-the power of testing and sifting new views being as yet a comparatively rare endowment. The number of those who will undergo the toil and labour of patiently thinking out a subject, is, in every country, comparatively small. Hence, every new truth, no matter under howsoever favourable circumstances given to the world, must, for a long time, remain greatly in a minority among the mass of the people. It has to maintain a struggle, step by step, against obstinate opposition, and fights its way up to a majority, through contumely and ridicule,-this very opposition and ridicule being probably necessary to stimulate the infant truth in its growth to an ultimate unassailable vigour. It must be confessed, too, that the increasing intelligence of our time is every day affording greater facilities to the reception of new truths. Young and inquiring minds are, above all others, open to these impressions; and as the young rise into manhood, the truths they have early imbibed become embodied in action. Increasing facilities are every day given to the utterance of new truths. The wide gulph which used to separate the thinkers of former days from the mass of the people, and prevented the general acceptation of these truths, is now traversed in many ways; but the chief method of communication between the thinkers and the people, is the Press. Formerly a great thinker had but slender He was means of operating on the general mind. confined, as in a prison-house, and looked through He studied, explored, his bars on the crowd without. means of distribuand discovered, but he had no tion, and often the truth he had so laboriously achieved died with him. The case is greatly altered now. The thoughts of a great explorer and thinker are immediately transferred into the public mind by means of the press, and soon permeate the national intellect. Editors are invaluable as distributors of the stores of intellectual wealth. They are the retailers, and sometimes the originators of thought, which, dropt day by day, and week by week, into the public mind, influences, in the most extraordinary manner, the popular will and actions. We have seen many great results of this action within our own day; perhaps the most successful and salutary achievement that could be named, was that magnificent contribution to national education, the establishment of the penny post. The press, too, has its resisters; but even these help on the truth by stimulating to its full discussion; and who fears for the truth in a free and open encounter? New truths, then, have, on the whole, a much better chance of being listened to now, than at any previous period; and the day would appear to be not remote, when the number of thinkers shall have so increased, as to give every new idea a fair chance of being listened to with attention and respect; when new opinions shall be considered, not for the purpose of studying how best to confute them, but to discover how much truth there is in them, and how they may be rendered the most promotive of the well-being and happiness of our species. THE LEAST WARLIKE BUONAPARTE. EIGHT miles from Florence, on the road to Sienna, and on a hill cultivated to its summit, stands the town of Santo Casciano, remarkable for its inn, La Campana, having been once the abode of Macchiavelli. There was he often seen in wooden shoes and peasant garb, eagerly inquiring of the passing travellers, as he stood at the door, the news from their several countries; there too, was he wont to pass the evening of a day spent in bird-catching, chatting or arguing with the miller and butcher of the place. It was in these country sports and in the avocations of ordinary peasant-life that he sought, as he himself tells us, to work off the effervescence of his brain. At a distance of twenty miles is Cestaldo, that claims to have given birth to Boccaccio, and falsely claims, for Boccaccio was born at Paris; though he certainly not only lived for a long time at Cestaldo, but died there. In a smiling valley between these two places, so remarkable for their association with Macchiavelli and Boccaccio, there is a village so inconsiderable that its name is unknown, and its church utterly devoid of a single one of those wonders of art so profusely scattered throughout Italy; and in this village, in 1807, the most brilliant period of the French empire, lived a Curé of the name of Buonaparte. He was as poor and obscure as if a man of his name had not brought the Pope from the Vatican for his coronation at Notre Dame, as quiet and unambitious as if he were not the uncle of Letizia and the grand-uncle of the young general who had conquered Italy, carried his arms to the country of the Pyramids, and become the king-maker of Europe. While the Curé, like another Alcinous, was cultivating the garden of his parsonage, pruning his trees, and marrying his few vines to the five or six elms of his little Jomain, all the noise that his grand-nephew was making in the world passed over his head unheard by him. Who that saw him in his tattered mantle and well-pieced shoes Certain it is that none of his could have the most remote idea that he had such illustrious connections? parishioners suspected it, and on his part, he had forgotten his native land, Corsica, to think only of them, simple and ignorant like himself. His highest ambition His recreations were the providing was to live for them and be buried amongst them in the village cemetery. his table with a little game and fish, by the aid of a gun and a fishing-rod which stood in opposite corners of his little sitting-room. If to these pursuits be added the culture of some flowers and a little excursion every year to collect his tithes, we shall have a tolerably correct idea of the temporal avocations of the Curé Buonaparte. As to his spiritual occupations, they never varied from saying mass twice a week, and preaching every Sunday after vespers. From amidst all his parishioners, he had selected as the more especial objects of his favour and solicitude, a hen, a young girl, and a youth. The hen was white, and so tame, that when the Curé breakfasted in the little porch before his door, and called her by her name, Bianca, she used to take the crumbs from his hand, and to tolerate if she did not enjoy his caresses; indeed, she sometimes carried her condescension so far as to lay her daily egg in the dusty folds of his cassock; in short, she was a great pet. Almost as great a favourite, though in a different way, was the young girl Mattea; he had known her ever since she was born, had baptized her, and catechized her, and it was with an almost paternal pleasure that he watched her growing up, and saw her looking more beautiful every day. Mattea, with her fine eyes, her light and graceful figure, and her Italian naiveté, that combination of artlessness, archness, He and simplicity, was the pride of the village. All the good Cure's hopes and projects for the future were centred in the happiness of the young girl. had planned a brilliant establishment for her, nothing short of marrying her to Tommaso, his sacristan, who held the third place in his affections. Tommaso, a tall strapping youth, was an almost constant inmate of the parsonage, and the Cure's factotum. He was gardener, cook, and clerk, repeating the responses, singing in the choir, and decorating the altar. He was a good lad on the whole, though, being somewhat hot and testy, he was at the head and tail of every village quarrel. In the time of Dante he would have been either a Guelph ora Ghibelline, but never could have stood neutral. He loved Mattea with an ardour apparently shared by the young girl, who gave him no reason to complain of her coldness in receiving the attentions of her destined husband. 66 were laughing and chatting among themselves. Just as the Cure had approached the window, Mattea had ventured out of the corner in which she had taken refuge at the first approach of the troop, and in a very few minutes he observed her listening with down-cast eye, and blushing cheek, to a dragoon, who was paying his court to her with an assiduity which at last roused Tommaso from his admiring absorption in the immense sabres and brilliant uniforms, and brought him to the side of the young girl. The next moment, the Curé beheld the poor Tommaso scornfully repulsed by the inconstant fair one, and, on his attempting to remonstrate, saw him taken by the ear by his more fortunate rival, and whirled to the other end of the yard; while, to increase the good man's dismay, as he put his head out of the window, crying, Mattea, Mattea, go home to your mother, my child, this is no place for you," he perceived another dragoon, for whom beauty had no attraction, and whom the regimental rations did not appear to suffice, in full chase after his poor white hen Bianca, who was running in terror under the feet of the horses. In vain did he cry alternately, Dragoon, pray let Bianca alone." The feeble voice of the good Curé, even though that of a Buonaparte, was unheeded. All his remonstrances were useless, and would probably have continued so, even had not another cry of "Good Captain, you will kill our Bianca," been interrupted by the door opening to admit Mattea and the dragoon, followed by Tommaso. "My child, my child, go home to your mother."-"We have just come to tell your reverence," said the dragoon, "that she is coming home to me. If your reverence will give us your consent, well and good; but if you are slow about it, we cannot promise to wait for it. Can we, my pretty Thus peacefully and happily was the good Curé passing his life, in the midst of his parishioners, and surrounded by beings whom he loved, when one fine summer's day an unusual bustle pervaded the village, and unwonted noises were heard. The tramp of horses resounded through its one street, and the next instant a troop of dragoons were crowding into the yard of the little mansion, while one of the Emperor's generals in brilliant uniform, and a hat with snow-white plume, presented" Monsieur Dragoon, let Mattea go home;" "Monsieur himself before the Curé, who, handing him a chair, remained standing with his arms crossed upon his bosom, as if waiting to know to what martyrdom he was doomed. "Re-assure yourself, I beg, Sir," said General Count N. "Have I not the honour of speaking to M. Le Curé Buonaparte, the uncle of Napoleon, Emperor of the French, and King of Italy?" "Yes, Sir, I believe it is so," stammered the Curé, who had heard some confused report of his nephew's elevation, but heard it as one of those remote events, from all concern with which he was shut out by countries innumerable, and distances immeasurable. "His Imperial Majesty's mother." "Letizia?" interrupted the Curé. "His Imperial Majesty's mother," continued the General," mentioned you to him?" one ?" "And poor Tommaso!" cried the Curé. "Oh! as to me, your reverence, I declare off, since she chooses to care more for the dragoon than she does for me; and besides, they tell me that so fine a fellow as I am was never made for ringing bells, when I might one day be a captain or a colonel. So I intend to turn dragoon, and who knows but that you may yet see me a Marshal of France." The Curé could not bear these successive blows to all his hopes, and, rushing out of the room, met the General. You" What is the matter, Sir?" said he; "what has occurred to agitate you thus ?" "Do you mean to little Napoleon?" said the Curé. "To the Emperor, M. Le Curé. It is quite out of course, that so excellent a man, so near a relative as you are, should be thus left to languish in the obscurity of a petty village-curé, whilst your family are ruling all Europe, and your nephew is wielding the destinies of the world. The Emperor has deputed me to wait upon you. have only to speak, only to wish. Is there any particular bishopric you desire? Would you prefer one in France to one in Italy, or would you rather exchange your black cassock for the Cardinal's robe? The Emperor has too much respect and affection for you to refuse you anything, and there is nothing he cannot do." The greatest personage that the poor Curé had ever seen in his life was the bishop, who came once every year into the village to confirm the children, and for about a fortnight after this episcopal visit, bright visions of the splendid ring, the gold mitre, and the lace surplice floated before the still dazzled eyes of the good Curé. But now far greater splendour was displayed before his mind's eye, and prospects of far higher dignity were presented to gild his future. He hesitated in momentary doubt whether he had heard rightly, and then said, as if thinking aloud, "Can it be true? My niece Letizia, empress? and I heard her first confession. It is now a long time ago, Sir, when she was quite a little girl." The General smiled. "My lord," replied the Curé, "I had a good, sweet, innocent girl here, and, since your arrival, I have lost her. One of your soldiers "One of my soldiers presume to treat your house with disrespect, the house of the Emperor's uncle! The scoundrel shall be instantly shot. Brigade-Major, find out who has dared to commit such an offence. To death with him in an instant." "Oh! no bloodshed, Sir; I implore of you, no bloodshed," said the Curé. "" Sir,' said the Brigade-Major, "as far as I can know of the matter, the man only wants to marry the girl, and she seems nothing loth herself. It is André Pitteau." "I can answer for the good character of the man," said the General; "and, should he marry your protégée, I will take care he shall soon rise from the ranks; and as the damsel seems to have set her heart upon him, perhaps, M. Le Curé, you may as well not refuse your consent." It was with a sad heart the old man gave up the plan he had cherished for years; but seeing that further opposition would be useless, he agreed to perform the marriage ceremony. He must first, however, go and look after his hen, his pet Bianca. He did not like to mention it to the General, remembering his threat of shooting Mattea's dragoon, and shrinking from compromising the life of a |