presented his friend to the young ladies and to Alfred, and inquiring after Mrs. Eldred's health, regretted her inability to be present on the occasion. It would have been quite impossible, from his manner, to conjecture that any thing but perfect harmony prevailed; and, indeed, he was more than willing to be at peace with Edith's family. He was too real a gentleman to bring anger and revenge into a holy place; and the presence of Edith disposed him to forgiveness and amity. The clergyman saw this, and wrung his hand with a warmth of respect which he had little expected to feel for a man who had been represented to him as worldly and unscrupulous.

When the usual ceremonies had been executed in due form, Mr. Eldred, who had kept near the door by which they had entered the vestry, drew Edith's arm within his own, and passed hastily into the church and down the central aisle. As soon as Treloar could extricate himself he hastened after them, and overtook them standing between a double file of school-children in the porch. He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Edith,” he said, "will you not walk with me to your carriage?" "I thought you were never coming," she replied, blushing, with a strange confusion of expressions in her face. Yet she relinquished her father's arm for her husband's.

The children were scattering flowers for her to tread upon, and the eldest girl offered her a white rose-bud, prettily tied up with a crimson carnation and a sprig of laurel. The little attention pleased Treloar, who placed a note in the hands of the schoolmistress, and asked her to give the little ones a holiday and a treat. Then he led Edith to the tall fly, handed her in, and, telling the shabby coachman to drive to Mr. Eldred's house, sprang in after her and closed the door.

His arm stole round her waist. His face lit up like that of an angel beaming with joy. But Edith cowered into her corner, burst out crying, and sobbed, "Let me alone; let me alone."

A few minutes later, walking away from her father's house, Treloar met Harcourt coming toward him. The two gentlemen looked at each other curiously. Harcourt's look seemed to say, "I fear you are not happy;" Treloar's seemed to say, "I fear you suspect I am not happy." Then they linked arms together, and walked back to their hotel.

The major's face had just traversed three successive stages. The first, during Edith's strange behavior at the altar; the second, in that consummate moment when he sat alone with her in the tall fly-alone for the first time with his bride, the girl whom he had chosen out of all the world, and in face of all the world, to honor with his love; the third, when, baffled, puzzled, and pained, he had left his bride, for the last time, in her father's house, and was walking, perhaps for the last time also, to meet Harcourt, and spend a parting hour with the trusty friend of his youth. A physiognomist

who might have seen his face in each of these phases would have decided that Mrs. Treloar had her destiny in her own hands, for great good or for great evil. The man was evidently, like Titian's Petrus Arretinus," Virtutum acerrimus ac vitiorum demonstrator." If he was, as Harcourt and all who knew him well averred, "a gentleman" (in the noble use of that ill-used word), this result was not to be attributed to any defect of the stronger passions, or any excess of intellectual over animal energy. It was the effect of a powerful will, trained skillfully in the first instance, and afterward exerted vigorously in aid of the nobler parts of his character, and in the suppression or restraint of those qualities which needed no indulgence. It required no physiognomist to see that he was sensitive, proud, resolute, and unsparing of himself where his purpose required a victim. The almost illimitable tenderness of this strong nature was not so apparent. Edith thought that this quality had sprung up within him, toward her only, out of the depths of his love for her. She was quite prepared to find him stern, and even cruel, to others, and rather wondered at so great a measure of gentleness having extended from her to cover her father. Moreover, she was quite prepared, without knowing it, to be angry and jealous of any other object of his tender regard.

No keen observation either of her face, with its fleeting gleams and pallors, of her eyes, with their expanding and contracting pupils, now of the deep sapphire blue, now a cold greenishgray, or of her changeful manner, was necessary to indicate that Mrs. Treloar was unfitted by nature or by training to have charge of her own destiny. Had not her husband been loveblind he might at once have seen that it was so. He would, indeed, have seen it, and would have changed his nature for her sake; would have allowed his will to be supreme law for her, and held tenderness in a leash, and covered sensitiveness with an iron mask. Could he have sounded her shallow, turbid affections, measured her narrow, stunted mind, and estimated the greed and violence of her passions, he would have controlled her, and so protected her from herself. But true love sees the radiance of beauty on the treacherous surface, multiplies this a thousandfold in its own fantastic prisms, and sinks into a rapturous trance, from which it often awakes disenchanted, and discerns too late that its vision of bliss was the Slough of Despond, and its gleams of beauty ignes fatui.

Divided and distraught within herself, Edith had given herself to a man whom she loved, yet feared; loved passionately, feared horribly. And out of the depth of the terror which possessed her when she thought that he might be false arose a desperate ferocity, a burning desire for vengeance upon him and upon her father; upon him for betraying her, and her father for taunting her with her risk. Upon her father she had already, in part, executed the vengeance

Will it be credited that, in the very carrying out of this unfilial vengeance, a revulsion of feeling set in? Edith was wholly unlike the typical young lady of the period, both in disposition and in those relations amidst which her character had received its abnormal development. It may have been from the picture of baffled rage which her father's face presented on that fatal morning, contrasted with the calm triumph in her husband's eye; it may have been from a tardy conviction that all the opposition which she had encountered must have arisen from genuine love for her and care for her interests; it may have been merely the voice of nature, and the suppressed power of old associations, bursting through the barriers which passion had erected in their way. From whatever causes, the result was indubitable and irresistible. A passionate pity for her aged and miserable parent sprang up within her. An overwhelming recollection of all that he had been to her and done for her in childhood and youth, of his unfailing gentleness and inexhaustible kindness, of his forbearance toward her self-will and wayward humors, of how much indulgence and care he had given, how little gratitude and consideration he had received -these feelings broke through the constraint which she had laid upon them, and filled her with remorseful tenderness. The past rose up from its grave. The future was clouded and troublous to her tearful eyes. The man in whom the future centred, despite her own will and willful longing, appeared as the destroyer

Nor was Edith the girl to accept things as they are, and to resolve to make the best of them for the sake of peace and happiness, much less from a sense of duty and resignation to the inevitable. There is no tyranny like the habit of yielding to emotion. It had assumed a complete mastery of her, and swayed her this way and that as it would. If her humor was to repine, she would fume and fret and chafe and rebel, and secretly contemplate any means, however terrible, of canceling the cause of her regret. If her humor was to rush blindly into an unknown future, she would do so with reckless ardor and self- abandonment, trampling madly on the past and present. Rarely, if ever, was she willing or able to give herself heartily to the present, with wisdom, even of the low egotistic sort, derived from the past; or with a confidence, even that of the fatalist, much less one serene and calm, in the future. Rejecting that which was actually within her grasp, she was ever yearning and striving after shadows, and that with a fatuous impatience and impetuosity which not only robbed her of present content, but threatened, in some sudden access of emotion, to plunge her into some dire and irremediable calamity.

Thus the last hour which Edith passed in the home of her childhood resembled more the lull which precedes than the calm which succeeds a storm. A sullen silence fell upon all the members of that unhappy family; and when her husband drove up to the door she descended the stairs of her father's house, for the last time, with a smile more like the first fitful gleam of lightning than the peaceful ray of returning sunshine.

THE

eign capitalists became its depositors, sovereign princes its creditors, moribund millionaires remembered it munificently in their legacies, while fire, plague, and pestilence, by diminishing its liabilities, augmented its resources.

Founded upon an abstraction, with a national debt for its capital, and a bankrupt treasury as a sinking fund, with no other security than the faith of the republic and the integrity of its directors, its shares, nevertheless, commanded a premium, and its bills were preferred to coin. Gradually absorbing first the revenues, and then the colonial possessions of the state, it had the custom-house for an auxiliary, extensive

harbors, built bonded warehouses, monasteries, churches, public bake-shops, and ducal palaces. It erected fortifications and manned them, it constructed galleys and equipped them, it acquired provinces and governed them. It was a savings-bank, a sinking fund, a revenue office, and, as the prototype of the East India Company, a politico-commercial oligarchy, that "made war like merchants, and engaged in commerce like sultans."

At a time when the magnificent financial | schemes of John Law and the bursting of the great "Mississippi Bubble" were involving Paris in beggary, and threatening the financial world with bankruptcy, St. George could boast the most solid and substantial credit in Europe, and became the model upon which were subsequently organized the celebrated banks of England and Amsterdam. With an unlimited credit, at a moment's notice it could draw all the gold of Genoa into its vaults, and that, too, when the "rival sea queens" controlled the rich commerce of the Indies; when Genoa alone could dictate terms to the Emperor of Constantinople, it maintained a navy comparable to that of England or the United States, and fought naval battles to which few modern sea-fights, except those of Nelson or Farragut, afford a parallel.

"A spectacle truly rare," exclaims Macchiavelli, "and by philosophers in all their real or imaginary republics never before realized, to see within one and the same political circle, among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, civil life and political corruption, justice and license; and should it ever occur, as in time it undoubtedly will, that St. George should absorb the whole city, Genoa would become a republic more memorable than that of Venice."

Though the prophecy of Macchiavelli never found its fulfillment, still the destinies of St. George and those of the republic were so intimately united for a period of nearly four hundred years that to write the history of the one would be to give a more or less complete historical sketch of the other. As this would be foreign to our present purpose, as well as impracticable within the narrow limits of a magazine article, we simply propose to indicate, in merest outline, some of the causes which led to the establishment of this, one of the oldest as well as one of the most remarkable banks of which we have any record, and at the same time to give some account of its organization, privileges, administration, and downfall.

It was a maxim of Voltaire that "a state which only owes itself will never become impoverished, while its very indebtedness will become a new and powerful incentive to industry." It is unnecessary to affirm that a national debt is a national blessing. Like all other evils, however, it has its compensations. It lightens the public burdens, occasioned by great national emergencies, by distributing them. Since revolution may involve repudiation, it becomes a strong conservative element in a government, by identifying the interests of the public creditor, whether native or foreign, with a maintenance of the political statu quo. It indirectly encourages immigration, stimulates commerce, and promotes industrial pursuits, by creating a desire on the part of every tax-payer to increase the area of taxation, and thereby diminish its severity.

The public debt of Genoa affords a notable illustration of the manner in which a heavy na

tional indebtedness may be made to subserve the public utility by the development of commercial industry. Dating back as far as 1148, it represented the aggregate of a number of loans, many of them in the nature of forced loans exacted from the citizens in troublous times, to which were assigned certain duties or imposts of the government for a longer or shorter period, with a view of providing for the interest and ultimately liquidating the principal. When these were consolidated they no longer bore a fixed rate of interest, but the profits of the bondholders rather assumed the nature of dividends, which were more or less according to the receipts of the customs assigned. Hence it was that each bondholder was personally interested in the development and promotion of commercial and industrial pursuits, with a view of increasing the volume of the revenues, and thereby his own individual profits. Then, too, as it was the interest of every creditor of the government to see that the customs were faithfully collected, since he had no other guarantee for the payment of either interest or principal, each bondholder became virtually a secret detective in the revenue service, thereby most effectually promoting not only the public prosperity, but economy of administration as well as official fidelity.

No one can doubt, to make use of a familiar example by way of illustration, but that the internal revenue on whisky would be more faithfully collected and more satisfactorily accounted for were Congress to pass a law assigning this revenue to the national creditor in