VII.

A Hot Day in Rome-Sunsets-The Tramontana-Classical Recollections of Albano and Castello-The Festa of the Madonna del Tufo -Characters.

EOPLE have an idea that the Italians are becom

PEOPLE

ing more civilised and eschewing the use of the stiletto; that a Bravo is a chimerical animal only existing in Cooper's romance; that wives are virtuous, husbands faithful, and cicisbeism quite out of date and altogether ungenteel. All these charitable surmises are mistakes-I could recount various anecdotes proving the truth of what I say but as to the murdering part, listen. There was a day last week in Rome of intense heat. I suppose this state of the atmosphere occasioned a moral delirium, for many who rose that morning blithe and gay, lay down before night on mother earth never to rise again. There was a madness abroad that day for certain.

S. W and a friend were refreshing the outward and inner man by a siesta at Nazzari's and an ice, when their attention was attracted by much running to and

fro, loud talking, swearing, and tumult-a general excitement, in fact, all tending towards the Via Babuino. They joined the crowd, and heard that an assassino had been committed in broad daylight, and that the corpse lay there. Pressing forward, they saw extended on the stones, quite dead, a lovely girl weltering in her blood, with a deadly wound in her side. They at once recognised her as a well-known model, renowned for her beauty and grace. There she lay, pale and bloody, on the cold stones, until some of the brothers of the Misericordia came (they that wear the black masks and long dark robes, and look more like mummies than men) and composed her limbs, and, laying her in a great sheet, carried her away. She had been walking with un certo amico, it seems, in the Via Babuino, when her husband passed. His ire was kindled, his jealousy aroused; he drew his stiletto and slaughtered her there on the spot where she stood; then ran away. But the certo amico, her cavaliere, ran after him when the poor thing dropped from his arm stone dead, and watched and dodged him into a certain house; and when in the evening he came out, the said amico, having his stiletto ready hid in the sleeve of his coat, struck him down then and there, and left him lying weltering in his blood as she had lain. Whether this valiant lover escaped or not I cannot say.

That same day a man was passing in a cart through the Piazza Barberini, where Bernini's classic Some one crossed his path,

by the carettino, gave the

fountain plays in the sun. and, being nearly run over horse a blow with a stick. No word was spoken; but the carettiere stopped his cart, descended, deliberately drew his stiletto, and stabbed the man dead; then, remounting, drove away. So much for the effects of a hot day in Rome.

We have had a series of the most magnificent sunsets imaginable. Sometimes great bands of purple and gold clasp the broad horizon in gorgeous girdles, the gold melting into the ocean in fields of glistening fire, or flaming here and there upon a distant mountainpeak, all Nature lying dark and black as a pall—a fitting foreground for this brilliant sight. Sometimes the whole heavens seem on fire-a terrible conflagration prefiguring that awful End when the earth and all that it contains shall be consumed with fervent heat. I have almost trembled as, standing under the pergola in our garden, I have watched the awful scene, too horribly beautiful to contemplate with aught but dread. Golden clouds, dissolving into crimson, saffron, and scarlet, lay quivering and palpitating as in an atmosphere of ardent fire, save where here and there sombre masses of purple, tipped with the

prevailing fire-tint, bore storms and thunders in their deep bosoms. Anon the parting clouds opened into cavernous recesses of inmost glory, and the sun, an orb of liquid fire, glowed out "stern as the unlashed eye of God." For awhile it glowed in infinite light, irradiating the sad Campagna with a wild, unearthly hue; then, dipping into the encircling sea, it slowly vanished, and deep shadows fell fast around, and the sullen, purple, massed-up clouds turned into banks of sombre lead colour. I have seen the sky at other times completely covered with a network of purple and gold, exquisitely lovely, with here and there touches and tinges as of fire, while between the parting rifts pale blue sky peeped softly out; and I have seen the vaulted firmament of a sweet heavenly blue, as it may have looked when God beheld his labour and pronounced it good.

Then, after the sunsets, came a mighty wind, the Tramontana, down from the icy North, passing across the snowy summits of the everlasting Alps, and bearing in its breath the rigid cold from out their glacier bosoms a furious wind that tore and rent the gigantic trees, wrenched the mantling leaves in showers from the bending boughs, and thundered among the rocky caverns of our hills like a torrent of invisible avalanches.

How that Tramontana wind roared and whistled about our mountain home! How it raged up at Monte Cavo! Heaven help the poor monks! They must have trembled in their beds, and said many an Ave in their fear. How it yelled among the tottering ruins of Tusculum, and bent and twisted the grand old pinetrees that diadem its sloping woods around Cicero's ruined portico! The motionless waters of the Alban Lake swayed to and fro this wild and dreary night— those mystic waters that never listen to the enticing breath of fragrant summer. Even Nemi, too, Diana's mirror, must have lashed its wooded sides under the influence of such a hurricane.

I thought of all this sitting beside the blazing wood fire on our own cheerful hearth, while the storm raged remorselessly without. It is delightful to sit and listen to the shrill whistling of the gale; to watch the shadows on the wall as the fire flickers. There is an exquisite sense of luxury and domestic peace and household security at such a time. There I sat ; and I questioned the wind as it swept up from the far North, of many things. I asked it of a certain corner in a once-loved home, deeply embosomed in an English wood-a pleasant home, where, in the happy days of my childhood, the sun smiled in winter as in summer. That corner - how well I remembered it! where the