about looks or suits like those Signora Sallicetti imports from Paris. The neighbors call me parsimonious. I had to be. And it's no wonder that Napoleon's disposition is uneasy, with what went before. It's mercy I didn't bear him in the saddleskirts, not on that strip of red carpet there. But come, my brother, why are you so worried about the boy? What do people say?"

"I am no more worried about him, Letizia, than you are yourself," returned the abbé. "As for what people say, they but exaggerate what you and I fear."

"And what is that?" looking him straight in the eye.

"That he, like Carlo, is consumed with self-interest, has forgotten Corsica and sold himself to France. Now, mind you, Letizia," he explained, shifting uneasily in his chair, "a son of yours is as my own. repeat what people say.'

I but

"Treachery then," she answered with fire. "The crime is yours to carry the gossip! You know not my son!"

Here she paused, as if, scarce knowing her son but knowing quite fully his father, she herself wondered.

"We do not always get along, he and I-perhaps we are too alike; and sometimes he resents reproof, gentle chiding from me, his mother. Yet he is loving and sensible to principles of honor. And you know how loyal he is to you, Fesch, who criticize him, and to all his family. No, no, there can be nothing wrong there!"

So, having reaffirmed her faith, she went rapidly on with that native eloquence all Corsicans have on occasion.

"I admit he has self-interest, but what young man has not who wants to rise? Still, duty and ambition often lie up the same road. He loves Corsica passionately, but sees for her security under France. The king is bound to fall, the Revolution to win control. On that I know he counts. And despite his moods, his dreams, he is a practical man—no visionary like Pasquale Paoli nor a zealot like you; for you are that, my dear brother, under all your outward placidity."

"Practical! How practical?" the abbé asked with unwonted heat. "No, I do not mean to hurt; but what does it all amount to? He forms a Jacobin club, it is closed; a National Guard, it is dispersed; tries to get himself elected adjutantmajor, to seize the citadel, is almost killed. No, everything your son this cocksure little lieutenant touches ends in failure. If he were wise like Joseph now, or had the boy Lucien's eloquence

"Did you ever stop to think, my dear brother, that he opened that club of his again; also that while we all prophesy great things for Joseph and Lucien, it is about Napoleon that we, like the townspeople, are always talking? And here we are at it again!"

With this she paused in her work and went to the window that gave on a terrace behind the house, with a few almond, mulberry, peach, and citron trees, and one giant chestnut. Joseph, Napoleon, Lucien, were somewhere about the island, and Marianne Elisa away at school at St.-Cyr; but here Pauline and Caroline, with Louis and little Jerome, were playing quite near a

summer-house made of rude boards. It had been built several years before by the Napoleon they were discussing, when the weather was too hot for the coop in the attic, "to get away," as he said, "from all the noise." Studying, studying always-that rude little structure was significant, she thought.

"Do you know," she said, as she returned to her sewing, "I had a dream last night. He was a baby again, playing with those faded red flowers on the carpet here; then a boy mounted on a hobby-horse. Suddenly he grew into a man, and the hobby-horse turned into a charger, while the carpet became a bloodred sky. Then he rode across the sky, high in the heaven, all his brothers and sisters in his train. Then, when he reached the zenith, he looked down from the trail of glory-and smiled at me as I lay in my bed as if to say, 'Will you believe believe in me now, Signora Mother?""

"Pshaw!" said the abbé, returning to his salty humor again, as the sounds of childish bickerings arose from the yard. "They'd all quarrel before they were half-way up. Joseph would be advising Napoleon which way to ride, Lucien in the sulks, and Pauline pulling Marianne's hair. Besides, Letizia, pride goeth-"

"Before a fall," she finished for him. "I know it; but for a man it is better to ride high and fall than never to mount at all."

Still, she disliked the dream, and distrusted it; preferring honor rather than glory for her sons. And as for what the abbé said, it seemed quite true. The little stripling appeared absurd enough—not when he looked you straight in the face, but when

you were away from him and talking about him.

22

However, the fancy was now dispelled by the sound of an affray from a near-by street. from a near-by street. Deliberately, because she was herself controlled and such affairs were common in Ajaccio, Letizia crossed to a southwest window, which gave a view of the corner from which the noise of the fracas arose.

Below, she saw the children clambering over the garden wall and up into the chestnut for a nearer view, but could herself make out only the fragment of a passing processioncowled priests and ragged followers of Paoli-with the Corsican colors. The column had halted, and the marchers were jeering some one on the sidewalk whose figure was hidden by the garden wall of the adjacent house and its overhanging fruit-trees. A stone crashed through a window of the neighboring house, followed by another that almost reached the branches of the chestnut-tree to which the Bonaparte children clung -Louis on the highest branch, as became his bold spirit, the slightly younger Pauline and Caroline on safer perches below, while little Jerome picked up some half-ripe burrs that had fallen to the ground. For some reason the clamor now ceased; Letizia could see the tip of the standard move through the trees, and the procession passed on.

And now three visitors were coming across the courtyard—a young man of graceful carriage, a young woman, and an older one, the first two well poised, the third excited and gesticulating, apparently over the disturbance Signora Bonaparte had

just witnessed. She went to the door to be ready to greet the guests, when the children rushed in pellmell, ahead of them, eager to tell of what they had seen. They were reprimanded by their mother, who, after greeting the new-comers, turned, with an apology, to quiet Pauline, a pretty child but a little more excitable than the others. She was much attached to her brother Napoleon and was crying:

"They stoned Napoleon and hurt him. He had blood on his forehead!" Here the oldest of the visitors, a Signora Sallicetti, volubly broke in:

"It is true, Signora Bonaparte; two stones actually fell in our carriage. I myself was almost killed. It was your son Napoleon who is always stirring things up. Charles here," indicating the young man beside her, "would have flown to his rescue, had I not held him by the arm. But, Charles, you tell it; my heart is beating too terribly. Have you, Letizia, any sal volatile?"

Despatching Pauline for the restorative, Letizia turned to the young man, whom she did not criticize for any failure to aid her son, knowing what he had on his hands in the excited woman before her; but already he was reassuring his hostess, though it occurred to him that here was a woman who needed support about as little as any woman he had ever

seen.

"Do not be alarmed, signora," he said. "Napoleon settled them-as usual," he added smilingly; then, seeing that his excitable aunt was a little more composed, continued: "Joseph was there, but it was Napoleon they aimed at. The procession was marching by, clerics, sympa

thizers with Paoli, and the customary rag-tag rabble, and Napoleon stopped to watch it, with that halfamused expression of his, when the tail end of the crowd, the rabble again, signora, took it into their heads to jeer at him-called him. 'traitor,' 'lover of the French,' and all that."

At this confirmation of all that he had been saying, Fesch glanced at Letizia significantly; but again the excitable Sallicetti broke in.

"It's Napoleon's fault, Letizia. Your son should have nothing to do with those low-born Jacobins!"

For all her poise, Letizia could scarcely suppress a smile, the caller's face shone so scarlet under the latest importation from Paris, one of those gorgeous creations called a chapeau à la belle poule. The main part of the hat was bateau-shaped, in color apple-green sprinkled with silver dots; and surmounting it were three sky-blue ribbons shaped like pleated Chinese junk sails, with a wisteria-hued velvet bow at the stern and pink ribbons, like banners, floating out from here and there. It had the effect of a gaily colored galleon under full sail on the excited lady's high-built coiffure—a galleon, be it said, tilted a bit off its keel by the late excitement. This, Madame Sallicetti-she preferred the French title-discovered to her consternation and was reassembling it before the large mirror.

Letizia, however, turned from the spectacle to ask:

"And Napoleon, was he seriously wounded?"

"No, madame; a large stone struck him in the forehead-a deep gash, but he did not fall."

"And Joseph?" "He took it like a man," returned the youthful visitor.

"Both were unmoved; but if I may venture it, signora, I think Joseph was steeled by his younger brother. For though it is past, they were in real danger of being killed; and Napoleon was like a rock-a rock with the eyes of a falcon," the young man added, mixing his metaphors enthusiastically. "It was his demeanor that quelled them."

Letizia, accustomed to bloodshed, was not perturbed by the accident itself-only perhaps for what it portended; and she turned to the other guests, Madame Sallicetti and her protégée, Mademoiselle de Launey. She was a tall girl of fine carriage and very evident breeding, with dark eyes finely set and inclined to serious mood, partly by nature, partly because of certain vivid memories of July, '89, in Paris. Her father, an officer of the Guard, had fallen in the sack of the Bastille.

The voluble Sallicetti had now recovered sufficiently to address herself to the Abbé Fesch with many commiserations on the unhappy state of affairs on the island.

"I declare dreadful things will happen here in Ajaccio!" she exclaimed. "Why, they're happening every day! Soon Corsica will be unfit to live in. For myself I plan to emigrate to France."

"But where, my dear signora?" returned the abbé. "To Toulon, Marseilles, Nice? The frying-pan into the fire! The Revolution is quiet for the moment; but it will break forth soon in more blood."

"Oh," said the lady, "that cannot be! The French are too polite,

too refined. What do you think, Madame Bonaparte?" Letizia turned.

"My place is here with my people,' she answered firmly, "until we are driven out."

"Bravo, mother!" said a voice from the doorway, and two young men entered and bowed respectfully to Letizia and their guests.

The elder, Joseph, was twentythree, with the large head that was apt to characterize the Bonapartes, fine features which showed some intellectual power, also a little indolence, especially in the heavy-lidded eyes.

The speaker, Lucien, then seventeen, and slighter in line of head and body than his brother, was much more vivid, though darker in coloring. In his profile, swarthy and incisive, one might have found the counterpart to the head on some fine old coin.

He was the orator of the family, and for the benefit of his mother's guests, and because he liked to talk and had often been told he spoke well, he plunged into an explanation of the affray.

"Just rabble, followers of Paoli, and some foolish priests-your pardon, uncle"—this, catching the eye of Fesch. "But they're vexed at the new Civil Constitution taking away some of their vested rights. It is equitable too," he declared with all the arrogance of youth. "Church and state should be separate for the common good.”

The usually good-natured abbé caught him up.

"With their separation follows anarchy!" he indignantly exclaimed. Both to plague his uncle and to

seize the opportunity for more eloquence, the youth staged another forensic display, when Letizia interfered.

"Lucien!" was all she said; and brave as the young man might elsewhere show himself, that "Lucien” was enough.

"Pardon, mother," he said with a smile. "I did not mean to plague dear Uncle Fesch, but times are changing. In the new order, the Revolution, lies our only hope."

"What hope, monsieur?" the young woman, Mademoiselle de Launey, asked, in a voice piercingly sweet. "I have seen your Revolution at work, you see, messieurs; men slaughtered the innocent; unspeakable things done to their bodies; my father's head carried on a pike!"

Lucien bowed and was about to utter some apology when his mother spoke rapidly in Italian, which the girl could scarcely understand. "You see, Lucien, your impetuosity has hurt. Go find Napoleon. Tell him I wish to see him before he leaves." "I cannot, signora, for already he is off somewhere inland."

Then, taking the opportunity, he made his escape upstairs, carrying off Joseph with him, while Letizia rang the bell-rope for old Mammucia Caterina.

When the wine, a thin sour wine from their own vineyards at Melleli, was served, Letizia turned to talk with the young Frenchman, Charles de Revillé, scion of an old Touraine family, whom Madame Sallicetti had appropriated during his stay in Corsica, as she did all things French. Letizia liked the young man both for his manner and his defense of Napoleon, for that was a refreshing

experience just now, when everybody was attacking him.

"You do not like our Corsica?" she hazarded, by way of indirection, as she took a seat by his side.

"On the contrary I do, signora— like her and sympathize.

"Also with my son, I think, from what you said. You know him well?" "For the past year only. It is a great honor," he added. "You mean, signor?" "That he is going far."

"Would you say on the right road? But that is a strange question for a mother to ask; and we Corsican mothers are proud. But somehow you have the air of a father confessor. Forgive me, signor; I do not jest. I mean you have great poise for one so young."

"I shall be twenty-one in October, signora."

"You are almost of an age then. Napoleon's birthday is in August. But you haven't yet answered my question.'

"Which, madame?"

"Does he follow the right road?" "That is a hard one to answer, signora, for one of my youth. I see many roads and, like the English poet's Hamlet, am sometimes of more than one mind. As for the Revolution"-here he lowered his voice so that Mademoiselle de Launey should not hear-"no limb can be amputated without some bloodletting."

"So speaks my son. As for myself, I am a very selfish woman, caring only for my family and for Corsica,' she declared, to add thoughtfully, after a pause: "I have watched him as only a mother can-in childhood winning and sweet,though sometimes