Albanese, the only physician at present residing with Garibaldi. He lived opposite to me, but in order to reach him I had to pass through another room, in which I saw traces, inter alia, of the tailoring trade being carried on. It was the room of Fasoli, a young Calabrian who was with us in 1860, joined Garibaldi again in 1862, and now lives with him at Caprera. At the college of Catanzaro, his native town, he had learned, as is the custom at the Neapolitan schools, a trade, that of tailoring, and an imprisonment at Varagnano had afforded him time and abundant opportunities for practising his art. Now he proudly called himself the tailor of Caprera. As he mentioned to me that he felt a sad want of red shirts, I was so lucky as to be able to leave him a spare one I had by me.

I made my inquiries of Albanese, and spoke with him about the general's state of health. My hopes that Garibaldi, judging from his appearance, which I had found much more promising than I had anticipated, would soon be able to sit his horse again, were disappointed. Albanese said to me that the cure of the patient, though certain, progressed but slowly, mainly in consequence of the rheumatic affections from which he was suffering: splinters of bone continually issued from the wound. In fact, on the morning of February 16th another piece

came away.

After I had opened my little portmanteau, I handed Garibaldi the letters I had brought for him, and settled a few business affairs with him. When this was all satisfactorily arranged, the general said to me that he must now show me how he could walk. I helped him to get up, gave him his crutches, and he hobbled before me through several rooms and into the kitchen. The trial went off satisfactorily. A pair of new crutches had arrived with the Sardegna. On experimentalising with them, however, an unfortunate accident occurred; the general fell down, though, luckily, without hurting himself. The new crutches proved to be too long, and he had to revert to the old ones for the present.

I spent an amusing hour in looking over the gems of Garibaldi's correspondence. In one of them a young man of Hull, relying on the noble sentiments of Mr. Garibaldi, begged for some employment, as things had been going queer with him for some time past. In another, a Viennese doctor declared that he was in possession of an infallible recipe to cure the gout. After he had succeeded in effecting six hundred cures, he ventured to offer his services to the hero of Italy. All Garibaldi's doctors were to collect some fifty gouty patients, prepare the cure, and he would complete it. The result should then be laid before the eyes of astounded Europe; but the secret, which the Austrian government was trying to extort from the discoverer, not. An immediate answer was requested, as the discoverer had an excellent opportunity at the time for getting away.

So far as I am aware, Garibaldi followed my advice, and left all these letters unanswered. The general is much too good humoured in replying to letters, many of which are the sheerest nonsense. In the evening, as the weather had become rather better, I strolled about the northern part of the island, and plucked several flowers and leaves as a reminiscence, with which to oblige friends some day.

The next morning (February 16) I was at breakfast and busily engaged in conversation with the other islanders present, when the general hobbled in and sat down by our side. Bruzzesi and I read the latest telegraphic despatches of any importance that we found, more especially those giving any news about Poland. After this, the catalogue of the last London Exhibition was fetched, in which the general looked out the agricultural machines, with especial reference to the one which had arrived for him on board the Sardegna. Ricciotti, the mechanician and road-maker of the island, was called upon to give an explanation of the drawings and diagrams.

After I had conveyed Garibaldi to his room, I brought him various photographs of himself, intended as presents, to which he signed his name. After dinner I paid a visit, under Fruscianti's guidance, to the stable, which is called the oratory. On the north side of the court-yard, whose western side is entirely occupied by the main building, there is next to the stables a small iron house, sent from England, in which Bassi now has his office and lodgings. This iron house was the immediate predecessor of the older stone house, but the third erection on Garibaldi's territory; before it was a small wooden house, which is still standing on the south side of the court-yard, and separated from the house by a garden. On the same spot stood, before the wooden house was built, the very first roof Garibaldi possessed in Caprera―a tent. The eastern side of the court-yard, facing the main building, is equally composed of wall and hedges.

After my visit to the oratory, I went with my companions through the South gateway, and began a long stroll about the island. We first came to the meadow to the south of the court-yard, on which graze the only two horses at present residing on Caprera-Marsala, the mare the general rode at Calatafimi, and her filly Caprera, born on the island itself, a charming little creature, which at once struck up a great friendship with me, kissed me, and, when we went away, followed me in order to knock my hat off.

When we had clambered over the nearest layer of rocks among the bushes, we noticed a cabin, surrounded by turnip-fields, belonging to Ferracciuolo, one of the inhabitants of the island, who settled there before the general: Signora Ferracciuolo was engaged in drawing water. This cabin led to a statistical conversation about the population of Caprera, from which I derived the following facts. Besides Garibaldi and his family, three other families, or individuals, inhabit the island: the Sonza family, Isolano, and il Pastore, the shepherd of an English lady, who formerly possessed the greater part of Caprera, and from whom Garibaldi purchased his estate. The lady at present resides at Maddalena, facing Caprera. The oldest inhabitant is ninety-eight years of age: as far as is known, no one has ever died on the island.

When we returned, we found an artist of the name of Stefani, and a housekeeper selected for the general by the ladies of Milan, who had arrived the previous day on board the Sardegna, and had now come across from Maddalena, as the weather had grown calmer. Stefani, who had been engaged by an English gentleman to make various sketches of the island, at once looked out for the best points, and the housekeeper

The

was also at work already. She was inspecting the linen stores. inhabitants of the Palazzo Garibaldi seemed not particularly edified by the anticipated labours of the housekeeper. They said that they could make their own beds and wash their linen: if there was anything to repair, Fasoli was there, and there was nothing that wanted ironing. Why, then, bring this confusion into the house? Happy fellows!

We began our walk through the island at about half-past one o'clock, and were back soon after four. As supper would not be ready till six, I persuaded Fasoli to accompany me on a short stroll along the coast. We followed the great "highway," which runs to the coast in a northern direction from the Palazzo to what is called the port, a bay which is the prolongation of a ravine down which a mountain torrent flows-when there is any rain. To the side of the road lie several patches of ground, which the general has fenced in and begun to cultivate. Along the road runs a double row of young cypresses planted by Garibaldi. On the port stands a small building, which forms the naval arsenal of the island, and serves to stow away the sails and tackling of the several boats and barques of which the fleet of Caprera is composed. I counted four of them; among them Menotti's stately yawl was the most remarkable.

On the morning of the 17th, after drinking coffee, we began the day with agricultural tasks. I and Fasoli and Bruzzesi set to work hoeing the garden, the others, with the exception of Fruscianti, who had something to do at the arsenal, and Bassi, who was engaged in writing despatches chiefly intended for me, proceeded to the rocks on the north shore to perform the same operations as ourselves. Stefani was drawing, and I every now and then had a stroll on the beach. After dinner we continued our task, this time in the presence of the general, who seated himself outside in the pleasant warm sunshine, accompanied by Sgranalini, who had also come across. Among other exploits, we transferred from their pots a mandarin and an orange-tree, and planted them in the garden, after I had made a layer of compost for the former. Garibaldi complimented me highly, by the way, on my horticultural talents.

In the afternoon, Captain Cuneo, a friend of Garibaldi's, paid him a visit, and invited all Caprera to a carnival supper. As the weather had become much calmer, it might be anticipated that the Sardegna would return from Porto Torres on Wednesday morning, and as I had no time to lose, it was settled that I should sail over to Maddalena that evening. I therefore packed up my few traps, received my various commissions from all sides, and bade the general a hearty farewell. Then I started with Menotti for Maddalena, and my visit to Caprera was ended.

1

FRENCH KITCHENS.

BY FREDERICK MARSHALL.

Of all the differences which exist between England and France in the details of domestic arrangement, there is not one more radical and more striking than the opposite organisation of their respective kitchens.

In England, where everybody lives in a house, the kitchen has a certain fixed specified place, the same throughout the land; it humbly retains the inferior position assigned to it, and regards with proper deference and respect the other rooms which stand over its head; it would never dare to indulge the revolutionary notion of going up-stairs or of approaching the drawing-room. The distinctions of rank, which form the essential basis of life in aristocratic England, exist here as in everything else; the kitchen is born to occupy a subordinate situation, and must stop in it.

But in democratic France, where there are no castes, where everybody is equal to everybody else, where, in the towns at least, people do not live in houses at all, but in apartments which are all complete on the same floor, the kitchen is no longer an outcast condemned to live half underground beneath the cold shade of its superiors; it enters the great family of rooms on a footing of equality with all its members, and lives on an absolute level with its fellows. The only cases in which this republican fraternity is not applied occur in the private hotels, which are few in number, and of rents so high that they can be occupied by very rich people alone, and in the country, where each family has a separate house. But the country is so little inhabited in France (by people who have kitchens that is, for, as regards this subject, the twenty-five millions of peasants are like the kitchens in England-they don't count), that the latter category of habitations, and the facility which they afford for cooking on the ground floor, can scarcely be admitted to constitute a serious exception to the general rule, especially as the organisation of the kitchen itself is materially the same in the châteaux and country residences as in the town apartments; the only real difference is in its size and position. In each of the apartments of Paris and the other towns of France, an ordinary room, generally extremely small, is all that is reserved for the preparation of food; there are in each house as many kitchens as there are apartments. The only invidious distinction of which they are the object is, that they are usually placed at one end of the apartment, not from any want of proper respect for them, but solely to keep the smell of cooking as far off as possible, just as people in London, with all their veneration for the Thames, avoid its immediate too odorous neighbourhood. In all the good houses a separate staircase leads directly up, through each successive floor, to a door which opens thereon from each kitchen, so that the water-carrier, the charcoal dealer, the butcher boy, and other bearers of dirtying goods or wearers of unclean boots, may reach it without passing through the apartment or up the polished steps of the grand escalier. But in the smaller and cheaper apartments, which everywhere necessarily constitute the vast majority of the whole (at least 400,000 of

the 480,000 lodgings which Paris now contains are under 301. a year rent), there is no escalier de service at all; the kitchen is only accessible through the rooms. In these ordinary cases it is at best a diminutive room, and is sometimes merely a cupboard five feet by three, without a window. A British cook would shriek with horror at the notion of calling such a hole a kitchen, and might even be justified in doubting whether she would consent to put her empty boxes into it. And yet more admirable dinners issue from it than she ever produced in the large, welllighted, airy hall in which she perspiringly damages the food confided to her ignorance.

The culinary genius of the French is for more than half in this remarkable result; the handy installation of the kitchen itself makes up the rest.

It cannot be fairly argued that the larger kitchens which are found in the great houses or in the dearer apartments should be taken as the type; they are relatively so rare, that a just idea on the subject can only be formed on the mass of the little ones. Besides, it may be repeated that the arrangement is substantially the same in all the kitchens of France, without reference to their position, size, or vertical latitude; there is more or less room to walk about in them, and they contain more or less saucepans; but they are alike in their distribution, whether they are on a sixth floor or in a cellar.

A fair average Paris kitchen is about nine feet long and five feet wide; it never has more than one window, which generally looks into an obscure court-yard, some three yards square, so that at least half the objects it contains are often invisible in the daytime, from sheer want of illumination.

The great immediate fact which strikes the mind of an Englishman who enters a French kitchen for the first time (that is, supposing he can see across it) is, there is no fireplace in it. A kitchen without a fireplace! one would as soon expect to see a pear without pips, or an Englishman without an umbrella. It is, however, a groundless impression. It is true that nothing is to be discovered which in any way corresponds with British ideas of a proper, respectable, legitimate range; but there is something which replaces it, and the fantastic form of that something affords a remarkable proof of the danger of imagining, as a good many people do, that the same object ought necessarily to have the same shape and the same character everywhere. Along the wall of the dark den-called kitchen by courtesy, just as the title of soup is conferred on mixtures which a right-thinking Englishman takes for warm water stirred with a tallow candle-runs an iron edged table, four or five feet long, and eighteen inches or two feet wide; it is paved with blue and white chequered earthenware tiles-and that is the fireplace.

It must be owned that when one is first told that a table is a fireplace the statement is not easy to realise, but an investigation of the nature of the structure diminishes the difficulty. In this table are cut from four to six square holes, each some eight inches across; in each of these holes, three inches below the surface of the table, is fixed a little iron grating; eighteen inches underneath runs a shelf or bottom, of stone or iron, of just the same size as the table itself. The space between this bottom and the table above it is closed in front by iron doors. The whole forms a