ed to make a bust of my humble self. Of course I was only too delighted. At that age for you remember that this was at an early date - a provincial young woman, who had seen little or nothing of the fine arts of any sort, would naturally be taken by the idea of having her poor features cast in monumental form."

Barclay recollected a winning unconsciousness of her own loveliness, even in its brightest day, as one of her greatest charms.

"But this Schwartzmann was an original sort of person," she continued.

"I recollect him, myself, in connection with various cranky doings."

"He prepared for us a surprise, which he intended as an extraordinary compliment. What do you think it was? From the study he had made of my head he modeled that of his statue, and added more or less of my figure. He let no one know till it was complete and set in its place, and then triumphantly called upon us to observe the distinguished honor he had paid me in raising me thus aloft, six times as large as life, a couple of hundred feet above the pavement. Neither my father nor any others had made the discovery; most people are very unobservant about such things, unless their attention is especially called to them."

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"I, for one, feel greatly obliged to your original sculptor for his pretty idea."

"My father did not by any means take it so amiably. He was angry at Schwartzmann for not having consulted him, and would have nothing to do with him for a good while afterwards. I was not quite sure, myself, that I liked being exalted so conspicuously before high heaven; but when I came to see how little attention was paid to the matter of the likeness by anybody else, I became reconciled, and duly appreciative of the honor."

"My interest in the Golden Justice is at last intelligible," said Barclay.

"I suppose you are going to gallantly pretend that you knew this all the time?"

"Not at all, but I assure you there has been a certain rapport between us from the first."

The statue with its surroundings was by this time well behind them. They followed the sylvan upper reaches of the Keewaydin River, favored of swimmers and the light skiffs of merry-makers in the pleasant summer time; thence, by a winding road, through the rich autumn woods, full of the pensiveness of the season; and struck the lake again, a considerable distance above the city, at a charming cove and fishing - station. known as the White-Fish Bay. They stopped a little at this place, to watch the fishermen drawing their nets. The water was placid and silvery, and the fish leaped in it, as the seines shoaled under them, and turned their pink and silver sides to the light.

The air was impregnated with a peculiar smokiness and fragrant smell of burning said to come from distant forest fires. Indeed, in that season there had been great fires to the northward, which had destroyed a populous town, and burned many of its inhabitants to death while standing up to their chins in the river, to which they had fled for refuge. The road homeward lay along the line of the bluffs. In the fields was encamped the corn, bivouacked in its russet sheaves, while at the door of every tent, like a goblin sentinel, squatted a yellow pumpkin. On the other side stretched out the lake, azure blue and boundless as the ocean, veiled only by scattering, thin-stemmed trees, with foliage exquisitely dyed.

"It was not I who assumed the post of emblem, remember; it was an accident. No one who knew would ever have chosen me."

"Ah, no, you are better than that. I knew it, I knew it; I did not believe it," he protested strongly. "I have at last heard the other side of your story."

"What do you mean? What have you heard?" she demanded, turning towards him, startled and flushed.

"That you have suffered innocently, with a heroic fortitude; that your career has been a cruel martyrdom."

"Let me hear no praises, no compliments, on that score, I beg of you. I scarcely knew what it was. It has all passed, like a troubled dream. But you speak of your discovery as something recent; is it possible that you did not know of this- of all this before?"

"Only in the vaguest mention, on the first day of my arrival. Nor do I now know any of the details. I did not wish to talk with others about you; it seemed an irreverence, a kind of profanation. And then, you had almost made me afraid to ask. You had almost made me think. Why did you delight to so misrepresent yourself?"

"It is a way we women of the world have of talking," she replied, with a hollow gayety.

"Was it quite fair?" he urged, gently. "We were friends once; you might have trusted me a little more. Instead of sympathy, you tried to excite "

"Do I want sympathy? No, I will not have it," she interrupted, almost

ashamed to think of what is passing about all this in the minds of those who used to know me? And I thought you knew ; I thought I had been the gossip of two hemispheres." Then, in a sudden revulsion of softer feeling, with tears starting to her eyes, which she vainly turned away to hide, "Ah, what a life! what a life! And I who had expected so much from it!"

They were again in the streets of the town. Barclay saw that, with the best intentions in the world, he had struck some sort of false note. They remained silent a while, then spoke of indifferent things, and were presently at her own door.

So far from being an absolute recluse, Barclay found that Mrs. Varemberg showed in many ways a feverish activity. She drove about on charitable errands, visited her father's industrial schools, took a certain oversight of his public library, and the like. At parting, on this day, she said she had taken charge of preparing a somewhat better exhibit than usual for the "art department" of a state fair, which was about to hold its annual session on its own grounds in the western outskirts of the city.

"I am to go there to-morrow," she said. "Would it interest you to accompany me, and see what a state fair is like?"

EVERY traveler who has left Italy by the St. Gothard railway must remember that visionary view at the head of Lake Como, which seems to resume, in one swift and shining tableau, all the multiform aspects of loveliness and grandeur, the graces of nature and the glories of art, which constitute the rich dowry of the queenly country to which he is bidding a reluctant farewell. For one supreme instant, he has all Italy in view infinite breadth of deep blue water and infinite translucence of caressing air; a bright little town, with arcaded piazza and climbing loggie, cathedral dome and clustering campanili, set like a jewel at the meeting of the lake's encircling arms; majestic mountain outlines floating away upon either hand, a silvery gleam of snow upon the topmost peaks, if the season be yet early; fortress towers and airy belfries and penciled spires of the cypress crowning every outlying spur, and leading the eye down through shimmering olive orchards and smiling vineyard rows, to where modest hamlets dip their feet in the lapping water, and stately villas gleam out from amid their ilex and laurel shrubbery, far down the vanishing shores. "Te, Larie, maxume!" are the words that spring unbidden to the lips of Italy's parting guest, as he gazes, with an eye twice dazzled, it may be, by the consummate beauty of this great transformation scene and the sudden dimness of his own vision; and other words of the Mantuan come sighing through his memory, and he thinks of that piteous company of the shades, flinging out their wan arms toward life itself as it receded from them, ripa ulterioris amore.

1 Though identified by long residence with Verona, it seems almost certain that the elder no less than the younger Pliny was born at Como, on

One moment more, and it is all snatched away. The tunnel has engulfed him, as the shadow of the dark valley may close over a man who has received his death-warrant at a banquet, and Italy is hidden from the eye of

sense.

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Fortunately, the frontier station at Chiasso, on the other side of the mountain, is not, after all, an unreturning bourne," and one may die to Italy many times in the course of a natural life. The last time that the present writer did so was on the Tuesday of Easter week, 1885, after having passed the better part of Sunday and Monday in and about the singularly rich and quaint cathedral of Como, which has been so little exploité by artists and travelers, in comparison with most, that one revels in its negligent splendor with something very like the delight of discovery.

Up the singular façade on either side the deeply sculptured portal rise, one above another, a long line of niches, and as we explore them in their order, trying to identify by his or her symbol the mitred or palm-bearing occupant of each, we come upon two figures which display no Christian insignia whatever, but sit there, nevertheless, with all the tranquil dignity of antecedent right, simply robed in the sculpturesque folds of the senatorial toga. Long since made happily at home among the invading saints, the two Plinies, uncle and nephew, father and son by adoption and by devotion, look benignly down upon their beautiful and beloved native place,1 the Novum Comum of later Roman history. Nay, these two gifted sons of the elder world, and especially the delightful and communicative junior, through

some one of the ancestral estates on the border of the Larian lake.

whom almost alone the other is personally known to us, are far more deeply associated with the long life of the little town and the ideal beauty of the region than any of those others, with the solemn name upon their foreheads, who declare so plainly, by all we know of their doings, that they ever sought, while here, another and an unearthly country.

"What is doing at Como?" writes the younger Pliny to his friend Caninius Rufus, in one of the earliest of his first series of letters. "What of that delightful country-seat of yours, with the unfading greenery of its cloister, its impenetrable plane-trees, the grassy banks, flower-studded, of its little canal, the lake lying beneath you, subservient to all your needs?" And then there is the merry epistle in which he thanks his friend Romanus for affording him a precedent for his own extravagance :— "You write that you are engaged in building. I am enchanted. Now I can cite you as an example, for of course it is reasonable to do what you are doing! The only difference is that you build by the Bay of Baiæ, and I by the Larian lake." And then he goes on to say that, amid the rather extensive property which he holds along the lovely shores of Como, there are two places for which he has a special predilection, the villas which he has named Tragedy and Comedy because the former is, as it were, set up on buskins, while the latter dawdles in socks. Tragedy stands high, on the dorsal ridge of a steep promontory, with a wide outlook over two bays. Comedy nestles on the water-side, in the shore's encircling arms.

forest game, and the deep quietude invites to study. . . . Ah me, I envy you! It exasperates me to think that I cannot have what I long for as sick men long for wine and baths and running water."

The most casual allusion to Como is enough to make the younger Pliny's diction thrill, and to inform it thoroughly with life and color. No matter if the story be a sad one which he has to tell, the warm touch of his own loving pride in a most fair birthplace is never absent. "What a difference it makes who does a thing!" he says on one occasion, beginning a letter to Marcus, at once abruptly and reflectively. "I was sailing the other day on our Larian lake, when an old friend pointed out to me a villa, with a chamber projecting over the water." From the window of this room, Pliny is told that a husband and wife, bound fast together, had lately leaped into the waves and perished. The wife, when she found that her husband was attacked by a cruel and incurable malady, had encouraged him to the deed, offering to go with him and show him the way to death. "I do not see," muses Pliny, "that there is any difference between this action and that famous one of Arria, the wife of Pætus (Pate, non dolet), except that Arria was a great lady, whereas the other was a compar atively obscure person, of whom one never would have heard but for my old fellow-townsman."

It was all, as we know, in accordance with the highest morality of the time, and we shall see hereafter how strongly Pliny was all his life swayed by his intimate connection with that illustrious family of confessors and martyrs for freedom, the descendants of the first Arria and of Cæcina Pætus. At present we are concerned only to picture to ourselves the scene of the quiet tragedy in question, and to note the softening of the Comensian's voice as he describes it. Fate had ordained that the

varied action of his own crowded life should pass in scenes which were almost all of them conspicuous for natural beauty with his uncle at Verona, in which Ruskin long since taught us to see one of the three cities in all the world most beautiful for situation; on the pleasant foot-hills of the Apennines, near the sources of the Tiber; by the matchless Gulf of Baia; and among the haunted shades and rosemary-wreathed avenues of that property of the Chigi which we call Castel Fusano. But whatever degree of truth there may be in the popular persuasion that the men of the old world in general cared little for landscape beauty (and we fancy there is not much), here, at least, was one who enjoyed scenery exactly as we enjoy it; who was never quite happy unless nature turned a fair countenance upon him, and he could feel, or fancy, himself in sympathy with earth and sea and sky; on whom we have abundant evidence to show that his rare privileges of "location" were by no means thrown away.

Caius Cæcilius, who was later on to receive through adoption by his already famous uncle the name of Plinius Secundus, was born at Novum Comum, A. D. 62. His gentile name Cæcilius, though not among the most élite of all the Roman patronymics, was yet an old and excellent one, and he displays an amiable and not unbecoming touch of family pride in the letter to the grandfather of his second wife, Calpurnia, in which he laments the disappointment of his first hope of issue by her; but he presses his confidence (not justified, by the way) that there will yet be a family to transmit his name, and to whom he will be able to leave his non subitas imagines, as who should say, "Our family portraits were not painted yesterday."

His own father, also a Caius Cæcilius, died while he was a mere lad. They were not, apparently a physically vigor

He had a very

ous or long-lived race. distinguished guardian, the general Verginius Rufus, who also held estates on the Lake of Como, and who was absent with the army in Spain when the elder Caius died, A. D. 71. The boy's maternal uncle, the elder Pliny, by whom he was now adopted, was something over forty years of age, and a man of irregular but extraordinarily varied capacity and achievement. Soldier, sailor, statesman, and courtier, beside being the author of seventy-five books of natural history and political and military memoirs, many of which have come down to us, he was at this period in the full prime of his laborious life. A highly distinguished man, yet what we know of the sensitive and affectionate nature of his adoptive son makes us particularly glad of the assurance that the boy's mother went with him to his new home in her brother's house. The younger Pliny always writes of his uncle with loyal reverence for his imposing character, and humble and unfeigned admiration of his tireless energy in study and the encyclopædic nature of his attainments, while he has left us a thrilling narrative of his tragical end. But there is nowhere the glow of filial fondness, the touch of tearful enthusiasm, with which he writes of those other great friends of his family and guardians of his youth, Verginius and Corellius Rufus. It is hardly possible, in fact, not to infer a something of at least outward asperity and sternness in the elder Pliny, an almost fierce preoccupation with his own affairs, and a rather ostentatious disdain of the ordinary weaknesses of humanity. There must have been drawbacks to the pleasure of visiting a man, however illustrious, who insisted upon always having loud reading during dinner, and who once, when a guest begged the reader to repeat a passage which he had pronounced hurriedly, turned sharply upon the gentleman, and asked if he had not understood