"You cannot believe I would gallop Catamount twenty-two miles on a hard road for any lady in the world. I don't suppose he'd take me if I wanted to go. She, indeed! There's no she in the matter!"

"You might have made one exception in common politeness," said Mrs. Lushington, laughing. "But I'm not satisfied yet. You and Catamount are a very flighty pair. I still think there's a lady in the case."

"A lady in boots and spurs, then," he answered; "six foot high, with grey moustaches and a lame leg from a sabre-cut-a lady who has been thirty years soldering, and never gave or questioned an unreasonable order. Do you know many ladies of that stamp, Mrs. Lushington? I only know one, and she has made my regiment the smartest in the service."

"I do know your Colonel a little," said she. "I met him once at Aldershot, and though he is anything but an old woman, I consider him an old dear! So I am not very far wrong, after all. Now, what did he want you for? Sent for you of course, to have-what do you call it ?—a whigging. I'm afraid, Master Bill, you're a sad, bad boy, and always getting into scrapes."

"Wigging!" he repeated indignantly. could have been kinder than the Chief.

"Not a bit of it; nothing He's the best old fellow in

the world! I wasn't sent for. I didn't go on my own account; I went down about Daisy."

Then he stopped short, afraid of having committed himself, and conscious that at the present crisis of his brother-officer's affairs, the less said about them the better.

But who, since the days of Samson, was ever able to keep a secret from a woman resolved to worm it out? As the strong man in Delilah's lap, so was Bill in the boudoir of Mrs. Lushington.

"Daisy," she repeated; "do you know anything of Daisy? Tell nie all about him. We're so interested, you can't think, and so sorry for his difficulties. I wish I could help him. Is there nothing to be done?"

Touched by her concern for his friend's welfare, he trusted her at

once.

"You won't mention it," said he," Daisy was with me at Kensington to-day. He can't show yet, you know; but still we hope to make it all right in time. He's got a month's leave for the present; and I packed him off, to start by the Irish mail to-night, just before I came to see you. He'll keep quiet over there, and people won't know where he is; so they can't write, and then say he doesn't answer their

letters. Anything to put off the smash as long as possible. One can never tell what may turn up."

"You're a kind friend," she replied approvingly, "and a good boy. There! that's a great deal for me to say. Now tell me where the poor fellow is gone."

"You won't breathe it to a soul," said honest Bill-"not even to Mr. Lushington ?"

"Not even to Mr. Lushington !" she protested, greatly amused.

He gave her the address with profound gravity, and an implicit reliance on her secrecy.

"A hill-farmer in Roscommon!" she exclaimed. "I know the man. His name is Dennis; I saw him at Punchestown."

"You know everything," he said, in a tone of admiration. "It must be very jolly to be clever, and that."

"It's much jollier to be 'rich and that,'" was her answer. is what we all seem to want-especially poor Daisy. much do you suppose it would take to set him straight?"

Money

Now, how

He was not the man to trust any one by halves. "Three thousand,” he declared frankly; "and where he is to get it beats me altogether. Of course he can't hide for ever. After a time he must come back to do duty; then there'll be a show up, and he'll have to leave the regiment."

"And you will get your troop," said Mrs. Lushington. "You see I know all about that too."

His own promotion, however, as has been said, afforded this kindhearted young gentleman no sort of consolation.

"I hope it won't come to that," was his comment on the military knowledge of his hostess. "I've great faith in luck. When things are at their worst, they mend. Never say die till you're dead, Mrs. Lushington. Take your 'crowners' good humouredly. Stick to your horse; and don't let go of the bridle !"

"You've been here more than your three-quarters of an hour,” said Mrs. Lushington, "and you're beginning to talk slang, so you'd better depart. But you're improving, I think, and you may come again. Let me see, the day after to-morrow, if the Colonel don't object, and if you can find another handkerchief with a deeper shade of blue."

So Bill took his leave, and proceeded to "The Rag," where he meant to dine in company with other choice spirits, wondering whether it would ever be his lot to marry a woman like Mrs. Lushington-younger, of course, and perhaps, though he hardly ventured to tell himself so, with a little less chaff-doubting the while

if he could consent so entirely to change his condition and his daily, or perhaps rather his nightly, habits of life. He need not give up the regiment, he reflected, and could keep Catamount, though the stud might have to be reduced. But what would become of Benjamin? Was it possible any lady would permit the badger to occupy a bottom drawer in her wardrobe? This seemed a difficult question. Pending its solution, perhaps he had better remain as he was.

(To be continued.)

ART IN FAIRYLAND.

VENICE SKETCHED FROM A GONDOLA. BY CHARLES KENT.

T really matters nothing how, for the first time in your life, you enter Venice. Whether it be in winter or in summer, by night or by day, on board a steamboat or ensconced in a railway carriage. Once you have actually quitted packet or station, once you have fairly stepped into your gondola, and are afloat among the hundred islands, so long as your sojourn there shall last, you are launched in a scene of enchantment. My own acquaintance with the beautiful city began under circumstances that any one might have regarded as unpropitious-approaching it, as I did, in the grey dawn and blighting cold of a Sunday morning in November. Yet, for all that, I was not in the least degree disillusioned. During the night I had crossed the Adriatic from Trieste, and was now entering the lagoon on board the Dalmatia just as the day was breaking. Rapidly as the light increased, gradually as the city was neared, the dream of a lifetime was surpassed by the waking reality. It was thus already, piecemeal, while I was yet standing on the deck of the steampacket, gazing over the bulwarks at the Riva Schiavoni-immediately fronting from the North the Isola San Giorgio. But when, soon after this, one's valise, and wraps, and minor impedimenta had been tossed down to the expectant gondolier, in whose picturesque conveyance, in another moment, I found myself seated in solitary state, skimming over the waters of the Grand Canal, past the familiar Dogana (even though never seen before, so instantly recognised, thanks to Canaletto and others, to say nothing of photography), as my boat swerves to the right up a narrow water-way, and thence, in and out, among the overshadowing houses-adieu! for the time being to simply every-day existence, to mere common-place and matter-of-fact. My destination is soon reached the landing-place, that is, leading me across the threshold of the Grand Hotel Victoria, known until yesterday as the Regina d'Ingleterra. Thawed back into something like an ordinary sense of warmth before a crackling wood fire, which I have caused at once to be kindled on the old-fashioned hearth of my apartment, and enjoying, besides the glow, my first taste of Venetian cookery in a thoroughly Italian breakfast, I eagerly sally forth immediately afterwards, alternately afloat and

afoot, upon my wanderings, hither and thither, through all the windings of that wonderful labyrinth of city and sea-Venice, for more than a thousand years the Bride of the Adriatic. From that moment, from that very forenoon, my recollections of Venice begin to date in their integrity. Thenceforth, not upon the instant, it is true, but later on, in the retrospect, they assume to themselves a certain air of substance and consistency. The peregrinations I then entered upon were in no way made systematically. Whithersoever I listed, I went ; now alone, now at the chance suggestion of my gondolier, now under the guidance of the intelligent cicerone happily engaged to direct my footsteps, once in a way, for several hours together. It is only after carefully threading the mazes of that amphibious capital, and then recalling to mind long afterwards what one has there been examining, that it is possible to realise even proximately the marvellous variety, profusion, and splendour of the magnificent spectacle that has been witnessed. While you are viewing it, you are for the most part dazzled and bewildered. It is subsequently, when your wanderings are over, when you come to look back at all you have been seeing in Venice, that you are at length enabled to regard scenes, localities, structures, masterpieces, with anything like a due sense of their relative proportions, of their full artistic significance, and of their grand historical associations. Summoning back to recollection, at this moment, the hall and galleries I have there traversed, the churches and palaces I have there visited, the shining perspective of those liquid highways and byways intersecting one another in such endless diversity, but above all, the lavish grandeur of the decorations squandered upon the walls of all those noble edifices, I can still in imagination wander again through Venice, whenever I so please, as through a world of Art in Fairyland.

Time out of mind the peninsula of Italy has been likened to a boot-to one of the long tight-fitting boots, a hessian or a wellington. Precisely in the same way I can't help seeing a resemblance in the general outline of the archipelago on which the city of Venice is built to a boot of Charles I., or of one of the Cavaliers. The Italian boot, as will be remembered, lies at an angle in the Mediterranean, as though, according to someone's whimsical remark, it were momentarily withdrawn, preparatory to giving a kick in the back to Sicily. The Cavalier boot of Venice, instead of being in any way so placed, however, lies horizontally, it might be said, toe downwards, at the north-western corner of the Adriatic, the broad bucket-shaped top of it directed landwards. Roughly trace such an outline exactly in that position, and you will have at once before you the frame or