His good fortune! As he sat upon his
wretched bed in his tiny lodging, luxurious
words rang in his ears. "And the chance
of achieving fame and fortune, keep that
in the foreground!" Fame and fortune!
And he had been overjoyed because he had
obtained a chance of earning a few shillings
as a bookseller's hack, a chance for
which he was indebted to a handicraftsman.
But a poor first step towards fame
and fortune, Marian would think! He understood
how utter had been her inexperience,
and his own; he had learned the
wide distance between the fulfilment of
such hopes as theirs, and the best of the
bare possibilities which the future held for
them, and the pain which this knowledge
brought him, for the sake of his own
share in it, was doubly keen for hers. It
was very hard for Walter Joyce to have to
suffer the terrible disappointment and
disenchantment of experience; but it was far
harder for him to have to cause her to
share them. Marian would, indeed, think
it a "poor first step." He little knew
how much more decisive a one she was
about to take herself.

THE LAST ASH OF A HOLY FIRE.

A FEW months ago a petition was presented
to the Italian parliament, which, though it concerned
a matter of private interest only, and
was one in a crowd of many others presenting
no features of interest whatever, excited some
attention in Italy, and will appear yet more
strange and remarkable to English readers.
It was the petition of certain members of a
family in Sicily, begging that they and their
descendants might henceforward be exonerated
from a certain payment which they and their
forefathers had hitherto been called upon to
make every year to the fiscal agents of the
government.

The payment in question has been made regularly,
ever since the year 1724. In that year,
a certain Sister Gertrude, a Benedictine nun,
was burned alive for heresy, in the city of Palermo.
Now, although the expenses attending
this execution were cheerfully supported
by the royal exchequer, it was not to be
expected that those occasioned by the long
previous proceedings before the tribunal of
the Holy Inquisition, enormously increased as
they were by the obstinacy and perversity of
this heretic nun, should be also paid out of
the royal funds. Who then was to pay these
expenses? If it be a rule of jurisprudence in
our own heretical latitudes that the Crown
never loses its claims, far more is it utterly out
of the question in orthodox Catholic lands that
Mother Church should lose any portion of her
dues, rights, and profits! And on this occasion
the Holy Inquisition had worked so hard, and
so assiduously during so long a time! Who
was to pay for all this? The family of the
heretic nun were condemned to pay the costs
of her trial. But all that the unhappy family
of the nun possessed in the world, was far from
sufficient to pay the charges of the Holy Office
for condemning its heretic daughter to the
flames. Under these circumstances a paternal
government came to the rescue, paid
the money down, and decreed that the family
should pay so much a year to the royal exchequer
for ever after!

This was the payment from which the descendants
of the family of that unhappy and
troublesome Sister Gertrude, now sought, in
the year of grace 1868, to be relieved, after a
hundred and forty-four years, during which it
had been regularly and annually made.

The Italian parliament is not without its fair
proportion of members whose notions of human
policy may be summed up in the well-known
formula of the drill-sergeant, "Be as you was!"
and it is perhaps strange that on the presentation
of this petition no honourable member rose
in his place to point out the demoralising effects
that would follow in a secluded and religious
little community in the Sicilian highlands, from
destroying the above record of a great and
salutary example. But the tide of public
opinion is running rather strong just at present
against Rome and its ways and works; and no
one was found to gainsay the petition of the
long-suffering Calatanisettan family.

The one or two papers which noticed the incident,
said that the petition proceeded from a
family of Palermo. But this was an error. The
family of Sister Gertrude belong to Calatanisetta,
a little inland townlet among the mountains.
It is wonderful enough that the revenue
of united and regenerated Italy should have
been increased by such a payment for several
years. And it would have been more extraordinary
still, if the people had belonged to,
and the circumstances had happened at, Palermo.
It must be supposed that, at Calatanisetta,
it is only just beginning to dawn upon
the minds of the inhabitants that the government
of Victor Emmanuel might be induced to
excuse a payment exacted on such grounds.
Or perhaps it had been entirely forgotten why
this annual charge was made; perhaps it was
not until some local antiquary happened to
stumble on the history of the matter, that the
idea of getting the payment remitted, occurred
to the family.

Nevertheless, the deed on account of which
this money has been paid yearly for a hundred
and forty-four years, was by no means done in
a corner. It is duly chronicled by the historians
of Sicily and of the kingdom of Naples.
It was the subject of a special record and detailed
description published at the time (and
now become very scarce), which a Bolognese
publisher has just reprinted.

From this latter source is taken the following
account of a scene that was being enacted in
Palermo while George the First was reigning,