I seized the chance with ardour keen:
A sheet of cartridge, vast and clean,
   Fit for a shipman's chart,
I spread before her on a board,
With pen and pencil amply stored,
Brushes and colours—in a word,
A stock in trade for Art.

The bait was tempting; down she sat
To draw her cousin Fan and Mat,
   The pony and the gig.
The sorrows lulled beneath the charm
Of Art, the sheet became a swarm
Of living stock, for field and farm
Duck, donkey, horse, and pig.

Her uncle's house (she'd never seen)
She pictured on its village green,
   In wild perspective traced;
With every sketch her heart grew strong
And bit by bit its load of wrong
Cast off, until a humming song
The bitter sobs replaced.

The pencil sped, the sighs were stilled,
The hieroglyphic sheet was filled
   A-blaze with blue and red,
Orange and purple, green and lake,
Till, finding head and fingers ache,
She gently asked, "Please, may I take
My drawings up to bed?"

I've kissed her, smiling in her sleep:
Her jealous fingers firm hold keep
   Still on the pictured scroll;
The little breast keeps heaving still,
The parted lips yet start and thrill;
But pleasant, soothing memories fill
The embryo artist's soul!

"O Goddess Art!" I cried, alone,
"Who hast such saving comfort shown
   To this my little child,
Thy gifts, that I have thrown away,
On her bestow, nor let her stray
From thine, the path of Wisdom's ray,
The pure and undefiled!"

VIVA L'lTALIA!

Two years ago I (a City man, sir) set out
alone from Balham Hill to spend my autumn
in Italy.

I took the nearest way over the Simplon,
after a short, cooling, icy glimpse of Switzerland,
to Milan, the great capital of Lombardy,
and whence our first bankers and pawnbrokers,
as my excellent friend the editor of Notes and
Queries assures me, first came. From the barren
snows round the Simplon hospice we tore down
the passes, our diligence horses crowned with
chesnut boughs, to Duomo d'Ossola, where, when
I saw brown, half-clothed men munching melon
at street corners, I exclaimed with rapture, "I
am in Italy!"

The next night, viâ Lago Maggiore, I got to
Milan, through fat dark plains starry with fireflies,
and through a night air hoarse with frogs. As
the diligence swept into Milan through clouds
of powdery white dust, I caught, on my way to
the hotel, moonlight glimpses of the great
white marble cathedral, with its pinnacles fine
as so much goldsmith work, stretching up
towards heaven.   *   *   *

And now, from the dark hush of the outer
square, with its sky full of all violet depths
of dimness, and spangled thick as the imperial
robe of Charlemagne with jewel stars, I
Burned into the Caffè (always double f in
Italian) del Duomo, in the great square
of the cathedral. A moment ago I stood
in the square looking up at the blue darkness
above me, as a diver might view the sea
above his head, the stars standing for such
phosphorescent sparks as light the surf of
the Mediterranean when it breaks in harmless
flame along a midnight shore. I was
communing with the spirits of the sky. Merely
by passing through the open glass folding-
doors of the caffè, my eyes were suddenly
dazzled by a jangle of light, my ears by a Babel
of voices. The waiters—Pierrots—were every
one in their black evening dress, or in their
tight-fitting black ballet dancing-trousers and
their yellow jackets. The place was full of
Austrian officers in their spotless white uniforms,
faced and turned down with mazarin blue and
cherry colour, their heavy steel-sheathed cavalry
swords, tasseled and knotted with white pipe-
clayed leather, rested on chairs, hung near them,
on the wall beside their cocked-hats, or clashed as
they moved insolently along the white-and-black
tiled floor of the caffè. It was a wonderful
change from the darkness and almost mournful
hush of the outer square, roofed by the black
blue sky, where the white marble Duomo showed
only by ghastly glimmers through the darkness.

I threw myself on a long settee that lined the
wall, within convenient reach of the little
immovable round marble table on which some empty
coffee-cups stood, and fell to study the Milanese.
I soon forgot the outer darkness, where the
great white shrine of marble, pale and wan,
heaped up its little clear-cut casket pinnacles,
fine-leafed and sharp, unto the lingering stars,
that seemed to burn like angels' watch-fires on
their highest cresting peaks, and plunged
myself, with the relish and abandonment of a
traveller courting forgetfulness and pleasure, in the
maze of crystalled lights that the great mirrors
on the walls echoed and repeated till they seemed
to lengthen into avenues and corridors of yellow
lamps, repeating, too, the white uniforms, and the
plumed hats, and the fair flaxen moustaches, and
the swords and the mazarins and cherry colours,
till the place seemed the banquet-hall of the
whole white-coated Austrian army: the waiters
who moved about among the crowd standing for
orderlies or aide-de-camps. Glimpses of side
rooms showed groups of patient subalterns with
small ground-plans of black-and-white dominoes
before them, and each with his small redoubt of
conquered pieces thrown up behind his line of
battle; and from other doorways leading into
inner rooms I heard the roll and clashing dry
rattle of the red and white balls on the green
cloth, luminous in the orbing lamplight.

It was some time before my pleased eye could
take in the various elements of this animated
scene; but, as my eye grew calmer, I found that
the occupants of this caffè—like all the Milanese