"Which I entreated you to believe, again and
again, most fervently, with all my heart, was
capable of better things, Mr. Carton!"

"Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss
Manette. I have proved myself, and I know better.
I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you
let me believe, when I recal this day, that the
last confidence of my life was reposed in your
pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there
alone, and will be shared by no one?"

"If that will be a consolation to you, yes."

"Not even by the dearest one ever to be
known to you?"

"Mr. Carton," she answered, after an agitated
pause, "the secret is yours, not mine; and I
promise to respect it."

"Thank you. And again, God bless you!"

He put her hand to his lips, and moved
towards the door.

"Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette,
of my ever resuming this conversation by so
much as a passing word. I will never refer to
it again. If I were dead, that could not be
surer than it is henceforth. In the hour of my
death, I shall hold sacred the one good
remembrance—and shall thank and bless you for it—
that my last avowal of myself was made to you,
and that my name, and faults, and miseries,
were gently carried in your heart. May it
otherwise be light and happy!"

He was so unlike what he had ever shown
himself to be, and it was so sad to think how
much he had thrown away, and how much he
every day kept down and perverted, that Lucie
Manette wept mournfully for him as he stood
looking back at her.

"Be comforted!" he said, "I am not
worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An hour
or two hence, and the low companions
and low habits that I scorn but yield to, will
render me less worth such tears as those, than
any wretch who creeps along the streets. Be
comforted! But, within myself I shall always
be, towards you, what I am now, though
outwardly I shall be what you have heretofore
seen me. The last supplication but one I make
to you, is, that you will believe this of me."

"I will, Mr. Carton."

"My last supplication of all, is this; and with
it, I will relieve you of a visitor with whom I
well know you have nothing in unison, and
between whom and you there is an impassable
space. It is useless to say it, I know, but it rises
out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to
you, I would do anything. If my career were of
that better kind that there was any opportunity
or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace
any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you.
Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet
times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing.
The time will come, the time will not be
long in coming, when new ties will be formed
about you—ties that will bind you yet more
tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn
—the dearest ties that will ever grace and
gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little
picture of a happy father's face looks up in
yours, when you see your own bright beauty
springing up anew at your feet, think now and
then that there is a man who would give his
life, to keep a life you love beside you!"

He said, "Farewell!" said "A last God
bless you!" and left her.

PIEDMONT.

THE Sardinian States are, altogether,
composed of the insular and the continental
dominions of the house of Savoy. We have
already glanced at the island portion. On the
continent, Savoy is a cluster of mountains,
whose monarch, the famous and used-up Mont
Blanc, has been crowned long ago with a diadem
of snow. Piedmont, whether we derive the
name from the French, " le pied des monts," or
the Italian, " il piè del monte," is, both actually
and etymologically, the foot of the mountains.
Still, a great part of Piedmont is not yet quite
the sole of the foot, but rather the instep. It
is not wholly in the plain, though it is all on
the slope which conducts to the plain. The
valleys of Aosta, of the Orco, of the Cervo,
and the Sesia (the last fed by Monte Rosa),
are naturally the outskirts of Switzerland,
stretching southward to bask in Italian
sunshine. This geographical character does not
belong to Piedmont alone. The whole of Austro-
Venetian-Lombardy, and a portion of Parma
and the Papal States, are physically and
geologically the same, or similar. They are, in
fact, vast plains formed by the wearing down
of the grand Alpine chain, with a little help
from the Apennines. Nevertheless, there is
more of the mountain's foot in Piedmont than
elsewhere in Northern Italy.

At some awfully remote date there uprose on
the earth's surface from out the waters, a lofty
wall, running in the direction of from east to
west, and joined at its western extremity by
another similar mighty wall, running from north
to south, and so forming a right-angled corner.
Those two broad, solid walls are the Alps.
From the southern end of the second wall,
there started a third and lesser wall (but
still of respectable dimensions), the Apennines,
running from west to east for a time, and then
starting off south-eastwards to follow their own
independent course, and afterwards form the
backbone of Italy. The foot of the walls, whose
mass extended backward over what is now
Savoy and Switzerland, was doubtless bathed
by the primeval ocean. So that the enclosure
formed by these three boundaries, till the
Apennines took their decided bend, was a vast arm
of the sea, or estuary, open to what is now
the Adriatic, at the eastern end. Then came
earthquakes, and steam explosions, and
cataracts of rain, splintering the tops of the walls,
rolling their fragments into the estuary, and so
helping to fill it up. As yet, Frost had not
appeared on earth. Afterwards he came: and
then his glaciers brought down innumerable
boulders, great and small; and the chips, and