her own vague efforts and excesses. There is
no tumult now, there is no faith now in wild
theories, there is no hope built upon the quicksand
of the popedom. Never before, perhaps, has
any nation watched events so wisely, and
received so nobly a lesson learnt from folly and
disaster. The experience which some nations
have not acquired in centuries, seems now to
have been acquired by Italy in ten years of
extreme adversity. The contrast is presented
thoroughly in Mr. Trollope's book; which
dwells only upon Tuscany, but has an outlook
over the whole stream of Italian history during
the last dozen years.

LOIS THE WITCH.

PART THE SECOND.

IT was hard up-hill work for Lois to win
herself a place in this family. Her aunt was a
woman of narrow, strong affections. Her love
for her husband, if ever she had had any, was
burnt out and dead long ago. What she did
for him she did from duty; but duty was not
strong enough to restrain that little member
the tongue; and Lois's heart often bled at the
continual flow of contemptuous reproof which
Grace constantly addressed to her husband, even
while she was sparing no pains or trouble to
minister to his bodily ease and comfort. It was
more as a relief to herself that she spoke in this
way than with any desire that her speeches
should affect him; and he was too deadened by
illness to feel hurt by them; or, it may be, the
constant repetition of her sarcasms had made him
indifferent; at any rate, so that he had his food
and his state of bodily warmth attended to, he very
seldom seemed to care much for anything else.
Even his first flow of affection towards Lois was
soon exhausted; he cared for her because she
arranged his pillows well and skilfully, and
because she could prepare new and dainty kinds of
food for his sick appetite, but no longer for her
as his dead sister's child. Still he did care for
her, and Lois was too glad of this little hoard
of affection to examine how or why it was given.
To him she could give pleasure, but apparently
to no one else in that household. Her aunt
looked askance at her for many reasons; the
first coming of Lois to Salem was inopportune,
the expression of disapprobation on her face on
that evening still lingered and rankled in Grace's
memory; early prejudices, and feelings, and
prepossessions of the English girl were all on the side of
what would now be called Church and State, what
was then esteemed in that country a superstitious
observance of the directions of a Papish
rubric, and a servile regard for the family of an
oppressing and irreligious king. Nor is it to be
supposed that Lois did not feel, and feel acutely,
the want of sympathy that all those with whom
she was now living manifested towards the old
hereditary loyalty (religious as well as political loyalty)
in which she had been brought up. With
her aunt and Manasseh it was more than want of
sympathy; it was positive, active antipathy to all
the ideas Lois held most dear. The very allusion,

however incidentally made, to the little
old grey church at Barford, where her father
had preached so long, the occasional reference
to the troubles in which her own country had
been distracted when she left, and the adherence,
in which she had been brought up, to the notion
that the king could do no wrong, seemed to
irritate Manasseh past endurance. He would get
up from his reading, his constant employment
when at home, and walk angrily about the room
after Lois had said anything of this kind,
muttering to himself, and once he had even stopped
before her, and in a passionate tone bade her
not talk so like a fool. Now all this was very
different to his mother's sarcastic, contemptuous
way of treating all poor Lois's little loyal
speeches. Grace would lead her on—at least
she did at first, till experience made Lois wiser—
to express her thoughts on such subjects, till,
just when the girl's heart was opening, her aunt
would turn round upon her with some bitter
sneer that roused all the evil feelings in Lois's
disposition by its sting. Now Manasseh seemed,
through all his anger, to be so really grieved by
what he considered her error, that he went much
nearer to convincing her that there might be
two sides to a question. Only this was a view
that it was like treachery to her dead father's
memory to entertain.

Somehow Lois felt instinctively that Manasseh
was really friendly towards her. He was little
in the house; there was farming, and some kind
of mercantile business to be transacted by him,
as real head of the house; and as the season
drew on, he went shooting and hunting in the
surrounding forests with a daring which caused
his mother to warn and reprove him in private,
although to the neighbours she boasted largely
of her son's courage and disregard of danger.
Lois did not often walk out for the mere sake
of walking, there was generally some household
errand to be transacted when any of the women
of the family went out; but once or twice she
had caught glimpses of the dreary, dark wood,
hemming in the cleared land on all sides, the
great wood with its perpetual movement of
branch and bough, and its solemn wail, that came
into the very streets of Salem when certain winds
blew, bearing the sound of the pine-trees clear
upon the ears that had leisure to listen. And
from all accounts, this old forest, girdling round
the settlement, was full of dreaded and
mysterious beasts, and still more to be dreaded
Indians, stealing in and out among the shadows,
intent on bloody schemes against the Christian
people; panther-streaked, shaven Indians, in
league, by their own confession as well as by the
popular belief, with evil powers.

Nattee, the old Indian servant, would
occasionally make Lois's blood run cold as she and
Faith and Prudence listened to the wild stories
she told them of the wizards of her race. It was
often in the kitchen, in the darkening evening,
while some cooking process was going on, that
the old Indian crone, sitting on her haunches by
the bright red wood embers which sent up no
flame, but a lurid light reversing the shadows of