kind. I like you very much; but I neither
want your money, nor . . . .  Do you know
what people are saying about you and Miss
Colonna? By the way, is not this your station?"

"About me and Miss Colonna!" said Saxon,
breathlessly.

"Yes—but this is certainly Sedgebrook. You
must be quick, for they don't stop one moment."

"For Heaven's sake, Miss Hatherton, tell me
first!"

"No, no—jump out, or you will be carried
on.  I'll tell you when you are safe outside."

Saxon jumped out, but clung to the window
with both hands.

"Now!" said he. "Now!"

"Well," replied Miss Hatherton, speaking
somewhat slowly, and looking him full in the
face, "they say, Mr.Trefalden—they say you
are going to squander your fortune on Italy;
marry Olimpia Colonna; and break Lord
Castletowers' heart."

But Saxon never heard the last five words at
all. Before Miss Hatherton could bring her
sentence to an end the shrill whistle drowned
her voice, and the train began to move. The
young man stood looking alter it for some
moments in blank bewilderment.

"Squander your fortune on Italy, and marry
Olimpia Colonna!" he repeated to himself.

"Fly to Castletowers, sir?" said the solitary
fly-driver of the place, recognising the Earl's
visitor.

But Saxon preferred to walk; so he took the
short cut through the fields, and strode on with
Miss Hatherton's words still ringing in his ears.

"Marry Olimpia Colonna!" he said, for the
twentieth time, as he sat down presently upon
a stile, and proceeded unconsciously to cut off
the heads of the nearest dandelions with his
cane. "Marry Olimpia Colonna! Good God!
there isn't a prince on this earth half good
enough for her!  As for me, I'm only just
worthy to be one of her slaves. What a mad
notion! What a mad, preposterous notion!"

Mad and preposterous as it was, however, he
could think of nothing else; and every now and
then, as he loitered on his way through the
pleasant meadows, he repeated, half aloud, those
wondrous words:

"Marry Olimpia Colonna!"

OUR COLONIES.

DEAR old Mrs. Britannia has a family of
forty-six children. Some members of the family
are infantine; some are in lusty early manhood;
while others are so matured in age, wealthy in
pocket, and self-governed in general economy,
that the tie that binds them to home is a very
slight one.

Recently, for the first time, these forty-six
children, her colonies, have sent in their accounts
in such form that the mother country knows
how each has thriven for fourteen consecutive
years.

Collectively, these colonies and foreign possessions
of Britannia cover an area of considerably
more than four million square miles—equal to
the whole of Europe, and a great deal to spare.
India claims one of these millions, and Western
Australia nearly another; and so they go down,
down, down in size, to Gibraltar, which is a
distinct and isolated British possession although
not a colony, and barely covers two square miles.
Several of the others are very small; such as St.
Helena with its fifty square miles, Hong-Kong
with thirty, Bermuda with twenty-four, and
Gambia with twenty; but small as they are,
each has its own governor.

Then, as to population, we make up not
much less than thirty million souls in the
British islands; and yet Britannia's possessions
over the seas contain two hundred millions.
India so overwhelmingly exceeds all the
rest in this particular, that we must leave that
out if we would compare the growth of the
colonies proper, between the years 'fifty and
'sixty-three (the two years which begin and
end the series). We then see that the North
American colonies increased from two and a half
to three and a half millions. But far more
wonderful were the Australian colonies; they
had less than half a million inhabitants
collectively in the first of the two years; they had
a million and a quarter in the second. When
we consider that, exception made of the babies
born on the spot, most of these seven or eight
hundred thousand additional persons travelled
ten thousand miles and more to get there, we
cannot help regarding it as a really wonderful
migration—not so wonderful as that of the
Irish to America in regard to numbers, but
more so in regard to the immense distance.
The world presents few contrasts more remarkable
than that between the density of population
in two of these foreign possessions of our old
mother. British India and Western Australia
are not far from equal in size; yet the one
contains as many inhabitants as two-thirds of
the whole of Europe; while the other does not
contain one quarter as many as Clerkenwell
parish. In the one, the people are obliged to
pack nearly two hundred to every square mile;
in the other, every man, if the population were
spread evenly, would stand alone in the middle
of a region of sixty square miles.

The forty-six colonies have, nearly all of them,
spent more than they have earned. They have not
taxed themselves to the extent of their annual
expenditure; and, as a consequence, they have
had to borrow, at a much higher rate of interest,
too, than the old country pays. India owed
sixty millions sterling just before her troubles
began in connexion with the mutiny; by the
time they were well over, she owed one hundred
millions—a token that mutinies are rather
expensive proceedings. New South Wales
boasts of six millions of debt, Victoria of eight,
Canada of twelve millions. Big Western
Australia, the most sleepy and stagnant of all our
colonies, sets down her debt at precisely seventeen
hundred and fifty pounds. Roundly speaking,
nobody does anything in this last-named