VERONICA.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "AUNT MARGARET'S TROUBLE."

IN FIVE BOOKS.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER III. A COUSIN.

THE carriage bearing Veronica rolled
along smoothly down a long avenue. It
was the road leading from an erst grand-
ducal villa which stands on the top of an
eminence—scarcely high enough to be
termed a hill, in a country of Alps and
Appenines, but which is of very respectable
altitude nevertheless, and is called the
Poggio Imperiale. The avenue is flanked by
cypress and ilex-trees, of ancient growth.

Veronica had heard her mother speak so
much, and so often, of Florence that she
thought she knew it. But coming to view
city and suburb with her bodily eyes, she
found everything strange, foreign, and, on
the score of beauty, disappointing. Later,
she understood the amazing picturesqueness
of that storied town, and, with every glance
its attractions grew on her. But there are
some places—as there is some music, and
that among the noblest—which do not
take at once the senses by storm, but need
time and familiarity to develop their wealth
of beauty and resource.

What Veronica saw with her unaccustomed
eyes, was, first, the long, dusty,
squalid Roman road, into which the carriage
turned at the foot of the avenue: then
the Porta Romana, with its huge, yawning
archway, through which carts of all kinds
were struggling; those coming in having
to stop to be examined by the officers of
the town custom dues, and those going out
pushing boldly through the gate and grazing
wheels against the stationary vehicles.

Everybody was talking very loudly. The
few who really could by no exercise of
ingenuity find any more articulate words to
say, solaced themselves by half-uttered oaths
and long-drawn lugubrious howls addressed
to the patient, lean beasts that drew the
carts.

In odd contrast with this nimble energy
of tongue, were the slow and languid
movements of all concerned. The octroi
men lounged against the walls on high four-
legged stools set out before a queer little
office, very dim and dirty, with glazed
windows. They had within reach long
iron rods, with which they probed trusses
of hay or straw, or which they thrust in
among bundles of linen, or piles of straw-
coloured flasks, or poked down amidst the
legs of people sitting in country chaises, or
under the box-seat of hackney coachmen.
And when they had thus satisfied themselves
that there was no attempt being made
to defraud the municipality of Florence of
the tax on food and wine, and whatsoever
other articles are subject to duty,
they—always with ineffable languor—put
their hands into their pockets again and
bade the driver proceed. One man
especially, with melancholy dark eyes and a
sallow face, uttered the permission to pass
on, "Avanti!" in a tone of such profound
and hopeless dejection, that one might have
fancied him a guardian of that awful portal
his great townsman wrote of, rather than a
mortal custom-house officer at the city gate,
and that he was warning the doomed
victims: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter
here!"

Sir John Gale's carriage only paused for
an instant in passing through the Porta
Romana. The spirited horses chafed at
the momentary check, and dashed on again
rapidly over the resounding pavement.

A succession of objects seemed to flit