all these kind of indulgences, and put a little
severity into his refusal, but quite unintentionally
; for though he was thankful he was not as
other men, he was not at all the person to
trouble himself unnecessarily with their reformation.

"I want to speak to you about Ellinor. She
says she thinks you must be aware of our mutual
attachment."

"Well!" said Mr. Wilkins. He had resumed
his cigar, partly to conceal his agitation at what
he knew was coming. "I believe I have had
my suspicions. It is not so very long since I
was young myself." And he sighed over the
recollection of Lettice, and his fresh, hopeful
youth.

"And I hope, sir, as you have been aware of
it, and have never manifested any disapprobation
of it, that you will not refuse your consent
—a consent I now ask you for—to our
marriage."

Mr. Wilkins did not speak for a little while
—a touch, a thought, a word more would have
brought him to tears; for at the last he found
it hard to give the consent which would part
him from his only child. Suddenly he got up,
and putting his hand into that of the anxious
lover (for his silence had rendered Mr. Corbet
anxious up to a certain point of perplexity—he
could not understand the implied he would and
he would not), Mr. Wilkins said,

"Yes! God bless you both. I will give her
to you, some day—only it must be a long time
first. And now go away—go back to her—for
I can't stand this much longer."

Mr. Corbet returned to Ellinor. Mr. Wilkins
sat down and buried his head in his hands, then
went to his stable, and had Wildfire saddled for
a good gallop over the country. Mr. Dunster
waited for him in vain at the office, where an
obstinate old country gentleman from a distant
part of the shire would ignore Dunster's existence
as a partner, and pertinaciously demanded
to see Mr. Wilkins on important business.

OUR VILLAGE ON THE MEDITER-
RANEAN.

IT is with the cowardly satisfaction of knowing
that these lines are never likely to be read
by my neighbours that I have dared to write
"Our Village" at the head of this paper, for we
stand in the census return of '58 as "Cettà,"
with three thousand inhabitants, for the most
part engaged in the Cabotagio (coasting trade)
and the fisheries. Still, with all this, we are
dismissed with about live lines—two more than
we obtained in '41—and which are devoted to
recording that some attempt has been made to
work the marble quarries in our vicinity, but
hitherto without any marked success.

Very brief and very dry is ail this. But why
should we complain? What are more succinct
than the few words which tell of birth, or death,
or marriage—the whole story of our lives?

The census official doubtless believed he had
told the world all that it could want to know
about us when he had noted how many we were,
and how we lived. To our own eyes the record
is, however, a very meagre one. We would
liked to have read more circumstantially about
ourselves; of our old castle, where Barbarossa
is said to have passed a night; of our Duomo,
built in 1270, and restored by Carlo Demetrio
Zangani in 1604, whoever he might be; of a
sulphur spring, of which no man ever drank
twice, in our Piazza, and an inscription over it
iu the vulgar tongue, that no one has ever
been able to render intelligible. These are all
things of which we feel ourselves proud, and
would like to have known that the world heard
of them, the more since John Murray ignores us
altogether.

Assuredly we were born to blush unseen, if
any portion of our mission had been to blush at
all; but I am proud to say it is not. We
know and feel that we live in one of the most
beautiful spots in Europe; that in our little
land-locked harbour five—some say seven—
great ships could lie at anchor; that the
entrance could be defended against the navies of
the world; that the steep mountains which gird
us are clothed with olives and vines, and in the
warmer spots with orange and lemon-trees; that
our syndic has a magnolia in his garden; that
our melons are famed in the markets of Chiavari
and Sestri, and our chesnuts are the envy
of four villages, crow-like on mountain peaks
around us.

We know that the oldest amongst us has
never seen snow nearer than the summit of the
distant Apennines; and a dead lemon-tree, killed
by the hard winter of 1814, stands out to
witness the severity of a season which has never
been cruel enough to revisit us.

It is true we are not very easy of access. The
mule-path, which forms our high road, has some
awkward turns, and skirts certain precipices
more picturesque than safe; and, although we
have the sea, it happens that, except those
especially occupied in the fisheries or the small
coast trade, few of us are sea-goers. Great
Britain, it is said, has fewer swimmers amongst
its population than certain kingdoms of Central
Europe whose natives never saw the sea, and
perhaps for some analogous reason. We, with
the blue waters of this glorious bay at our feet,
with land and sea winds alternating their gentle
breezes, with all that can enchant the eye on
every side, rarely venture on the water; but
poke about the market-place and the little
adjoining streets, or sit lazing at the Café del
Commercio—so called in honour of an institution
of which we know about as much as a
South African does of an ice-house.

A guide-book or a gazetteer would most
probably use little ceremony in setting us down as
a fishing village, yet our own estimate of
ourselves is not an humble one. I do not pretend
to say that a stranger, if by any odd accident
of life such a thing should come amongst us,
arriving at Port Stretto, would at once jump at
the conclusion that he was in the midst of a