tower of floating San Giorgio blazed, a slender, roseate shaft against the blue. Somewhere from up the Riva sounded a fresh voice singing the Santa Lucia. And all this to our young barbarian meant banishment! My Venice, where these many years I had pitched my happy tent! However, the boy was blurting out something in my ear, and I could not but listen. "Choose, choose to look at it that way?" he exclaimed. Then, with a burst of the inborn German sentimentalism, grafted so oddly on his American speech, "If some one had adopted you, a helpless, hungry child; taken you to her heart; warmed you at her hearth; set you at her table; made you free of her glorious birthrightwould you speak of choosing to call her mother? Is that not the wonder of ither wide arms for all? And you would make of me that most despicable of human beings a man without a country?"

"Ruhig, ruhig, mein kind," interrupted Mrs. Meier, anxiously; but the lad, his glowing eyes fastened on my face, hurried on, and still the strain of the alien blood tinged his speech with a passion that we, and the American stock which springs from us, are chary of expressing.

"And now," he cried, "that our mother needs her sons, now that she is struggling, bleeding, dying, it may be, you say, 'You are no American. She is not your

mother !'"

"Ruhig, ruhig, mein kind!" Again the anxious contraction of Mrs. Meier's face. Her son sank back as if exhausted; then, with a hesitancy half diffident, half uncouth, that formed a sharp contrast with the overstrained, school-boy rhetoric of a moment before

"If you were an American, I guess you'd understand."

There was something almost disconcerting in the gaze, so direct, so disapproving, with which his eyes continued to measure me. I felt an absurd desire to divert it. "There comes a fellow-countryman of yours," I said, "who makes his home over here." It was Bradford, hat in hand, loitering along the Riva. "That is he, stop ping to talk to that pretty water-carrier with the splashing copper buckets. Engaging her for a model, perhaps. He is He is an artist." Young Meier's glance followed my pointing finger, and rested on Bradford's

superb figure and then on his face-a face so noticeable that I had never seen him pass along the street without causing men and women to turn and gaze at him with involuntary admiration. But, to my surprise, the lad's expression was one of the most intense pity. His straight brows were drawn as if in pain, and the hollow eyes underneath had melted from searching disapprobation to a singular warmth and glow.

"What!" he exclaimed, "he, too! What keeps him here? How he must suffer!"

After all, the burst of compassion was as real a tribute as the usual more conventional and somewhat envious admiration. It was impossible, at a first glance, to imagine Robert Bradford constrained by any but noble motives. In a breath, this inflammable young hero-worshiper had cast at the older man's feet a passionate devotion, an unquestioning belief.

"Tell me about him," he continued, eagerly. "What keeps him over here? He looks so strong. Why can't he fight? His heart, perhaps?"

"Governor Bradford? Oh, that's all in the history; I've read about that,” interrupted the lad. "Oh, of course he's on our side. That makes it all the harder, doesn't it? And just look at his shoulders and the way he holds his head! That's the kind of man we want; I don't mean merely to fight; of course that's all I could do-but to lead. Oh, how can he stand it, being exiled here!"

A curious sense of embarrassment kept me silent, yet I knew it was little more than a "truant disposition "-a desire to escape from the narrow walls of a life which gave no play to an artistic naturethat held Bradford in willing exile. Should I disclose to this young worshiper the clay feet of his idol?

"He is here is some reason," I stammered, finally. "It seems he is not free to go."

When I next met Bradford, the somewhat uncomfortable impression left by my interview with the lad had vanished, and only a sense of the humor of the situation remained.

It was at a reception given by the beauty of the season, a Russian countess. Excited by the brilliancy of the assemblage, Bradford had been in one of his most audacious and captivating moods. From across the room he had observed my amused attention, and made his way to me through the throng. We were always good friends. A woman of "infinite taste," he was pleased to call me.

Greeting me with the chivalrous note in his voice always so grateful to a woman no longer young, "I perceive, Madonna," he said, "a particularly quizzical quality in your glance. You have You have something to tell me."

"That you are an object of compassion," I returned; and then, with some embellishments, I told my tale.

"May I assist at the little comedy?" I asked.

"What time will you take me there, Madonna?"

I laughed.

"Well, come at eleven tomorrow morning. Oh, by the way," as my gondola glided off, my gondola glided off, "do you exhibit this year?"

He glanced at me with a slight lift of his eyebrows. "So you have not forgiven me?" he said.

For we still were vainly waiting for Robert Bradford to take up his idle brush and give the world his masterpiece.

One of the rooms of our palazzo-pension yet boasted the remains of a faded fresco. A fair St. Catherine stood with bowed, golden head, awaiting martyrdom. The rounded throat, the virginal draperies of the breast, were handled with a peculiar charm and subtlety. From its decoration the room was called the "Sala Santa Catarina." In previous years I had occupied it, and Bradford, on his visits to me, had always taken great delight in the delicacy of the dim outlines and the hints of a warm and masterly coloring. As, therefore, on the next day we

"You seem to miss the humor of it," I exclaimed, somewhat tartly, for I had made so good a story of it that an everwidening group had gathered about us, and ripples of laughter had followed each reference to Bradford as an exile, a hero, a possible savior of his country.

"To each nation its a sense of humor," he remarked, dryly.

"Are you not of all nations?" I retorted. Then I turned to the more appreciative group around me, and he moved

ments, he exclaimed, "What! the Sala Santa Catarina ? I shall be glad to meet her saintship again.”

The door was opened, and we entered. The Meiers, mother and son, were eagerly awaiting us. On a lounge near the window lay Theodore. His glance swept me aside and fastened on my companion. A flush overspread his pale cheeks. He half rose, but Bradford hurried forward to prevent him.

How kind of you to let me come to see you!" said Bradford. "Fellow-countrymen, you know!" The invalid sat tongue-tied. "And you couldn't have a jollier place to be laid up in than Venice, could you, now? And your windows, why, they sweep the whole lagoon! And as for company, our little St. Catherine here "he stopped suddenly, with an odd break in his voice. I turned from Mrs. Meier to see what it meant.

Where from his lounge young Meier's eyes could rest on it, and full across the lovely head and breast of St. Catherine, was stretched a huge, glaring map done in the crudest of primary blue, orange, and red. I am not too well acquainted

with the topography of the States, but I could not fail to recognize, printed in laborious capitals, the names of places grown familiar in the war news: Washington, Fort Sumter, Bull Run, Richmond. It was a war map. Bradford went up to it. "Did you make this?" he asked with apparent sympathy, while at the same moment he deftly extracted a pin that was impaling St. Catherine and glanced behind the paper to see what mischief had been wrought.

of fear, though there was nobody pursuing them." He sank back with a deep-drawn sigh. "Oh, to have to live among people who know no better than that! Oh, even though I can't fight, if I could only be at home!"

Bradford sat silent and looked at the overwrought lad.

"It is the face," I said to myself. "The artist sees a subject there. Repellent as this hysterical emotion must be to him, something doubtless strikes him in the

"Gott, ja !" added his mother, with her eyes on Bradford's face. She, too, seemed oblivious of my presence. "It is always the war, the war. He must make maps. He follow every battle. Sometimes he think he know better than the generals themselves."

"Well, but haven't there been terrible mistakes?" burst out the boy, turning to Bradford as one in authority. "That storming the height, now, at Bull Run! See where I have put the black dots? If McDowell had only led his forces along that line "

light transfusing the irregular peasant features, as does a flame clouded glass."

It was evident, however, that young Meier had read the searching, almost somber, gaze quite differently. He seized the sensitive artist-fingers in his own broad but wasted hands. "If it's hard for me," he said, brokenly, "what must it be for you who could do so much if you were there! Oh, but some of these Americans over here! Americans! Why, they are just drifting seaweed. They don't belong anywhere. They haven't any roots."

Bradford laid a light touch on the lad's

Bradford returned to the lounge and sat down on it. Is there room for me? Do I crowd you?" he asked. He knew that to be so crowded was joy unspeakable; that his close presence, his firm, cool touch, were sending waves of delight through the veins of the half-abashed boy. What do you read all day?" he continued. "Ah, the papers, of course. What piles you have there, and of all dates and countries!"

The feverish flush in the lad's face deepened. He fumbled among the scattered papers and drew one out. "The way they look at things over here!" he cried, vehemently. "Listen, listen to this!" He half rose on his elbow, grasp ing the sheet with quivering fingers. "The North has lost all-even military honor; her people were bellowing behind. the army. It is a complete victory for the South-as complete a victory as Austerlitz. But an American battle is not as dangerous as an American steamboat. It is carried on upon strict humanitarian principles. Seventy thousand American patriots have fled twenty miles in an agony

When we had reached my drawingroom, I looked at him inquiringly. "Now why did you get me to take you?" I asked.

Oh,

He was gazing moodily out of the window, but at my question he broke into vehement speech. "The dreariness of it all, over there!" he exclaimed, as if in answer to some outspoken protest. "How I hated it! No beauty, no distinction. The dead level of the commonplace. you can't fancy it! The hideousness of the straight brick streets; the hard, keen light; the rushing, insensate, moneymaking life, or hardly better; the meager, colorless, puritanical content; the dearth of incentive; the barbaric taste! Who could produce anything worth while! Then I came over here."

"Then you came over here," I repeated, for he had relapsed into a frowning silence, and I seemed forgotten. "Then I came over here," continued Bradford, slowly. "Beauty enough, or the wreck of it. At first I was intoxicated, I dreamed dreams-till-” He lifted his shoulders and flung out his

hands, palms up, as the more expressive Continentals had taught him. "What had I new to say? It had all been said centuries ago far better than we futile moderns could conceive of. I tell you, this Past you and your kind so worship, it ties the hands, numbs the powers. For a moment you struggle, then submit. The critics cry: Something original! You are an American: give us a message from the New World!' The New World has no message." He quickened his restless pacing up and down the room, then burst out irritably, "That boy fancies it has."

"That boy will make havoc of the Santa Catarina," I returned, hotly. "I shall tell the Signora to have his war maps promptly taken down."

"You will do no such thing," exclaimed Bradford, with a roughness quite unusual to him. Then, checking himself, he waved his hand as if to dismiss the question. "A shadow," he added; "let it go."

And again I looked at him critically. After all, one can never really know these Americans. They continually treat one to surprises.

My intercourse with young Meier was always slight. He never fancied me; but his mother, who could not speak without his name on her lips, came often to claim my sympathy.

The day after our visit she stopped me by the water-gate, in the narrow garden, first to thank me for the joy I had given her son by bringing "den schönen Herrn," and then, with credulous eyes and bated breath, to tell me that the boy had had a dream.

"Three time in the one night he dream it," she said. "He think it mean he gets well and fight for his country. He dream he find lying on his breast a great shining medal of honor."

"How curious!" I answered.

same fixed idea. Crude and provincial as it all was, it had, at odd moments, an insistent trick of recurring to my thought. And America herself! Was the lad's fervor of patriotism due solely to his extreme and impressionable temperament, or might there be, in that raw new world, some element potent to lay hold of the heart and fire it with a devotion even unto death?

This was the beginning of the inex plicable intimacy between Robert Bradford and his devotee. Weeks passed by and there was no change. None of his old friends saw, at this time, anything of the older man. When he was not with Theodore he was at his studio. Whenever I saw the lad with Bradford, his eyes still spoke a passionate worship.

I re

A death among near relatives took me for a time to England. While there I heard rumors about Bradford; it was reported that he had at last "arrived;" had produced his masterpiece. called our many talks and his conviction of the futility of effort. What had finally seemed to him worth while? On my return journey to Venice, I resolved to stop over a few days in Paris and attend the Salon.

In the American colony in Paris I had many acquaintances, and on the night of my arrival I dropped in to an "at home" of one of them. My question as to Bradford's subject was received with a burst of merriment.

"You have not heard?" they laughed. "Yes, he has a medal. No, you shall not be told the subject; you shall see for yourself. It is a matter of Saul among the prophets.' Why, with a certain set of his compatriots he is the hero of the hour."

Then followed the reluctant admission, "But it is good work. He has shown he can do something if he chooses. A trifle theatrical, perhaps, but really very cleverly composed. Notice the foreshortening of the left arm.”

On the following morning I went to the Salon and made my way to the knot of people before Bradford's picture.

"Dulce et decorum est pro patriâ mori,” ran the legend. Of a truth, Saul among the prophets!

A lad, in the uniform of the Northern States, lay dying on the field of battle.

He had half risen on his arm. One hand clutched his wounded breast, but in his face, the face not of the native but of the foreign born, and struggling with the agony and palior of death, shone an unspeakable joy. His lips were parted, his wide eyes fixed and bright. One could see they were following the triumphant. charge of his own victorious side. It was the face of Theodore Meier. Dulce et decorum est pro patriâ mori.

Through the weary hours of my journey the picture haunted me. Bradford was again in Venice when I arrived, and one morning, as I was about to step into my gondola, I ran across him. At my invitation he joined me, and we were soon gliding out towards the Lido.

"Well, I have been to Paris," I said.
He nodded.

"Dulce et decorum," I continued. "Your picture has certainly created a stir. Why, they told me it had actually made

I

Americans of some of your compatriots and sent them back to fight. And the people who know say it is good."

"Yes, I believe it is good," he assented, moodily.

"It was even rumored you had gone back."

His face lighted up with its old whimsical smile.

"I am not sure I didn't for a moment half form a resolve to go," he said.

"You might have won another medal, or a cross, or whatever kind of decoration they bestow over there for bravery on the field of battle. By the way, you must show me your medal."

"One doesn't wear them, you know," said Bradford, throwing open his coat, as if to corroborate his assertion. After a pause he added, gravely, "I sent it here to the boy. I told him that it belonged to him. His mother wrote me it was buried with him."

T is hardly probable that any English critic, not even excepting Augustine Birrell, who is a notorious Borrowlover, would place George Borrow's works on a list of the most important contributions to the English literature of the nineteenth century; but all critics agree that the author of "Lavengro" and "The Bible in Spain" is one of the singular and interesting personalities in the literary history of the last hundred years in England.

Borrow was a curious mixture of the adventurer and religious fanatic. He sprang from a family of humble position and circumstances, and was without education in the modern sense of the word; but he was born with an extraordinary gift for acquiring abstruse and difficult languages. Owing partly to this gift and partly to his love of wandering, he obtained. the position of agent of the Bible Society, and in this capacity made some remarkable

George Borrow: Life and Correspondence. By William I. Knapp, Ph.D., LL.D. 2 vols. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.

The Works of George Borrow: The Bible in Spain, Lavengro, Romany Rye, The Gypsies of Spain. Edited by William I. Knapp, Ph.D., LL.D. 4‍ vols. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.

The Works of George Borrow: Lavengro, The Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain, The Zincali. I vol. each. John Lane, New York.

journeys into Russia, Portugal, and Spain. While his faithfulness in performing his duty as colporteur is not to be questioned, it must be confessed that his enthusiasm for observing how men and women live and think and talk beyond the borders of English conventional society was quite as great as his enthusiasm for the cause of religion; so it happens that "The Bible in Spain," notwithstanding its gentle title, is about as robust a story of adventure as one could ask for. Borrow's life may be outlined in a few words: he wandered in various parts of the world studying nature and human nature; became a linguist of some renown in his time; made himself an expert in Gypsy life and lore; and in at mass of writing, some of it incoherent and ordinary, has left many things that form a permanent contribution to literature. There is just now a Borrow revival, and along with it the inevitable small band of extravagant admirers-Borrovians, let us call them just as there are Browningites, Wagnerians, Stevensonians, Brahmsites, Meredithians, Omarists, and the like. It is a pity that the extravagance of the few often prejudices the many, thus turning the enthusiasm of the disciple into a hin