three steps to my carriage, and there all your trouble ends. Why, Will," he added, "I have been yearning for you as if you were my own son; and of all the men that ever I came for in my long days, I have come for you most gladly. I am caustic, and sometimes offend people at first sight; but I am a good friend at heart to such as you."
"Since Marjorie was taken," returned Will, "I declare before God you were the only friend I had to look for." So the pair went arm-in-arm across the courtyard.
One of the servants awoke about this time and heard the noise of horses pawing before he dropped asleep again; all down the valley that night there was a rushing as of a smooth and steady wind descending towards the plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure enough Will o' the Mill had gone at last upon his travels. R. L. S..
From The Spectator.
THE DEATH OF VICTOR EMANUEL.
The pope has enjoyed, in his own view at least, an hour of supreme triumph, and it has been a Christian one. He has forgiven, with all the plenitude of authority with which the system of Rome invests him, the dying sinner who in health tore from his hands the last temporal dominion of the Church. In all history we know of no scene more strikingly dramatic than this of the pale old priest, unable to leave his couch, in hourly expectation of death, yet in his prostration asserting superiority to the soldier-king who had dethroned him, and sending his forgiveness and the order for the sacraments of the Church to the daring, dissolute trooper, whose destiny it has been to carry up to their culminating point the fortunes of the oldest reigning house, save one, in Europe, — to remake a State divided for a thousand years, and to reduce or raise the Church of Rome once more to a purely spiritual power in the world. Victor Emanuel, king of Italy, has always seemed to observers outside Piedmont something of an enigma, but in Savoy and Turin he has been, from the second year of his reign, thoroughly comprehended. King of Piedmont or king of Italy, he has been from first to last what every ancestor has been, since, a thousand years ago, the dukes of Maurienne found themselves independent, and the race began to hope that north or south, in Provence or in Italy, it should carve out a sufficient realm. No race in Europe has been more consistent. Open the history of France or Italy where you will, and there is always a duke of Savoy, a prince of Savoy, a king of Piedmont, a king of Sardinia, Philibert or Humbert, Amadeo or Victor — the house is too old for a surname — holding the mountain-gates between the two countries, allying himself with both or either, or betraying either or both, but always, amidst all changes, maintaining a reputation for daring, for adroitness, and for a certain determined persistence, which impressed observers even when the politics of the house became most tortuous, or in appearance vacillating. Neither Bourbon nor Hapsburg could ever destroy the house they hated, and even Napoleon failed. The original type of the race is that of the German robber-knight, the bold, unscrupulous baron, who uses his position to crush all whom he can reach; but it was modified by the geographical position of their possessions, hemmed in as they were between stronger States, without a language or a nationality, until the Savoyard became a hereditary diplomatist whom the subtlest feared, a statesman who conciliated while he tyrannized over his few people, a soldier who waged war rather as a captain of free lances than a sovereign. Brave, dissolute, un-unscrupulous, yet with some statesmanlike insight and extraordinary tenacity, the line from Humbert II. (1078) down to Victor Emanuel, through eight hundred ears of varied fortune, might always have been accurately described as the soldier-dynasty of the Alps, with all the vices and many of the virtues the world attributes to the soldier and the hungry mountaineer. The greatest man of the house till Victor Emanuel appeared, the wonderful general whom our fathers so much admired, and who, by the side of Marlborough, upheld through a long career of victory the cause of Europe against Louis XIV., and who signed himself habitually "Eugenio von Savoye," because he was as much Italian as German, and as much Frenchman as either, appears in his memoirs, under all his court varnish and all his magnanimity, a thorough Savoyard, daring, ambitious, dissolute, luxurious, and persistent as a river. In Victor Emanuel, this last quality, always so perceptible in his house, took a shape that made the fortune alike of his dynasty and of Italy. When after the dark day of Novara he ascended the throne, his subjects expected in the sullenly brave young prince so deeply connected with the Austrian house, an Ital-
