you by itself?" Then she smiled sadly. "What could satisfy me?" she murmured, and thought: "How foolish of me to wish to forego unrest! It is the life principle of art."

Sally became so deeply absorbed in preparing for her first concert, often rehearsing, and having talks with the eminent orchestral leader who was to supply the orchestra, that she grew very absent-minded about the other affairs of each day. The papers wrote her up, her photograph got about, and it began to seem to everybody outside that her failure was a foregone conclusion, according to the ordinary outcome of puffs and hopes.

Morris complained bitterly to Seymour about the awful publicity Sally was getting. Seymour took it very coolly. They had changed places concerning this, unless Seymour was hiding a severe ordeal. What he said was that he had known so many great artists that, as he considered Sally a wonderful promise of a great artist, he did not mind the publicity in papers and shop windows any more than he minded having Tom, Dick, and Harry look upon her lovely face when she went out of doors.

When the day of the concert at last arrived, Morris's pale countenance and agitated behavior led Seymour to laugh at him.

"Sally herself is not nervous," he expostulated.

"She does not know all that this first trial stands for," answered Morris, biting his knuckles and shedding some boyish tears. "Her failure would be so absurd now, after this rumpus of premature praise; and to think of anything absurd happening to Sally makes-" He stopped, and stalked round in a passion of anger. Then he added: "The whole family is in it, to make or mar.

This lame explanation of his state of mind did not prevent Seymour from looking at him with undisguised concern. He pulled himself together, and replied, turning sadly away,

"Don't worry about a failure, my dear Wayne."

And Sally did not fail.

There she had stood, in a simple white mull dress in the midst of an orchestra which was in itself a royal compliment to her ability, and there she drew from the Straduarius the voice of music in rapture and refinement.

"She studied with Joachim," people whispered here and there, as the crowds pressed slowly out into the night again.

"She studied with King David," snapped a smart matron of means, in clothes that spoke for her fashionable character. "I don't believe the Joachim assertion, but I am glad America has a downright musical genius at last if she were only not a she!"

Everybody felt effervescent-the appreciators because they could not wholly express their delight, and the dullards because they thought themselves the only sensible persons concerned, and could not quite express this either.

The

Sally had been invited to a great supper, where she was to have shone as the especial attraction; but she would not go. She hardly saw her dearest friends, Seymour and Alice, and the consciousness of Lucille or any lesser person was like a consciousness of mortality. The splendid applause was ringing in her ears. life of her musical hope was abloom. She was in ecstasy, but she looked solemn and simple. The people who knew most saw in her a medium with the connection gone for the present, a votary of a divine wonder whose prayers were ended for the day. The others craned their necks to catch a parting glimpse of the girl who carried inspiration around in her pocket like a peculiar perfume of her own concoction.

Wayne Morris, as pale and ecstatic as herself, looked into her face and grasped her hand, and spoke a few deep words with all his heart. She saw him. She thanked him with a childlike smile. Then he melted away in the dark crowd near the anteroom; she knew not why.

The next day Seymour came early to see her; that is, late in the morning. She heard with quiet pleasure that the papers were full of her triumph. Some of her letters at breakfast had served up little dishes of verse in her honor. These did not attract her or turn her head, although she was not sure but that those waves of applause might contain a subtle poisonthose clappings and murmurs and lustrous gazes from thousands of people at

once.

But her heart bounded every time she allowed herself to think what Joachim might have said of the way she rendered this or that passage, and what he would have vouchsafed to let fall about her own little composition, which she had

had the conceit to play, and which had enchanted the canaille, who were glad of its distinct melody.

Seymour congratulated her very much as he would have done upon her having her usual good health. She felt the high praise of his taking her power over her hearers for granted. To be sure, he had seen her hugged and kissed with enthusiasm by people one shivers with admiration over— - beautiful prime donne or fiery old players of piano and violin. She had exerted a spell over such necromancers as Patti and Liszt. But it had been a girlish spell of rainbow promise, far fainter than the sustained dignity of her public performance. This was a victory which it was incumbent upon no one to predict for her. Yet Seymour had made calm assertions that did not hedge, indicating precisely such an issue.

"I owe so much to you," said Sally, in answer to his cheerful words this morning. "I hardly know whether the success is mine or yours. Just think how you have helped me with belief and introduction and prestige and money! How you have been everything to me but the work I have put into my practising and wakeful nights of ardent thought! Ned, I do not know how a man can be so strong, so generous, as you are."

"You will soon think me an ogre of selfishness," he answered. "I am greedily full of something important enough to me. Those cards-they were to go out after the concert, you know. Our wedding-cards! It is, in my opinion, the most interesting subject that could be broached." He took her hand and kissed it over and over again.

"The wedding-cards?" Sally repeated, agitated for the first time since he had known her. "Oh, delay them for a while! I do not know how I could be married in so short a time! I do believe I am a new being since this success, though I may not seem so, and though it may seem such a trivial, unscientific success without the approval of some great authority. Still, it was a revelation to me, and I live at last in a delicious phase of life that was only hearsay a day ago. Ned, I must get my equilibrium again before I can be the docile, passive creature I was. I hope I have not been made foolish by a little applause; and, upon my word, I think it is only that art is so like cosmic force that contact with it to the

full jostles our little individuality, as a tree bends in a thunder-storm. You will think me delirious, I fear, dear Ned-and oh, how precious such delirium is!—and you will concede that I must come to my senses before those cards can go out for the wedding!"

"I was colossally' stupid to mention that sort of thing now," Seymour answered, appearing to be content.

Sally was immediately beset with such a flood of social business and praise of a genuine, exciting sort, and such crowding requests for performances, that she rapidly grew tired of breathing. In a week or so she declared that she was going to disappear into her hidden musicroom; and so she did. Seymour now had to get along without her for two or three days at a time. Finally she invited him to join her at her mysterious retreat. And while Alice Malone read and sewed at a distance, Sally played to him, and was very nice to him, and seemed more like herself than for a long time.

As she sat upon the edge of the platform, and kept up a Hungarian beebuzzing of her violin while she talked, Seymour wondered whether her special purpose in inviting him had been to tell him that she would set the wedding-day, or that she wished to defer it still longer.

All at once she laid down her instrument, and said, as she followed with her eyes Alice's figure - who was withdrawing to some screens hiding a gas-stove, where the girls brewed coffee and tea at their fancy: "I have been an age away from Europe! I would like so much to amuse myself with Europe again!"

"If you have any such hankering," responded he, "I wish you would let me take you there." He noticed that in a trice she grew pale, looking motionlessly down at her hands, as she leaned forward in a negligent attitude that was fit for sculpture. "Of course," he went on, "I like to have you giving something to your native land; I am proud that you have come home to make your first public appearance. But you must not pine for anything that is possible, and you have already shown what you can do when put upon your mettle, and what you will condescend to do among little groups of connoisseurs. So I think your native land has been sufficiently recognized. Come, Sally, let me take you to the places we both love."

He colored.

Suddenly she looked at him, and saw the angry flush, and her heart was melted; for she had never seen him show pain, and had not believed that he would ever be roused to indignation against her.

"I will not be put off," was all he answered.

He reached out his hands to embrace her, but let them fall again to his sides. "Old as I am," he faltered, "I will wait a year."

He drew back as if shrinking from a blow, looking at her with a sort of terror. Her proposition meant more than you might have judged. At last his eyes were opened to her real feeling for him. It could not have been harder to bear if she had said, point-blank, that she did not love him, and that their engagement must be broken. He would not have acceded if she had done so, and the situation would have been just the same. There had been no confusion about their intercourse. Its language was simple and clear, and a great deal could be said by a tone, and it could be unerringly comprehended.

His silence touched her to the soul. "Then the worst is true," he ended by replying.

She became eagerly alarmed, and murmured, "The worst ?"

"You care for-some one else." She started to her feet. The change in the attitude of his mind was as if an embrace were to turn to a stab. "Take back those words, Edward Seymour!" she cried, as angry as he was himself.

"Oh, Sally," he answered, gentle on the instant, but despairing, "have I not watched the misery which Wayne is so obviously undergoing? You pity him much too well."

She rested her arm upon the pedestal of a bust of Pallas which stood near her, and then covered her face with her hands. He did not know from what source she received courage, but she soon recovered her self-control, and replied, looking down, but no longer crouching in shame, "I love him." After a pause she look ed up and met Seymour's gaze. "But I know it is you who could satisfy love most genuinely. I should be too degraded in my own eyes if I believed that I could not live down a passion of young eyes and pulses, such as Wayne's, for a love like yours. Do not tell me that I am so

Alice Malone approached with a tray of fairylike tea things and a smile of superior calm.

Seymour set the tray on the platform for her, and Sally sat down and applied herself to filling the cups.

When she asked Seymour whether he would take one lump or two, she blushed; and Alice was secretly amused, as people always are at lovers' moods.

"Just think, Alice," Sally said, pouring. cream into the cups as her last manœuvre in their preparation, "Ned wants to break our engagement!"

"Good gracious, what an idea!" exclaimed he, petrified.

66

He

He says he is worth a great deal more than such a frivolous girl as I am. says I am too young."

What does all this nonsense amount to?" Alice Malone laughed, taking her cup.

"Ask him why he won't marry me," cried the girl, handing Seymour his tea as steadily as she had of late placed the bow upon her violin in the presence of a thousand or so of people.

"Well, if Ned is in a towering rage at your delays, I for one cannot blame him!” Alice retorted, faithlessly.

"Delays?" Sally said, stirring her tea. But she did not go on.

"Good heavens! Sally," blurted Seymour, regardless of consequences, "do you love me, after all?"

"A lovers' quarrel?" put in Alice. "Why, Ned, perhaps she does not know it, but she adores you. Don't you, you goose?" This to Sally.

"If a crude person can love," the girl replied, raising her eyes to the man before her with a smile that made his thoughts spin.

"Next month?" asked Alice Malone, concisely.

Seymour gave a little gasp of uncertainty, and then got his cue from a tender smile on Sally's lips, and said, “Yes.”

last year,

ties.

As we attacked the chickens, I per

cona down the Adriatic coast of Italy by the fast train called the Indian Mail. There was excitement in the very name, and more in the conversation of the people who sat beside me at the table of a queer little eating-house on the shore, before whose portal the Indian Mail stopped late in the evening. We all descended and went in. A dusky apartment was our discovery, and a table illuminated by guttering candles that flared in the strong currents of air. Roast chickens were stacked on this table in a high pile, and loaves of dark-colored bread were placed here and there, with portly straw-covered flasks of the wine of the country. No one came to serve us; we were expected to serve ourselves. A landlord who looked like an obese Don Juan was established behind a bench in a distant corner, where he made coffee with amiability and enthusiasm for those who desired it. It was supposed that we were to go to him, before we returned to the train, and pay for what we had consumed; and I hope that his trust in us was not misplaced, for with his objection to exercise, and his dim little lamp which illumined only his smiles, there was nothing for him but trust. The Indian Mail carries passengers who are outwardbound for Constantinople, Egypt, and India; his confidence rested perhaps in the belief that persons about to embark on such dangerous seas would hardly begin the enterprise by crime. To other minds, however, it might have seemed the very moment to perpetrate enormi

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 507.-36

companions were English. Everybody talked, and the thrill of the one American increased as the names of the steamers waiting at Brindisi were mentionedthe Hydaspes, the Coromandel, the Cathay, the Mirzapore: toward what lands of sandal-wood, what pleasure-domes of Kubla Khan, might not one sail on ships bearing those titles! The present voyagers, however, were all old travellers; they took a purely practical view of the Orient. Nevertheless, their careless "Cairo," "Port Said," "Bombay," "Ceylon," "Java," were as fascinating as the shining balls of a juggler when a dozen are in the air at the same moment. My right-hand neighbor, upon learning that my destination was Corfu, good-naturedly offered the information that the voyage was an easy one. "Corfu, however, is not what it has been!"

"But, Polly, it is looking up a little, now that the Empress of Austria is building a villa there," suggested a sister, correctively.

After this outburst of talk, we all climbed back into the waiting train, and went flying on toward the south, following the lonely, wild-looking coast, with the wind from the Adriatic crying over our heads like a banshee. It was midnight when we reached Brindisi. At present this, the ancient Brundusium, is the jumping-off place for the traveller on his way to the East; here he must leave the land and trust himself to an enigmatical deep. But if he wishes to have the sensation in full force, he must not

The sea which I saw was of a miraculously blue tint; in the distance the cliffs of a mountainous island rose boldly from the water, their color that of a violet pansy; a fishing-boat with red sails was crossing the foreground; over all glittered an atmosphere

other spurt, and Pullman trains will go through to Calcutta, with a ferry over the Bosporus.

At Brindisi I became the prey of five barelegged boatmen, who, owing to the

UNIVERSITY OF THE IONIAN ISLANDS.

The

noise of the wind and the water, communicated with each other by yells. Austrian-Lloyd steamer from Trieste, outward bound for Constantinople, which carried the friends I was expecting to meet, was said to be lying out in the stream, and I enjoyed the adventure of setting forth alone on the dark sea in search of her, in a small boat rowed by my Otranto crew.

Early the next morning, awakening on a shelf in a red velvet cupboard, I was explaining to myself vaguely that the cupboard was a dream, when there appeared through the port-hole a picture of

so golden that it was like that of sunset in other lands, though the sky, at the same time, had unmistakably the purity of early morning. Later, on the deck, during the broadly practical time of after breakfast, this view, instead of diminishing in attraction, grew constantly more fair. The French novelist of to-day, Paul Bourget, describes Corfu as "so lovely that one wants to take it in one's arms!" Another Frenchman, who was not given to the making of phrases, no less a personage than Napoleon Bonaparte, has left upon record his belief that Corfu has "the most beautiful situation in the world." What, then, is this beauty? What is this situation?

First, there is the long and charming approach, with the snow-capped mountains of Albania, in European Turkey, looming up against the sky at the end; then comes the landlocked harbor; then