She did not look up, but she said: "I little spiritual in your estimation as such could not marry you yet, Ned." an opinion would make me. I asked you for a year in which to kill my folly. You have my troth, and I mean to keep it to the letter, and in spirit, too." 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. "You must let me wait a year," she firmly said. 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 looked 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 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." 66 Old?" She spoke the words as a breeze whispers on an August day. There was a long glance between them. 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 manoeuvre in their preparation, "Ned wants to break our engagement!" 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." NOT CORFU AND THE IONIAN SEA. BY CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON. OT long before Christmas, last year, I found myself travelling from Ancona 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 "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 delay his journey; for, presently, the Indian Mail will rush through Greece and meet the steamers at Cape Colonna; and then, before long, there will be an such fairy-tale beauty that the dream became lyrical. 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. noise of the wind and the water, communicated with each other by yells. The 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 SOlovely 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? 66 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 the picturesque old town, its high stone houses, all of creamy hue, crowded together on the hill-side above the sea-wall, with here and there a bell tower shooting into the blue. Below is the busy, manycolored port. Above towers the dark double fortress on its rock. And finally, the dense, grovelike vegetation of the island encircles all, and its own mountainpeaks rise behind, one of them attaining a height of three thousand feet. There are other islands of which all this, or almost all, can be said-Capri, for instance. But at Corfu there are two attributes peculiar to the region; these are first, the color; second, the transparency. Although the voyage from Brindisi hardly occupies twelve hours, the atmosphere is utterly unlike that of Italy; there is no haze; all is clear. Greece (and Corfu is a Greek island) seemed to me all light-the lightest country in the world. In other lands, if we climb a high mountain and stand on its bald summit at noon, we feel as if we were taking a bath in light; in Greece, we have this feeling everywhere, even in the valleys. Euripides described his countrymen "forever delicately tripping through the pellucid air," and so their modern descendants trip to this day. This dry atmosphere has an exciting effect upon the nervous energy, and the faces of the people show it. It has also, I believe, the defect of this good quality, namely, an over-stimulation, which sometimes produces neuralgia. In some respects Americans recognize this clearness of the atmosphere, and its influence, good and bad; the air of northern New England in the summer, and of California at the same season, is not unlike it. But in America the transparency is more white, more blank; we have little of the coloring that exists in Greece, tints whose intensity must be seen to be believed. The mountains, the hills, the fields, are sometimes bathed in lilac. Then comes violet for the plains, while the mountains are rose that deepens into crimson. At other times salmon, pink, and purple tinges are seen, and ochre, saffron, and cinnamon brown. This description applies to the whole of Greece, but among the Ionian Islands the effect of the color is doubled by the wonderful tint of the surrounding sea. I promise not STATUE OF CAPO D'ISTRIA. to mention this hue again; hereafter it can be taken for granted, for it is always present; but for this once I must say that you may imagine the bluest blue you know the sky, lapis lazuli, sapphires, the eyes of some children, the Bay of Naples and the Ionian Sea is bluer than any of these. And nowhere else have I seen such dear, queer little foam sprays. They are so small and so very white on the blue, and they curl over the surface of the water even when the sea is perfectly calm, which makes me call them queer. You meet them miles from land. And all the shores are whitened with their never-ceasing play. It is a pygmy surf. It was eleven o'clock in the morning when our steamer reached her anchorage before the island town. Immediately she was surrounded by small boats, whose crews were perfectly lawless, demanding from strangers whatever they thought they could get, and obtaining their demands, because there was no way to escape them except by building a raft. Upon reaching land, one forgets the extortion, for the windows of the hotel overlook the esplanade, and this open space amiably offers to persons who are interested in first impressions a panoramic history of two thousand five hundred years in a series of striking mementos. Let me premise that as regards any solid knowledge of these islands, only a contemptible smattering can be obtained in a stay so short as mine. Corfu and her sisters have borne a conspicuous part in what we used to call ancient history. Through the Roman days they appear and reappear. In the times of the Crusaders their position made them extremely important. Years of study could not exhaust their records, nor months of research their antiquities. To comprehend them rightfully, one must indeed be a historian, an archæologist, and a painter at one and the same time, and one must also be good-natured. Few of us can hope to unite all these. The next best thing, therefore, is to go and see them with whatever eyes and mind we happen to possess. Good-nature will perhaps return after the opening encounter with the boatmen is over. From our windows, then, we could note, first, the citadel high on its rock, three hundred feet above the town. The oldest part of the present fortress was erected in 1550; but the site has always been the stronghold. Corinthians, Athenians, Spartans, Macedonians, and Romans have in turn held the island, and this rock is the obvious keep. Later came four hundred years of Venetian control, and 1 am ashamed to add that the tokens of this last-named period were to me more delightful than any of the other memorials. I say "ashamed," for why should one be haunted by Venice in Greece? With the Parthenon to look forward to, why should the lion of St. Mark, sculptured on Corfu façades, be a thing to greet with joy? Many of us are familiar with the disconsolate figures of some of our fellowcountrymen and country women in the galleries of Europe, tired and dejected tourists wandering from picture to picture, but finding nothing half so interesting as the memory of No. 4699 Columbus Avenue at home. I am afraid it is equally narrow to be scanning Corfu, Athens, Cairo, and the sands of the desert itself for something that reminds one of another place, even though that place be the enchanting pageant of a town at the head of the Adriatic. History, however, as related by the esplanade, pays no attention to these aberrations of the looker-on; its story goes steadily forward. The lions of St. Mark on the façades, and another memento of the Doges, namely, the statue of Count von Schulenburg, who commanded the Venetian forces in the great defence of Corfu in 1716-these memorials have as companions various tokens of the English occupation, which, following that of Venice, continued through forty-nine years, that is, from 1815 to 1863. Before this there had been a short period of French dominion. The souvenirs of the British rule are conspicuous. The first is the palace built for the English Governor, a functionary who bore the sonorous official name of Lord High Commissioner, a title which was soon shortened to the odd abbreviation, "the Lord High." This palace is an uninteresting construction stretching stiffly across the water side of the esplanade, and cutting off the view of the harbor. It is now the property of the King of Greece, but at present it is seldom occupied. If the palace is ordinary, what shall be said of another memento which adorns the esplanade? This is a high, narrow building, so uncouth that it causes a smile. It looks raw, bare, and so primitive that if it had a pulley at the top it |