and with a vividity of description that is remarkable. Thus there is an account of the midsummer sultriness in the city of Milan that makes us hot to read. After patience and privations innumerable, fortune at last smiles on Giovanni. He defends the cause of a well-known personage, and thus attracts public attention. This is his first step upon the ladder of success, which he now mounts rapidly and steadily. But with success come its temptations. He is courted, drawn into society, succumbs to the fascinations of a fashionable woman, and the image of Rachel fades in his memory. He still looks forward to ultimate marriage with her; but he thinks there is plenty of time, and he is just now interested in the intrigue in which he is engaged. The news he hears by accident that Signor Pedrotti is dead, and that Rachel lives alone in the big castle, together with the discovery of a note from her, written years ago, thai never reached him, in which she promises fidelity, arouse his slumbering ideal, and he rushes off to the village to claim the wife he has so long neglected. Most skilfully and artistically is this portion of the story told. He expects to find her changed, of course, but he pictures that it will be a change in which she, like himself, has gained in culture and worldly knowledge. He finds her a worthy, faithful, and excellent person, but a rustic, a villager. Their interview, in which no definite words pass between them, and after which he departs for Milan, though he says he shall call again next day – a promise she knows he will not keep, and he knows he does not mean – is told with remarkable ability, tenderdess, and fine tact; and mournful as is the sudden sunset of this ideal, deeply as its pathos moves us, we acquiesce in its conclusion as a necessity that is inevitable. We only feel the vast "pity of it," and its sad truth to life.
'In Risaia' furnishes a forcible picture of the sufferings endured by those who work amid the rice-fields, where youth and health are sacrificed to a labour that makes women old crones at thirty. The nature of the work obliges them to stand in water that reaches above their knees, while in spring a white veil of mist envelopes all the flat land; and things grow worse rather than better when the heat increases, and there uprises from the stagnant waters miasmas whose stench is often insupportable. Yet to labour in the rice-fields is often the only means of livelihood to be gained by the young people of the district; and here they work together for long hours, ill-fed, ill-housed, to return home, after the harvest, fever-stricken and pallid. The heroine of the tale, Nanna, the spoilt and only daughter of peasants, goes also to work in the rice-fields. There would be no absolute necessity in her case, if that rigid adherence to outward convention which specially characterises the Italians, and which the peasantry possess to a high degree, did not make it needful that, having reached a marriageable age, she should wear in her hair that aureole of silver pins which, after the fashion of those districts, is regarded as a signal that suitors may come forward. These pins are dear: it needs sixty-two francs for the father to purchase them, and he, poor man, barely knows how to pay his rent. But to get these pins is a necessity. The whole family put their shoulders to the wheel, and for this
