secret that simple Beppo gave in return for Lisa’s confidences. All the world knew his pains! He would bellow out his soft complainings to any one who would listen to him, pouring out all his great, big, earnest, simple, deeply-smitten heart.
Carlo said once that Beppo reminded him, when the elegiac fit was on him, of one of his own oxen, breathing with outstretched head its melancholy bellowings to the breeze as it went a-field. And if Giulia’s eyes could have wielded daggers as well as look them, when he so spoke, methinks Carlo would never have jibed at his brother or any one else any more.
Farmer Paolo Vanni, and his counsellor Don Evandro, supposing it finally admitted that it was beyond their united power to bring Beppo and Lisa together, would have been glad to secure the Fano attorney’s crowns on behalf of his younger brother, Carlo. And Carlo, despite a certain degree of inclination to make love to his beautiful cousin, half due to real admiration of her beauty, and half to a feeling that it would be very pleasant to carry her off from under his brother’s nose, would have had no difficulty in acceding to such an arrangement. But neither in this way did it seem likely, for the reasons that the reader is in possession of, that Sandro Bartoldi’s money could be made available for increasing the greatness of the Bella Luce family.
And it is now intelligible, also, why old Paolo Vanni, despite all his worldly prosperity, was not altogether a happy man, and why the Bella Luce household was not an abode of that unbroken felicity, contentment, and peace of mind, which are usually supposed to be the characteristics of dwellings placed in romantic situations, and ten miles from the nearest post-office.
GOLD, BREAD, AND SOMETHING MORE.
In our “voyages by the fireside”—the only voyages that most of us are able to indulge in—there has been a great change of scenery going on for some time past. Scenes that we supposed we had a distinct and faithful idea of, have presented new features within a few years, and some have wholly changed their aspect. An Australian plain was conceivable enough twenty years since—an expanse of coarse grass, spreading to the horizon a surface varied only by a few ups and downs, and clumps or belts of gum-trees; and nothing could appear more simple to the imagination than the position of the shepherd, seated on the great stone amidst the grass, in the intervals of his toils with his sheep. The case was not quite so simple as it looked. That big stone happened to be gold; and when this was found out, the solitary shepherd gave place to hundreds and thousands of such people as put an end to quiet wherever they go. A barbaric town and its rude commerce and conflicts fill the space in the mind’s eye so lately occupied by sheep and their shepherd. Even a greater change has come over our notion of the interior of Africa. We used to see a scorching wilderness of sand, glaring rocks, a sky without clouds, and an earth without water; and now we are preparing to watch the progress of Captains Speke and Grant, as they march for weeks together on the banks of vast rivers, and traverse valleys rich enough to grow all the finest products of the soil. We see them forcing their way through jungles, and taking shelter from the sun under noble timber trees; and, in short, finding themselves plunged into a region of teeming fertility, as unlike a parched, sandy, and rocky desert as one part of the earth’s surface can be to another.
In one of these cases, actual change has been wrought in the aspect of the scene: in the other, we have merely substituted a true for a false conception. The time seems to have arrived for both kinds of change to take place in our mind’s pictures of a region which ought to have great interest for us,—that prodigious expanse of land and water which belongs to us in the northern latitudes of the Western hemisphere. Nowhere in Australia itself have the transformations been so marvellous as some will be, for months and years to come, in certain regions of the Hudson’s Bay territories,—as we have been accustomed to call the expanse which stretches, north of the Canadas, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Some of us thought we knew those regions so well! In the Barren lands, the dreary district west of Hudson’s Bay, we have seen the Esquimaux trudging through the snow, on the track of the musk-ox or the reindeer; or fishing when the lakes melt, and gathering moss and weeds for vegetable food. Even this scene may grow milder and more animated as new reasons arise for seeking the shores of Hudson’s Bay. Due south of these barren lands lies a tract which till lately had hardly come before our imaginations at all. We did not hear of many fur-bearing animals there; and that feature—of furry animals—was the only one we knew of in Hudson’s Bay territory which was not specially described to us. Two or three travellers, or companies of travellers, who had been exploring in search of a road to British Columbia, at length told us what was under the sun in that part of his course. There were lakes of various dignities,—from Lake Superior, to bright pools hidden in the forest, and betrayed only by their streams when the settlers desired to learn whence came the useful waters. In some parts these lakes were known to be deep; but for the most part they were believed to be shallow; and in some so reedy and weedy that canoes could scarcely pass along them. We were able, after reading thus much, to see the polar water-fowl arriving in this watery region, in long lines from the north, the lines becoming wavy and uncertain, and then breaking up altogether, as the wild swans and geese and ducks plunged in throngs into the swamps and lake margins. We could see the Indian fowler skulking in the sedges, with his snares or his bow. He had waited long for more feathers for his adornment, and for this change of food: and now he was patient to wait in his lair till he could bag birds enough to make him welcome at his wigwam. We could image to ourselves, too, the gloomy forest, damp and mossy, which all the settlers who had yet gone there had scarcely been able to open to the light, so as to dry a space big enough to live on. Most of them