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many of which were the rarest originals in early Flemish and Italian art, were dusted with tender care, and hung from hasty nails upon the bare ghastly walls. Delicate ivory carvings, wrought by the matchless hand of Cellini—early Florentine bronzes—priceless specimens of Raffaelle ware and Venetian glass—the precious trifles, in short, which the collector of mediæval curiosities amasses for his heirs to disperse among the palaces of kings and the cabinets of nations—were dragged again to unfamiliar light. The invaded sepulchral building seemed a very Pompeii of the Cinque Cento. To examine, arrange, methodize, select for national purposes, such miscellaneous treasures, would be the work of weeks. For easier access, Darrell caused a slight hasty passage to be thrown over the gap between the two edifices. It ran from the room niched into the gables of the old house, which, originally fitted up for scientific studies, now became his habitual apartment into the largest of the uncompleted chambers which had been designed for the grand reception-gallery of the new building. Into the pompous gallery thus made contiguous to his monk-like cell, he gradually gathered the choicest specimens of his collection The damps were expelled by fires on grateless hearth-stones, sunshine admitted from windows now for the first time exchanging boards for glass; rough iron sconces, made at the nearest forge, were thrust into the walls, and sometimes lighted at night—Darrell and Fairthorn walking arm in arm along the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein's Nobles, Perugino's Virgins. Some of that high-bred company displaced and banished the next day, as repeated inspection made the taste more rigidly exclusive. Darrell had found object, amusement, occupation—frivolous if compared with those lenses, and glasses, and algebraical scrawls which had once whiled lonely hours in the attic-room hard by; but not frivolous even to the judgment of the austere sage, if that sage had not reasoned away his heart. For here it was not Darrell's taste that was delighted; it was Darrell's heart that, ever hungry, had found food. His heart was connecting those long-neglected memorials of an ambition baffled and relinquished—here with a nation, there with his father's grave! How his eyes sparkled! how his lip smiled! Nobody would have guessed it—none of us know each other; least of all do we know the interior being of those whom we estimate by public repute; but what a world of simple, fond affection, lay coiled and wasted in that proud man's solitary breast!