chair; the legs were not quite even, and I sent it back to be planed. When brought again I protested that it still rocked a hair's breadth; the child replied, "Eh, signora mia, where is the man absolutely without vice?"

His reply reminded me of a shoemaker who said to me when I was unduly insistent as to the wear of shoes I was ordering, "Yes, they are good; yes, they will last; but not forever. No stuff is eternal." We Anglo Saxons think we have the monopoly of moral conviction; but sometimes an arrow comes to us from a Latin quiver. A man in a tiny twine shop did up a package for me to post, with much skill and patience, and I, thanking, protested, "But I have taken up so much of your time." He replied gravely, "What is it in comparison with eternity!"

With the spring scores of new trades leap into being: first, the vending of lemon, orange, and barley water from a stand which is a real nosegay of leaves and lem

ons.

Who can forget the glowing, admirably disposed colors of a Venetian or Roman green grocer? I often recall the quaint market-place at Ferrara, where the booths were garlanded with blushing pomegranates wedded to their delicate green glossy leaves limned against a deep blue sky. A mournful wail of "Spiderhunter, spider-hunter" announces an old man laden with long canes, bunches of prickly butchers-broom for house-cleaning before Easter. Then comes the man who sells cherries "with and without a master," and he who carries "fruits of the sea," and the little donkey carts filled with flasks of "acid water" from a mineral spring near Rome, which is delivered at your door be it even on the fourth floor, for one cent, with a bright smile thrown in for lagnappe.

Those who have spent Christmas in Rome know how gay the Piazza Navona is made for Epiphany with booths of cheap toys. The main stock is of presepi

little sheds of cork-bark with miniature terra cotta figures representing the Nativity. A small shed with the Holy

Family costs from twenty to forty cents, and additional figures of shepherds, magi, peasants, and all kinds of domestic animals, can be had for one cent apiece. Pausing one day before a stall, I apologized for merely looking. The old vendor beamed on me kindly and said, “Look, look, Signora, how can people fall in love with my wares unless they do look."

He said he began immediately after Epiphany to make images for the next year; he devoted one month to pigs (very ungodly-looking black swine), one to magi, one to peasants spinning, one to cocks, and so on, reserving the last month, "when there was more inspiration," to making the Holy Family. The Holy Family consists of the Baby, Mary, Joseph, and two cows! The old fellow's pleasure and pride in his one-cent figurines had a flavor of the artist's joy in creation.

I ordered some straight shelves from a plain carpenter, to hold some bits of ancient pottery. The next morning he appeared with a drawing of a graceful curved outline for the frame instead of a straight one, suggesting that divisions be omitted as they spoiled the effect. The man's bow on arriving and leaving, his attitude while making suggestions, his deft way of picking up his kit of tools, might be envied by the leader of the cotillion, so full it was of grace and ease.

One day my sister and I found a friend in bed, and were moved to admiration by the beautiful inlaid bedstead. Where, how, could a like one be obtained?

And Valeria replied: "It was made by a man who is a real artist; he can copy or create any design. This he adapted from my antique chest of drawers. Do you see how exquisitely the pattern is made to lend itself to the curves and different spaces? No, he is not expensive. He restored the wood-work of the Borgia apartments. He is now making a carved altar for the Pope."

Everything, price and all, was satisfactory; we took the man's address and paid little heed to Valeria's parting words,

"But don't think you'll get that bed in a hurry."

We sent for the artist and had a long and charming conversation with him as to wood, design, period. He talked most agreeably of the Louis XVI bureau he was to follow in making the bedstead, its epoch, the details which were complicated to reproduce, which brass finishings were antique. He used his pencil as readily as a good talker does his tongue, and showed a real feeling for and knowledge of art, which made us feel as if we had been to hear a famous lecturer on the subject. He promised to find the proper wood on the morrow and begin the bedstead immediately. We were delighted with him and the near prospect of the bedstead.

A week later we dropped in to see him; he had not begun the work, but would the next day. Two weeks later we wrote him a note, but had no reply. Some time after we left a message at his shop asking him to call. He did so in a few weeks and paid us another charming visit to copy the design on the bureau. He sipped a glass of wine, spoke with appreciation of a seventeenth century ceiling, and told of several interesting works of art (not ours!) he was engaged in. He gave a graphic description of a fine carved bedstead he had executed for the erratic Duke of Gallese. We were a little depressed by hearing that that bed had only been delivered in time for the duke's dead body to be laid out upon it. He added, however, with grim humor that the duke's daughter Donna Maria was very glad to get it, as it was a more tangible possession than her father's other bequest of Lake Albano !

Every few weeks, my brother, who has the Anglo Saxon's intolerance of fibs and the dallyings of art, goes to see our bedstead-maker and tries threat and persuasion. He is met with gracious good-humor and promised the bed next week. My sister and I have given up going; we remember that Julius II was of an impatient, choleric disposition, but that he

never got his tomb finished; and though we hope to see that bedstead in the flesh, we are not sure we ever shall. And in the mean time we have procured another to sleep on.

In having old furniture restored, one is struck by the artisan's knowledge of and respect for the traditions of style and art. He makes subtle distinctions between what is beautiful in itself and what has the merit of a certain period or style. This inherent sense of fitness and proportion runs through all that Italians do. It makes them excellent raconteurs and actors, and cooks who vie with the French. It prevents their ever presenting such sickening scenes of public love-making as the parks afford in Germany, or committing such crimes of color and cut in dress as prevail amongst the lower classes in London.

Gabriele d'Annunzio's graces of style and his "purple patches" fired the fancy of Italians and made them tolerate his moral lacunæ. His standard of debt-paying is well known. A tailor to whom he owed a long score vowed he would not be done out of it like the others, and departed to extract the money or give D'Annunzio a sound beating. Some one met the tailor later and inquired the result. The reply was,

He was describing his wooing and wedding of a girl of Monte Rotondo.

"What should I take her for a nuptial gift? It must be something appropriate to my profession; she was marrying a poor man, but a barber, a perfumer. I decided it should be a bouquet which should compass her with odor, and perfume all Monte Rotondo. I took her a bouquet of orange blossoms which was two yards to span; it was only a nosegay, but neither Torlonia nor Colonna could surpass it. Monte Rotondo was odorous; no man needed to ask: who weds Nina Gigliucci? The very air informed him: A Barber, a Perfumer of Rome!"

THE WESTERN RAILROAD

MUCH has been said in the Club of late on the subject of the railroad. But always it has been the short-distance affair of sectional New England which has been under discussion. I wonder if I may add a word in praise of the Western Railroad.

I capitalize it purposely, for it seems to me quite a different thing from its eastern counterpart. As different as Achilles, say, from a park policeman. An eastern railroad is fussy, impatient, obnoxious in its neighborhood, a thing of noisy utility, to be employed, then shunned. Whereas the Western Railroad goes with an epic sweep and grandeur. The whole West is full of poetry, of course, of high romance and vigor; but no rugged peak ever stirs me more, no stretch of prairie land, than the gallant Railroad holding its way through the untamed wilderness. I stand on the back platform and watch the slender steel track unroll, so lonely a thread in that spreading realm of solitude and silence! On either hand, barren mile after mile, untouched if not all unexplored, northward as far as the thought can reach, southward far, far, far. And this narrow way through the heart of it the one bond of civilization, the one token of mankind. It becomes a daring, exultant song which the train sings under my feet as I think

of its desolate condition, a weird song too, with a minor strain which increases through the night. I lie in my berth and am borne head first, rushing, helpless. through the darkness. Is it a dragon which has me in charge? And whither will he transport me?

Take the magic letters, C. P. R.—what do they signify? Not merely a train of sleeping cars, but the wide Canadian wilderness, the splendid north shore of Superior, the Canadian Rockies, a continent of wonder and joy made visible to us. It is the whole thing, the C. P. R., so far as we are concerned. Even when we go camping, C. P. R. is stamped upon our outfit. And thankless would be the tourist's heart that felt no responsive love.

It was once my privilege to stay at Glacier for some days. Reasoning from an eastern point of view, I should have. thought that to live in a hotel which opened directly from a railroad station platform, and whose dining-room was inundated four times a day by hungry, clamoring tourists, would be anything but pleasant. I soon found, however, that I preferred this lively centre of action to the more discreet and æsthetic retirement of Lake Louise. Nor were my reasons gregarious merely. I actually felt the mountains better · the vigor and exultation of them for the coming of those toiling trains, puffing and laboring up to us, hard put to it, but dauntless. They were of one kinship with Mount Sir Donald, the stalwart and weather riven. To think of the wellnigh insuperable difficulties which they had surmounted to come this way at all! The perilous precipice safely edged, the deep gorge bridged, the steep ascent climbed patiently, curve on curve. That a train should deliberately set itself to penetrate such a vastness as this, crawling high on the shoulders and crags, an intrepid inch-worm! The tears often actually stood in my eyes as I watched it come in, drawing out of its mighty solitude, bearing safely its precious burdens. And precious they were, of a truth, those

burdens, nothing less than the lives of us all. Our very existence hung upon the good faith of the train. All our food, all our clothes, all our furniture, all our letters and newspapers, every material need we had, must be supplied by the C. P. R., or we must suffer lack. Great benevolent god, it came to seem, patiently ministering.

If I laid myself down beside the track of an eastern railroad, I should not expect to sleep all night. But there at Glacier my rest was sound. A great red eye would glare in at me, stealing past my window, but the touch was friendly and comforting: "All is well. I'll watch. Go to sleep." Even the bells and the whistles and the heavy rumble of freight trains failed to annoy. As for the soot, it was not at all; the mountain winds tossed it away. I have never known a railroad to be such incarnate graciousness.

The privilege of the mighty it took, this western demi-god, to mind its own times and seasons. I think there was hardly a day of my stay when all four trains were not late. Lavishly late too,-four, five, eight hours, on such a grand scale moves, or delays, the West. But, again, the irritation and wrath which would attend such hesitation in the particular, punctual East, was quite wanting here. People deplored, from time to time, the thwarting of their plans, but their philosophy was instant. I think we had all of us vague images, when a train was very late, of some grim encounter, beyond there, far

in,

among the mountain gorges, some deadly set-to with savage forces of the wilderness, from which our train would emerge at last, fiercely spent but triumphant.

This eulogy may sound extravagant, but in truth I mean every word. I never return from a western trip (which same may the gods grant me often!) without feeling in my awakened heart, blown through with big refreshment, a strain of poetry which is just the song of the train which has borne me. Homeric poetry it is,

too. We do well to listen.

THE BEECH TREE

I HAVE always felt a sense of satisfaction that the

"Wielder of the stateliest measure

ever moulded by the lips of man had so warm a place in his heart for the beech-tree. I do not forget that the American poet whom I most revere has said "True poetry springs not from rocks and trees; but the words were uttered when his soul was on fire with a great movement for human freedom and was hardly capable of a full recognition of the claims of Nature. Who shall say that the poetic germ latent in the young Mantuan's heart did not receive its first awakening some bright summer day as he lay beneath that grove of old beeches with their stormbroken tops, so feelingly mentioned in the Eighth Eclogue, the cattle slaking their thirst at the reedy margin of the Mincius just below him, stray rays of sunlight from the soft Italian blue filtering down through the stirring leaves over his head and falling in dancing patches of gold upon the delicate green coverlet of his earthen couch, while the vague susurrus of the bees trembled upon his ears as now and then the fitful whiffs of Zephyrus passed away and allowed the leaves to cease their rustling, and in the distance the nibbling she-goats dotted those gently sloping hills at the rear, distending their udders with the juices of the cytisus towards the evening milking?

What other tree in all the woods can keep up its companionship with the recipient human heart through all the varying moods of the year in equal measure with the beech? As I look from my window now, a stately specimen across the road greets my eye with a harmonious blending of greens and golds and russets and rich dark browns, indescribable in the countless transition shades by which its leading colors are welded into a unified effect of restful and soul-satisfying beauty. The leaves of the two large walnut-trees which flank it on the right and left are already far on the road to a quick and un

sightly decay. The November winds will catch the myriad leaves of my beech-trees and take them whirling over the crest of the hill, where they will find a restingplace in deep deposits in the edge of the college woods. Go there six months from now and stir them up, after the rains and snows of winter and spring have done their worst, and you will find hundreds of them still without a break, their glossy browns even yet a thing of joy and beauty. You can scarce tell when they pass back to their original dust. There is no time of the year when you cannot find them so, in any spot where large masses of them may huddle together for self-protection.

But what of the tree itself, when frost and rain and wind have at last denuded it of its graceful mantle? What of it? Stand where you have it in full outline against the gray of a December sky, and look at the delicate tracery of its countless twigs upon that otherwise unbroken screen of snow-cloud. What artist's hand could match that web of sinuous curves, dividing and subdividing as the eye passes upward and outward until it culminates in a lace-work of lithe and graceful beauty too intricate for human vision to analyze ? Your oaks and maples and elms have nothing to match that. Let the clouds begin to drop their feathery burden now, and see that mass of bewitching tracery softened and blurred and blended with the slow, tremulous motion of the falling flakes, and you have still another effect that the beech alone can give. If conditions be right, the flakes will cling fast to those limbs, and the outer circle, where all are lithe and slender, will gradually be transformed into long rolls of fleecy white, like the rolls of clean white wool that used to come back to our mothers from the carding machine, in the days when the hum of the spinning-wheel was heard in the land.

The night comes, and while you sleep the clouds clear away. Let us suppose you have the dyspepsia, or an early train to catch, or a six months old baby, or anything else whatever that will get you out

of bed in time to watch the first rays of the sun at work among those snow-wreathed beech twigs. Who shall attempt to paint in mere words the colors that the crayons of Phoebus are spreading upon this royal canvas? Here is all the glitter of Aladdin's cave brought right to your window. With the gathering warmth of those piercing rays the snow begins gradually to let go. its hold, and its soft muffled beating upon the deep white cushion below comes with the effect of some weird, irregular kind of music to the ear. Go back to your fire awhile and then look again. The smaller limbs are clean of snow now, but on the tip of each twig and at the point of every one of those long russet-jacketed buds which Nature has already provided for the coming spring hangs a tiny drop of water, sparkling like a diamond in the fresh sunlight, a bewildering profusion of glory that no other tree but the beech can produce, simply because no other has the facilities for its proper distribution. We shall not linger over the equally wonderful effect when its limbs are robed with the hoar-frost, whether seen in the silvery glint of the moonlight, or under the full glow of the sun, or yet again through the vague curtain of a winter morning fog. Suffice it to say that no shift whatever of our varying and often intensely disagreeable winter weather will ever allow you to surprise the beech-tree in any dress or attitude out of keeping with its native grace, dignity, and beauty.

What can be more delicate than its fresh young leaves and blossoms, when the swelling buds have burst asunder and thrown off those broad, russet-brown scales, at the vitalizing touch of the spring sunshine and the mellow south-wind? We need not follow it through the spring and summer. Since long before the days of Gallus and Lycoris young men and maidens have been carving their love in its receptive bark to grow with its growth, and tired mortals have been stretching their limbs beneath its shade, catching little glimpses of blue sky, white cloud, or golden sunshine as the pliant branches