but we'll meet at Naples one of these days, and set all these things to rights.'

"I suppose the wine must have been far stronger than I thought; perhaps, too, drinking it in the open air made it more heady; then the novelty of the situation had its effect-it's not every day that a man sits hob-nobbing with a king. Whatever the reason, I became confused and addled, and my mind wandered. I forgot where I was. I believe I sang something-I am not sure what-and the King sang, and then we both sang together; and at last he whistled with a silver call-whistle that he wore, and he gave me in charge to a fellow—a ragged rascallylooking dog he was-to take me back to Catanzaro ; and the scoundrel, instead of doing so, led me off through the mountains for a day and a half, and dropped me at last at Reccone, a miserable village, without tasting food for twelve hours. He made me change clothes with him, too, and take his dirty rags, this goat-skin vest and the rest of it, instead of my new tweed suit; and then, sir, as we parted, he clapped me familiarly on the shoulder, and said, 'Mind me, amico mio, you're not to tell the padrone, when you see him, that I took your clothes from you, or he'll put a bullet through me. Mind that, or you'll have to settle your scores with one of my brothers.'

"By the padrone you perhaps mean the King,' said I, haughtily.

'King, if you like,' said he, grinning; we call him "Ninco Nanco:" and now that they've shot Pilone, and taken Stoppa, there's not another brigand in the whole of Italy to compare with him.' Yes, sir, out came the horrid truth. It was Ninco Nanco, the greatest monster in the Abruzzi, I had mistaken for Victor Emmanuel. It was to him I had presented my watch, my photograph, my seal-ring, and my purse with forty-two napoleons. Dirty, ragged, wretched, in tatters, and famished, I crept on from village to village till I reached this place yesterday evening, only beseeching leave to be let lie down and die, for I don't think I'll ever survive the shame of my misfortune, if my memory should be cruel enough to preserve the details."

"Cheer up, Joel; the King is to review the National Guard to-day. I'll take care that you shall have a good place to see him, and a good dinner afterwards."

"No, sir; I'll not go and look at him. Ninco Nanco has cured me of hero-worship. I'll go back to town and see after the exchanges. The sovereigns that come from the mint are the only ones I mean to deal with from this day forward.”

THE POLITICAL QUARANTINE.

IN one of Alfred de Vigny's clever sketches of the Reign of Terror, he gives a picture of the interior of the Bastile, and shows us the little children representing in their plays the terrible incidents that characterise the era. Here was one being tried for his life, here another being led to the guillotine, as though the passion of that thirst for blood had actually insinuated itself into the veins of infancy, and corruption begun from the very cradle. Nothing, however, is more true than that the presence of some great national calamity will so tinge men's thoughts with its colours, that all their daily actions and sayings will partake of the features of the disaster. A great flood or a great fire will leave after them innumerable traces in the expressions of a people long after their ravages have ceased.

I was reminded of this tendency t'other day by an article I read in the Times.' It was a very able and well-reasoned paper on the respective merits of the various claimants for high office, and especially for the Premiership. The writer told us that Lord Russell was old, Lord Granville polite, Lord Clarendon diplomatic, and Mr Gladstone fully qualified for the highest post in the realm.

He showed us, at what I confess to have felt an unnecessary length, that because we had lately been ruled by a very able man in spite of his years, great age alone could not be esteemed a qualification for office, still less could the memory of that long catalogue of indiscretions which attached to Lord Russell, and made him more terrible as a colleague than as an opponent.

It was, however, when canvassing the claims of Mr Gladstone that the writer evinced that sympathy with the passing events of our time to which I have briefly made some allusión already. We live in an age of epidemics: with cholera, yellow fever, and the cattle plague besieging us, we are straining every nerve to guard ourselves against contagion, and by all the measures of a rigid Quarantine to keep out the dreaded pestilence. No wonder, then, if the author of this article-whose eye could never glance down a column without encountering ice - bags,

chlorine gas, and Mr Gamgee - should have felt himself warped by the prevailing tendencies of the time, and led to adopt not merely the expressions but the practices so incessantly presented to his notice.

His line of argument is this-Here is a great orator, a great financier, and a great rhetorician, with abilities to command the respect of Parliament, and an integrity above reproach. He is all that we want to lead an Administration, except in some trifling defects of coldness of manner and distance, which serve to repel followers, and what is more serious still, a boldness in innovation that, if allied with dangerous partisans, might lead us all much farther than we wished or ever intended.

The coldness might be cured. It is by no means impossible, indeed we have seen instances of it, that the possession of power will render a man genial, gentle, and accessible, who, in a subordinate station was restless, dissatisfied, and even uncourteous. It is the warmth, not the coldness, the writer says, we have to dread; and what he advises in consequence is, that he should be "Quarantined;" that is, that during the entire of the coming session he should be under the surveillance of a Political Board of Health, carefully watched and noted, all his symptoms recorded, his tongue especially looked to, and every