"We are all, my children," the monk began, in a voice full of emotion, "witnesses of one of the most extraordinary miracles. I do not doubt for a moment but that it was San Dominico, the founder of our holy order, who moved the heart of a sinful woman on her dying bed, induced her to make a voluntary confession of her guilt, and mercifully takes charge of oppressed innocence."

"Mancomale! that oppressed innocence," Baffetto growled in his beard, as a sign of his approval.

"And," the Dominican continued, "that, lastly, it is the miraculous power of the saint which imparts fresh life to the penitent sinner, in order to bring the gloriously commenced work for the benefit of our holy faith to an equally glorious ending. Peace be to him and glory for it through all eternity. Amen. Hence I have not the slightest hesitation in saluting you, eccelenza, by the title of your illustrious ancestors, as Prince Castrucci of Castro San Martino. I warn you to thank Heaven and the saints, but, before all, San Dominico, on your knees for the mercy vouchsafed to you, and to prove your gratitude by rich gifts to the poor, and especially to their refuge. I mean the monastery of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. For the present I invite your excellency to preserve the secret of your illustrious birth for a short period, until I have had time to prepare your illustrious mother, the Principessa Maria Castrucci, whose confessor I, though so unworthy, am, for this surprising event, and conduct you to her arms. So early as to-morrow, my prince, I hope to be permitted to lead you as such to the palace of your fathers."

With a profound bow the Dominican turned to depart, but at the moment Prince Baffetto seized the hanging sleeve of his gown, and whispered mysteriously, "Padre, it would be a nice thing if you would advance me to-day, on account of my inheritance, two or three crowns. I have lost the whole afternoon in becoming a prince. I ought to have stood as model to the German painter at the corner of the Via Rasella— I should have earned my three pauls-certain is certain; if the old principessa won't have me, I shall have lost my money."

"Be without fear, my son, your mother will not deny you, nor the princely inheritance slip from you. I am not the man to have temporal wealth at my disposal, but if the widow's mite is not beneath your notice, I willingly offer it to you."

"Show it here, padre," the prince cried, impatiently, and stared with saucer eyes at the small leather purse which the monk pulled out. "Two papetti, three more, make a scudo-here with them—another paul, just enough for a bottle of orvieto. Va bene. I can manage till tomorrow. Good-by, padre. Eleven pauls in one's pocket, per bacco, with that sum a man can play the signore."

The Princess-Dowager Maria Castrucci was an elderly, withered lady, very avaricious, and immoderately bigoted. She was tall and thin-her regular features might in earlier years have made pretensions to beauty, had they not evidenced concealed gall and arrogance; add to the portrait nose long and thin, mouth with ugly wrinkles, and pale lips, cheeks wondrously berouged, hair-powder, a rosary eternally in her hand, nestling in a small sofa, on which her wheezy lapdog alone had room by her side; before her, on a low tabaret, a coarse-gowned monk or a priggish abbate. Prince Gaetano Castrucci, her hitherto supposed son, an amiable young man, and thorough gentleman, had been carefully brought up

by his enlightened father, and, quite in opposition to the habits of the Roman nobility, sent to travel in foreign countries at an early age. There he had certainly seen and heard many things, which came into collision with the principles considered normal in his blessed native land: above all, the priestly domination had lost its nimbus in his eyes. When the old Principe Manlio Castrucci died, Gaetano returned to Rome to undertake the management of the estates to which he had succeeded. He found his palace converted into a synod of black, white, brown, grey, barefooted, shod, bearded and smooth-chinned monks, and the last bald pate had more to say in it than himself. In vain did he try every means in order to banish the holy vermin from out his four walls, but he unfortunately recognised the truth of the proverb, that fleas are ten times more difficult to extirpate than rats, and priests a hundred times more than fleas. While engaged in this Augean operation he had had violent quarrels with the conscience-keepers, and drawn on himself the hatred of all, and chiefly of his mother's confessor. With his mother, who clung to her tonsured body-guard, Gaetano had also quarrelled, and in the conviction that he could effect nothing during her lifetime, he had gone to Naples, where he held the post of chamberlain to the king. Here it was that he formed the acquaintance of an amiable young English lady, contrived to gain her affections, and was engaged to her, a step which rendered the breach with his mother and the house clergy perfectly incurable, for Albion's blonde daughter was unable to cover the unfortunate blot of having been brought up in another faith, either by her good birth or the real pearls of the five figures which represented her dowry.

Father Tommaso sent in his name to the princess, took his seat on the stool facing her, and then began, with folded hands and upturned eyes, an edifying sermon about the strange dispensations of Providence, which he concluded with the explanation: "Your prayer, eccelenza, has been heard. Not that the lost youth has become himself converted and turned to apostolic humility, but because the remarkable confession of a penitent sinner has revealed to me that this oak-apple growing on a noble branch was grafted on it by a scandalous deception. I will speak more clearly: the nurse, Anna Pastone, has confessed how, blinded by criminal greed, she changed the two infants, dared to lay her own low-born son on your heart, and allowed your noble descendant to pine up to the present hour in obscurity. Rejoice, signora, praise the saints, that Heaven has liberated you from an unworthy son. Doubly fortunate mother! your real well brought-up son is sighing for the moment when he may be allowed to throw himself at your feet. Grant me the happiness of leading him to your arms after so long a separation."

It was a considerable time ere the princess could understand the story of the exchange of children and the happiness that awaited her. The monk, however, did not leave off until the case was quite clear to her, and she at once sent off a courier to her son Gaetano with a letter, in which Padre Tommaso requested him politely, but rather coldly, to be kind enough to look about him for another inheritance, mother, and, name, and suggested Anna and Luigi Pastone for the latter vacant articles.

After the princess had shown herself so ready to give up her hitherto son, she expressed the natural wish to see his substitute as speedily as

possible. Father Tommaso, however, felt very fully that Baffetto would require a few slight touches before he could be introduced with success to his princely mamma; hence he put her off till the following morning, and ordered her to pray off a dozen rosaries, as a seasonable distraction, till then. The princess humbly obeyed this order as well.

When the reverend father proceeded, on the following morning, to the Via della Purificazione, he found old Anna Pastone fresh and merry, as if a finger even had never pained her, spinning in the doorway, and learned from her lips that the present Prince Gaetano Castrucci, or Baffetto, as we will call him henceforth, in order to prevent any misunderstanding, had not come home during the night. "Heaven knows," the old woman's irreverent report concluded, "where the scamp is lurking." Shaking his head, the padre proceeded to the Café Gnocchi in order to seek his protégé, but there he was absent the first time for years. No one was able to give any certain information about the missing man, and only one of the models mentioned a report that Baffetto had been on the previous evening overtaken by orvieto, had a row in consequence, and was arrested by the gendarmes.

The Dominican gave a violent start on hearing this. He proceeded very despondingly to the nearest guard-house, and there really found. Prince Baffetto sunk in the deepest reflection, and snoring under a bench.

The priest's application sufficed to effect the liberation of the prisoner. The priest impetuously dragged him from the guard-room, and began in an earnest and well-delivered speech to urge on him, before all things, the duties of his exalted race. Never did a more fertile seed fall on stonier

ground. His excellency behaved most violently, cursed and swore, and finally deigned to make the assertion that, unless he could go to the Osteria every evening and drink his fill, the deuce a prince would he be, and the monk could look for another fool.

“At any rate hasten, eccelenza, to dress yourself, and arrange your toilette for the presentation."

"Dress? I?

Baffetto stared, first at the priest and then at himself. Am I not dressed, eh? Have I not tied on my red and blue-striped fascia expressly for mamma princess, and put on my red woollen cap? What more would you have, padre ?"

64

Cut off your beard, my prince-this odious, wildly-entangled forest, which gives you the aspect of a bandit."

"Be that farther from me," Baffetto replied, "than January from mulberries. Young and old know me as Baffetto, and a Baffetto without a beard is a Pope without cardinals. And now let us hasten to get to the spot, padre. I am longing for my palace and a good breakfast."

They were soon standing before the former. If the prince had done so much to give the monk's patience a hard trial, the servants did their share in completely exhausting it. The porter refused Baffetto admission with levelled bamboo, and after he had been appeased, with some difficulty, the groom of the chambers refused to announce a rogue-as his face showed him to be-to her excellency. Baffetto threatened him with his highest displeasure-the canıériere called him an ass. wanting, but that prince and subject seized each other by the hair. The demon seemed on this day to sow tares among the wheat by handfuls.

Little was

What the eloquence of the padre did not succeed in effecting was produced by a five-paul piece being thrust at the right moment into the jowl of the camériere Cerberus. He held his tongue, and the doors of the princely apartment were thrown open. The surprise of the princess at the sight of her lost and recovered son might be called grander than it was pleasant. Speechless, she leant back in the ottoman, and measured with cold, searching glances the new comer, who, with a gawky smile, was twirling his red nightcap.

"With no slight surprise," she at length said, slowly, "we make the observation, that the subject in question does not bear the slightest resemblance to the features so deeply engraved on our heart of our deceased and illustrious consort, nor to our own, but, on the contrary, the marked stamp of an extremely vulgar person."

The padre rubbed his hands in embarrassment, dropped a few remarks about the surprising freaks of nature, and ventured the supposition that after the removal of the disfiguring beard the princely features would be more easy to trace. The princess waggled her head thoughtfully, rang for the camériere, and commissioned him to accompany his Excellency Prince Gaetano di Castrucci to his apartments, there drag him out of his primitive condition, and impart to him a human, and, if possible, princely

appearance.

Baffetto allowed himself to be led away more patiently than might have been supposed. The princess his mother and the Dominican remained behind, in order to consult how the indispensable polish should be given to this very rough jewel in the shortest possible space of time.

The hour for dinner was long past, and the meal had been served up, but neither prince nor camériere put in an appearance. The major-domo sent to fetch them found the reconciled couple playing at zecchinetta with a very dirty pack of cards, which his excellency had filched from the Café Gnocchi. The prince was a winner, and in the rosiest humour. He broke off the game with reluctance, and with the assurance that he would speedily give a revanche.

The camériere, however, had done his utmost on Baffetto: he was hardly recognisable. His face had become as smooth as the palm of his hand, with the exception of a small moustache, and his locks hung in the prescribed spirals: linen, clothes, and the other articles which constituted the external man, and which were temporarily borrowed from the wardrobe of the ex-prince, stood in a proper ratio to the rest. Baffetto, besides, was not an ugly fellow, and thus it happened that the principessa deigned to express her satisfaction, traced some resemblance in the nostrils with those of her departed husband, and graciously offered him her hand to kiss. Baffetto squeezed it so heartily as to draw a yell from

her Altezza.

Generally we must say in praise of Prince Baffetto, that he became used to his new position with extraordinary speed, and the more easily so, because, on the one hand, there is not so tremendous a gulf as people might be inclined to suppose between the tone of a true dandy and that of a street vagabond; and, on the other, because that is regarded as wit with nobly-born persons which in low-born clods is called impudence. If, then, the young prince, through absence of mind or too lively a recollection of past times, happened to make a few mistakes-as, for instance,

when he leapt, in his plumed hat and sword, behind his carriage instead of into it; or slipped from the tedious conversazione of the salons into the ground floor, in order to dance a Saltarella to the tune of the spit with some sturdy kitchen wench; or when, in society, he pulled off his light tail-coat to throw it over his shoulders, after the Birbaccione fashion, and sneaked into a corner of the Temple of Peace, in order to play undisturbed alla Mora with the stone-cutters there-this did no injury to the amiability of the child of nature, as he was called in the great world, and, on the contrary, made him more interesting in the sight of the ladies. At the soirées they actually contended for his simple excellency. His luck with the women was decided, and already people were talking of a marriage with the daughter of an immensely rich banker, who, commencing with lucifer-matches, had attained through usury a ducal crown. Father Tommaso reaped from the princess, who every day grew more attached to her new son, the most flattering thanks for his fortunate interference, and his monastery the most splendid donations. The servants would have died for their condescending master, and, in the whole world, there was only two persons dissatisfied with the change-namely, in the first instance, old Anna Pastone, who found herself awfully disappointed in her sanguine hopes, because Prince Baffetto regarded the late recognition of his princely birth, and the therefrom resulting loss of the glorious hours which now fell to his lot, as a crime, and would have nothing to say to her, or even see her; and, secondly, the ex-Prince Gaetano Castrucci, or Luigi Pastone, as he was henceforth to be called.

The latter, at the very moment when the courier was sent off to him with the disinheriting letter, had crossed to Sicily in the suite of his nonarch. To the constant change of residence, as well as the defective communication in the interior of the country, must be ascribed the fact that this letter did not reach its destination till a month after. It was a crushing blow for him. His pride forbade his retaining his situation, and conmanded him voluntarily to retire from it before the story of his misfor une became town talk. He immediately handed in his resignation, and returned to Naples. He felt incapable of appearing before his affia ced bride as a nameless adventurer, and hence broke off the engagement with a bleeding heart: he released the lady, in writing, from her pledge, and only allowed her to conjecture from undecided expressions that a misfortune, not of his creating, forced him to give up the happiness of his life. After this, he hurried to Rome with the determination to go hence abroad, and find death in the ranks of a foreign army.

It was on one of those beautiful winter days, such as only the Roman February can offer, when the deeply-lamenting Gaetano was walking up and own the grounds of the Monte Pincio, and at length sunk in melancholy reflections, leant over the stone balustrade, and allowed his eye to wander over glorious Rome stretched out at his feet, the city on nich he was so soon going to turn his back for ever. Rome is so beautiful, so wondrously beautiful in the eyes of the stranger, who revels for the first time in its splendour-but how much more beautiful in those of the departing man, who is leaving his paternal city for ever!

A beggar woman came up to Gaetano, and, in the Madonna's name, implored him for alms. He silently handed her a silver coin. The beggar looked up in his face, uttered a loud cry, and threw herself at his