grindstone. I want to speak to you, Ga-, but between his movements of incredulity, briel." relieved.

esty to her own advantage, that she had perating. He had not finished, either. absolutely no other sound judgment with- He continued in a more agitated voice: in easy reach.

"Well, what is your opinion of my conduct?" she said, quietly.

"That it is unworthy of any thoughtful, and meek, and comely woman."

66

My opinion is (since you ask it) that you are greatly to blame for playing pranks upon a man like Mr. Boldwood, merely as a pastime. Leading on a man you don't care for is not a praiseworthy col-action. And even, Miss Everdene, if you seriously inclined towards him, you might have let him discover it in some way of true loving-kindness, and not by sending him a valentine's letter."

In an instant Bathsheba's face oured with the angry crimson of a Danby sunset. But she forbore to utter this feeling, and the reticence of her tongue only made the loquacity of her face the more noticeable.

The next thing Gabriel did was to make a mistake.

"Perhaps you don't like the rudeness of my reprimanding you, for I know it is rudeness; but I thought it would do good."

She instantly replied sarcastically. "On the contrary, my opinion of you is so low that I see in your abuse the praise of discerning people."

"I am glad you don't mind it, for I said it honestly, and with every serious meaning."

I see. But, unfortunately, when you try not to speak in jest you are amusing just as when you wish to avoid seriousness you sometimes say a sensible word." It was a hard hit, but Bathsheba had unmistakably lost her temper, and on that account Gabriel had never in his life kept his own better. He said nothing. She then broke out,

I

may ask, I suppose, where in particular my unworthiness lies? In my not marrying you, perhaps !"

"Not by any means,' said Gabriel, quietly. "I have long given up thinking of that matter."

"Or wishing it, I suppose," she said, and it was apparent that she expected an unhesitating denial of this supposition.

Whatever Gabriel felt, he coolly echoed her words

"Or wishing it either."

Bathsheba laid down the shears. "I cannot allow any man to - to criticise my private conduct!" she exclaimed. "Nor will I for a minute. So you'll please leave the farm at the end of the week!"

It may have been a peculiarity at any rate it was a fact that when Bathsheba was swayed by an emotion of an earthly sort her lower lip trembled: when by a refined emotion, her upper or heavenward one. Her nether lip quivered now.

"Very well, so I will," said Gabriel, calmly. He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break. "I should be even better pleased to go at once," he added.

"Go at once then, in Heaven's name!" said she, her eyes flashing at his, though never meeting them. "Don't let me see your face any more." "Very well, Miss Everdene - so it shall be."

And he took his shears and went away from her in placid dignity, as Moses left the presence of Pharaoh.

From Macmillan's Magazine. SPANISH LIFE AND CHARACTER IN THE INTERIOR, DURING THE SUMMER OF 1873.

LETTER XII.

A VISIT TO MURILLO'S HOUSE. WHO, among painters, has done his work more nobly, or more skilfully, than the painter of Seville, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo?

A woman may be treated with a bitterness which is sweet to her, and with a rudeness which is not offensive. Bathsheba would have submitted to an indignant chastisement for her levity had Gabriel protested that he was loving her at the same time; the impetuosity of passion unrequited is bearable, even if it It was a bright sunny evening in Destings and anathematizes there is a tri-cember, 1873, when, fresh from the conumph in the humiliation, and a tender- templation of the fixed, dark, stedfast ness in the strife. This was what she gaze of his "San Francisco receiving the had been expecting, and what she had Stigmata" (now in the Academia de Belnot got. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exas

----

las Artes at Cadiz), and his exquisitely sweet "Angel de la Guarda," in the cathedral of Seville, I bent my hasty steps

towards the home of this great artist in Seville.

I passed through the narrow winding streets of the "Judería," or Jewish quarter, now no longer restricted to the Jewish population. The sun hardly ever looks upon these narrow paved paths, with their tall houses seeming almost to meet overhead: but they were growing wet with the evening dews, which fall heavily in winter, partly making up for the lack of rain.

ill-lighted room, with floors of common red tiles, and a dark cupboard in each room, if my memory serves me in good stead.

My Andalucian lassie trundled up the narrow winding stairs-so narrow, so dark, only the width of five bricks placed lengthways, and with a little fronting of worn wood-work. On the first storey the doors are still small, the rooms dark and narrow. They were inhabited by a Spanish family, and I did not more than step inside them.

In a little street, now called "Plaza de Alfaro," or running out of that little To the top, or second storey, the stairsquare, is the great painter's simple case is little better than a creaking house, with "No. 2" written over its wooden ladder; but at the top my guide lowly Spanish portals. A Spanish man- showed me a little niche in the wall. servant and a dark-eyed, good-natured" Here," she said, "used to be one of his Andalucian lassie were laughing and love- paintings." All the rooms have floors of making at the door. I told them my er- red brick or tile; all are narrow and rand, and the girl pointed lazily and dark. On the top storey is the old wondering evidently what on earth the kitchen, the only inhabitant of which was English señor had come to see the house a black, white-breasted retriever puppy, for to a little marble tablet just inside who welcomed us with every noisy demthe door, fixed in the wall, to the left onstration of delight, and evidently did hand as you enter. not at all appreciate the honour of being a prisoner in Murillo's kitchen!

Like the house itself, and all the surroundings, it was most unpretending and unobtrusive.

On it was the simple inscription

En esta casa fué ciertamente

En la que murió

el dia 3 de Abril de 1682 el insigne pintor Sevillano Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

The lassie, romping with her mute companion, threw open a door, through which I crouched and squeezed, and we stood upon the roof a tiny space, sloping down to the front, only five yards by three, looking straight down into the walled garden of the alcazar, a typical Spanish garden, with its gorgeous orange and lime trees, its rich irrigated plots of

neat evergreen borders.

It is a plain, white-washed, modest Span-vegetables, its square regular beds, and ish house, consisting of a ground floor and two upper floors. The little street Here, I thought, more likely than in in which it stands is narrow; part of the the dark, narrow rooms, the great master house fronts another house, the rest over- wrought. The view was very beautiful looks a garden, with a high wall around Spanish housetops, remember, are not it, making the lookout from the lower like our smoky English housetops, fit rooms still duller than would a house only for sparrows, and smoke, and cats. fronting it. Under the wall of this gar- Spanish cities are smokeless, chimneyless; den a few muleteers and gitanos, in pic-no smuts fly about, and on Spanish turesque and gaudy costumes, their housetops, we can safely dry our white bronzed brown faces reminding one of snowy linen. the truthfulness of the great painter's colouring, were watering their donkeys and mules.

The view was very beautiful-over the old garden, over the tops of snow-white houses with flat, brown roofs; above was nothing but the cloudless blue sky, with the setting sun sinking below the distant sierra, in red and golden splendours to his rest.

I asked leave to go over the house, and asked where, in which room, Murillo painted. "Why, how can I tell," said the good-natured lassie, "in which room he painted? Everyone says that he painted under the orange-trees in the old walled garden of the alcazar opposite; but vamos! come over the house." So we went. On either side of the tiny This, then, was the humble house of "hall," as you enter, is a narrow door, the great painter. Here he lived, and each door opening into a small, narrow, here died in April, 1682, aged sixty-four,

And then I passed out; the dark-eyed hoyden locked up her dog once more in the classic kitchen, only too glad to return to her love-making.

by an unlucky fall from the scaffold, as, scented geranium, or "malva-rosa" of the he was painting one of his grandest, or at Spaniards, the heliotrope, the scarlet geleast most elaborate, paintings, the ranium, and the crimson and clove carna"Marriage of Santa Catalina," taken from tions, straggled over the trim box-hedges its home in the Convent of Los Capuchi- that enclosed their beds. nos in Cadiz during the Revolution of the In the inner quadrangle — like the first summer of 1873, and now in the "Aca- very small- an ancient mule, under the demia de Bellas Artes," in the same city. shade of a fig-tree, still more ancient, was Here, in this humble house, lived and slowly turning round the water-wheel, died the one perhaps of all painters who with its shining, dripping caskets, of an excelled in every style that he under- old Moorish noria; all around him, and took the frio, or dark and sternly overhead, the lime-tree and the orangemarked, as in his "St. Francis receiving tree showed their bright yellow fruit to the Stigmata; his earliest style, the the setting sun; truly, I thought to mycálido, defined outline, with warmer col- self, here a painter might paint, a poet our, as in his "Adoration of the Shep- sing to the tune of the turning wheel and herds,” in the Gallery at Madrid; and the gushing fountains, with the scent of the vaporoso, or blending style, some-exotic plants filling the balmy evening thing akin to the style of our own Turner, air. of which, as an example, may be quoted his "Martyrdom of St. Andrew," also in the Madrid Gallery. Here dwelt and died the painter of the "Holy Family," a a work full of peace and love; of more than one exquisite "Concepcion;" of "La Virgen de los Dolores," so full of mournful pathos, of "San Juan con el Cordero," full of fervour, of "St. Francis embracing his Crucified Son."

A few doors from this house is an open, small, dusty space, a barren oval, belted in by stunted acacia-trees, with a solitary gas-lamp in its centre; it is called now "Plaza de Santa Cruz," Santa Cruz being the name of a tiny church, pulled down in 1858. On one of the walls (of a private house) fronting this little hovel, is a marble tablet, with the inscription,

Para perpetuar la memoria de que en el ambito de esta plaza hasta poco hace templo sagrado hastan depositadas las cenizas del celebre pintor Sevillano Bartolomé Esteban Murillo la Academia de Bellas Artes Acordó poner esta lapida. Modesto monumento, pero el primero Que se consagra a su ilustre fundador 1858.

And so, as the shades of eve drew on I left the haunts of the great painter - the painter of truth and of life as he saw it, and as those in Andalucia see it at the present day.

A few doors from the little house which "ciertamente " was that of Murillo, stands another, more pretentious, which claims the honour of having been the house in whose bright, quiet garden he was wont to paint. The kindly señora on my presenting my card, and asking leave to enter the garden, at once sent her servant to conduct me thither. We passed through the courtyard of the house and into the garden, which consisted of two small quadrangles, but, oh, so beautiful! Well might the great master exchange his dark narrow rooms, and his tiny strip of sunny roof aloft, for the peacefulness and beauty of this quiet spot. The orange-trees, crowded with green and yellow fruit, lent their shade; the lime-tree, with its larger fruit of sicklier hue, and the fig-tree, with its broad, cool leaves, grew in quiet profusion; hard by, sheltered by cypresses, was a Murillo, however, neither needs nor tank, and a trickling, gurgling fountain claims any notice of his life; into his of crystal water; the grape-vine climbed works he threw his life, and he lives in over a rustic trellis work: the pimiento, his works works that have elevated or pepper-tree, the most graceful of Span- and refined thousands of souls — and he ish trees, like to, but more graceful than, cannot die; he needs no memorial stone, the English weeping-willow, also lent its no tablet, no biography; as is the case shade. Two fountains, with their trick- with all the good and great, "his works ling waters, soothed the ear of those who do follow him; and perhaps amid all sate and worked, or read, in this shady his toils and labours to the last - for he spot; magnolias, camelias, climbed the died at the age of sixty-four of a fall from walls; the sweet lemon-verbena, the a scaffold while painting one of his master

Of Murillo's life I know nothing; but no scandalous or libellous report has ever, I believe, currently attached itself to his name, as it did most falsely for a period to that of another exceedingly beautiful painter, Alonso Cano.

pieces

for himself, but to the elevating and ennobling of others who should follow him, and could breathe that prayer so hard to be breathed by one living amid all the seductions of this present life, "Show Thy servants their work, and their children Thy glory.

LETTER XIII.

he looked forward to no reward guards who, mounted or on foot, should keep the roads free from banditti ; they were dressed after the fashion of the French gendarmerie, probably owing to the French influence then prevailing at Court, and numbered at first some five or six thousand. These men are chosen for (1) having been steady and good soldiers, (2) height and strength, (3) education; but they have all served in the Regular Army for a certain time, and are CHRISTMAS; AND ITS HOPES AND FEARS. equally able to hunt in couples as police"PEACE on earth, goodwill to men men, or in large bodies as regular troops. was not, alas! the burden of our Christ- Their pay is two pesetas per diem, and mas carol and our New Year's greeting an allowance, if mounted, for fodder for in the wilds of the Interior. How often, their horses. Their chief occupation, of since that day when the angels sang late, has been not so much to suppress songs of peace and joy, has the Divine robbery in the camp as to quarter themChristmas greeting seemed an idle mock-; selves in disaffected towns, and prevent ery, when the pale moon is looking down outbreaks and licenses. on fields of the suffering and the slain; or on the widow and the orphan crouch-; call it here, noche-buena; the streets in ing over the half-empty grate; or, as was the daytime were bright with the various the case but just now in Spain, on dis- dresses of those that bought and sold; quietude and plotting, and anxiety of at night, from every house in every street, every sort, misrule, disorder, and con- came the tinkle of the guitar, the rom spiracy, "men's hearts failing them for rom rom of the Zambomba,* and the ratfear." tle of the tambourine; at midnight, in each church, the "Child New-born," who came to bring "peace on earth, goodwill to men," was exhibited and adored by the sable crowd of worshippers; at midnight, too, strange contrast! marched into our town, with bayonets fixed, and gleaming bright as their well-ordered ranks passed each little oil-lamp, a body of guards.

A few Christmas episodes in our life in the Interior might, I have thought, prove of sufficient interest to warrant me in jotting them down, without comment or adornment.

I was travelling much, both by day and by night, about Christmas time, and the most unobservant eye could not fail to see sufficient indications of some extraordinary movement; the guardias civiles, preservers of law and order throughout Spain, were being shifted about in bodies from place to place; here, a body of twenty, wrapped in their huge capas, rifle in hand and sword-bayonet by side, with their keen dark eyes scrutinizing every fresh face, would enter the railway carriage; at another station two, with a prisoner, would join them, silent and stern as ever. Every honest man welcomes and respects these brave, clever, truthful, sober, indefatigable preservers of peace and justice; they are a terror only to evil-doers!

I have already given a slight sketch of the services which these men are ever ready to perform, but I will recur to the subject again. Before Señor Martinez de la Rosa, the well-known author of "Poems for Children," and other poems, came to be connected with the Cabinet of Christina, he was robbed on the highway; when he came into power he was instrumental in forming a body of

Christmas eve came at last, or, as we

Well, if we are to have peace, for the present, I suppose, it must be won and preserved by the sword.

Men kept their Christmas time, as usual; outwardly all was noise, and festivity, and glitter; but every eye was looking forward to one day: the day on which the Córtes would reassemble, and demand of Emilio Castelar an account of his arduous but nobly fulfilled stewardship.

Strange whispers went about; every Spaniard is a politician, whether he light his errant watch-fire, and strew his rough bed to leeward of a clump of prickly pear

This is called a musical instrument, although why, except on the lucus a non lucendo principle, I cannot understand. It is made of earthenware, and in shape One end is just like a common English flower-pot. open: over the other a piece of drum-parchment is tightly stretched; into this parchment is inserted a reed, which protrudes about eight or nine inches from the parchment; the musician wets his fingers, and rubs them up and down the stem of the reed, which gives a hoarse hollow sound, called by the Spaniards "the rom these instruments, played by children, at Christmas rom rom of the zambomba." No house is without time.