escaped from her keeper, tray beang arrangée pore doncy le cong cong!"

SILENTIA AS SHE APPEARED TO LADY DIAVOLETTA BEELZEBUB.

Dismal and grim though the exterior of that palazzo was, needing but towers and machicolated parapets to seem a fortress, or an encircling wall to seem a frowning monastery where cowled figures met each other only to whisper sepulchrally, "Brother, we must die," it was yet the scene of not a few laughable experiences. And perhaps even in this respect it may not have differed so widely as one might think from cloistered shades of other days, when out of sad, earth-colored raiment and the habit of dismal speech human sentiment painted pictures while yet the fagots grew apace for their destruction as well as for the funeral-pyre of their scolding and bellowing enemy, Savonarola. For where Fra Angelico, working from the life, could create a San Sebastian so instinct with earthly vitality and earthly bloom that pious Florentine women could not say their prayers in peace in its presence, there were three easels, each bearing a canvas, in different parts of the room. Before each easel worked a Leatherstonepaugh, each clad with classic simplicity in a long blue cotton garment, decorated with many colors and smelling strongly of retouching varnish, that covered her from the white ruffle at her throat to the upper edge of her black alpaca flounce.

The room was silent, and, except for the deft action of brushes, motionless. Only that from below was heard the musical splash of the Barberini Tritons, and that from the windows could be seen the sombre pines of the Ludovisi gardens swaying in solemn rhythmic measure must have been sometimes unbending from the dole and drear of mediæval asceticism into something very like human fun.

One day the Leatherstonepaughs were all at work in the immense studio. Silentia alone was idle, and, somewhat indecorously draped only in a bit of old tapestry, with dishevelled hair and lolling head, leaned against the wall, apparently in the last stages of inebriety. There against the blue sky, all the world would have seemed petrified into the complete passiveness of sitting for its picture.

YOUNG CAIN INTERVIEWING SILENTIA.

Marietta was their model. She was posed in a nun's dress, pensive gray, with virginal white bound primly across her brow. Marietta is a capital model, and her sad face and tender eyes were upturned with exactly the desired expression to the grinning mask in the centre of the ceiling. Silentia kindly consented to pose for the cross to which the nun clung; that is, she wobbled weakly into the place where the sacred emblem would have been were this Nature and not Art, and where the cross would be in the picture when completed. Marietta clung devoutly to Silentia's ankles, and Silentia looked as cross as possible.

"How unusual to see one of Italia's children with a face like that!" said a Leatherstonepaugh as she studied the nun's features. "One would say that she had really found peace only after some terrible suffering."

"She does not give me that impression," said another Leatherstonepaugh. "Her contours are too round, her color too undimmed, ever to have weathered spiritual storms. She seems to me more like one of Giovanni Bellini's Madonnas, those fair, fresh girl-mothers whom sorrow has never breathed upon to blight a line or tint, and yet who seem to have a prophecy written upon their faces—not of the glory of the agony, but of the lifelong sadness of a strange destiny. This girl has some mournful prescience perhaps. Let me talk with her by and by."

"Marietta," said a Leatherstonepaugh in the next repose, "if you were not obliged to be a model, what would you choose to be, of all things in the world?"

This was only an entering-wedge, intended by insidious degrees to pry open the heart of the girl and learn the mystery of her Madonna-like sadness.

Marietta looked up quickly: "What would I be, signorina? Dio mio! but I would wear shining clothes and ride in the Polytheama! Giacomo says I was born for the circus. Will le signorine see?"

In the twinkling of an eye, before the Leatherstonepaughs could breathe, the pensive gray raiment was drawn up to the length of a ballet-skirt and the foot of the Madonna-faced nun was in the open mouth of one of Lucca della Robbia's singing-boys that hung on the wall about five feet from the floor!

"Can any of the signorine do that?" she crowed triumphantly. "I can knock off a man's hat or black his eye with my foot."

All the Leatherstonepaughs groaned in doleful chorus, "A-a-a-h-h!"

And it was not until young Cain, ostracised from the studio during the séance, whistled in through the keyhole sympathetic inquiries concerning the only woe his little soul knew, "Watty matter in yare? Ennybuddy dut e tummuck-ache?" that they chorused with laughter at their "Giovanni-Bellini Madonna."

Margaret Bertha Wright.

SHELLEY.