Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/732

 724 them has a theory of her own, and of course reads all the tokens of evidence in her own light. Each one appeals to the servant who is in constant attendance on the club-room. He is a sharp-witted fellow, and tells to each one of them a different story, suited to the several prevailing impressions which their leading questions have enabled him to detect. Every one of them is thus led on a wrong track. There is no end of fun in the way of comic scenes between lover and maiden, and husband and wife: the women driving the men to desperation by their obstinate strivings to come at the truth, and their perverse wresting meanwhile of every trivial incident to the confirming of their own suspicions. At last the ladies, each acting separately, and each following out her own particular hypothesis, manage, each for herself, to get hold of the keys of the house where the club has its session. The scenes in which these stratagems are carried out are wonderfully rich. The men are all solemnly bound not to part with their keys to any uninitiated person, but, as might be expected, come off second best in the contest, and are every one of them overreached or overwhelmed by the women. At last, and after no end of misses and narrow escapes, the women, separately, and each thinking to steal a march on the others, make their way into the house, and get into the antechamber of the saloon of reunion. Here, standing betrayed one to the other, they make a virtue of necessity, and agree to act in concert. They find a peephole, but none will believe what they see, because none see what they expect. At last, in scrambling for turns at the keyhole, they make a noise, and are discovered. The mystery is then solved, and general reconciliation follows. The curtain falls; the community is restored to happiness, and convinced of the folly of unreasonable curiosity, of which they profess themselves determined never again to admit the disquieting intrusion.

This plot is admirably worked out by Goldoni,—especially in the scene in which one of the wives, aided by a cunning waiting-maid, manages to steal her husband's keys, though he never will part with them off his person.

"La Guerra," or, as it might be rendered, "Life in the Camp," is a stirring military episode, very much in the spirit of "Wallenstein's Lager." It gives you everything of war except the actual conflict of troops. It is a lively, bustling piece, of which the action never flags, and where the interest is sustained from beginning to end. These four plays comprise the contents of a single volume of Goldoni's works, taken at random. Are they not enough to indicate a richness of deposit that might reward a farther research and utilisation? We venture to predict that the man who first tries his skill in this direction will achieve a great success.