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BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 34!

going to church, marketing, singing, working. At night the vocalists were in the ascendancy, but, as Walter re- marked, they did sing and they were not drunk. They awoke the echoes of the surrounding hills with madrigals and chorus. If the square of Como had been a thorough- fare in an English city those bands of workmen and holiday-makers would, it is to be feared, have been roaring out some music-hall song or hiccoughing a vulgar chorus of the slums.

" One goes from home," said Walter, " not only to see how great England is in many things, but how small, not to say brutal, she may be in others."

In the afternoon our English travelers said their prayers with the rest of the church-going community, and towards evening made their first little excursion on the lake, which they navigated in dreamy sunshine on the morrow.

Sweet and gentle searchers after truth have discovered that Bulwer Lytton adapted his poetic description of the Lake of Como from a foreign source ; other philanthropic critics have at the same time ridiculed the poem as utterly overdone being applied to the famous Italian lake. Per- mit a humble worshipper of nature, and one who loves art none the less, to say that Bulwer's half page of sug- gestive description is only a faint indication of the spirit and beauty of the Lake of Como. Why, there is even an hotel at Bellaggio, half way down the lake, which goes near to be worthy of the well-known lines :

' A palace lifting to eternal summer Its marble walls from out a glossy bower Of coolest foliage, musical with birds."

The lake is a sheet of water thirty-five miles in length, and every yard of it a picture of romantic beauty high sloping hills that hem you in now and then, making not