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 on every theme which came before her eye: poems that the next hour she forgot as utterly as the nightingale forgets no doubt the trills that he sets rippling through the night under the myrtle and the bay leaves. It 1s not an uncommon gift; In country places where the dreary levelling parrot-learning of the towns has not touched and destroyed the natural original powers of the people, this trick of musical language, of words that burn, and paint their pictures with fire of passionate and just recital, still refreshes and adorns the life of the labourer of the cornlands and the fishing villages and the old grey farm-houses, set high on a ledge of Carrara or Sabine hills and the fragrant orange thickets, and the sombre calm woods of Sardinia or Apulia. Where the Italian has not been dulled, stiffened, corroded, debased by the levelling and impoverishing influences of modern civilisation, there is he always classic, eloquent, ardent, graceful in body and mind; there is he still half a Greek, and wholly a sylvan creature.

Musa, with her old mandoline with its ivory keys across her knee, and her brown hand every now and then calling the sleeping music from its strings, had moments of