stock, the Bensos of Cavour, belonged to the old Piedmontese nobility.  A legend declares that a Saxon pilgrim, a follower of Frederick Barbarossa, stopped, when returning from the Holy Land, in the little republic of Chieri, where he met and married the heiress to all the Bensos, whose name he assumed.  Cavour used to laugh at the story, but the cockle shells in the arms of the Bensos and their German motto, “Gott will recht,” seem to connect the family with those transalpine crusading adventurers who brought the rising sap of a new nation to reinvigorate the peoples they tarried amongst.  Chieri formed a diminutive free community known as “the republic of the seven B’s,” from the houses of Benso, Balbo, Balbiani, Biscaretti, Buschetti, Bertone, and Broglie, which took their origin from it, six of which became notable in their own country and one in France.  The Bensos acquired possession of the fief of Santena and of the old fastness of Cavour in the province of Pignerolo.  This castle has remained a ruin since it was destroyed by Catinat, but in the last century Charles Emmanuel III. conferred the title of Marquis of Cavour on a Benso who had rendered distinguished military services.  At the time of Cavour’s birth the palace of the Bensos at Turin contained a complete and varied society composed of all sorts of nationalities and temperaments.  Such different elements could hardly have dwelt together in harmony if the head of the household, Cavour’s grandmother, had not been a superior woman in every sense, and one endowed with the worldly tact and elastic spirits without which even superior gifts are of little worth in the delicate, intimate relations of life.  Nurtured in a romantic chateau on the lake of Annecy, Philippine, daughter of the Marquis de Sales, was affianced by her father at an early age to the eldest son of the Marquis Benso di Cavour, knight of the Annunziata, whom she never saw till the day of their marriage.  At once she took her place in her new family not only as the ideal grande dame, but as the person to whom every one went in trouble and perplexity.  That was a moment which developed strong characters and effaced weak ones.  The revolutionary ocean was fatally rolling towards the Alps.  It found what had been so long the “buffer state” asleep.  There was a king who, unlike the princes of his race, was more amiable than vigorous.  Arthur Young, the traveller, reports that Victor Emmanuel I. went about with his pocket full of bank notes, and was discontented at night if he had not given them all away.  “Yet this,” adds the observant Englishman, “with an empty treasury and an incomplete, ill-paid army.”  It was a bad preparation for the deluge, but when that arrived, inevitable though unforeseen, desperate if futile efforts were made to stem it.  Some of the Piedmontese nobility were very rich, but it was a wealth of increment, not of capital.  The burdens imposed when too late by the Sardinian Government, and afterwards the cost of the French occupation,