Salvini’s visit to America has been fruitful of a double good.  He has shown forth the splendor of Italian genius, even revealing to us new marvels in that mine of wealth, the works of the greatest Bard of the English-speaking race; and he has gone back to Italy to tell her people of things he has seen in the New World which his great compatriot discovered—­as wonderful in their way as any related by Othello to Desdemona’s willing ear.

R. DAVEY.

THREE FEATHERS.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF “A PRINCESS OF THULE.”

CHAPTER XX.

TINTAGEL’S WALLS.

What was the matter with Harry Trelyon?  His mother could not make out; and there never had been much confidence between them, so that she did not care to ask.  But she watched, and she saw that he had, for the time at least, forsaken his accustomed haunts and ways and become gloomy, silent and self-possessed.  Dick was left neglected in the stables:  you no longer heard his rapid clatter along the highway, with the not over-melodious voice of his master singing “The Men of Merry, Merry England” or “The Young Chevalier.”  The long and slender fishing-rod remained on the pegs in the hall, although you could hear the flop of the small burn-trout of an evening when the flies were thick over the stream.  The dogs were deprived of their accustomed runs; the horses had to be taken out for exercise by the groom; and the various and innumerable animals about the place missed their doses of alternate petting and teasing, all because Master Harry had chosen to shut himself up in his study.

The mother of the young man very soon discovered that her son was not devoting his hours of seclusion in that extraordinary museum of natural history to making trout-flies, stuffing birds and arranging pinned butterflies in cases, as was his custom.  These were not the occupations which now kept Master Harry up half the night.  When she went in of a morning, before he was up, she found that he had been covering whole sheets of paper with careful copying out of passages taken at random from the volumes beside him.  A Latin grammar was ordinarily on the table—­a book which the young gentleman had brought back from school free from thumb-marks.  Occasionally a fencing-foil lay among these evidences of study, while the small aquaria, the cases of stuffed animals with fancy backgrounds and the numerous bird-cages had been thrust aside to give fair elbow-room.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Trelyon to herself with much satisfaction—­“perhaps, after all, that good little girl has given him a hint about Parliament, and he is preparing himself.”

A few days of this seclusion, however, began to make the mother anxious; and so one morning she went into his room.  He hastily turned over the sheet of paper on which he had been writing:  then he looked up, not too well pleased.