and one that made our traveling costumes look uncommonly shabby:  it was taken up behind in the approved style, and only needed a bustle to have been truly effective.  Doubtless she had seen plenty of those articles in Stockholm, only her husband said, “I hope, dear, you will never put on one of those horrid things;” and she told him certainly not if he did not like them; but I think she found afterward she needed one for that blue dress, and sent for it at the first opportunity.  The young husband was not got up for show, knowing very well that no one would mind him, but he looked beamingly happy; and if he was not in a dress-coat with a flower in his buttonhole, like the habitues of the Comedie Francaise or the Italiens, he understood how they use an opera-glass there.  The glass was a new acquisition that he had brought home with him, and after practicing with it at the Royal Theatre in the capital, he was fully prepared to stand up between the acts, with his arm behind him in a negligently graceful attitude, and study the balcony.  His acquaintances there must have found it rather embarrassing, for it was not a usual thing in Carlstad to look at one’s friends through an opera-glass:  he was the only person who did it, and they probably all talked about it when they went home.

We were so occupied with our surroundings that we hardly thought of the piece, though it was given with considerable spirit, if I remember rightly.  The sailors were fine, jolly tars, and the Chinese ladies and gentlemen toddled about in flowered dressing-gowns and talked with their thumbs, as it would appear the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire usually do; but the house did not allow itself to be betrayed into unseemly enthusiasm.  There was an involuntary laugh now and then, and once somebody said bravo, but as a general thing a discreet reticence prevailed, and the actors might have gone through the piece on their heads in an extravagant desire to elicit signs of approval:  they would only have received a cool little round of applause when the curtain fell.

We, at all events, had no hesitation in telling the commissioner that we had enjoyed ourselves immensely; and so, it appeared, had he.  He was even bold enough to call it a very fine company, and as we walked back to the hotel at half-past nine in broad daylight, he told us what they were going to play the next evening, possibly in the hope that we should stay for it and he should get another seat.  That was out of the question, however, sorry as we were to disappoint him.  He had to tuck us into the carriage the following day, and let us drive away and leave him bereft of his charges.  “You shall have a good ride,” were his parting words, kind and fatherly as he was to the last; and so we had.  But we found no one again to care for us so tenderly as our old friend, nor did any one take us to the theatre throughout the remainder of the journey.  G.H.

VENETIAN CAFFES.