He kept me, introduced me to Blanche, and persuaded me to write for leave to stay another two months, when he would return to England with me. Little by little he made me talk about Alice, till he knew all my story.

"Ah! that is it; you shall be unhappy because you want £500 every year, and I have so much as that. I am a patriot to get rid of my money. So it is that you will not take money. You have saved my life, and you will [{207}] not take money; but I shall make you take money, my friend, English Guy; you shall have as thus." And he handed me my appointment as secretary to one of the largest railways in Italy. "Now you shall take money; now you will not go to your fogland to work like a slave; you shall take the money. That is not all. I am one of the practice patriots—no, the practical patriots—of Italy. They come to me with their conspiracies to join, their secret societies to adhere to, but I do not. I am director of ever so many railways; I make fresh directions every day. I say to those who talk to me of politics, 'How many shares will you take in this or in that?' I am printer of books; I am builder of museums; I have great share in docks, and I say to these, 'It is this that I am doing that is wanted.' This is not conspiracy; it is not plot; it is not society with ribbons; but it is what Italy, my country, wants. I grow poor; Italy grows rich. I am not wise in these things; they cheat me, because I am an enthusiast. Now, Guy, my brother, you are wise; you are deep; long in the head; in short, you are English! You shall be my guardian in these things—you shall save me from the cheat, and you shall work hard as you like for all the money you shall take of me. Come, my Guy, is it so?"

Need I say that it was so? The count and his Blanche made their honeymoon tour in England. They spent Christmas day with Alice and myself at Mr. Morton's, and when they left, Alice and I left with them, for our new home in Florence.

From The Cornhill Magazine.
THE WINDS.

O wild raving west winds.…
Oh! where do ye rise from, and where do ye die?

The question which is put in these lines is one which has posed the ingenuity of all who have ever thought on it; and though theories have repeatedly been propounded to answer it, yet one and all fail, and we again recur to the words of him who knew all things and said, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth."

However, though we cannot assign exactly the source whence the winds rise or the goal to which they tend, the labors of meteorologists have been so far successful as to enable us to understand the causes of the great currents of air, and even to map out the winds which prevail at different seasons in the various quarters of the globe. The problem which has thus been solved is one vastly more simple than that of saying why the wind changes on any particular day, or at what spot on the earth's surface a particular current begins or ends. Were these questions solved, there would be an end to all uncertainty about weather. There need be no fear that the farmer would lose his crops owing to the change of weather, if the advent of every shower had been foretold by an unerring guide, and the precise day of the break in the weather predicted weeks and months before. This is the point on which weather-prophets—'astro-meteorologists' they call themselves now-a-days—still venture their predictions, undismayed by their reported and glaring failures. [{208}] It has been well remarked that not one of these prophets foretold the dry weather which lasted for so many weeks during the last summer; yet, even at the present day, there are people who look to the almanacs to see what weather is to be expected at a given date; and even the prophecies of "Old Moore" find, or used to find within a very few years, an ample credence. In fact, if we are to believe the opinions propounded by the positive philosophers of the present day, we must admit that it is absurd to place any limits on the possibility of predicting natural phenomena, inasmuch as all operations of nature obey fixed and unalterable laws, which are all discoverable by the unaided mind of man.

True science, we may venture to say, is more modest than these gentlemen would have us to think it; and though in the particular branch of knowledge of which we are now treating daily prophecies (or 'forecasts,' as Admiral Fitzroy is careful to call them) of weather appear in the newspapers, yet these are not announced dogmatically, and no attempt is made in them to foretell weather for more than forty-eight hours in advance. We are not going to discuss the question of storms and storm-signals at present, so we shall proceed to the subject in hand—the ordinary wind-currents of the earth; and in speaking of these shall confine ourselves as far as possible to well-known and recorded facts, bringing in each case the best evidence which we can adduce to support the theories which may be broached.

What, then, our readers will ask, is the cause of the winds? The simple answer is—the sun. Let us see, now, how this indefatigable agent, who appears to do almost everything on the surface of the earth, from painting pictures to driving steam-engines, as George Stephenson used to maintain that he did, is able to raise the wind.