with the help of the devil. A large chest full of gold is supposed to exist in its recesses, and Caterina's ghost wanders through its vast halls. Sometimes she carries a lamp. If any one tries to explore its dark staircases she appears and extinguishes the light they bear. The foundation of these legends is the more strange, as Caterina never possessed Forione, Monte Poggiolo, or Castrocaro.

Caterina was the last lay ruler of Imola and Forli. Three hundred and fifty-nine years of papal rule followed. Her arms are the last which remain without triple crown or keys, and her priestly successors have chosen to stig matize her rule as the antithesis of their own mild and beneficent government. Little by little these arms grew to be the object of hatred and terror, and the Visconti viper, which she carried in right of her grandmother, came to be regarded as a symbol of the devil. To-day, however, all this mystery is vanishing. A more just judgment has made its way, and Caterina's memory is vindicated. When we remember the time in which she lived, we are forced to admit that her rule was, on the whole, wise and benevolent, though imperious and sometimes tyrannical. Personally she had some resemblance to that Napoleonic heroine, "Madame Sans Gêne," but she never fell below the level of the greatest ladies of her time. An interesting document given by Pasolini is a letter from Savonarola to Caterina in answer to one of hers, which unfortunately is lost. It is dated June 18, 1497, the very day on which the friar's excommunication by Alexander VI. was published in the Church of Santo Spirito at Florence. In this letter Savonarola encourages Caterina in the hope that God will hear her prayers, and exhorts her to continuance in prayer, to justice towards her subjects, to alms-giving, and to the consideration of the shortness and misery of this present life, with promises to pray to God for her without ceasing.

Frag

ments of Caterina's own letters, addressed often to the most notable men of her time, evince her great shrewd

ness and the keen knowledge of men and things. She writes, for instance: "It is better not to trust any living creature, because when things of importance begin to be treated, it seems as if they then came of necessity to light, and more is always said than the real truth." "No bonds can hold men who are driven to despair." "It does not seem to me honest to make contracts in matters ecclesiastical." "When preparing for war, we must get rid of words and painted horses." "With words no State can be defended." To Lorenzo de' Medici she once wrote, "Sum prima per sentire le botte che havere paura" (I must first feel blows ere I am afraid), a phrase that struck Pasolini as so characteristic of the woman that he prefixed it as a motto to his book. Whenever she wore woman's dress she was very grand and splendid in her attire, and insisted that her women should be so too. She was devoted to animals, in an age when love of animals was little known, especially fond of horses and dogs.

Caterina has had at various times biographers who have given most diverse accounts of her; but all agree in the description of her pious and repentant widowhood at Florence. She had the misfortune to live at a time when those endowed with power were of necessity led into violence; yet she always retained a strong, almost a spiritual faith. When preparing for her defence against Cæsar Borgia, she writes to the nuns of the Murate, imploring their prayers in her extremity. The letter to which that of Savonarola is an answer must have been of the same tenor. Perhaps we cannot better close this article than by quoting, as Pasolini has done, the conclusion of the earliest biography of Caterina, written not long after her death:

Caterina, thus liberated from her long captivity of eighteen months, borne with the strongest patience, proceeded to Florence, where her children were, and there, welcomed and caressed by the Signory, worn out, and satiated with the affairs of this false world, she turned her ideas wholly to thoughts of a more safe and

tranquil life. And as in the management of temporal rule, to the rare and unusual credit of the female sex, she was the equal of the bravest and most prudent men of that age, so when given to the Spirit and to holiness in both the active and the contemplative life, she surpassed all the examples of her time. Whence, when the course of her years was ended, it is not forbidden to a pious and Christian soul to believe that the angels received that blessed soul into the kingdom of heaven, and gave it up, purged and purified, to its Creator, where in the calm state of eternal glory it may enjoy the most blissful vision of God, the Three in One, who liveth and reigneth for ever and ever.

Certainly for her there was "light at evening time." She had borne a son who was to carry on during his brief life the noblest traditions of her heroic line, and time was given her in which to dispose as she desired of all her worldly goods. Peace to her memory! Her virtues were her own, her crimes those of her age and surroundings, and no woman certainly can reflect, without a thrill of pride, upon the fact that the only being who dared to make a stand against the resistless might of the Borgia was one of themselves, a lonely, unaided widow.

HELEN ZIMMERN.

From Temple Bar.

A DULDITCH ANGEL.

A SKETCH.

"She lived by my side a matter o' sixty yare, and she niver so much as laid a straw i' my path," said old Angel to me, speaking of the wife he had just buried.

He was a little old man, blue-eyed, white-haired, apple-cheeked. He was dressed in the Sunday suit which had distinguished him, perhaps, from the time when he went courting the paragon he lamented: a long velveteen coat, adorned with brass buttons; a tall hat, decorated with a hat-band now, worn at the back of his head. Under one arm he carried a huge green umbrella, under the other a heavy stick. Outside

his own gate he never ventured without these implements of offence and defence; he brought both to church as regularly as he brought his Bible and prayer-book; I never remember to have seen nim use either.

There may have been, in former years, weather "big" enough to warrant him in mounting the green umbrella, but he spoke of present-day downfalls cheerfully as "a m'isture," and let the rain beat upon his round, rosy face, and pour off the battered brim of his tall hat, keeping his gingham safely under his arm the while. Perhaps he shrank from seeming to claim a superiority over the other men who have no spare cash for such trivialities as umbrellas, and who adopt no protection from the storm other than an old artificial manure sack flung over their shoulders. Perhaps he feared lest thé rain should injure the dear possession. It was never unfolded; neither was his stick used for support.

Old Angel lived at the extremity of the parish in a little one-storied cottage, planted all alone behind a long strip of garden, where marigolds and the dark columbine, tall white lilies, and the old York and Lancaster rose grew among the gooseberry and currant bushes. For Angel was, as will be seen, a man of sentiment and encouraged the beautiful.

The garden boasted also a very old greengage tree, the pride of old Angel's heart.

With his umbrella and his stick tucked away under his arms, he would toddle up to the Rectory in the early spring to solicit orders for the fruit. It was an unceasing satisfaction to him -a satisfaction, however, which he politely strove to conceal-that there was not a greengage tree in all the Rectory garden.

"I thought as how I'd be betimes wi' ye for the gages," he would say, "I thought as how I'd give ye fust chancet. I ha' heared tell as th' Rev'rend is agraable to th' fruit; and I think, ef so be as my mem'ry don't mislade me, ye ha'nt a gage i' yer orn gaarden?”

We always hastened to confirm this point and to lament the fact.

"Mayhap 'tis made up to ye," he would continue, as one who was loath to press an advantage. "Theer be a fine bully (bullace tree) I know i' th' orchard-for one day we was a-talkin' matters over, th' Rev'rend and me, and he telled me so his-self. He di'n't patronomize th' bully like th' gages, from what he let on to me. Howsever, there be a good show t' year-th' tree be a picter for blow, and ef so be as th' kerstels (clusters) set, yer may reckon I'll be able to 'blige ye. An' ef so be as I kin, my dear wumman, you may be sure I wull."

The time of blossom was the only time of triumph for old Angel; for the harvest of the tree was apt to be sadly disappointing. We, at the Rectory, have had to make up to him for the deficiency of the measure we had ordered by unmeasured praise of the quality of the fruit.

""Tis a good gage," the old fellow would admit dispassionately, looking mournfully upon the pint or so of the plums-the entire crop-he was transferring from his basket to our own; "and the Rev'rend is agraable to th' fruit, I know. The bully be a useful sort'er a plum, but he ain't to comparison in tastiness to th' gage."

The tears ran down his cheeks as he talked about the old wife he had just laid in the churchyard. It was of her goodness to him alone he spoke; but for years we, in Dulditch, had witnessed his patience, his tenderness, his unfailing devotion to the peevish and afflicted old woman, whose loss he now artlessly mourned.

She was, it had seemed to us, a troublesome, unlovable patient; fractious, ungrateful, indocile. In the last years of her life she had been imbecile, as well as incurably afflicted in other ways. As gently and as wisely as a good mother waits on her stricken child did the old husband wait upon his wife. There were no near neighbors, and those from a distance who had lent a helping hand soon tired of the unremunerative office. He made no protest or complaint. Cheerfully and alone he labored on.

A young man rejoices over his bride.

wondering at her beauty, waiting on her whims, indulging her caprices, worshipping her with heart and eye; and the world smiles indulgent at the pretty sight. Over such a devotion as this of the ignorant old pauper husband to his unlovely, ungracious old wife, it has seemed to me that the angels themselves might smile, well pleased.

"I'll tell ye how't be," he said, with his little half-childish chuckle, one day when I had been moved to express to him my appreciation of his untiring care and tenderness, "I'll tell ye th' wuds I used ter say ter my old wumman in our young time, when her and me, happen, di'n't allust think alike, as, happen, men and women sometimes don't, 'Meery,' I'd say, 'Meery,' (these hare be th' wuds) 'theer's on'y one thing to be put down to yar favor, Meery, bor,' I'd say, 'and that be—I love yer.'"

He nodded his head triumphantly at this reminiscence. "Tha's how't be, ye see, wi' Meery and me," he cried, in concluding the matter, "Tha's how't be."

About his poverty, any more than about his trials with his invalid wife, he never complained. He was neither ungrateful for kindness, nor avaricious of benefits. He was incapable of grudging what fell to another's share or was given to another's necessity. More than once he refused the little money-help that could be offered him.

"Kape it yerself, my dare wumman," he said, his stiff fingers closing mine upon the coin in my hand, "Ye'll maybe want it as much as me. I ha' heered tell as how money's skeerse up to th' Rect'ry; and th' Rev'rend he don't look no matters hisself. Come sickness, tha's expensive, as ye'll find, mayhap. Kape 't yerself, and thenk 'e."

For any little service he did accept, the white lilies, the red and white striped roses of his garden payed a pretty toll. So sure as a can of broth, a medicine bottle filled with wine, was dispatched to him so surely did old Angel present himself with the floral tribute gathered from among the gooseberry bushes. It was in payment for the old night-shirt from the rector's

stock, given him to be buried in, that he insisted on bequeathing me the lavender bush from beside his door.

The last garment which shall drape their mortal bodies is always a matter❘ of serious import to the poor. It was with much reluctance that old Angel confided to me the fact that the shirt which had been set aside for his own burial had been taken to deck the body of his wife; she, during the irresponsible condition of the last years of her life, having "made a hand o' th' shimmy" she had provided for the occasion.

The lavender bush was especially precious to her husband, as "Meery" had set it, and had always "favored" the plant. He had "strowed" her body with the flowers when she lay in her coffin, he told me.

Angel had been born and bred a Primitive Methodist, but seceded from that body twenty years or so before his death, and came over to the Church, the reason he gave being that he wished to "set under" a gentleman.

"Why, him as prache at chapel b'ain't no better nor me," he used to say, with fine contempt. "Wha's th' good o' his settin' hisself up ter mandate ter me? Gi' me a preacher as kin look down on yel, high and haughty-like, to hold forth. I don't, so to say, set no store by none o' them smiley and similiar (familiar) ones."

He was an out-and-out Conservative, although he never knew it, and was always on the side of the moneyed classes and of authority.

"Them as ha' th' proputty is them as oughter rule," he said. ""Tis for th' quality to ha' th' haughtiness, and for we to ha' th' manners. Manners don't cost nowt, as I tell 'em, and a man'll be a sight o' time a-wearin' up 's hat by touchin' on it. As fur a-settin' up ter be akal (equal) alonger th' gentry and sech like-why 't can't niver be done-niver! Tneer be them, sure enow, and hare be we, and us can't imitate ter say as we be o' th' same pattern. Why, even in heaven, bless th' Lord, theer be the angels and the archangels, and ef so be as I ha' to chuse when I git theer, I think, happen, 't'll

be th' lessest o' th' two I make ch'ice on."

Such views would not meet with approval in the White Hart sanded kitchen, or even in Littleproud's shop, but old Angel was not a frequenter of either place.

He was one of the rector's staunchest upholders, although his favorite form of defence, when put down in black and white, appears somewhat of the lukewarm order, and his praise seems to some of us unnecessarily faint.

"That he's a p'or critter I b'ain't a-denyin'," he would say dispassionately, "but them as know tell ter me there ain't much ch'ice among 'em. An' ef so be as we ha'n't got much ter boast on, we must be thankful for no wuss. Th' Rev'rend-yew kin see he've got book-larnin' by the wacant look on 'm; and I'm one for heerin' them as ha' book-larnin' hold forth. Ef so be as yew ha'n't th' onderstandin' for't-'tis wallable all th' same. I ha'n't naught to say agin th' Rev'rend, considerin' his capacity o' life."

It is said that the greatest compliment a man can pay his wife is to take another after her death. The number of wives who wish to have the admiration of their husbands so expressed is probably small. Be that as it may, it is certain that old Angel, who had loved and sincerely mourned his wife, lost no time in trying to replace her. He was specially attracted to our own faithful and invaluable domestic through the coincidence of her bearing the Christian name of the deceased Mrs. Angel. On the day that he called to arrange with the Rector the hour for the burying he made an offer of himself, hand and heart, stick, umbrella, and one-and-sixpence a week, to our Mary while he waited in the kitchen.

We were a little shocked at such precipitancy, but we soon learnt that even this was not his first affaire, he having already proposed matrimony to Susannah Chaney, the widow woman who had been summoned to lay Mary Angel forth.

Our Mary always refused to believe

that she herself was not the widower's first choice, and she stoutly discredited