MME. DE K., who all this time has been kneeling on the other side of her, her face buried on the arm of the chair, in the attitude of a person weeping. If she can hear that, my friend, she 's saved! (To Daisy, appealing.) My child, my child, we have wronged you, but we love you!

WINTERBOURNE, in the same manner. Daisy, my dearest, my darling! Wake a moment, if only to forgive me!

MME. DE K. She moves a little! (Aside, rising to her feet.) He never spoke so to me!

GIOVANELLI, a little apart, looking round him. Where is he, where is he -that ruffian Eugenio?

WINTERBOUrne. In the name of pity, has no one gone for her mother? (To Giovanelli.) Don't stand there, sir! Go for her mother!

GIOVANELLI, angrily. Give your commands to some one else! It is not for me to do your errands.

MME. DE K., going to him pleadingly. Have n't you common compassion? Do you want to see the child die?

DAISY, looking at Winterbourne. With you? With you? What has happened? WINTERBOURNE, still on his knees beside her. Something very blessed. I understand you - I love you!

DAISY, gazing at him a moment. Oh, I'm very happy! (Sinks back again, closing her eyes.)

WINTERBOURNE. We shall be happy together when you have told me you forgive me. Let me hear you say it — only three words! (He waits. She remains silent.) Ah, she sinks away again! Daisy, won't you live-won't you live for me?

DAISY, murmuring. It was all for you - it was all for you!

Winterbourne, burying his head in her lap. Vile idiot! Impenetrable fool! DAISY, with her eyes still closed. I shall be better-but you must n't leave

me.

WINTERBOURNE. Never again, Daisy never again! (At this moment Eugenio strides into the room by the door opposite to the one through which Giovanelli has gone out.)

SCENE IX. WINTERBOURNE, DAISY, EUGENJO, MADAME DE KATKOFF; then RANDOLPH, and all the others.

EUGENIO, looking amazed at Daisy and Winterbourne. What does this mean? What horrible thing has happened?

WINTERBOURNE, on his feet. You will learn what has happened quite soon enough to please you! But in the meanwhile, it is decent that this young lady should see her mother. (While he speaks,

MME. DE K. She's saved! She's saved!

WINTERBOURNE. You 're with me, little Daisy. With me forever!

MME. DE K. Ah, decidedly I had better leave you! (Goes out to the balcony.)

EUGENIO. Her mother is not important: Miss Miller is in my care. Cara signorina, do you suffer?

DAISY, vaguely. Poor mother, poor mother! She has gone to the Carnival. EUGENIO. She came home half an hour ago. She has gone to bed.

MME. DE K. Don't you think there

would be a certain propriety in your requesting her to get up? (Randolph comes in at this moment, hearing Madame de Katkoff's words.)

RANDOLPH. She is getting up, you can bet your life! She's going to give it to Daisy.

MME. DE KATKOFF. Come and speak to your sister. She has been very ill. (She draws Randolph towards her, and keeps him near her.)

DAISY, smiling languidly at her brother. You are up very late

- very late.

over

RANDOLPH. I can't sleep here! I've been talking to that waiter. EUGENIO, anxious. I don't see the Cavaliere. Where is he gone?

RANDOLPH. He came up to tell mother, and I came back ahead of him. (To Giovanelli, who at this moment returns.) Hallo, Cavaliere !

GIOVANELLI, solemnly, coming in. Mrs. Miller is dressing. She will presently arrive.

MME. DE K., to Randolph. Go and help your mother, and tell her your sister is better.

RANDOLPH. I'll tell her through the door- or she 'll put me to bed! (Marches away.)

GIOVANELLI, approaching Eugenio, aside. I shall never have the girl!

EUGENIO. You had better have killed her! (Aside.) He shall pay me for his flowers! (Reënter Reverdy.)

REVERDY. The doctor will be here in five minutes.

MME. DE K. He won't be necessary now; nor even (seeing Mrs. Costello come back with a little bottle, and accompanied by Miss Durant) this lady's precious elixir !

MRS. C., approaching Daisy, rather stiffly. Perhaps you would like to hold it to your nose.

DAISY, takes the phial, looking at Mrs. Costello with a little smile. Well, I was bound you should speak to me !

REVERDY. And without a presentation, after all!

GIOVANELLI, starting; then recovering himself and folding his arms. congratulate you, Mademoiselle, on your taste for the unexpected.

DAISY. Well, it is unexpected. But I never deceived you!

GIOVANELLI. Oh, no, you have n't deceived me: you have only ruined me! DAISY. Poor old Giovanelli! Well, you've had a good time.

bourne.

Winter

MRS. C., impressively, to Your wife? WINTERBOURNE. My dear aunt, she has stood the test!

EUGENIO, who has walked round to Madame de Katkoff, in a low tone. You have n't kept the terms of our bargain.

MME. DE K. I'm sick of your bargain- and of you!

EUGENIO. (He eyes her a moment ; then, vindictively.) I shall give your let

ter to Mr. Winterbourne.

MME. DE K. Coward! (Aside, joyously.) And Mr. Winterbourne will give! it to me.

GIOVANELLI, beside Eugenio. You must find me another heiress.

EUGENIO. I thought you said you'd had enough.

GIOVANELLI. I have been thinking over my debts.

EUGENIO. We'll see, then, with my next family. On the same terms, eh? GIOVANELLI. Ah, no; I don't want a rival! (Reënter Mrs. Walker.)

MRS. W., to Daisy. I can't find the Consul; but as you 're better it does n't matter.

DAISY. I don't want the Consul: I want my mother.

MRS. W. I went to her room as well. Randolph had told her you were better, and so and so (Pausing, a little embarrassed, and looking round the circle.)

DAISY. She is n't coming?

MRS. W. She has gone back to bed!

MRS. C., as to herself and the audience. They are queer people, all the same!

WINTERBOURNE, laying his hand on Reverdy's shoulder. We shall be married the same day. (To Daisy.) Sha'n't we,

-to

DAISY, who has risen to her feet, leaning on his arm. Oh, yes; you ought to go home!

Henry James, Jr.

THE queerest freak of nature in Spain, and perhaps in Europe, is Monserrat, the convent mountain on the east coast, about thirty miles from Barcelona. Goethe refers to it in the second part of Faust, where we read:

"It is not unamusing to see Nature

From the Devil's point of view." It is not generally supposed that the devil, whose office it is to destroy, ever created anything, but if he should try his hand at a landscape the result would be something like Monserrat.

Whether

he would fill its almost inaccessible caves and the holes in the rocks with hermits is a question for the theologians. That he resisted the establishment there of one of the greatest convents of the Middle Ages, I presume there is no doubt, and that he sees with chagrin the one hundred thousand pilgrims annually crowding to its broken shrines is taken for granted. It is not probable, however, with his Mephistophelean sympathy with the " progress of the age," that he is disturbed by the curiosity-hunters, who have, to use his own language, “a devil of a time" in getting there, or by the thrifty spirit which makes a little money out of the desire to see its sacred places and buy pious souvenirs.

We took the rail from Barcelona to Zaragoza, one day early in June, and rode a couple of hours to the little station of Monistrol. The country is broken into low hills and sharp ravines,

and although it is absolutely barren of grass and ragged in aspect, it is much better cultivated than most parts of Spain, and presents an appearance of industrious agriculture. By contrast to the thriftlessness elsewhere, it is a paradise of verdure, and when its nakedness is covered by the vines is far from being unpleasing. From the station, where the road runs along an upland slope, we looked down upon the river Llobregat and its valley. There, at the very base of the mountain, lies the straggling village of Monistrol, with its old stone bridge and high, quaint, dilapidated buildings.

Out of this valley rises the scarped, gashed, and flamboyant mountain, as by a tour de force, thrust up, with almost perpendicular sides, into the air nearly four thousand feet. It is said to have a circumference at its base of about twenty-four miles. It springs out of the valley an irregular, unique, independent mass of rock, with little verdure apparently, and glowing in the afternoon light with a dull reddish color. I do not know whether it was really thrown up in some prehistoric spasm of nature, or whether its peculiar form is owing to gradual degradation and decay; but it looks like a molten mass spouted from a solid base into fantastic, contorted, and twisted flames, freaky shapes of fire caught and solidified into pointing fingers, towers, pinna

cles, beacons, and writhing attitudes of stone. Another mountain so airy, grotesque, and flame-like does not exist. It cannot be anything else than nature from the devil's point of view, and it might well suggest the idea that it is a veritable piece of the infernal landscape flung up here as a curiosity and a warning. This mass of rock is rent by a deep gash on the east side. That this appalling cleft was not there originally, but was formed by a convulsion at the moment of the crucifixion in Palestine, I have only the authority of the monkish writers, who have made this mountain of miracles a subject of deep scientific study. There is this confirmation of the theory: that nobody except the monks can tell when the chasm was made. And there is this, further, to be said that but for this gash, this ragged ravine, there would have been no place for the convent, and only the poorest sort of shelter for the hermits.

A lumbering omnibus-diligence was waiting at the Monistrol station to take passengers up the mountain. These are sociable conveyances in Spain, having some of the uses and none of the conveniences of railway palace and dining-room cars. Into the interior were jammed nurses, babies, soldiers, priests, and peasants; all talking and chattering, all eating or nursing, all sweltering and half stifled in the clouds of dust that enveloped the coach. It is the fashion in Spain, when one eats his luncheon or dinner in a public conveyance, to offer of his food and drink to his fellow-travelers; it would be very uncivil not to do this. It is the fashion, also, to decline to take it; so that Spain is the land that combines extreme generosity with the least expense. No doubt both the generosity and the economy are genuine. It does one good in his soul to be liberal in the offer of his bread and boiled meat (left from the soup eaten at home) and sour wine to his companions, and they are all put in good

humor by declining. We secured places on the driver's seat in front, where we had the full benefit of the dust, and were deprived of the sustenance contained in the garlic-laden air of the interior. We dashed along at a fine rate down into the valley, and clattered into the town with a good deal of importance; but that was the end of our liveliness. Thenceforward, for four mortal hours, we dragged up the side of the mountain at what seemed to be about the rate of movement of a glacier. The town of Monistrol is picturesque at a distance, and unsightly close at hand. Its tall houses, with recessed balconies the width of the front on each story, are piled one above another in shabby disorder, on the steep sides of the river and up the hill. These balconies, which appear to be the living and lounging places of the families, are screened from the sun by curtains of matting, and are gay with garments of all colors and all styles of wear. Before beginning the ascent the diligence halted at a friendly little posada, with a flower-garden, where lively and pretty girls served the passengers with such refreshments as they called for. The road climbing the mountain-like nearly all the roads in Spain, where the government has thought it worth while to make any - is splendidly built. It is carried up the mountain side, along ledges and precipices, in a series of gradually ascending loops and curves, constantly doubling on itself, and going a distance of two miles to make a quarter of a mile ascent. Lately, trees figs, maples, cherries, pines, and aspens have been planted along this broad highway, so that in a few years its sun-beaten travelers will enjoy a much-needed shade. All the ravines about which the road coils like an interminable serpent are terraced, and carefully cultivated and set with vines.

The slow, creeping movement of the diligence at length became so intolerable that several of the passengers dismount

ed, and walked on, reaching the monastery before it. As we rose, the capricious character of the mountain became more apparent. Great masses of rock overhung the road; the walls were but tressed like artificial fortifications, and a range of tapering towers, not needles and spires, as in the dolomites and the pointes d'aiguilles at Chamouni, but bluntly and clumsily terminated, like fingers and thumbs, stood up in the air. At one point we passed beneath a partially isolated column that is held aloft exactly like a light-house. The mountain is longest from east to west, and the old monks fancied that it had the form of a gigantic ship, with its prow upheaved; a mysterious vessel in which the Virgin Mary conducted her devotees.

some of whom, however, suffered shipwreck, according to the legendsto the port of Salvation. It might as well be called a Noah's ark, stranded in a dry time. The mountain in its formation and composition is of the utmost interest to geologists and mineralogists. A near inspection shows that the entire mass, ledges, walls, towers, and pinnacles, is composed of small round stones, of various colors, agglomerated into a sort of pudding-stone, a party-colored mosaic, reddish and greenish and grayish, and very beautiful when the sun strikes it. The mountain is also very rich, for the botanist, in plants and wild flowers.

After miles of weary curving and doubling the road sweeps along the north side of the mountain and enters the eastern cleft, in which the convent buildings and gardens are found. There was no sign of any habitation, or possible place for one, until we were actually in it. The ravine ends in a horseshoe curve, set about with perpendicular precipices and towers, the latter leaning towards each other in drunken confusion, pointing in various directions into the sky; some the shape of monstrous tenpins, and one, which was my favor

ite, exactly the shape of a thumb with a distinctly accented nail. In this almost inaccessible spot, nobody except religious fanatics would ever have deemed it possible to obtain standing-room for extensive religious houses. But here, jammed into this crevice, frowned on by precipices all around, with a ragged, yawning gulf in front and below, extending down, down, to the far-off, dreamy valley, are the several houses of a vast monastery, a large church, buildings for laymen, a great restaurant, ruins of fine Gothic edifices destroyed by the everbarbarous French invaders, some cypresses, and some tiny garden spots. All these structures cluster about the head of the ravine, and rest on ledges over which the rocks hang in threatening attitudes. Standing in the courtyard of the church, about which are the high barracks of the "religious," and looking up to the beetling, impending crags and the blue heavens above the dark mass, one has a conception of the sublime daring of religious faith in the presence of forbidding and implacable nature. Round about, high up among the rocks, are the caves and the ruined stone huts of the old hermits.

It was near sundown when we reached this haven of rest and made a demand on its hospitality for the few days of our pilgrim sojourn. The monastery has a great history, into which it is no part of this paper to enter. It was suppressed over forty years ago, and is no longer of much importance as an active religious community; it has less than a score of monks to occupy its vast barracks. But it is now, as it has been for ages, a thronged place of pilgrimage on account of its famed image of the Black Virgin. Many years ago extensive buildings were erected for the temporary accommodation of pilgrims and lay brothers, and in these strangers are hospitably assigned quarters for three days, or for nine days on special permission, without charge for lodging. But Spain is like