now it will trouble its owner
no more forever. It was a foolish, extravagant companion, and we are
glad to be rid of it. One little blazing fragment lifts itself out
of the flame, and we can trace on the smouldering relic the stamp of
Austria. Go back again into the grate, and perish with the rest, dark
blot!

"We look round our quiet apartment, and wonder if it be all true, this
getting home again. We stir the fire once more to assure ourself that we
are not somewhere else,--that the street outside our window is not
known as Jermyn Street in the Haymarket,--or the Via Babuino near the
Pincio,--or Princes Street, near the Monument. How do we determine that
we are not dreaming, and that we shall not wake up to-morrow morning and
find ourself on the Arno? Perhaps we are _not_ really back again where
there are no

"Eremites and friars,
White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery."

Perhaps we are a flamingo, a banyan-tree, or a mandarin. But there
stands the tea-cup, and our identity is sure!

Here at last, then, for a live certainty! But how strange it all seems,
resting safely in our easy slippers, to recall some of the far-off
scenes so lately present to us! Yesterday was it, or a few weeks ago,
that this "excellent canopy," our modest roof, dwelt three thousand
miles away to the westward of us? At this moment stowed away in a
snuggery called our own; and then--how brief a period it seems! what a
small parenthesis in time--putting another man's latch-key into another
man's door, night after night, in a London fog, and feeling for the
unfamiliar aperture with all the sensation of an innocent housebreaker!
Muffled here in the oldest of dressing-gowns, that never lifted its
blessed arms ten rods from the spot where it was born; and only a few
weeks ago lolling out of C.R.'s college-window at Oxford, counting the
deer, as they nibbled the grass, and grouped themselves into beautiful
pictures on the sward of ancient Magdalen!

As we look into the red fire in the grate, we think of the scarlet
coats we saw not long ago in Stratford,--when E.F., kindest of men and
merriest of hosts, took us to the "meet." We gaze round the field again,
and enjoy the enlivening scene. White-haired and tall, our kind-hearted
friend walks his glossy mare up and down the turf. His stalwart sons,
with sport imbrowned, proud of their sire, call our attention to the
sparkle in the old man's eye. We are mounted on a fiery little animal,