EMBROIDERESS OF TREVISO.

THE
EMBROIDERESS OF TREVISO.

It was our third day of rain, and the wood and garden walks around the
country house we were staying at, were turned into water-courses. On
the first and second day, the party of guests had made it a point of
honour to be as inexhaustible in good humour as the sky in clouds, and
within the large five-windowed saloon, with the oleanders blooming
before it, jests rained, laughter rippled, and witty repartees flashed
uninterruptedly as the drops pattered on the terrace outside. On this
third day, however, even the most genial in our ark became dimly
conscious that the deluge might prove more persistent than their good
spirits. True no one ventured to break the vow of enduring this
visitation in common,--made the day before yesterday,--by slinking off
to his room and sulking there on his own resources. But general
conversation, games, spontaneous play of intelligence and wit, had
somewhat failed since the professor who passed for a great
meteorologist, had confessed that instead of the change to fair which
he had promised, his glass actually showed a fresh fall of the mercury.
He had procured a second barometer, and was now seriously investigating
the causes of this discrepancy between two prophets. His wife meanwhile
was silently painting in body colours on grey paper her sixth
water-lily; at a second table, Frau Helena was setting up her men for a
seventh trial of skill at chess, while Frau Anna sat in a corner beside
her baby's cradle, fanning away the flies from it, while trying to
guess the conundrums and charades in the old almanac open on her knee.
The young doctor with whom Frau Helena was playing chess, saw in this
interval of silence an opening for doing justice to a rustic anecdote,
but suddenly broke off, remembering that he had told it the day before.
The husband of Frau Anna, mindful of the elder Shandy's sagacious
dictum, that all manner of mental distresses and perplexities are best
endured when the body is in a horizontal position, had stretched
himself out full length on an old leather sofa, and blew the smoke of
his damped cigar up in slow blue circles to the ceiling.

In the midst of these more or less successful efforts to adapt oneself
to one's fate, the off-hand cheery way in which a middle-aged man with
arms locked behind, continued slowly pacing up and down the roo