the lovely melody. "It
is all as you say, purely impersonal and poetic. My mother is an
Englishwoman, but she sings 'Dumfounder'd the English saw, they saw'
with the greatest fire and fury."

Chapter XIII. The spell of Scotland.

"I think I was never so completely under the spell of a country as I
am of Scotland." I made this acknowledgment freely, but I knew that it
would provoke comment from my compatriots.

"Oh yes, my dear, you have been just as spellbound before, only you
don't remember it," replied Salemina promptly. "I have never seen a
person more perilously appreciative or receptive than you."

"'Perilously' is just the word," chimed in Francesca delightedly; "when
you care for a place you grow porous, as it were, until after a time you
are precisely like blotting-paper. Now, there was Italy, for example.
After eight weeks in Venice, you were completely Venetian, from your fan
to the ridiculous little crepe shawl you wore because an Italian prince
had told you that centuries were usually needed to teach a woman how
to wear a shawl, but that you had been born with the art, and
the shoulders! Anything but a watery street was repulsive to you.
Cobblestones? 'Ordinario, duro, brutto! A gondola? Ah, bellissima! Let
me float for ever thus!' You bathed your spirit in sunshine and
colour; I can hear you murmur now, 'O Venezia benedetta! non ti voglio
lasciar!'"

"It was just the same when she spent a month in France with the Baroness
de Hautenoblesse," continued Salemina. "When she returned to America, it
is no flattery to say that in dress, attitude, inflection, manner, she
was a thorough Parisienne. There was an elegant superficiality and a
superficial elegance about her that I can never forget, nor yet her
extraordinary volubility in a foreign language,--the fluency with which
she expressed her inmost soul on all topics without the aid of a single
irregular verb, for these she was never able to acquire; oh, it was
wonderful, but there was no affectation about it; she had simply been
a kind of blotting-paper, as Miss Monroe says, and France had written
itself all over her."

"I don't wish to interfere with anybody's diagnosis," I interposed at
the first possible moment, "but perhaps after you've both finished your
psychologic investigation the subject may be allowed to explain herself
from the inside, so to speak. I won't deny the spell of Italy, but I
think the spell that Scotland casts over one is q