are all alike; you know you are, love!"

"I am sure," said the Parson, simply, "that I have good cause to speak
well of the sex--when I think of you, and my poor mother."

Mrs. Dale, who, with all her "tempers," was an excellent woman, and loved
her husband with the whole of her quick little heart, was touched. She
pressed his hand, and did not call him _dear_ all the way home.

Meanwhile the Italian passed the fields, and came upon the high-road about
two miles from Hazeldean. On one side stood an old-fashioned solitary inn,
such as English inns used to be before they became railway hotels--square,
solid, old-fashioned, looking so hospitable and comfortable, with their
great signs swinging from some elm tree in front, and the long row of
stables standing a little back, with a chaise or two in the yard, and the
jolly landlord talking of the crops to some stout farmer, who has stopped
his rough pony at the well-known door. Opposite this inn, on the other
side the road, stood the habitation of Dr. Riccabocca.

A few years before the date of these annals, the stage-coach, on its way
to London, from a seaport town, stopped at the inn, as was its wont, for a
good hour, that its passengers might dine like Christian Englishmen--not
gulp down a basin of scalding soup, like everlasting heathen Yankees, with
that cursed railway whistle shrieking like a fiend in their ears! It was
the best dining-place on the whole road, for the trout in the neighboring
rill were famous, and so was the mutton which came from Hazeldean Park.

From the outside of the coach had descended two passengers who, alone,
insensible to the attractions of mutton and trout, refused to dine--two
melancholy-looking foreigners, of whom one was Signor Riccabocca, much the
same as we see him now, only that the black suit, was less threadbare, the
tall form less meagre, and he did not then wear spectacles; and the other
was his servant. They would walk about while the coach stopped. Now the
Italian's eye had been caught by a mouldering dismantled house on the
other side the road, which nevertheless was well situated; half-way up a
green hill, with its aspect due south, a little cascade falling down
artificial rock-work, and a terrace with a balustrade, and a few broken
urns and statues before its Ionic portico; while on the roadside stood a
board, with characters already half effaced, implying that the house was
to be "Let unfurnished, with or without land."

T