country we need no license for marriage.
Here are a bride and groom awaiting your blessing. Perform your
office, sir." And before I could summon heart or voice, making no
response, bewildered and faint, I was the wife of Colonel Vorse, and
my husband's arms were supporting me as the words of the prayer and
benediction rolled over us.

"There is no time like the present," he cried, gayly, his tones no
longer broken, "as I have always found." And suddenly, before he
ceased, and while they all thronged round me, there came a sharp
strange sigh singing through the air, that grew into the wild
discordant music of multitudinous echoes, and we all turned and sprang
intuitively to see, rent in the moonlight and sheathed in the glorious
spray of a thousand ice-falls, the Mount of Sorrow bow its head and
come down, and, while the whole earth shook and smoked back in hoar
vapors, the great snow-slide in its swift sheeting splendor flash and
wipe out before our eyes the last timber of the hut and barn and byre
of the Rayniers.

SISTER SILVIA.

BY MARY AGNES TINCKER.

_Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1878._

Monte Compatri is one of the eastern outlying peaks of the Alban
Mountains, and, like so many Italian mountains, has its road climbing
to and fro in long loops to a gray little city at the top. This city
of Monte Compatri is a full and busy hive, with solid blocks of
houses, and the narrowest of streets that break now and then into
stairs. For those old builders respected the features of a landscape
as though they had been the features of a face, and no more thought of
levelling inequalities of land than of shaving down or raising up
noses. When a man had a house-lot in a hollow, he built his house
there, and made steps to go down to it: his neighbor, who owned a
rocky knoll, built his house at the top, and made stairs to go up to
it. Moreover, if the land was a bit in the city, the house was made in
the shape of it, and was as likely to have corners in obtuse or acute
as in right angles.

The inhabitants of Monte Compatri have two streets of which they are
immensely proud--the Lungara, which wriggles through the middle of the
town, and the Giro, which makes the entire circuit of the town,
leaving outside only the rim of houses that rise from the edge of the
mountain, some of them founded on the natural rock, others stretching
roots of masonry far down into the earth.

One of these houses on the Giro had for