t long remain.

H. JAMES, JR.

A SAXON GOD.

In the year of grace 1854, Ernest Philip King, a young attache of the
English embassy at Athens, married Haidee Amic, the most beautiful
woman in that city. Neither of the pair possessed a fortune, and their
united means afforded a not abundantly luxurious style of living; but
they loved each other, and the fact that he was the portionless son
of a Church of England divine, and she the daughter of an impecunious
Greek of noble family and royal lineage, was no drawback to the early
happiness of their wooing and wedding. They had two children, a boy
and a girl, born within two years of each other in Athens: the girl,
the elder of the two, they named Hyacinthe; the boy was called
Tancredi.

Five years after this marriage had taken place King lost his position
at the embassy, and only received in exchange for it a mean government
clerkship in Rome at a meagre salary. Thither he removed, and after
dragging out a miserable and disappointed existence five years longer,
he died in the arms of his beautiful and still young wife. Thereafter
the youthful widow managed to keep life in herself and her two little
ones by dint of pinching, management and contrivance on the pittance
that had come to her from the estate of her impecunious father. They
lived in a palace, it is true--but who does not live in a palace in
Rome?--high up, where the cooing doves built their nests under the
leaden eaves, and where the cold winds whistled shrilly in their
season.

Such accomplishments as the mother was mistress of she imparted to
her children. What other education they received was derived from
intercourse with many foreigners, English, French, Russians, and from
familiarity with the sights and wonders of Rome, its galleries, ruins,
palaces, studios.

At eighteen Tancredi had obtained a situation as amanuensis to an
English historian resident in Italy; and Hyacinthe already brooded
over some active and unusual future that spread itself as yet but
dimly before her. She inherited from her mother her unparalleled
beauty--the clear, colorless, flawless skin, the straight features,
the lustrous eyes with their luxuriant lashes and long level brows,
her lithe and gracious figure and slender feet and hands: of the
English father her only physical trace was the large, full, mobile
mouth with its firm white teeth. She had from him the modern spirit
of unrest and the modern impetus and energy: