down the street with Bourne.

I could never discover if he held much Spanish stock. But I think he does. All the Spanish proprietors have a certain expression. Bourne has it to a remarkable degree. It is a kind of look as if-in fact, as if a man's mind were in Spain. Bourne was an old lover of Prue's, and he is not married, which is strange for a man in his position.

It is not easy for me to say how I know so much, as I certainly do, about my castles in Spain. The sun always shines upon them. They stand lofty and fair in a luminous, golden atmosphere-a little hazy and dreamy, perhaps, like the Indian-summer, but in which no gales blow and there are no tempests. All the lofty mountains and beautiful valleys and soft landscape that I have not yet seen are to be found in the grounds. They command a noble view of the Alps-so fine, indeed, that I should be quite content with the prospect of them from the highest tower of my castle, and not care to go to Switzerland.

The neighboring ruins, too, are as picturesque as those of Italy, and my desire of standing in the Colosseum, and of seeing the shattered arches of the Aqueducts stretching along the Campagna and melting into. the Alban Mount, is entirely quenched. The rich gloom of my orange groves is gilded by

fruit as brilliant of complexion and exquisite

of flavor as any that ever dark-eyed Sorrento girls, looking over the high plastered walls of southern Italy, hand to the youthful travellers, climbing on donkeys up the narrow lane beneath.

The Nile flows through my grounds. The Desert lies upon their edge, and Damascus stands in my garden. I am given to understand, also, that the Parthenon has been removed to my Spanish possessions. The Golden Horn is my fish-preserve; my flocks of golden fleece are pastured on the plain of Marathon, and the honey of Hymettus is distilled from the flowers that grow in the vale of Enna-all in my Spanish domains.

From the windows of those castles look the beautiful women whom I have never seen, whose portraits the poets have painted. They wait for me there, and chiefly the fair-haired child, lost to my eyes so long ago, now bloomed into an impossible beauty. The lights that never shone glance at evening in the vaulted halls upon banquets that were never spread. The bands I have never collected play all night long, and enchant into silence the brilliant company that was never assembled. In the long summer mornings the children that I never had play in the gardens that I never planted. I hear their sweet voices, sounding low and far

away, calling "Father! father!" I see the
lost fair-haired girl, grown now into a wom-
an, descending the stately stairs of my castle
in Spain, stepping out upon the lawn, and
playing with those children. They bound
away together down the garden; but those
voices linger, this time airily call-
ing, "Mother! mother!"

But there is a stranger
magic than this in my
Spanish estates.
The lawny

slopes on which,

when a child, I

played in my fa

ther's old coun

try place, which was sold

when he failed, are all there, and not a flower faded nor a blade of grass sere. The green leaves have not fallen from the spring woods of half a century ago, and a gorgeous autumn has blazed undimmed for fifty years among the trees that I remember.

Chestnuts are not especially sweet to my palate now, but those with which I used to prick my fingers when gathering them in New Hampshire woods are exquisite as ever to my taste when I think of eating them in Spain. I never ride horseback now at home; but in Spain, when I think of it, I bound over all the fences in the country, barebacked, upon the wildest horses. Sermons I am apt to find a little soporific in this country; but in Spain I should listen as reverently as ever, for proprietors must set a good example on their estates.

Plays are insufferable to me here-Prue and I never go. Prue, indeed, is not quite sure it is moral; but the theatres in my Spanish castles are of a prodigious splendor, and when I think of going there Prue sits in a front box with me-a kind of royal box-the good woman attired in such wise as I have never seen her here, while I wear my white waistcoat, which in Spain has no appearance of mending, but dazzles with immortal newness, and is a miraculous fit.

Yes; and in those castles in Spain, Prue is not the placid, breeches - patching helpmate with whom you are acquainted, but her face has a bloom which we both remember, and her movement a grace which my Spanish swans emulate, and her voice a music sweeter than those that orchestras dis

course. She
is always there

what she seemed to me when I fell in love with her many and many years ago. The neighbors called her then a nice, capable girl; and certainly she did knit and darn with a zeal and success to which my feet and my legs have testified for nearly half a century. But she could spin a finer web than ever came from cotton, and in its subtle meshes my heart was entangled, and there has reposed softly and happily ever since. The neighbors declared she could make pudding and cake better than