“Thanks,” returned Mrs. Vervain; “it’s very good of you to say so, Mr. Ferris, and it’s very gratifying, all round; but don’t you see, it doesn’t serve the present purpose. What teachers do you know of?” She had been by marriage so long in the service of the United States that she still regarded its agents as part of her own domestic economy. Consuls she everywhere employed as functionaries specially appointed to look after the interests of American ladies traveling without protection. In the week which had passed since her arrival in Venice, there had been no day on which she did not appeal to Ferris for help or sympathy or advice. She took amiable possession of him at once, and she had established an amusing sort of intimacy with him, to which the haughty trepidations of her daughter set certain bounds, but in which the demand that he should find her a suitable Italian teacher seemed trivially matter of course. “Yes. I know several teachers,” he said, after thinking awhile; “but they’re all open to the objection of being human; and besides, they all do things in a set kind of way, and I’m afraid they wouldn’t enter into the spirit of any scheme of instruction that departed very widely from Ollendorff.” He paused, and Mrs. Vervain gave a sketch of the different professional masters whom she had employed in the various countries of her sojourn, and a disquisition upon their several lives and characters, fortifying her statements by reference of doubtful points to her daughter. This occupied some time, and Ferris listened to it all with an abstracted air. At last he said, with a smile, “There was an Italian priest came to see me this morning, who astonished me by knowing English--with a brogue that he’d learned from an English priest straight from Dublin; perhaps _he_ might do, Mrs. Vervain? He’s professionally pledged, you know, not to give the kind of annoyance you’ve suffered from in teachers. He would do as well as Padre Girolamo, I suppose.” “Do you really? Are you in earnest?” “Well, no, I believe I’m not. I haven’t the least idea he would do. He belongs to the church militant. He came to me with the model of a breech-loading cannon he’s invented, and he wanted a passport to go to America, so that he might offer his cannon to our government.” “How curious!” said Mrs. Vervain, and her daughter looked frankly into Ferris’s face. “But I know; it’s one of your jokes.” “You overpraise me, Mrs. Vervain. If I could make such jokes as that priest was, I should set up for a humorist at once. He had the touch of pathos that they say all true pieces of humor ought to have,” he went on instinctively addressing himself to Miss Vervain, who did not repulse him. “He made me melancholy; and his face haunts me. I should like to paint him. Priests are generally such a snuffy, common lot. And I dare say,” he concluded, “he’s sufficiently commonplace, too, though he didn’t look it. Spare your romance, Miss Vervain.”