Cola smiled, and his eyes kindled. "I will try!" he said in his own heart, and from that day he drew no more caricatures.' Cola Monti's national and personal sympathies were now strongly excited in favour of a poor little Italian organ-boy, who was found dying of starvation by the roadside. He had no other means of permanently assisting him than by supplying him with drawings to sell, in the hope of thus enabling him to collect a fund sufficient for the purchase of a new organ, his own having been destroyed. This fund at length amounted, by slow accumulations, to L.10 in silver; but the organ-boy, who had become devotedly attached to his patron, could not consent to be thus paid off. Poor Cola was now in destitution himself. His mother had died; his stepfather refused to contribute longer to his support; and in fact he was thrown adrift upon the world. The generous debate between him and his protégé was terminated by both proceeding to London upon the fortune of L.10--Cola to pursue his career of an artist, and Seppi in the quality of his servant. Arrived in London, 'Cola woke the next morning, dreaming that he was at school again, and that, somehow or other, his class was all composed of great stout farmers, who would persist in repeating their Italian verbs with a strong Staffordshire accent. The dream vanished under the influence of a bright sunbeam that crept through the small uncurtained window, and just reached his nose. In London, the good-natured sun is more partial to attic windows than to any other, and it made Cola's tiny room quite cheerful. From thence he looked, not at the street, which lay many feet below, but skywards, where, above the tops of the houses, he could see the great dome of St Paul's lifting itself up, grand and giant-like, with its ball and cross glistening in the clear light of early morning. This was the first sight that struck Cola in London. His artist-mind felt it to the uttermost. The numberless streets below seemed so solemn and quiet, lying in the shadow of the scarcely-risen sun; and though even now the sounds of life were beginning to stir, they were but faint as yet, while over the dark and half-awakened city watched its great temple, already illumined with the sunbeams. It was a scene that Cola never forgot, and never will while he lives.' He finds his way as soon as possible to the National Gallery. 'I shall not enlarge upon the feelings of the boy-artist when he beheld for the first time this grand collection of paintings. He had seen many in his childhood; but the memory of them was grown dim. He looked on these with the sensations of one blind, who re-enters a long-forgotten world with his eyes opened. He began to understand and to feel what Art really was. This new sense dazzled and overwhelmed him; his heart beat wildly; he trembled; and fairly subdued with emotion, he sat down in the darkest corner he could find, turned his face away into the shadow, while the tears rose, large and silently, to