when they arose, to her ears before she was twelve. She knew that the “F.O.” was sometimes unreasonable, and that the shippers were troublesome, before she had quite mastered English, which was not her native tongue. Then there came a further development, when Rita no longer echoed her father’s opinions, but had ideas of her own. This followed so quickly upon the first, and added such a delightful variety and animation to their intercourse, that the Vice-Consul fully believed she had been a critic in her cradle, and that all her lively views upon things in general had come to her direct by inspiration from above. She was seventeen now, though she looked younger. For five years she had been everything that a grown-up companion can be, with something besides that no grown-up companion ever was. They were everything to each other. She reverenced him, and she laughed at him, and patronized his ideas, and thought him the first of created beings. Nothing but a child could so mingle veneration and superiority, the freedom of an equal, the keenness of a critic, the enthusiasm of adoring love. There was not a thing he said which she could not pull to pieces, nor any of his actions that were not subject to her comments. “I would not have done that, papa, if I had been you,” she would say; and yet she was of opinion that of all human creatures there was not one, on the whole, who came within a hundred miles of Her Britannic Majesty’s Vice-Consul at Leghorn. This was the result of Rita’s observations during the dozen years or so which she had unconsciously spent in accumulating materials upon which to form an opinion. And this was no small thing to say, for a clever child is the most close of observers, and far less likely to be blinded by partiality than any other human critic. As for the Vice-Consul, he had no such foundation of commonsense and close observation to support his certainty that such another as his Margherita had never been born to man. He worshipped his child without any reason at all. If she had been stupid, perhaps even if she had been unamiable, he would have loved her all the same; but he took it for a special instance of the goodness of God towards him that she was delightful, and lovely, and sweet, and clever--as well as that she was Rita, which last, however, was the chief and unspeakable claim to his love.