weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to the island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest selected from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British hunger for empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much as to their anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere than at home. My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be helped, philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his health was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did not suit so well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the lungs; she was soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and finally was driven to take refuge for the greater part of a year in Lisbon and Madeira, returning only a little before the departure of the family for Italy in 1858. But there must have been in him an ancestral power of resistance still effective after more than two centuries of transplantation; he grew ruddy and robust while facing the mist and mirk, and inhaling the smoky moisture that did service for air. Nor was his health impaired by the long hours in the daily consulate--a grimy little room barely five paces from end to end, with its dusty windows so hemmed in by taller buildings that even had there been any sunshine to make the attempt, it could never have succeeded in effecting an entrance through them. Here, from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all varieties of scamps and mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the tribe of piratical cutthroats which in those days constituted a large part of the merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were his constant companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and sooty skies without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which they exhaled; he entered deeply into all their affairs, projects, and complaints, feeling their troubles, probably, at least as keenly as they did themselves, and yet he came out of it all with clear eyes and a sound digestion. I presume the fact may have been that he unconsciously regarded the whole affair somewhat as we do a drama in a theatre; it works upon our sensibilities, and yet we do not believe that it is real. There was nothing in the experience germane to his proper life; it could not become a part of him, and therefore its posture towards him remained inveterately objective. The only feature of it that quickened a responsive chord in him was the revelation of the intolerable condition