Beppa had finished speaking: tears fell from her eyes. We watched them flow in silence without seeking to console her. But suddenly she dried them, and said to us with her capricious vivacity, "Well, what is the matter with you that you are so sad? Is that the effect fairy-stories produce upon you? Have you never heard of Orco, the Venetian Trilby? Have you never met her at evening in the churches or on the Lido? She is a good devil, who only does harm to oppressors and traitors. One may say that she is the real genius of Venice. But the viceroy, having heard indirectly and confusedly of Count Lichtenstein's perilous adventure, begged the patriarch to pronounce a great exorcism over the lagoons, and since then Orco has never reappeared." L. W. J. IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT. The Solent Sea, the channel dividing the Isle of Wight from the mainland, varies in breadth from one to six miles. The island must at one time have formed a portion of the mainland, and so late as when the Greeks traded with Cornwall for tin the Solent is said to have been passable at low water by men and carts. The circumference of the island is about sixty miles, the surface undulating, with a range of fine downs running through from east to west, having here and there points of considerable elevation. It is said to have been well wooded formerly, but no forests remain, and the hedge-rows, coppices and scattered trees are all it can now offer in the way of foliage. The scenery of the north side of the island is quiet, pleasing, here and there picturesque, but the southern side is full of the beauty of bold cliffs, chasms, irregular coast- and hill-lines, tumbled rocks, bare, wind-swept hills, and sheltered coves where flowers bloom and ivy climbs from the very verge of the sea. On this side lies the famous region known as the Undercliff--a series of terraces rising ambitiously from the sea up the steep sides of St. Boniface's Down--the tract being about seven miles long, and from a quarter to half a mile broad. On the one hand, the bold promontories, the shell-like bays of the sea-line; on the other, the lofty, rounded down, with here and there its buttress of gray rock coming out in naked grandeur; between the two a lovely irregularity of soft slope, sinuous or dimple-like valleys, dark ravines, velvet-smooth laps of terrace, with now and again a sudden springing brook, and everywhere the thickets of holly and cedar clambered rampantly over by masses of ivy and traveler's joy--_our_ Virgin's bower clematis--and such sunshine as falls not elsewhere in England over all.