The first time he saw Agnes bending like a flower in the slanting evening sunbeams by the old gate of Sorrento, while he stood looking down the street lined with kneeling forms, and striving to hold his own soul in the sarcastic calm of utter indifference, he felt himself struck to the heart by an influence he could not define. The sight of that young face, with its clear beautiful lines and its tender fervour, recalled a thousand influences of the happiest and purest hours of his life, and drew him with an attraction he vainly strove to hide under an air of mocking gallantry. When she looked him in the face with such grave, surprised eyes of innocent confidence, and promised to pray for him, he felt a remorseful tenderness, as if he had profaned a shrine. All that was passionate, poetic, and romantic in his nature was awakened, to blend itself in a strange mingling of despairing sadness and of tender veneration about this sweet image of perfect purity and faith. Never does love strike so deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful and desolated nature; there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its interlacing fibres. In this case it was not merely Agnes that he sighed for, but she stood to him as the fair symbol of that life-peace, that rest of soul, which he had lost, it seemed to him, for ever. “Behold this pure, believing child,” he said to himself,—“a true member of that blessed Church to which thou art a rebel! How peacefully this lamb walketh the old ways trodden by saints and martyrs, while thou art an infidel and unbeliever!” And then a stern voice within him answered,—“What then? Is the Holy Ghost indeed alone dispensed through the medium of Alexander and his scarlet crew of cardinals? Hath the power to bind and to loose in Christ’s Church been indeed given to whoever can buy it with the wages of robbery and oppression? Why does every prayer and pious word of the faithful reproach me? Why is God silent? Or is there any God? Oh, Agnes, Agnes! dear lily, fair lamb, lead a sinner into the green pastures where thou restest!” So wrestled the strong nature, tempest-tossed in its strength,—so slept the trustful, blessed in its trust,—then in Italy, as now in all lands. A County Ball. Amongst the pleasures in pursuit of which it is the custom to undergo an extraordinary amount of hardship and suffering, the County Ball is entitled to be mentioned, inasmuch as it happens often at a time of year when frost and snow prevail; and that enthusiasm will carry carriage-loads of people a distance of twelve or even twenty miles, that they may dance in a crowd, denser even than that of a London ball, if that is possible, and not go home till morning, when daylight has probably appeared.