to her, as the horses were changed in the little post-towns, that it was in honour of Holy Week that the savage-looking bearded men, the big, brawny, madonna-like women had got on their best clothes? Did it strike her that the unplastered church-fronts were draped with black, the streets strewn with laurel and box, as for a funeral, that the bells were silent in their towers? Perhaps not; and yet when, a few years later, the Countess of Albany was already wont to say that her married life had been just such as befitted a woman who had gone to the altar on Good Friday, she must have remembered, and the remembrance must have seemed fraught with ill omen, that last day of her girlhood, travelling through the black deserted valleys of the March, through the world-forgotten mountain-towns with their hushed bells and black-draped churches and funereally strewn streets. At Loreto--where, as a good Catholic, the Princess Louise of Stolberg doubtless prayed for a blessing on her marriage, in the great sanctuary which encloses with silver and carved marble the little house of the Virgin--at Loreto the bride was met by a Jacobite dignitary, Lord Carlyle, and five servants in the crimson liveries of England. At Macerata, one of the larger towns of the March of Ancona, she was awaited by her bridegroom. A noble family of the province, the Compagnoni-Marefoschis, one of whom, a cardinal, was an old friend of the Stuarts, had placed their palace at the disposal of the royal pair. We most of us know what such palaces, in small Italian provincial towns south of the Apennines, are apt to be; huge, gloomy, shapeless masses of brickwork and mouldering plaster, something between a mediaeval fortress and a convent; great black archways, where the refuse of the house, the filth of the town, has peaceably accumulated (and how much more in those days); magnificent statued staircases given over to the few servants who have replaced the armed bravos of two centuries ago; long suites of rooms, vast, resounding like so many churches, glazed in the last century with tiny squares of bad glass, through which the light comes green and thick as through sea-water; carpets still despised as a new-fangled luxury from France; the walls, not cheerful with eighteenth-century French panel and hangings, but covered with big naked frescoed men and women, or faded arras; few fire-places, but those few enormous, looking like a huge red cavern in the room. The Marefoschis had got together all their best furniture and plate, and the palace was filled with torches and wax lights; a funereal illumination in a funereal place, it must have seemed to the little Princess of Stolberg, fresh from the brilliant nattiness of the Parisian houses of the time of Louis XV.