A FEW MORE STRAY LEAVES AND TRACES.

The passage from New York to Gibraltar took twelve days. The "Saxonia" is slow, but sure and steady. There was little sea-sickness, and less cause for it, but small-pox broke out in the steerage our first day at sea. The child—for a child it was that showed the dread symptoms—was at once placed in the isolation hospital. We all had to be vaccinated, and the "Saxonia" steamed into the harbour of Funchal, Madeira, flying the yellow-jack. There was, however, little fear of infection among our fellow-passengers in the first cabin, as became apparent the night before we made port. There was a dance on the deck, which we were all invited to join. Conspicuous on the list of dances that lay before each passenger as we sat down that evening to the dinner table was "the vaccination waltz!" Next morning a pathetic little wooden box, roughly carpentered, was landed at Madeira. It contained the remains of the little child which had died in port—not of small-pox, which had turned out after all to be chicken-pox—but of two hard-boiled eggs administered by a fond mother during convalescence. So at least the story ran on board ship, though I fancy it was just made up to free us the more completely from apprehension.

Madeira is one of the loveliest islands of the sea. The waters around it are of the deepest blue, and its sloping fields of the richest verdure. Funchal, the capital city, is on the shores of a winding bay. The houses spotlessly white, the roofs red-tiled, form a pleasing contrast of colour with the green of the fields and the tropical trees around about them. Madeira belongs to Portugal. The inhabitants are almost all of them Catholics, and very devout. The storm of persecution that so lately burst over the mother country has spared this distant daughter in her sea-girt home.

Quitting the boat at Gibraltar, and passing by rail through Spain and the south of France, I reached Rome before the middle of May. Rome is greatly changed since I knew it first, and changed, I am free to own, for the better. New streets have been opened, old ones straightened and widened, and all the streets are fairly well kept. The city has taken over the magnificent Villa Borghese, and turned it into a park, to which access is given, out of the very heart of Rome, from piazza, Barberini, along a broad highway, across the Pincian Hill. The deep valley beyond is bridged by a lofty embankment. No city is more favoured than Rome in its parks and fountains.

Rome is greatly changed, too, spiritually, and for the better. There is more of devotion in the churches; more of respect, or at least of outward respect, for the pilgrim in the streets. In Rome ecclesiastical things are pretty much as they have always been. There is a saying familiar to the theologian, Communia vilescunt—common things are held uncommonly cheap. What so common as the priest in Rome! None so poor as to do him reverence. Even a bishop on occasion does not fare much better. Apropos of this I have been told a story, which to quote the well-worn Italian saying, Se non é vero, é ben trovato—if not true, is a clever take-off, and may serve to point a moral.

Last winter there was a grand function in the Sixtine Chapel. The Holy Father was there, and the place was packed with people. They kept pressing forward in their eagerness to get near the Pope. At last the papal guard turned their backs to the multitude, and held them there. A belated Cardinal tried to force his way through, but couldn't. Taking one of the guard by the shoulder, he told him who he was and that he had to get by. "Oh, pardon me, your Eminence," cried the soldier, greatly taken aback, "I thought you were only a Bishop!"

The public consistory of May the 28th, viewed simply as a pageant, was well worth waiting for. Cardinals and bishops, in their scarlet and purple robes, lined the front seats, and the elect Cardinals, in gorgeous panoply, brought up the rear of a long procession. The ambassadors to the Holy See and the heads of the old noble families of Rome, were conspicuous in seats specially reserved for them. But what struck one as without parallel in so august an assemblage was this singular circumstance: a peasant from Riese sat in the throne of Peter, and three other peasants from Riese, two sisters and a niece, who bore about them all the marks of their peasant ancestry, occupied the place of honour in a tribune hard by. It was the apotheosis of democracy. The like had never been seen at the Papal Court, at least since the swineherd Sixtus, the fifth of that name, refused to receive, when dressed as a fine lady, the mother whom he afterwards welcomed when she came back to him in her peasant costume.

It is not easy to gain admittance to a papal consistory, and thereby hangs another tale. From immemorial time the noble Roman families have a sort of prescriptive right to a large number of admission tickets, which they use in part themselves, and in part, it is said, offer for sale in the hotels of Rome. These are eagerly bought up by tourists and travellers, who are largely Protestant. Hence it comes to pass that while a bishop often cannot get a ticket for an attendant priest, hundreds of Protestants and unbelievers hold prominent places at the consistory. The story is of the time when Pasquino (whence our English "pasquinade") entertained the Romans with his clever satirical skits. They took the form of cartoons, and were placed during the night at the foot of a statue to which all Rome was wont to take its way to amuse itself of a morning. After one of the public consistories, this is what greeted the eye of Rome. Two young men are hurrying to the Vatican. Some curious passer-by bids them the time of day, and would know why they hasten so. "We are on our way," they say, "to the Vatican, to the consistory." "But where is the use of your going; you can't get in." "Oh, that's all right," rejoin the confident pair, "we turned Protestant yesterday!"

On leaving Rome I visited Assisi, fraught with memories of St. Francis and St. Clare, Loreto, also, with its Holy House, and from Ancona crossed to Tersatto, near Fiume, where the Angels first set down the House of the Virgin when they came with it over the sea. I recrossed the Adriatic to Venice in an Austrian boat. Four of us slept in one small stateroom, packed like sardines. I could barely squeeze into my berth, and passed the night in dread lest the big burly German (known to be such by his gutturals) who occupied the upper berth should fall through and quite flatten me out. My sympathies have always been with the under dog, and henceforth will be more than ever—for I was the under sardine!

We came to Venice in the early morning when the newly risen sun had turned everything into gold. There she sat a queen upon the waters. Small wonder that one Joseph Sarto should have pined, and pines still, in his prison-palace of the Vatican, for this old home of his on the sea, which it is his inclement destiny never more to set eyes on. Venice is a city without streets. Instead there are canals and corridors—canals where glide the swan-like gondolas, and corridors between the houses, so narrow that people living on opposite sides may shake hands across.

While I sat writing the last paragraph the life of Pope Pius the Tenth was slowly ebbing away. He was passing to the better world, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. He had fought the good fight, he had kept the faith. He had laboured while yet it was day, knowing that the night cometh when no one can labour more. His was a truly simple and apostolic life. He had a single eye to the glory of God and the good of his fellow-man. If ever there was one who could say that he sought not the office, but that the office sought him, he was the Pope whose loss we mourn. He has done an enduring work for God and the Church, and has left an inspiring example of a life untainted with worldliness and fragrant with faith and good works. Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him!

I spent a night in Domodossola just beyond the beautiful Lago Maggiore, in the Italian Alps. Here the Rosminian Fathers have a college for boys, largely attended. A unique feature of the museum is a room filled with labelled specimens of the different kinds of stone taken from the great Simplon tunnel—an almost endless variety. Beyond the Simplon, on the Swiss side, the train, which is driven by electricity, passes along the side of a precipitous mountain. An Alpine river winds its way two thousand feet below. From the window of the train I caught a glimpse of a flying aeroplane, about midway down. Far beyond on the other side the eye rested on great fields of untrodden snow. The valleys of Switzerland are for the most part so narrow that it is easy to get a good view of the wonderful mountain scenery.

At Berne I had just time to pay a visit to my old acquaintances—I dare not say friends—the bears. There are as many as seven of them now in the underground enclosure across the Aar river, the cubbies that I saw on my first visit having grown into bears. I bought one or two specimens of the beast in wood, and saw many more that would have made interesting additions to my former repertoire—bears painting, bears playing cards, bears playing the piano, bears working in wood, bears smoking long German pipes, bears nursing sick bears, and bears rejoicing in the birth of cubbies!

From Berne I passed to Strassburg, from Strassburg along the banks of the Rhine to Cologne, and from Cologne to Aix-la-Chapelle, known to me from schooldays as a place where peace treaties were signed. Peace then brooded on the land, a land of plenty, smiling with promise of a rich harvest. But on every hand were soldiers, and the whole nation appeared to be cast in a military mould. Whatever the outcome of the terrible war into which Europe is plunged to-day, the future historian will record and lay due stress on this significant fact, that Germany led the world in war-like preparation, and that other nations did but strive to keep pace with her.

The return voyage, on the Empress of Britain, was almost without incident. One day of storm we had, in mid-ocean, when our big ship was tossed about and great seas broke over her. A day or two later, on the banks of Newfoundland, an iceberg was sighted almost directly ahead. It looked ghostlike as it loomed up out of the haze, and the air for miles around was chill as winter. I left the ship at Rimouski, about sunrise of a July morning, close to the spot where her sister ship went down a few weeks before with almost every soul on board. At Rimouski I took an eastbound train to my old home, feeling, as I never felt before, the force of Sir Walter's undying lines: