Couple this fact with the general spirit of mockery that prevails in fashionable circles--mockery of religion, mockery of sentiment, mockery of all that is best and noblest in the human heart--add to it the general spread of "free-thought," and THEREFORE of conflicting and unstable opinions--let all these things together go on for a few years longer and England will stare at her sister nations like a bold woman in a domino--her features partly concealed from a pretense at shame, but her eyes glittering coldly through the mask, betraying to all who look at her how she secretly revels in her new code of lawlessness coupled with greed.

For she will always be avaricious--and the worst of it is, that her nature being prosaic, there will be no redeeming grace to cast a glamour about her.

France is unvirtuous enough, God knows, yet there is a sunshiny smile on her lips that cheers the heart.

Italy is also unvirtuous, yet her voice is full of bird-like melody, and her face is a dream of perfect poetry! But England unvirtuous will be like a cautiously calculating, somewhat shrewish matron, possessed of unnatural and unbecoming friskiness, without either laugh, or song, or smile--her one god, Gold, and her one commandment, the suggested eleventh, "Thou shall not be found out!" I slept that night on deck.

The captain offered me the use of his little cabin, and was, in his kind-hearted manner, truly distressed at my persistent refusal to occupy it.
"It is bad to sleep in the moonlight, signor," he said, anxiously.