ived, he slew
his mother, in the bitterness of his heart.

"News had come to Rome of the cruelty of the Sultan's mother to
Constance, and an army was sent to waste her country. After the land
had been burned and desolated, the commander was crossing the seas in
triumph, when he met the ship sailing in which sat Constance and her
little boy. They were both brought to Rome, and although the
commander's wife and Constance were cousins, the one did not know the
other. By this time, remorse for the slaying of his mother had seized
Alla's mind, and he could find no rest. He resolved to make a
pilgrimage to Rome in search of peace. He crossed the Alps with his
train, and entered the city with great glory and magnificence. One day
he feasted at the commander's house, at which Constance dwelt; and at
her request her little son was admitted, and during the progress of the
feast the child went and stood looking in the king's face. 'What fair
child is that standing yonder?' said the king. 'By St. John; I know
not!' quoth the commander; 'he has a mother, but no father that I know
of.' And then he told the king--who seemed all the while like a man
stunned--how he had found the mother and child floating about on the
sea. The king rose from the table and sent for Constance; and when he
saw her, and thought on all her wrongs, he could not refrain from
tears. 'This is your little son, Maurice,' she said, as she led him in
by the hand. Next day she met the emperor her father in the street,
and, falling down on her knees before him, said, 'Father, has the
remembrance of your young child Constance gone out of your mind? I am
that Constance whom you sent to Syria, and who was thought to be lost
in the sea.' That day there was great joy in Rome; and soon afterwards
Alla, with his wife and child, returned to England, where they lived in
great prosperity till he died."

BOOKS AND GARDENS

Most men seek solitude from wounded vanity, from disappointed ambition,
from a miscarriage in the passions; but some others from native
instinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my solitude, such
as it is, from an indolent turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten by
an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,--the past of
the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an
individual,--and which makes me independent of the passing moment. I
see every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle n