rs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place,
Winchfield, Hants._

THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY.

CHAPTER I.

THE BRIDE.

On the Wednesday or Thursday of Holy Week of the year 1772 the inhabitants
of the squalid and dilapidated little mountain towns between Ancona and
Loreto were thrown into great excitement by the passage of a travelling
equipage, doubtless followed by two or three dependent chaises, of more
than usual magnificence.

The people of those parts have little to do now-a-days, and must have
had still less during the Pontificate of His Holiness Pope Clement XIV.;
and we can imagine how all the windows of the unplastered houses, all
the black and oozy doorways, must have been lined with heads of women
and children; how the principal square of each town, where the horses
were changed, must have been crowded with inquisitive townsfolk and
peasants, whispering, as they hung about the carriages, that the great
traveller was the young Queen of England going to meet her bridegroom;
a thing to be remembered in such world-forgotten places as these, and
which must have furnished the subject of conversation for months and
years, till that Queen of England and her bridegroom had become part
and parcel of the tales of the "Three Golden Oranges," of the "King of
Portugal's Cowherd," of the "Wonderful Little Blue Bird," and such-like
stories in the minds of the children of those Apennine cities. The Queen
of England going to meet her bridegroom at the Holy House of Loreto. The
notion, even to us, does savour strangely of the fairy tale.

What were, meanwhile, the thoughts of the beautiful little fairy
princess, with laughing dark eyes and shining golden hair, and brilliant
fair skin, more brilliant for the mysterious patches of rouge upon
the cheeks, and vermilion upon the lips, whom the more audacious or
fortunate of the townsfolk caught a glimpse of seated in her gorgeous
travelling dress (for the eighteenth century was still in its stage of
pre-revolutionary brocade and gold lace and powder and spangles) behind
the curtains of the coach? Louise, Princess of Stolberg-Gedern, and
ex-Canoness of Mons, was, if we may judge by the crayon portrait and the
miniature done about that time, much more of a child than most women of
nineteen. A clever and accomplished young lady, but, one would say,
with, as yet, more intelligence and acquired pretty little habits and
ideas than character; a childish woman of the worl