tenced to being torn
to pieces by she-goats at Genoa. Poor, beautiful Bianca! On the
fulfilment of her unjust and barbarous sentence it is too horrible to
dwell at any length. This glorious creature, this resplendent vision,
this divine goddess--she-goats! Dreadful, degrading, unutterable!!!

The day for her death[8] dawned fair over the Mediterranean. Bianca,
garbed in white, walked with dignity into the meadow wherein the
she-goats anxiously awaited her. She bravely repressed a shudder, and
fell upon her knees. History tells us that every goat turned away, as
though ashamed of the part it was destined to play. Then, with a look of
ineffable peace stealing over her waxen face, Bianca rose to her full
height, and, flinging her arms heavenwards, she delivered that
celebrated and heartrending speech which has lived after her for so
long:--

"_Dio mio, concerto--concerto!_"

One by one the she-goats advanced....

SARAH, LADY TUNNELL-PENGE

("WINSOME SAL")

[Illustration: SARAH, LADY TUNNELL-PENGE

_From a painting by Augustus Punter_]

Ffraddle of 1643 was very different from the Ffraddle of 1789, and still
more different from the Ffraddle of 1832. At a time when civil war was
raging between Jacobites and Papists and Roundheads and Ironsides and
everything, Ffraddle stood grey, silent and indomitable--the very spirit
of peace allied with strength seemed embodied in its grim masonry. The
clash of arms and the death cries from millions of rebellious throats
which echoed athwart the length and breadth of young England were unable
to pierce the stillness of Ffraddle's moated security. Owls murmured on
its battered turrets, sparrows perched on its portcullis, cuckoos cooed
all over it, heedless indeed of the turmoil and frenzied strife raging
outside its feudal gates.

What a birthplace for one of history's most priceless pearls--Sarah
Twig! The heart of every lover of beauty leaps and jumps and starts at
the sound of that name--Sarah Twig. Why are some destined for so much
while others are destined, alas! for so little? Who knows? Sarah--a
rose-leaf, a crumpled atom, dropped as it were from some heavenly garden
into the black times of the Merry Monarch--when, according to
Bloodworthy, virtue was laughed to scorn and evil went unpunished; when,
according to Follygob, virginity was a scream, and harlotry a hobby; and
when, according to Sheepmeadow, homeliness was sin, and beauty but a
gilded casket concealing