which was
Leam's birthright. Was he mad? Was he dreaming? What was this mocking
trick of eyesight that was perplexing him? Surely it was madness; and
yet--no, it could be no one else. Supreme, beloved, who else could
personate her so as to cheat him?

She came on, her eyes always fixed on the distance, seeing nothing of
Alick standing dark against the sky. She came nearer, nearer, till he
saw the glory of her eyes, the curve of her lip, and could count the
curling tresses on her brow. Then he came down from the height and
strode across the space between them.

She lifted up her eyes and saw him. For an instant the sadness cleared
out of them as the mists had cleared from the sky: her pathetic mouth
broke into a smile, and she held out both her hands. "Alick, dear Alick!
my good Alick!" she cried in a voice of exquisite tenderness.

"My queen!" he said kneeling, his honest upturned face wet with tears.
"Lost and now found!"

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE ITALIAN MEDIAEVAL WOOD-SCULPTORS.

More or less during the whole of this century, and ever more during the
recent years of it, the love of art, especially in what have been called
the "industrial" manifestations of it, has been becoming a passion in
Germany and in France, as well as in England and America. Museums for
the collection and preservation of the works produced by the artists of
those centuries which were the palmy days of art have been established
in all these countries, and private amateurs have vied with them in
enriching their respective countries with specimens of all the many
kinds of art-industry which remain to us from those times when religion
encouraged and surrounded itself with the beautiful and the cultivation
of the beautiful was a religion. And it is mainly--indeed, almost
entirely--to Italy that the lovers and admirers of mediaeval art come in
search of those remains of it which, it is hoped, will be (or rather are
being) the means of producing a second art _renaissance_. The quantity
of objects, more or less genuinely representing the mediaeval art in all
its many branches, which has been carried out of Italy within the last
quarter of a century is something perfectly astounding, and far exceeds
what any one would believe who has not remained in Italy long enough to
observe the process. A considerable portion, no doubt, of the articles
thus carried home with them by the lovers of art has consisted of modern
imitations of ancient workman