is a prayer. In the presence of life and beneath the firmament, poor little one! she feels herself vaguely great; she bestows her presence on the spring, the light, the shade, on the great sun setting on the cloudy horizon, the dazzling splendours of evening, the murmuring streams heard but unseen, on the fields, on serene, ever-during nature, with the gravity of a little queen. Never has she seen a man but bowing down; one day she will be Duchess of Brabant, she will govern Flanders or Sardinia. She is the Infanta, five years old, disdainful, for so are the children of kings. On their white brows is a circle of shadow, and their tottering steps are the beginnings of rule. She inhales the breath of her flower, waiting till they pluck her an empire; and already her royal looks say "It is mine." From her emanates love mingled with vague terror. He who seeing her so trembling, so fragile, should lay his hand on her, were it but to save her, would have the shadow of the scaffold on his brow ere he could move or speak.

The gentle child smiles; having naught else to do save live and hold in her hand the rose, and be there beneath the heavens, amid the flowers.

The day wanes; from the nests quarrellers come chattering; purple hues of sunset are on the branches of the trees; crimson tints strike on the brows of the marble goddesses, who seem palpitating at the approach of night; all soaring things alight; no sounds, no glare; mysterious evening gathers the sun beneath the wave, and the bird beneath the leaf.

Whilst the child smiles, with the flower in her hand, in the vast Roman Catholic palace, whose every ogee shines like a mitre in the sun, a terrible form is behind the panes. A shadow seen from below as in a mist, wanders from window to window, and one is afraid of it;

sometimes this shadow stands motionless the whole day in one spot, like a shade in a burial-ground. The dread creature is as though he sees naught; he roams from room to room, pale and dark; he presses his white face against the window-panes, and muses; pallid spectre! His shadow lengthens in the evening glow; his funeral step is slow as the knell from a belfry; it is Death, if it be not the King.

It is he; the man in whom lives and trembles the kingdom. If we could look into the eyes of the dark phantom standing at this moment with his shoulder against the wall, we should see in its dim depths, not the little child, the garden, the rippling water reflecting the golden heavens of a clear evening, the woods, the birds billing together: no, in those eyes clear as the glassy wave, unfathomable as ocean, sheltered beneath ominous brows, we should behold a moving mirage, a whole flock of ships flying before the wind, the vast trembling motion of a fleet in full sail 'mid the foam, the undulating waves beneath the stars, and in the mist, afar off, an island, a white cliff listening for the approach, over the waves, of the thunder.

Such is the vision now filling the frigid brain of this master of men, so that he perceives naught around him. The Armada, the formidable, moving fulcrum of the lever with which he is to over-turn a world, journeys at this instant over the dim waves; the King follows it with the eyes of his soul, a victor; his tragic ennui has no other glimmer of relief. Philip the Second was a thing of terror. Eblis in the Koran, Cain in the Bible are scarce so black as was this royal phantom in his Escurial, son of a like imperial phantom. Philip the Second was the Evil One, wielding a sword. He filled the high places of the world as a dream. He lived: none dared look at him; fear made a strange light around the King; men trembled merely to

see his major-domos pass; their bewildered eyes confound him with the abyss, and with the stars of blue heaven! So nearly, in the eyes of all men, did he rival God! His fateful will, overwhelming, obstinate, was as a cramping-iron upon Destiny; he held America and India; he leaned upon Africa, he ruled over Europe, only in the direction of sombre England was he uneasy. His mouth was silence and his soul mystery; his throne was built on snares and frauds; the powers of darkness were his support: like a statue, he sat horsed on gloom. Always clad in black, this Almighty of the earth looked as if in mourning for having to exist. He was like the sphinx who endures and is silent, immutable; being himself All, he had no need of words. Never had this king been seen to smile. A smile was as impossible to those lips of iron as dawn to the dark gates of hell. If sometimes he shook off his adder-like torpor, it was to help the executioner in his task: the gleam in his eyes was reflected from the pyres his breath sometimes fanned. He was a terror to thought, to man, to life, to progress, to the right, he the devotee of Rome; Satan reigning in the name of Jesus Christ: the things which issued from his dark soul were like the sinister glidings of vipers. The Escurial, Burgos, Aranjuez, his haunts, never illuminated their ghostly halls. No festivals, no court, no buffoons; treachery for sport, autoda-fé for festival. Kings perplexed saw in the night his projects darkly unfolded above their heads; his reverie was a weight upon the universe. He had the power and the will to conquer all things, break up all things; his prayers went up with the hollow sound of a thunderbolt; lightnings flashed from his deep dreams. Those who were in his thoughts said to themselves: "We are being strangled." And the people, from one end of his empire to the other, trembled as they felt his gleaming eyes fixed on them.

Charles was a vulture, Philip an owl.

As he stands there in gloomy black doublet with the order of the golden fleece round his neck, he is the rigid sentinel of destiny. His immobility commands, his eye shines like a crevice in the vault of a cavern; his finger makes a mysterious gesture as if writing a mandate to Darkness. O miracle! he smiles grimly, a bitter, an impenetrable smile. For the vision of his armament at sea grows more and more in his sombre thoughts; he beholds it sailing on urged by his purpose, as if he were there soaring at the zenith: all goes well, the docile ocean grows calm; the Armada awes it as the ark the deluge: the fleet spreads itself out in sailing order, and the ships keeping at fixed distances, a chess-board of masts and decks and rigging undulates on the waves like a great hurdle. These vessels are sacred, the waves make a hedge about them. The currents have their part to play in helping the ships to reach the shore, and do not fail; round about them the waves caressingly dash into spray, the reef changes to a harbour, the foam falls in pearls. Behold each galley with its gastadour; some from the Scheldt, some from the Adour; the hundred commandants and the two high constables. Germany sends her formidable cruisers, Naples her brigantines, Cadiz her galleons, Lisbon her seamen, for there is need of lions. Philip leans forward, what is distance to him? He not only sees, he hears. They move hither and thither. Hark to the sounds from the trumpets, the footsteps of the sailors on the decks, the mosços, the admiral leaning on his page, the drums, the boatswain's whistle, the sailing signals, the call to battle, the ominous sepulchral sound of the clearing of the decks. Are those cormorants? Are those citadels? The sails make a loud hollow sound like the beating of wings: the waters roar, and all the vast

fleet sails swiftly on, rolling, spreading itself with prodigious noise. And the gloomy King smiles to see assembled eighty thousand swords on four hundred ships. O savage grins of the vampire glutting his hunger. He grasps it at last, that white England! Who can save it? The match is put to the powder! Philip holds, of his own right, the sheaf of thunderbolts. Who can wrest it from his grasp? Is he not the sovereign lord whom none contradict? Is he not the heir of Cæsar? the Philip whose shadow stretches from the Ganges to Pausillippo? Is not the last word spoken when he says "It is my will"? Does he not hold victory by the hair of her head? Is it not he who has launched forth this fleet, these dread ships which he pilots, and does not the sea convey them as she ought? Are not these black-winged dragons, a countless flight of them, obedient to the beck of his little finger? Is he not the King? is he not the sombre man to whom this whirlwind of monsters submit?

When Cifresil Bey, son of Abdallah Bey, had dug the great wells of the mosque, at Cairo, he caused to be inscribed on them, "Heaven is God's; the earth is mine;" and as all things are linked, blended, related together, all tyrants being but different manifestations of one despot, what that sultan said of old, this king thought.

Meanwhile, by the fountain's margin, in silence, the Infanta still held the rose in her hand gravely, and sometimes, sweet blue-eyed angel, she kissed it. Suddenly a breath of air, a breeze such as the quivering evening flings over the plain, a riotous zephyr skimming the horizon, troubles the water, shakes the reeds, sends a shiver through the distant masses of myrtle and asphodel, reaches even to the beautiful peaceful child, and with one swift brush of its wing, shaking even the overshadowing tree roughly, scatters the petals of the flower into the fountain, and the Infanta has but a thorn left in her hand.