she, though a mother of three or four children, ready to receive with favor the mean robber of her husband’s rights and honor?  Read the London newspapers any day and you will find that once “moral” England is running a neck and neck race with other less hypocritical nations in pursuit of social vice.  The barriers that once existed are broken down; “professional beauties” are received in circles where their presence formerly would have been the signal for all respectable women instantly to retire; ladies of title are satisfied to caper on the boards of the theatrical stage, in costumes that display their shape as undisguisedly as possible to the eyes of the grinning public, or they sing in concert halls for the pleasure of showing themselves off, and actually accept the vulgar applause of unwashed crowds with a smile and a bow of gratitude!  Ye gods! what has become of the superb pride of the old regime—­the pride which disdained all ostentation and clung to honor more closely than life!  What a striking sign of the times too, is this:  let a woman taint her virtue before marriage, she is never forgiven—­her sin is never forgotten; but let her do what she will when she has a husband’s name to screen her, and society winks its eyes at her crimes.  Couple this fact with the general spirit of mockery that prevails in fashionable circles—­mockery of religion, mockery of sentiment, mockery of all that is best and noblest in the human heart—­add to it the general spread of “free-thought,” and therefore of conflicting and unstable opinions—­let all these things together go on for a few years longer and England will stare at her sister nations like a bold woman in a domino—­her features partly concealed from a pretense at shame, but her eyes glittering coldly through the mask, betraying to all who look at her how she secretly revels in her new code of lawlessness coupled with greed.  For she will always be avaricious—­and the worst of it is, that her nature being prosaic, there will be no redeeming grace to cast a glamour about her.  France is unvirtuous enough, God knows, yet there is a sunshiny smile on her lips that cheers the heart.  Italy is also unvirtuous, yet her voice is full of bird-like melody, and her face is a dream of perfect poetry!  But England unvirtuous will be like a cautiously calculating, somewhat shrewish matron, possessed of unnatural and unbecoming friskiness, without either laugh, or song, or smile—­her one god, Gold, and her one commandment, the suggested eleventh, “Thou shall not be found out!”

I slept that night on deck.  The captain offered me the use of his little cabin, and was, in his kind-hearted manner, truly distressed at my persistent refusal to occupy it.

“It is bad to sleep in the moonlight, signor,” he said, anxiously.  “It makes men mad, they say.”

I smiled.  Had madness been my destiny, I should have gone mad last night, I thought!

“Have no fear!” I answered him, gently.  “The moonlight is a joy to me—­it has no impression on my mind save that of peace.  I shall rest well here, my friend—­do not trouble yourself about me.”