one of the leading doctors at Varallo whether the figure was man or woman.  He said it was evident I was not married, for that if I had been I should have seen at once that she was not only a woman but a mother-in-law of the first magnitude, or, as he called it, “una suocera tremenda,” and this without knowing that I wanted her to be a mother-in-law myself.  Unfortunately she had no real drapery, so I could not settle the question as my friend Mr. H. F. Jones and I had been able to do at Varallo with the figure of Eve that had been turned into a Roman soldier assisting at the capture of Christ.  I am not, however, disposed to waste more time upon anything so obvious, and will content myself with saying that we have here the Virgin’s grandmother.  I had never had the pleasure, so far as I remembered, of meeting this lady before, and was glad to have an opportunity of making her acquaintance.

Tradition says that it was she who chose the Virgin’s name, and if so, what a debt of gratitude do we not owe her for her judicious selection!  It makes one shudder to think what might have happened if she had named the child Keren-Happuch, as poor Job’s daughter was called.  How could we have said, “Ave Keren-Happuch!” What would the musicians have done?  I forget whether Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was a man or a woman, but there were plenty of names quite as unmanageable at the Virgin’s grandmother’s option, and we cannot sufficiently thank her for having chosen one that is so euphonious in every language which we need take into account.  For this reason alone we should not grudge her her portrait, but we should try to draw the line here.  I do not think we ought to give the Virgin’s great-grandmother a statue.  Where is it to end?  It is like Mr. Crookes’s ultimissimate atoms; we used to draw the line at ultimate atoms, and now it seems we are to go a step farther back and have ultimissimate atoms.  How long, I wonder, will it be before we feel that it will be a material help to us to have ultimissimissimate atoms?  Quavers stopped at demi-semi-demi, but there is no reason to suppose that either atoms or ancestresses of the Virgin will be so complacent.

I have said that on St. Anne’s left hand there is a lady who is bringing in some flowers.  St. Anne was always passionately fond of flowers.  There is a pretty story told about her in one of the Fathers, I forget which, to the effect that when a child she was asked which she liked best—­cakes or flowers?  She could not yet speak plainly and lisped out, “Oh fowses, pretty fowses”; she added, however, with a sigh and as a kind of wistful corollary, “but cakes are very nice.”  She is not to have any cakes just now, but as soon as she has done thanking the lady for her beautiful nosegay, she is to have a couple of nice new-laid eggs, that are being brought her by another lady.  Valsesian women immediately after their confinement always have eggs beaten up with wine and sugar, and