Excerpt from The Marshal

On the wall of the large hall Of a house in Virginia hang two portraits side by side. Both are Of young men, both in uniform, one in the dark blue coat and the White and red of an infantry Officer Of the French Empire, the other in that scarlet shirt which came to be a ¿ag, almost as much as a dress, to the heroic band of insurgents who struggled for free Italy against the Austrians. The master of the Virginia house, coming into it to-day, meets always those two pairs of eyes the eyes Of his grandfather the Marquis and Of a French 'peasant to whom his grandfather's youth was linked by ties of more than brotherhood.

It is the chronicle Of the latter which is here written. Yet woven into it, as in truth it happened, is so much Of the life of the Marquis Zappi that for any one read ing that chronicle it will be easy to surmise how it hap pened that the grandson of Pietro rules now in Carni fax, the Virginian house where Piietro's friend found asylum after his imprisonment under the Austrians. It will be easy to surmise how the foreign names Of this story are the names shouted one to another to-day by American girls and boys under the live-oaks Of that Virginia lawn, how a Francois and an Alixe and a Pietro and a Gaspard play together in the new world as others of their names played, a century back, in an Older country.

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