UPON my desk lies a book on which is printed in bold autograph characters "Tales from Carmen Sylva's Kingdom." But who is Carmen Sylva? Has she, indeed, a realm that is situated in any portion of the globe, or is her kingdom one of pure romance, that has no existence out of the realms of fairy tale? The kingdom is far-distant Roumania, as a State, newcomer among the European kingdoms, but as a land and nation, older far than the governments around it, to whom it has for centuries proved a bone of contention. "Puin" the natives fondly call their land, a word that in their speech means "my darling." Puin has had much to suffer from the nations that compass her round about and have at various periods of her history enslaved her, trampling her fruitful garden under their iron heels, uprooting her flowers, and destroying her labors. But Puin is at peace now, and happy in her ruler, whose consort is no other than Carmen Sylva. There rests upon her brow a dual crown: one formed of leaves of laurel plucked in the gardens of Apollo; one made of stern iron, fashioned out of guns captured from Mohammedan Turks, and given to her by Charles, Prince of Hohenzollern, now King of Roumania. That he, an alien, an unimaginative and inflexible Prussian, has been able to retain the throne, that he has overthrown intrigues, confounded conspiracies, that he has gained, if not the love, at least the sincere respect of his subjects, is due in great part to the lady who sits beside him, and who a queen in the best and richest sense of the word, has made his paths smooth and has won the hearts of all that come in contact with her. A lovable woman truly; one of those magnetic presences to whom our hearts go out at first sight, we know not why; in whom a true and noble womanhood rises above the factitious dignity of royalty. Brought under the influence of her deep blue eyes of her full, rich, sympathetic voice, her genial smile, the wish naturally arises to know more of the woman and the queen.
     "I was born far from a throne," she said to me one day, as we sat chatting in cozy tête-à-tête in the tiny study she had made for herself in the Villa Spinola - that house embosomed in orange and lemon gardens, which stands upon the shores of the beautiful Gulf of Genoa, where she spent some weeks last year. "Yes, I was born very far from a throne, and I am heartily glad of it.I thus had a more natural youth." She is fully aware of the fact that princes as rule look at life through the wrong end of the telescope, fully aware that it is a fate from which it seems almost impossible to save them; but she hopes and thinks that she has escaped this doom -- thanks to the wisdom of her parents, to the comparative modesty of her origin, to the fact that life his been very real and grave to her, and that she his not been shielded and guarded from seeing aught but its sunny side, or one carefully tricked out for her contemplation. Carmen Sylva, as she calls herself by her nom de plume, a name compounded from her fondness for song and wood, was by birth a princess of Wied, one of the many tiny principalities with which Germany abounded. At the time the princess was born namely, December 29 1843, her family, one of the oldest among small German princelings, had by their kindliness and culture made them beloved of their subjects. She was a robust, bright-eyed little girl, a very piece of quicksilver, to whom it was needful to teach reading at the age of three, in order to keep her occupied. Her alert intelligence was carefully trained by her cultured parents and by able tutors. She soon distinguished herself by her knowledge of languages, her passion for poetry and music, and her genuine love of the fine arts. Nor were the strictly feminine branches of education neglected. Princess Elizabeth learned to ply her needle as deftly as her pen, her cooking spoon as well as her drawing-pencil. But she was by no means a merely studious child. Her lively animal spirits needed constant vent, and many a time would she manage to get outside the park, gather the village children about her, and prove the ringleader of wild and merry games. From the age of five it was her ardent desire, her ideal, to be a national school-mistress; and when she was not romping with them, it was her delight to gather the village children around her and teach them what she had just learned herself. There was not much etiquette in her father's little court, where sorrow and sickness had early taken up a permanent abode. The father was a chronic invalid, and the mother was prostrated for five years, while during the whole period of Princess Elizabeth's intellectual development, for eleven years, her youngest brother struggled wearily with a life of pain to which death hourly held out hopes of re-