I had not been long there when I overheard voices in an adjoining
apartment. It was a consultation between my father and the monk, about
the means of getting me back quietly to the convent. My resolution was
taken. I had no longer a home nor a father. That very night I left the
paternal roof. I got on board a vessel about making sail from the
harbor, and abandoned myself to the wide world. No matter to what port
she steered; any part of so beautiful a world was better than my
convent. No matter where I was cast by fortune; any place would be more
a home to me than the home I had left behind. The vessel was bound to
Genoa. We arrived there after a voyage of a few days.

As I entered the harbor, between the moles which embrace it, and beheld
the amphitheatre of palaces and churches and splendid gardens, rising
one above another, I felt at once its title to the appellation of Genoa
the Superb. I landed on the mole an utter stranger, without knowing
what to do, or whither to direct my steps. No matter; I was released
from the thraldom of the convent and the humiliations of home! When I
traversed the Strada Balbi and the Strada Nuova, those streets of
palaces, and gazed at the wonders of architecture around me; when I
wandered at close of day, amid a gay throng of the brilliant and the
beautiful, through the green alleys of the Aqua Verdi, or among the
colonnades and terraces of the magnificent Doria Gardens, I thought it
impossible to be ever otherwise than happy in Genoa.

A few days sufficed to show me my mistake. My scanty purse was
exhausted, and for the first time in my life I experienced the sordid
distress of penury. I had never known the want of money, and had never
adverted to the possibility of such an evil. I was ignorant of the
world and all its ways; and when first the idea of destitution came
over my mind its effect was withering. I was wandering pensively