no inn but slept in the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a
tongue half Latin, half Dutch, which I failed to master. The
next day was a blaze of heat, the mountain-paths lay thick with
dust, and I had no wine from sunrise to sunset. Can you wonder
that, when the following noon I saw Santa Chiara sleeping in its
green circlet of meadows, my thought was only of a deep draught
and a cool chamber? I protest that I am a great lover of natural
beauty, of rock and cascade, and all the properties of the poet:
but the enthusiasm of Rousseau himself would sink from the stars
to earth if he had marched since breakfast in a cloud of dust
with a throat like the nether millstone.

Yet I had not entered the place before Romance revived. The
little town--a mere wayside halting-place on the great
mountain-road to the North--had the air of mystery which
foretells adventure. Why is it that a dwelling or a countenance
catches the fancy with the promise of some strange destiny? I
have houses in my mind which I know will some day and somehow be
intertwined oddly with my life; and I have faces in memory of
which I know nothing--save that I shall undoubtedly cast eyes
again upon them. My first glimpses of Santa Chiara gave me this
earnest of romance. It was walled and fortified, the streets
were narrow pits of shade, old tenements with bent fronts swayed
to meet each other. Melons lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now
and then would come a high-pitched northern gable. Latin and
Teuton met and mingled in the place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has
taught us, the offspring of this admixture is something fantastic
and unpredictable. I forgot my grievous thirst and my tired feet
in admiration and a certain vague expectation of wonders. Here,
ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that romance and I shall at