take it very easily--he had money enough for that; yet he would keep
architecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in a
community where every one was intensely occupied, and he unconsciously
paid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an objectless life was
disgraceful to a man.

In the meantime he suffered keenly and at every moment the loss of the
occupation of which he had bereaved himself; in thinking of quite other
things, in talk of totally different matters, from the dreams of night,
he woke with a start to the realisation of the fact that he had no
longer a newspaper. He perceived now, as never before, that for fifteen
years almost every breath of his life had been drawn with reference to
his paper, and that without it he was in some sort lost, and, as it
were, extinct. A tide of ridiculous home-sickness, which was an
expression of this passionate regret for the life he had put behind him,
rather than any longing for Des Vaches, swept over him, and the first
passages of a letter to the _Post-Democrat-Republican_ began to shape
themselves in his mind. He had always, when he left home for New York or
Washington, or for his few weeks of summer vacation on the Canadian
rivers or the New England coast, written back to his readers, in whom he
knew he could count upon quick sympathy in all he saw and felt, and he
now found himself addressing them with that frank familiarity which
comes to the journalist, in minor communities, from the habit of print.
He began by confessing to them the defeat of certain expectations with
which he had returned to Florence, and told them that they must not look
for anything like the ordinary letters of travel from him. But he was
not so singular in his attitude toward the place as he supposed; for any
tourist who comes to Florence with the old-fashioned expectation of
impressions will probably suffer a disappointment, unless he arrives
very young and for the first time. It is a city superficially so well