of the saloons, incrusted with various-colored marbles, give an idea of
splendor which I never gained from anything else. The floors, laid in
mosaic, seem too precious to tread upon. In the royal palace, many of
the floors were of various woods, inlaid by an English artist, and they
looked like a magnification of some exquisite piece of Tunbridge ware;
but, in all respects, this palace was inferior to others which we saw. I
say nothing of the immense pictorial treasures which hung upon the walls
of all the rooms through which we passed; for I soon grew so weary of
admirable things, that I could neither enjoy nor understand them. My
receptive faculty is very limited, and when the utmost of its small
capacity is full, I become perfectly miserable, and the more so the
better worth seeing are the things I am forced to reject. I do not know
a greater misery; to see sights, after such repletion, is to the mind
what it would be to the body to have dainties forced down the throat long
after the appetite was satiated.

All this while, whenever we emerged into the vaultlike streets,
we were wretchedly cold. The commissionaire took us to a sort of
pleasure-garden, occupying the ascent of a hill, and presenting seven
different views of the city, from as many stations. One of the objects
pointed out to us was a large yellow house, on a hillside, in the
outskirts of Genoa, which was formerly inhabited for six months by
Charles Dickens. Looking down from the elevated part of the
pleasure-gardens, we saw orange-trees beneath us, with the golden fruit
hanging upon them, though their trunks were muffled in straw; and, still
lower down, there was ice and snow.

Gladly (so far as I myself was concerned) we dismissed the
commissionaire, after he had brought us to the hotel of the Cross of
Malta, where we dined; needlessly, as it proved, for another dinner