inn and howl and sing like madmen, and the nobles who drive gigs,
showing almost as much throat as a lady at a ball. This person
frequently entertains me with his _amori_, past, present, and
future; he evidently thinks me very odd for having none to entertain
him with in return; he points out to me the pretty (or ugly)
servant-girls and dressmakers as we walk in the street, sighs deeply or
sings in falsetto behind every tolerably young-looking woman, and has
finally taken me to the house of the lady of his heart, a great
black-mustachioed countess, with a voice like a fish-crier; here, he
says, I shall meet all the best company in Urbania and some beautiful
women--ah, too beautiful, alas! I find three huge half-furnished rooms,
with bare brick floors, petroleum lamps, and horribly bad pictures on
bright washball-blue and gamboge walls, and in the midst of it all,
every evening, a dozen ladies and gentlemen seated in a circle,
vociferating at each other the same news a year old; the younger ladies
in bright yellows and greens, fanning themselves while my teeth
chatter, and having sweet things whispered behind their fans by
officers with hair brushed up like a hedgehog. And these are the women
my friend expects me to fall in love with! I vainly wait for tea or
supper which does not come, and rush home, determined to leave alone
the Urbanian _beau monde_.

It is quite true that I have no _amori_, although my friend does
not believe it. When I came to Italy first, I looked out for romance; I
sighed, like Goethe in Rome, for a window to open and a wondrous
creature to appear, "welch mich versengend erquickt." Perhaps it is
because Goethe was a German, accustomed to German _Fraus_, and I
am, after all, a Pole, accustomed to something very different from
_Fraus_; but anyhow, for all my efforts, in Rome, Florence, and
Siena, I never could find a woman to go mad about, either among the