n the Piazza, with a few charred
English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and
contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror
of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and
to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing
snows as with a peasant's white linen kerchief. And I am walking out
upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which
the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the
city's noonday streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo
of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella
Venezia," and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers
one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder
that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola
toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the
unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in
coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out
upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became
insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o'clock we took
the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio,
walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand,
gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I
counsel the reader to turn to _I Promessi Sposi_, if he would know
how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride
through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness
provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same
sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land,
have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the
descriptive Muse.

After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect
whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the
lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our
heated senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake
lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for
the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of
habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water's edge, and
we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible
house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,--and some
one mouths that well-wo