monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment
and discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the
distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my mind was half
absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our
hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us? I have
mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and
terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent life.

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which
is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered suffering,
with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time. Then came
the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into
variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and
longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father
said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--

"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home
with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go
through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our
neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we
shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense that a
new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-
past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of
night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten
grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of
memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal
gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river
seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed
under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient
garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and
owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to
and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It
is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of
ancient fad