a last lingering glance at the land he was
about to leave behind. Italy was the only country, his wife told him,
that she had ever known him to quit looking over the shoulder. His
regard for the people was, perhaps, intensified by the reaction against
the estimation in which he had been wont to hold them. "The
vulgar-minded English,"--he said in one of those deliciously irritating
and double-acting sentences he was afterward in the habit of frequently
uttering--"talk of the damned Italians, and the vulgar-minded American,
quite in rule, imitates his great model." Certainly his prejudices
against the inhabitants of that country were soon swept away. He
contrasted them favorably with all their neighbors. They were (p. 071)
more gracious than the English, more sincere than the French, and
infinitely more refined than the Germans. In grace of mind, and in love,
and even knowledge of the arts, a large portion of the common Italians
were, in his opinion, as much superior to the Anglo-Saxons as
civilization is to barbarism. He came in time to have a sort of fondness
even for the professional mendicants. He furnishes us a curious picture
of the beggars who assembled about his residence daily in Sorrento, to
whom he invariably gave a grano apiece. The company, starting out from
one or two, had been steadily reinforced by recruits from far and near,
till it ran up to the neighborhood of a hundred men, who regularly
presented themselves for their pittance. There is no more graphic
description in his writings than his account of the scene which took
place when a new-comer among the beggars had the indiscretion, on
receiving his grano, to wish the giver only a hundred years of life; the
indignation of the king of the gang at this exhibition of black
ingratitude; the tumult with which the blunder was corrected, and the
shouts and outcries with which the pitiful hundred was changed into a
thousand years, and long ones at that.

During this time his literary activity was unceasing. Before the close
of 1830 he had completed four novels: "The Prairie," "The Red Rover,"
"The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish," and "The Water Witch,"--all of which were
devoted to the delineation of scenes and characters belonging to his
native land. Before he started for Europe he had begun a new Indian
story. This was finished during his early residence in Paris. He had
felt it to be a hazardous venture to bring into "The Last of the
Mohicans" the personages wh