uest an
interview, her servants spurned me from her door and flung my letter in
my face--how, looking up at her windows, I then, instead of forgiving,
solemnly cursed her with the bitterest curses my tongue could devise--and
how, this done, I shook the dust of Paris from my feet, and became a
wanderer upon the face of the earth, are facts which I have now no space
to tell.

The next six or eight years of my life were shifting and unsettled
enough. A morose and restless man, I took employment here and there, as
opportunity offered, turning my hand to many things, and caring little
what I earned, so long as the work was hard and the change incessant.
First of all I engaged myself as chief engineer in one of the French
steamers plying between Marseilles and Constantinople. At Constantinople
I changed to one of the Austrian Lloyd's boats, and worked for some time
to and from Alexandria, Jaffa, and those parts. After that, I fell in
with a party of Mr. Layard's men at Cairo, and so went up the Nile and
took a turn at the excavations of the mound of Nimroud. Then I became a
working engineer on the new desert line between Alexandria and Suez; and
by-and-by I worked my passage out to Bombay, and took service as an
engine fitter on one of the great Indian railways. I stayed a long time
in India; that is to say, I stayed nearly two years, which was a long
time for me; and I might not even have left so soon, but for the war that
was declared just then with Russia. That tempted me. For I loved danger
and hardship as other men love safety and ease; and as for my life, I had
sooner have parted from it than kept it, any day. So I came straight
back to England; betook myself to Portsmouth, where my testimonials at
once procured me the sort of berth I wanted. I went out to the Crimea in
the engine-room of one of her Majesty's war steamers.

I served with the fleet, of course, while the war lasted; and when it was
over, went wandering off again, rejoicing in my liberty. This time I
went to Canada, and after working on a railway then in progress near the
American frontier, I presently passed over into the States; journeyed
from north to south; crossed the Rocky Mountains; tried a month or two of
life in the gold country; and then, being seized with a sudden, aching,
unaccountable longing to revisit that solitary grave so far away on the
Italian coast, I turned my face once more towards Europe.

Poor little grave! I found it r