er physical exhaustion of the night
and day. When his servant came in he found his master in a heavy sleep.
And, at Crowborough House, the Duke dined and fumed alone.

XXI

"Why does any one stay in England who _can_ make the trip to Paradise?"
said the Duchess, as she leaned lazily back in the corner of the boat
and trailed her fingers in the waters of Como.

It was a balmy April afternoon, and she and Julie were floating through
a scene enchanted, incomparable. When spring descends upon the shores of
the Lago di Como, she brings with her all the graces, all the beauties,
all the fine, delicate, and temperate delights of which earth and sky
are capable, and she pours them forth upon a land of perfect loveliness.
Around the shores of other lakes--Maggiore, Lugano, Garda--blue
mountains rise, and the vineyards spread their green and dazzling
terraces to the sun. Only Como can show in unmatched union a main
composition, incomparably grand and harmonious, combined with every
jewelled, or glowing, or exquisite detail. Nowhere do the mountains lean
towards each other in such an ordered splendor as that which bends round
the northern shores of Como. Nowhere do buttressed masses rise behind
each other, to right and left of a blue water-way, in lines statelier or
more noble than those kept by the mountains of the Lecco Lake, as they
marshal themselves on either hand, along the approaches to Lombardy and
Venetia; bearing aloft, as though on the purple pillars of some majestic
gateway, the great curtain of dazzling cloud which, on a sunny day,
hangs over the Brescian plain--a glorious drop-scene, interposed between
the dwellers on the Como Mountains, and those marble towns, Brescia,
Verona, Padua, which thread the way to Venice.

And within this divine frame-work, between the glistening snows which
still, in April, crown and glorify the heights, and those reflections of
them which lie encalmed in the deep bosom of the lake, there's not a
foot of pasture, not a shelf of vineyard, not a slope of forest where
the spring is not at work, dyeing the turf with gentians, starring it
with narcissuses, or drawing across it the first golden net-work of the
chestnut leaves; where the mere emerald of the grass is not in itself a
thing to refresh the very springs of being; where the peach-blossom and
the wild-cherry and the olive are not perpetually weaving patterns on
the blue, which ravish the very heart out of your breast. And alread