danger in his profession of a gallant, the
Englishman seldom, in those foreign lands, went from home at night
without the protection of pistols. At the sight of firearms, the
ruffians felt their courage evaporate; they fled from their prey; and
the Englishman assisted Volktman in conveying the Italian to her home.
But the terror of the encounter operated fatally on a delicate frame;
and within three weeks from that night Volktman was a widower.

His marriage had been blessed with but one daughter, who at the time of
this catastrophe was about eight years of age. His love for his child in
some measure reconciled Volktman to life; and as the shock of the event
subsided, he returned with a pertinacity which was now subjected to no
interruption, to his beloved occupations and mysterious researches.
One visitor alone found it possible to win frequent ingress to his
seclusion; it was the young English man. A sentiment of remorse at the
jealous feelings he had experienced, and for which his wife, though
an Italian, had never given him even the shadow of a cause, had
softened--into a feeling rendered kind by the associations of the
deceased, and a vague desire to atone to her for an acknowledged
error,--the dislike he had at first conceived against the young man.
This was rapidly confirmed by the gentle and winning manners of the
stranger, by his attentions to the deceased, to whom he had sent an
English physician of great skill, and, as their acquaintance expanded,
by the animated interest which he testified in the darling theories of
the astrologer.

It happened also that Volktman's mother had been the daughter of Scotch
parents. She had taught him the English tongue; and it was the only
language, save his own, which he spoke as a native. This circumstance
tended greatly to facilitate his intercourse with the traveller; and
he found in the society of a man ardent, sensitive, melancholy, and
addicted to all abstract contemplation, a pleasure which, among the
keen, but uncultivated intellects of Italy, he had never enjoyed.

Frequently, then, came the young Englishman to the lone house on the
Appia Via; and the mysterious and unearthly conversation of the starry
visionary afforded to him, who had early learned to scrutinise the
varieties of his kind, a strange delight, heightened by the contrast it
presented to the worldly natures with which he usually associated, and
the commonplace occupations of a life in pursuit of pleas