n this world whose
definition of a gentleman is "one who does whatever pleases _us_!"

In Florence we went directly to the Hotel d'Europe in the Via
Tuornabuoni, where my Indian blanket vanished even while entering the
hotel, and surrounded only by the servants to whom the luggage had been
confided. As the landlord manifested great disgust for me whenever I
mentioned such a trifle, and as the porter and the rest declared that
they would answer soul and body for one another's honesty, I had to grin
and bear it. I really wonder sometimes that there are not more boarders,
who, like Benvenuto Cellini, set fire to hotels or cut up the bedclothes
before leaving them. That worthy, having been treated not so badly as I
was at the Hotel d'Europe and at another in Florence, cut to pieces the
sheets of his bed, galloped away hastily, and from the summit of a
distant hill had the pleasure of seeing the landlord in a rage. Now
people write to the _Times_, and "cut up" the whole concern. It all
comes to the same thing.

In Florence I saw much of an old New York friend, the now late Lorimer
Graham. When he died, Swinburne wrote a poem on him. He was a man of
great culture and refined manner. There was something sympathetic in him
which drew every one irresistibly into liking. It was his instinct to be
kind and thoughtful to every one. He gave me letters to Swinburne, Lord
Houghton, and others.

I made an acquaintance by chance in Florence whom I can never forget: for
he was a character. One day while in the Uffizi Gallery engaged in
studying the great Etruscan vase, now in the Etruscan Museum, a stranger
standing by me said, "Does not this seem to you like a mysterious book
written in forgotten characters? Is not a collection of such vases like
a library?"

"On that hint I spake." "I see," I replied, "you refer to the so-called
Etruscan Library which an Englishman has made, and which contains only
vases and inscriptions in that now unknown tongue of Etruria. And
indeed, when we turn over the pages of Inghirami, Gherard, and Gori,
Gray, or Dennis, it does indeed really seem--But what do you really think
the old Etruscan language truly was?"

"Look here, my friend," cried the stranger in broad Yankee, "I guess I'm
barkin' up the wrong tree. I calculated to tell _you_ something, but
you're ahead of me."

We both laughed and became very good friends. He lived at our hotel, and
had been twenty-five years in Italy, an