tood.

When I was again alone, after several rehearsals I found a way of
accommodating the human form to the hybrid receptacle, and was amazed
at its luxuriousness. The secret of this lay in the sheet, which was
fragrant of lavender, and protected the body from contact with a cold,
base metal which hundreds of other bodies must have touched before.

"'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands," might be said
of a hotel bath-tub as well as of a stolen purse; and having once
known the linen-lined bath of Aosta, I was promptly spoiled for
common, un-lined tubs. This was a lesson not to form hasty opinions;
but being a normal man, I shall no doubt continue to do so until the
day of my death.

The Boy and I broke our fast together on the loggia, which was even
more entertaining as a _salle-a-manger_ by morning than by night. The
coffee was exquisite; the hot, foaming milk had but lately been drawn
from its original source, a little biscuit-coloured Alderney with the
pleading eyes of that fair nymph stricken to heiferhood by jealous
Juno. The strawberries and figs came to the table from the hotel
garden, and so did the luscious roses, which filled a bowl in the
centre of our small white table.

This was Arcadia. The very simplicities of the hotel endeared it to
our hearts, and there was no real comfort lacking which we could have
obtained in London or in Paris.

After breakfast we set off with our cameras to the town, a walk of ten
or fifteen minutes. It was strange, in this pilgrimage of mine, how
often I found myself running back into the Feudal or Middle Ages, as
far removed from the familiar bustle of modern days as if an iron door
had been shut and padlocked behind me.

There was little of the Twentieth Century in Aosta (named by Augustus
the "Rome of the Alps"), except the monument to "Le Roi Chasseur," and
the bookshops, which seemed extraordinarily well supplied with the
best literature of all countries. The type of face we met was
primitive; scarcely one which would have been out of place on some old
Roman coin. Here, at the end of a narrow, shadowed street, where St.
Anselm first saw the light (it must have been with difficulty) we came
upon a magnificent archway, built to do honour to Augustus Caesar's
defeat of the brave Salasses, four and twenty years before the world
had a Saviour. A few steps further on, and we were under the majestic
mass of the Porta Pretoria; or we were crossing a Roman bri