cceeding morning, for Nice, where they would spend the
carnival: Lent falling very late this year.

The events of the ensuing months contain no musical history of any note.
Italy, still arrogant over her florid successes of the fifties, had
nothing but ridicule for the robust northern style which, to the ears
accustomed to simple melody, accompanied by the tum-ti-tum of
guitar-notes, that lightest dessert of the musical feast, was as the
howling of demons drowning the songs of an angel-choir. Ivan,
progressing slowly southward towards the Eternal City, found his name
everywhere unknown; so that he was obliged to depend for comfortable
rooms and ready service solely on his title. In Rome, to be sure, the
score of "Boris Teleken" was to be seen in a window or two, side by side
with those of "Lohengrin" or "Tannhaeuser." And there the society of
which Leoncavallo was president, gave him a dinner, at which the
conversation turned principally on the beauties of the Italian climate
and the glories of her historic past.

These things did not, however, wound that professional vanity of which
Ivan possessed so infinitesimal an amount. Never was man more thoroughly
inoculated by _amor Italiae_ than Gregoriev. During the first weeks of
his stay in Rome, guide-books and histories of the city were never out
of his hands; and he took up his pen only to write the promised weekly
letter to his cousin. Nor, as the spring advanced, and the tides of the
Roman populace, driven before the hot blast of the sirocco, began to
roll towards Frascati and the hills, would Ivan follow them. On the
contrary, he seemed to glory in the increasing heat of the unclouded
sun; and, when he had sent from him, one by one, every member of his
party save Piotr and Piotr's son, young Ivan, he began to prepare for a
more reckless journey, southward. While his anxious but obedient retinue
proceeded to Florence to prepare for him a winter abode, this madman,
attended by a courier and his two servants, whom neither expostulation
nor threat could drive from his side, set out for Naples, en
route--_horror incredibilis_, for Sicily!

During July and August Kashkine, staying, in a condition of enraged
resignation, in Berne, daily awaited a telegram announcing Ivan's mortal
illness or death. Instead, however, he merely received frequent
epistles from the subject of his fears, written in increasing ecstasy;
till finally, in the first week of September, came the climax