of artificial flowers. The funeral was
a mock funeral--the banquet a stage feast of painted fruits and empty
goblets! Alas! we cannot undo that foolish past. We may only hope to
blot it out with after records of high, and wise, and tender things.
Thus it is that the young man's heart is like the precious palimpsest of
old. He first of all defiles it with idle anacreontics in praise of love
and wine; but, erasing these by-and-by with his own pious hand, he
writes it over afresh with chronicles of a pure and holy passion, and
dedicates it to the fair saint of all his orisons.

Dalrymple and his wife are now settled in Italy, having purchased a
villa in the neighborhood of Spezzia, where they live in great
retirement. In their choice of such retirement they are influenced by
more than one good reason. In the first place, the death of the Vicomte
de Caylus was an event likely to be productive of many unpleasant
consequences to one who had deprived the French government of so
distinguished an officer. In the next, Dalrymple is a poor man, and his
wife is no longer rich; so that Italy agrees with their means as well as
with their tastes. Lastly, they love each other so well that they never
weary of their solitude, nor care to barter away their blue Italian
skies and solemn pine-woods for the glittering unrest of society.

Fascinated by Dalrymple's description of his villa and the life he led
in it, Hortense and I made up our minds some few weeks after our
marriage, to visit that part of Italy--perhaps, in case we were much
pleased with it, to settle there, for at least a few years. So I
prepared once more to leave my father's house; this time to let it, for
I knew that I should never live in it again.

It took some weeks to clear the old place out. The thing was necessary;
yet I felt as if it were a kind of sacrilege. To disturb the old dust
upon the library-shelves and select such books as I cared to keep; to
sort and destroy all kinds of hoarded papers; to ransack desks that had
never been unlocked since the hands that last closed them were laid to
rest for ever, constituted my share of the work. Hortense superintended
the rest. As for the household goods, we resolved to keep nothing, save
a few old family portraits and my father's plate, some of which had
descended to us through two or three centuries.

While yet in this unsettled state, with the house all in confusion and
the time appointed for our journey drawing near