s in passes of the Pampas; of homes where the civilized man had
never seen a brother nor heard a native tongue. It is in vain I endeavor
to recall anything like a connected narrative. All that I can well
remember is the great hold the characters had taken in my mind; how they
peopled the landscape around me, and followed me wherever I went.

This was in autumn. As winter drew nigh we moved into an Italian
city, much frequented by foreigners, and especially the resort of our
countrymen. The new life of this place and the interest they excited,
so totally unlike all that I had left at my little villa, effected a
complete revolution in my thoughts, utterly routing the belief I had
indulged in as to the characters of my story, and the incidents in which
they displayed themselves. Up to this all my efforts had been, as it
were, to refresh my mind as to a variety of events and people I had once
known, and to try if I could not recall certain situations which had
interested me. Now the spell was broken, all the charm of the illusion
gone, and I awoke to the dreary consciousness of my creatures being mere
shadows, and their actions as unreal as themselves.

There is a sort of intellectual bankruptcy in such awakenings; and
I know of few things so discouraging as this sudden revulsion from
dream-land to the cold _terra firma_ of unadorned fact.

There was little in the city we now lived in to harmonize with
"romance." It was, in fact, all that realism could accomplish with the
aids of every taste and passion of modern society. That this life of
present-day dissipation should be enacted in scenes where every palace
and every street, every monument, and indeed every name recalled a
glorious past, may not impossibly have heightened the enjoyment of the
drama, but most unquestionably it vulgarized the actors.

Instead of the Orinoco and its lands of feathery palms, I had now
before me the Arno and its gay crowds of loungers, the endless tide of
equipages, and the strong pulse-beat of an existence that even, in the
highways of life, denotes passion and emotion.

What I had of a plan was lost to me from that hour. I was again in the
whirlpool of active existence, and the world around me was deep--triple
deep--in all cases of loving and hating, and plotting and gambling, of
intriguing, countermining, and betraying, as very polite people would
know how to do: occupations to watch, which inspire an intensity of
interest unknown in an