of dilating on
its beauties; and even the dreary sound of the chaunting from
neighbouring mass-performances, as it floated in at all the open
windows, which at first was a sad trouble, came to have its charm for
him. I remember a vivid account he gave me of a great festa on the hill
behind the house, when the people alternately danced under tents in the
open air and rushed to say a prayer or two in an adjoining church bright
with red and gold and blue and silver; so many minutes of dancing, and
of praying, in regular turns of each. But the view over into Genoa, on
clear bright days, was a never failing enjoyment. The whole city then,
without an atom of smoke, and with every possible variety of tower and
steeple pointing up into the sky, lay stretched out below his windows.
To the right and left were lofty hills, with every indentation in their
rugged sides sharply discernible; and on one side of the harbour
stretched away into the dim bright distance the whole of the Cornice,
its first highest range of mountains hoary with snow. Sitting down one
Spring day to write to me, he thus spoke of the sea and of the garden.
"Beyond the town is the wide expanse of the Mediterranean, as blue, at
this moment, as the most pure and vivid prussian blue on Mac's palette
when it is newly set; and on the horizon there is a red flush, seen
nowhere as it is here. Immediately below the windows are the gardens of
the house, with gold fish swimming and diving in the fountains; and
below them, at the foot of a steep slope, the public garden and drive,
where the walks are marked out by hedges of pink roses, which blush and
shine through the green trees and vines, close up to the balconies of
these windows. No custom can impair, and no description enhance, the
beauty of the scene."

All these and other glories and beauties, however, did not come to him
at once. They counted for little indeed when he first set himself
seriously to write. "Never did I stagger so upon a threshold before. I
seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left
Devonshire-terrace; and could take root no more until I return to it. . . .
Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they
played nectar, they wouldn't please me half so well as the West
Middlesex water-works at Devonshire-terrace." The subject for his new
Christmas story he had chosen, but he had not found a title for it, or
the machinery to work it with; when, at the moment of