e went, excessively
dirty and neglected, but in no other respect different from the "villas"
in its neighborhood. The front garden door, after I had rang twice, was
opened by a yellow-faced, suspicious old foreigner, dressed in worn-out
clothes, and completely and consistently dirty all over, from top to
toe. On mentioning my name and business, this old man led me across a
weedy, neglected garden, and admitted me into the house. At the first
step into the passage, I was surrounded by books. Closely packed in
plain wooden shelves, they ran all along the wall on either side to the
back of the house; and when I looked up at the carpetless staircase, I
saw nothing but books again, running all the way up the wall, as far as
my eye could reach. "Here is the Artist Painter!" cried the old servant,
throwing open one of the parlor doors, before I had half done looking at
the books, and signing impatiently to me to walk into the room.

Books again! all round the walls, and all over the floor--among them a
plain deal table, with leaves of manuscript piled high on every part of
it--among the leaves a head of long, elfish white hair covered with a
black skull-cap, and bent down over a book--above the head a sallow,
withered hand shaking itself at me as a sign that I must not venture to
speak just at that moment--on the tops of the bookcases glass vases
full of spirits of some kind, with horrible objects floating in the
liquid--dirt on the window panes, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, dust
springing up in clouds under my intruding feet. These were the things I
observed on first entering the study of Professor Tizzi.

After I had waited for a minute or so, the shaking hand stopped,
descended with a smack on the nearest pile of manuscript, seized the
book that the head had been bending over, and flung it contemptuously
to the other end of the room. "I've refuted _you,_ at any rate!" said
Professor Tizzi, looking with extreme complacency at the cloud of dust
raised by the fall of the rejected volume.

He turned next to me. What a grand face it was! What a broad, white
forehead---what fiercely brilliant black eyes--what perfect regularity
and refinement in the other features; with the long, venerable hair,
framing them in, as it were, on either side! Poor as I was, I felt
that I could have painted his portrait for nothing. Titian, Vandyke,
Valasquez--any of the three would have paid him to sit to them!

"Accept my humblest excuses,