existence with palette, pencil or pen, may be the least capable of
practising them. Enough! of all the wicked calumnies which would
represent the doughty Salvator to have been a remorseless robber and
murderer, I do not believe a single word, and I hope you, dear reader,
maybe of the same opinion, or I should have to cherish a certain amount
of doubt whether you would quite believe what I am going to tell you
about him.

For--as I hope--my Salvator will appear to you as a man burning and
coruscating with life and fire, but also endowed with the most charming
and delightful nature, and often capable of controlling that bitter
irony which--in him, as in all men of depth of character--takes form of
itself from observation of life. Moreover, it is known that Salvator
was as good a poet and musician as a painter, his inward genius
displaying itself in rays thrown in various directions. I repeat that I
have no belief in his having had anything to do with the crimes of Mas'
Aniello; I rather hold to the opinion that he was driven from Naples to
Rome by the terror of the time, and arrived there as a fugitive at the
very time of Mas' Aniello's fall.

There was nothing very remarkable about his dress, and, with a little
purse containing a few zecchini in his pocket, he slipped in at the
gate just as night was falling. Without exactly knowing how, he came to
the Piazza Navoni, where, in happier days, he had formerly lived in a
fine house close to the Palazzo Pamphili. Looking up at the great
shining windows, glittering and sparkling in the moonbeams, he cried,
with some humour, "Ha! it will cost many a canvass ere I can establish
my studio there again." Just as he said so he suddenly felt as if
paralysed in all his limbs, and, at the same time, feeble and powerless
in a manner which he had never before experienced in all his life. As
he sank down on the stone steps of the portico of the house he murmured
between his teeth, "Shall I ever want canvasses? It seems to me that
_I_ have done with them."

A cold, cutting night-wind was blowing through the streets; Salvator
felt he must try and get a shelter. He rose with difficulty, tottered
painfully forward, reached the Corso, and turned into Strada
Vergognona. There he stopped before a small house, only two windows
wide, where lived a widow with two daughters. They had taken him as a
lodger for a small sum when first he came to Rome, known and cared for
by nobody, and he hoped he