e voice.

The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he
went on:--

"Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President?
No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his
hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the
Baptistery echo, 'We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of
Congress.' I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a
little,--thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, 'There is no other
echo in the world besides this. You are right.' I am unique," pursued
the cicerone, "for making this echo. But," he added with a sigh, "it has
been my ruin. The English have put me in all the guide-books, and
sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel
came here, I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says
the king, 'Pfui!'"--here the cicerone gave that sweeping, outward motion
with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject,--"'make me
the echo!' I was forced," concluded the cicerone, with a strong sense of
injury in his tone, "to howl half an hour without ceasing."

II.

COMO.

My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,--a vision that
remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July bring
out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. Then I behold
myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle that
seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute
Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite
pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon
it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and
crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a vast
heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred English tourists
blackening here and there upon the ruin, and contributing a smell of
burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene. All round
Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to the north rises Monte Rosa,
her dark head coifed with tantalizing snows as with a peasant's white
linen kerchief. And I am walking out upon that fuming plain as far as to
the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze horses may melt any minute; or
I am sweltering through the city's noonday streets, in search of Sant'
Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to
our hotel, "Alla Bella Venezia," and greeted o