ness, wandered among narrow streets, between blue, red, and yellow
houses, stopping at times to look at some sunny upper window hung about
with clusters of _sorbe_ and _pomidori_. By this time he had won
appetite for a more substantial meal. In the kind of eating-house that
suited his mood, an obscure _bettola_ probably never yet patronized by
Englishman, he sat down to a dish of maccheroni and a bottle of red
wine. At another table were some boatmen, who, after greeting him, went
on with their lively talk in a dialect of which he could understand but
few words.

Having eaten well and drunk still better, he lit a cigar and sauntered
forth to find a place for dreaming. Chance led him to the patch of
public garden, with its shrubs and young palm-trees, which looks over
the little port. Here, when once he had made it clear to a succession
of rhetorical boatmen that he was not to be tempted on to the sea, he
could sit as idly and as long as he liked, looking across the sapphire
bay and watching the bright sails glide hither and thither With the
help of sunlight and red wine, he could imagine that time had gone back
twenty centuries--that this was not Pozzuoli, but Puteoli; that over
yonder was not Baia, but Baiae; that the men among the shipping talked
to each other in Latin, and perchance of the perishing Republic.

But Mallard's fancy would not dwell long in remote ages As he watched
the smoke curling up from his cigar, he slipped back into the world of
his active being, and made no effort to obscure the faces that looked
upon him. They were those of his mother and sisters, thought of whom
carried him to the northern island, now grim, cold, and sunless beneath
its lowering sky. These relatives still lived where his boyhood had
been passed, a life strangely unlike his own, and even alien to his
sympathies, but their house was still all that he could call home. Was
it to be always the same?

Fifteen years now, since, at the age of twenty, he painted his first
considerable landscape, a tract of moorland on the borders of
Lancashire and Yorkshire. This was his native ground. At Sowerby
Bridge, a manufacturing town, which, like many others in the same part
of England, makes a blot of ugliness on country in itself sternly
beautiful, his father had settled as the manager of certain rope-works.
Mr. Mallard's state was not unprosperous, for he had invented a process
put in use by his employers, and derived benefit from it. He wa