inued all
through Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, and down the Mediterranean to
Genoa and Civita Vecchia, and thence up the long, lonely, bandit-haunted
road to Rome, and in Rome, with exasperating aggravations, right up to
April, or later. My own first recollection of St. Peter's is that I
slid on the ice near one of the fountains in the piazza of that famous
edifice; and my father did the same, with a savage satisfaction, no
doubt, at thus proving that everything was what it ought not to be.
Either in London, or at some intermediate point between that and Paris,
he caught one of the heaviest colds that ever he had; and its feverish
and debilitating effects were still perceptible in May. "And this is
sunny Italy--and this is genial Rome!" he wrathfully exclaims. It was
like looking forward to the Garden of Eden all one's life, and going
to vast trouble and expense to get there, and, on arriving, finding the
renowned spot to be a sort of Montreal ice-palace. The palaces of Rome
are not naturally fitted to be ice-palaces, and the cold feels all the
colder in them by consequence.

But I am going too fast. The first thing my father did, after getting on
board the little Channel steamer, was to go down in the cabin and drink
a glass of brandy-and-water, hot, with sugar; and he afterwards remarked
that "this sea-passage was the only enjoyable part of the day." But the
wind cut like a scimitar, and he came on deck occasionally only--as when
I came plunging down the companion-way to tell him, with the pride of a
discoverer, that France was broad in sight, and the sun was shining
on it. "Oh!" exclaimed my mother, looking up from her, pale
discomfortableness on a sofa, with that radiant smile of hers, and
addressing poor Miss Shepard, who was still further under the sinister
influence of those historic alpine fluctuations which have upset so
many. "Oh, Ada, Julian says the sun is shining on France!" Ada never
stirred. She was the most amiable and philosophic of young ladies; but
if thought could visit her reeling brain at that moment, she probably
wondered why Providence had been so inconsiderate as to sever Britain
from its Gallic base in those old geologic periods before man was yet
born to sea-sickness.

Sunshine on the pale, smooth acclivities of France, and half a dozen
bluff-bowed fishing-boats, pitching to the swell, were all that was
notable on our trip across; and of Boulogne I remember nothing, except
the confused moun