wonder how they can really be
shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of. I
got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one night, and staid lost in that
labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all
alike, until toward three o'clock in the morning. It was a pleasant
night and at first there were a good many people abroad, and there were
cheerful lights about. Later, I grew accustomed to prowling about
mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and interesting myself with
coming around corners expecting to find the hotel staring me in the face,
and not finding it doing any thing of the kind. Later still, I felt
tired. I soon felt remarkably tired. But there was no one abroad, now
--not even a policeman. I walked till I was out of all patience, and very
hot and thirsty. At last, somewhere after one o'clock, I came
unexpectedly to one of the city gates. I knew then that I was very far
from the hotel. The soldiers thought I wanted to leave the city, and
they sprang up and barred the way with their muskets. I said:

"Hotel d'Europe!"

It was all the Italian I knew, and I was not certain whether that was
Italian or French. The soldiers looked stupidly at each other and at me,
and shook their heads and took me into custody. I said I wanted to go
home. They did not understand me. They took me into the guard-house and
searched me, but they found no sedition on me. They found a small piece
of soap (we carry soap with us, now,) and I made them a present of it,
seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity. I continued to say Hotel
d'Europe, and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young
soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something. He said he
knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent
him away with me. We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it
appeared to me, and then he got lost. He turned this way and that, and
finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder
of the morning trying to find the city gate again. At that moment it
struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way.
It was the hotel!

It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there
that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the
government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly
and from country to city, so that th