mated through my consulate, on
the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my
own countrymen there. At Rome too it was not much better.
But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this
secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks,
and am really remote. I like my present residence
immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence,
and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each
member of the family, including servants, has a separate
suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of
upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring
expeditions. At one end of the house there is a moss-grown
tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was
confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being
burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I
hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a
month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a
romance, which I have in my head, ready to be written out."

This romance was _Transformation_, which he wrote out during the
following winter in Rome, and re-wrote during the several months that
he spent in England, chiefly at Leamington, before returning to
America. The Villa Montauto figures, in fact, in this tale as the
castle of Monte-Beni, the patrimonial dwelling of the hero. "I take
some credit to myself," he wrote to the same friend, on returning to
Rome, "for having sternly shut myself up for an hour or two every day,
and come to close grips with a romance which I have been trying to
tear out of my mind." And later in the same winter he says--"I shall
go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well
contented there.... If I were but a hundred times richer than I am,
how very comfortable I could be! I consider it a great piece of good
fortune that I have had experience of the discomforts and miseries of
Italy, and did not go directly home from England. Anything will seem
like a Paradise after a Roman winter." But he got away at last, late
in the spring, carrying his novel with him, and the book was
published, after, as I say, he had worked it over, mainly during some
weeks that he passed at the little watering-place of Redcar, on the
Yorkshire coast, in February of the following year. It was issued
primarily in England; the American edition immediately followed. It is