ummer, at Como in the late autumn, at Rome in the winter,
at Castellamare in the spring,--everywhere in its season, and
yet somehow--And so they began to try that last resource of bored
people,--places out of the season and places out of common resort,--and
it was thus that they found themselves at Florence in June, and in
Marlia in July.

CHAPTER III. TRAVELLING ACQUAINTANCE

About the same hour of the same evening which we have just chronicled,
a group of persons sat under some spreading chestnut-trees beside a
brawling little rivulet at the Bagni de Lucca. They were travellers,
chance acquaintances thrown together by the accidents of the road, and
entertained for each other those varied sentiments of like and dislike,
those mingled distrusts, suspicions, and beliefs, which, however
unconsciously to ourselves, are part of the education travelling
impresses, and which, when long persevered in, make up that acute but
not always amiable individual we call "an old traveller."

We are not about to present them all to our reader, and will only beg to
introduce to his notice a few of the notabilities then present. _Place
aux dames!_ then; and, first of all, we beg attention to the dark-eyed,
dark-haired, and very delicately featured woman, who, in half-mourning,
and with a pretty but fantastically costumed girl beside her, is working
at an embroidery-frame close to the river. She is a Mrs. Penthony
Morris, the wife or the widow--both opinions prevail--of a Captain
Penthony Morris, killed in a duel, or in India, or alive in the
Marshalsea, or at Baden-Baden, as may be. She is striking-looking,
admirably dressed, has a most beautiful foot, as you may see where
it rests upon the rail of the chair placed in front of her, and is,
altogether, what that very smartly dressed, much-beringed, and essenced
young gentleman near her has already pronounced her, "a stunning fine
woman." He is a Mr. Mosely, one of those unhappy young Londoners whose
family fame is ever destined to eclipse their own gentility, for he is
immediately recognized, and drawlingly do men inquire some twenty times
a day, "Ain't he a son of Trip and Mosely's, those fellows in Bond
Street?" Unhappy Trip and Mosely! why have you rendered yourselves so
great and illustrious? why have your tasteful devices in gauze, your
"sacrifices" in challis, your "last new things in grenadine," made such
celebrity around you, that Tom Mosely, "out for his travels," can no
m