whom it is his fortune to Journey in company for a brief space.

Strange enough, indeed, is that intimacy of travelling acquaintanceship
--familiar without friendship, frank without being cordial. Curious
pictures of life might be made from these groups thrown accidentally
together in a steamboat or railroad, at the gay watering-place, or the
little fishing-village in the bathing-season.

How free is all the intercourse of those who seem to have taken a vow
with themselves never to meet each other again! With what humorous zest
do they enjoy the oddities of this one, or the eccentricities of that,
making up little knots and cliques, to be changed or dissolved within
the day, and actually living on the eventualities of the hour, for
their confidences! The contrasts that would repel in ordinary life, the
disparities that would discourage, have actually invited intimacy;
and people agree to associate, even familiarly, with those whom, in the
recognized order of their daily existence, they would have as coldly
repelled.

There was little to bind those together whom we have represented as
seated under the chestnut-trees at the Bagni de Lucca. They entertained
their suspicions and distrusts and misgivings of each other to a liberal
extent; they wasted no charities in their estimate of each other; and
wherever posed by a difficulty, they did not lend to the interpretation
any undue amount of generosity; nay, they even went further, and argued
from little peculiarities of dress, manner, and demeanor, to the whole
antecedents of him they criticised, and took especial pains in their
moments of confidence to declare that they had only met Mr.------
for the first time at Ems, and never saw Mrs.------ till they were
overtaken by the snow-storm on the Splugen.

Such-like was the company who now, headed by the obsequious butler,
strolled leisurely through the spacious saloons of the Villa Caprini.

Who is there, in this universal vagabondage, has not made one of such
groups? Where is the man that has not strolled, "John Murray" in hand,
along his Dresden, his Venice, or his Rome; staring at ceilings, and
gazing ruefully at time-discolored frescos,--grieved to acknowledge to
his own heart how little he could catch of a connoisseur's enthusiasm
or an antiquarian's fervor,--wondering within himself wherefore he could
not feel like that other man whose raptures he was reading, and with
sore misgivings that some nice sense had been omi