we dip our pen into the cocked hat of the brave little bronze warrior who has fed us many a year with ink from the place where his brains ought to be.  Pausing before we proceed to paper, we look around on our household gods.  The coal bursts into crackling fits of merriment, as we thrust the poker between the iron ribs of the grate.  It seems to say, in the jolliest possible manner of which it is capable, “Oh, go no more a-roaming, a-roaming, across the windy sea!” How odd it seems to be sitting here again, listening to the old clock out there in the entry!  Often we seemed to hear it during the months that have flown away, when we knew that “our ancient” was standing sentinel for Time in another hemisphere.  One night, dark and stormy on the Mediterranean, as we lay wakeful and watchful in the little steamer that was bearing us painfully through the noisy tempest towards Saint Peter’s and the Colosseum, suddenly, above the tumult of the voyage, our household monitor began audibly and regularly, we thought, to mark the seconds.  Then it must have been only fancy.  Now it is something more, and we know that our mahogany friend is really wagging his brassy beard just outside the door.  We remember now, as we lay listening that rough night at sea, how Milton’s magic sounding line came to us beating a sad melody with the old clock’s imagined tramp,—­

  “The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint.”

Let the waves bark to-night far out on “the desolate, rainy seas,”—­the old clock is all right in the entry!

Landed, and all safe at last! our much-abused, lock-broken, unhinged portmanteau unpacked and laid ignobly to rest under the household eaves!  Stay a moment,—­let us pitch our inky passport into the fire.  How it writhes and grows black in the face!  And now it will trouble its owner no more forever.  It was a foolish, extravagant companion, and we are glad to be rid of it.  One little blazing fragment lifts itself out of the flame, and we can trace on the smouldering relic the stamp of Austria.  Go back again into the grate, and perish with the rest, dark blot!

“We look round our quiet apartment, and wonder if it be all true, this getting home again.  We stir the fire once more to assure ourself that we are not somewhere else,—­that the street outside our window is not known as Jermyn Street in the Haymarket,—­or the Via Babuino near the Pincio,—­or Princes Street, near the Monument.  How do we determine that we are not dreaming, and that we shall not wake up to-morrow morning and find ourself on the Arno?  Perhaps we are not really back again where there are no

  “Eremites and friars,
  White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery.”

Perhaps we are a flamingo, a banyan-tree, or a mandarin.  But there stands the tea-cup, and our identity is sure!