Fascinated by Dalrymple’s description of his villa and the life he led in it, Hortense and I made up our minds some few weeks after our marriage, to visit that part of Italy—­perhaps, in case we were much pleased with it, to settle there, for at least a few years.  So I prepared once more to leave my father’s house; this time to let it, for I knew that I should never live in it again.

It took some weeks to clear the old place out.  The thing was necessary; yet I felt as if it were a kind of sacrilege.  To disturb the old dust upon the library-shelves and select such books as I cared to keep; to sort and destroy all kinds of hoarded papers; to ransack desks that had never been unlocked since the hands that last closed them were laid to rest for ever, constituted my share of the work.  Hortense superintended the rest.  As for the household goods, we resolved to keep nothing, save a few old family portraits and my father’s plate, some of which had descended to us through two or three centuries.

While yet in this unsettled state, with the house all in confusion and the time appointed for our journey drawing nearer and nearer day by day, a strange thing happened.

At the end of the garden, encroaching partly upon a corner of it, and opening into the lane that bounded it on the other side of the hedge, stood the stable belonging to the house.

It had been put to no use since my father’s time, and was now so thoroughly out of repair that I resolved to have it pulled down and rebuilt before letting it to strangers.  In the meantime, I went down there one morning with a workman before the work of demolition was begun.

We had some difficulty to get in, for the lock and hinges were rusted, and the floor within was choked with fallen rubbish.  At length we forced an entrance.  I thought I had never seen a more dreary interior.  My father’s old chaise was yet standing there, with both wheels off.  The mouldy harness was dropping to pieces on the walls.  The beams were festooned with cobwebs.  The very ladder leading to the loft above was so rotten that I scarcely dared trust to it for a footing.

Having trusted to it, however, I found myself in a still more ruinous and dreary hole.  The posts supporting the roof were insecure; the tiles were all displaced overhead; and the rafters showed black and bare against the sky in many places.  In one corner lay a heap of mouldy straw, and at the farther end, seen dimly through the darkness, a pile of old lumber, and—­by Heaven! the pagoda-canopy of many colors, and the little Chevalier’s Conjuring Table!

I could scarcely believe my eyes.  My poor Hortense!  Here, at last, were some relics of her father; but found in how strange a place, and by how strange a chance!