After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our heated senses like dew.  How far we have left Milan behind!  On the lake lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves.  Hints of habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water’s edge, and we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline,—­and some one mouths that well-worn fustian.  The rags of sentimentality flutter from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy—­like the wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.

The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and shadows gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver.  There is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied hearts we fall asleep in our room there.  The steamer starts for the head of the lake at eight o’clock in the morning, and we go on board at that hour.

There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the after part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us.  A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night.  We reach a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on a scene and shifted out of sight at a theatre.  But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many-curving lake.  We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river,—­like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current.  Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more.  Many little towns climb the heights half-way, and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives, peasants’ houses scale them to the crest.  They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow.  So cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark below, we should have had no current of air.  A burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley,—­out of which a marshy stream oozes into the lake,—­and on the snow-crowned hills upon the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at the landing.