The piercing Tramontane came down upon us in the Bay of Naples with so fierce a blast that we doubted if we were not in Iceland, and were glad to make our escape to Rome, where we found an asylum in the Hotel de Minerve, not far from the Pantheon.  Many of the old palaces and convents of Italy have been transformed into hotels.  This was the ancient palace of the princes of Conti.  I was so captivated by the superb dining-room that the quality of the dinners made but a faint impression.  What! eat in the presence of all those marble goddesses, looking down upon us, serene and cold, as if from their thrones on the starry Olympus!  Or if I turned my eyes resolutely away from Juno, Ceres and Minerva, they were sure to be snared by the dancing-girls of Pompeii stepping out from the frescoed walls, or inextricably entangled in the lovely garlands of fruit and flowers that wound their mazy way along the borders.

One evening, while we were waiting for one of the endless courses of a table-d’hote dinner, my wandering eyes were caught by the most perfect human head I had ever seen.  It seemed that of the youthful Lord Byron, so well known in busts and engravings—­the same small head with high forehead and clustering dark-brown curls, the perfectly-moulded chin, the full, ripe beauty of the lips.  The eyes were a deep blue, but I thought them black at first, they were so darkly shaded by the thick black lashes.  I am convinced that Byron must have had just such eyes, for some of his biographers describe them as black and others as blue.  When he rose from the table I saw a slight, well-knit figure of exquisite proportions, like the Greek god of love. (Not Cupid with his vulgar arrows, but the true heavenly Eros.  I saw him once in the Museum at Naples, and again in the Vatican.  Is it Love, or Death, or Immortality?  I queried, and then I knew it was the three in one.) I soon learned that the youth whose ideal beauty had impressed me so strongly was the Count Francisco de Alvala of Toledo in Spain.  I fancy that his eyes were as easily attracted to beauty as mine, for the next day he was my vis-a-vis at table; not for the sake of looking at me, I was well aware, but on account of my beautiful neighbor.  However, he sought my acquaintance with the grave courtesy becoming a grandee of Spain, and naturally gained that of Miss St. Clair also.

It is the most natural thing in the world to make acquaintances in Rome.  People talk together of the things they have seen or wish to see:  they go to the same places by day, and in the evening they meet in the ladies’ parlor to compare their impressions.  The young count never failed to join us in the evening.  He had always something to show us—­prints of his home in Spain, articles of virtu that he had bought, sketches that he had made, for he was a good amateur artist.

A group of young people of different nations generally collected on these occasions, and the conversation often turned on the usages peculiar to their respective countries.