I approved Césarine’s choice; and I was particularly glad she had pronounced for an hotel, where all is plain sailing, instead of advising a furnished villa, the arrangements for which would naturally have fallen in large part upon the shoulders of the wretched secretary.  As in any case I have to do three hours’ work a day, I feel that such additions to my normal burden may well be spared me.  I tipped Césarine half a sovereign, in fact, for her judicious choice.  Césarine glanced at it on her palm in her mysterious, curious, half-smiling way, and pocketed it at once with a “Merci, monsieur!” that had a touch of contempt in it.  I always fancy Césarine has large ideas of her own on the subject of tipping, and thinks very small beer of the modest sums a mere secretary can alone afford to bestow upon her.

The great peculiarity of Meran is the number of schlosses (I believe my plural is strictly irregular, but very convenient to English ears) which you can see in every direction from its outskirts.  A statistical eye, it is supposed, can count no fewer than forty of these picturesque, ramshackled old castles from a point on the Küchelberg.  For myself, I hate statistics (except as an element in financial prospectuses), and I really don’t know how many ruinous piles Isabel and Amelia counted under Césarine’s guidance; but I remember that most of them were quaint and beautiful, and that their variety of architecture seemed positively bewildering.  One would be square, with funny little turrets stuck out at each angle; while another would rejoice in a big round keep, and spread on either side long, ivy-clad walls and delightful bastions.  Charles was immensely taken with them.  He loves the picturesque, and has a poet hidden in that financial soul of his. (Very effectually hidden, though, I am ready to grant you.) From the moment he came he felt at once he would love to possess a castle of his own among these romantic mountains.  “Seldon!” he exclaimed contemptuously.  “They call Seldon a castle!  But you and I know very well, Sey, it was built in 1860, with sham antique stones, for Macpherson of Seldon, at market rates, by Cubitt and Co., worshipful contractors of London.  Macpherson charged me for that sham antiquity a preposterous price, at which one ought to procure a real ancestral mansion.  Now, these castles are real.  They are hoary with antiquity.  Schloss Tyrol is Romanesque—­tenth or eleventh century.” (He had been reading it up in Baedeker.) “That’s the sort of place for me!—­tenth or eleventh century.  I could live here, remote from stocks and shares, for ever; and in these sequestered glens, recollect, Sey, my boy, there are no Colonel Clays, and no arch Madame Picardets!”

As a matter of fact, he could have lived there six weeks, and then tired for Park Lane, Monte Carlo, Brighton.