[The “Indian summer” to which he looked forward was not to be reached without passing through a season of more than equinoctial storms and tempests.  His career had reached its highest point only to be threatened with a speedy close.  He himself did not exceed more than two or three years’ longer lease of life, and went by easy stages to Venice, where he spent eight days.] “No place,” [he writes,] “could be better fitted for a poor devil as sick in body and mind as I was when I got there.”]

Venice itself [he writes to Dr. Foster] just suited me.  I chartered a capital gondolier, and spent most of my time exploring the Lagoons.  Especially I paid a daily visit to the Lido, and filled my lungs with the sea air, and rejoiced in the absence of stinks.  For Venice is like her population (at least the male part of it), handsome but odorous.  Did you notice how handsome the young men are and how little beauty there is among the women?

I stayed eight days in Venice and then returned by easy stages first to Padua, where I wanted to see Giotto’s work, then to Verona, and then here (Lugano).  Verona delighted me more than anything I have seen, and we will spend two other days there as we go back.

As for myself, I really have no positive complaint now.  I eat well and I sleep well, and I should begin to think I was malingering, if it were not for a sort of weariness and deadness that hangs about me, accompanied by a curious nervous irritability.

I expect that this is the upshot of the terrible anxiety I have had about my daughter M—.

I would give a great deal to be able to escape facing the wedding, for my nervous system is in the condition of that of a frog under opium.

But my R. must not go off without the paternal benediction.

[For the first three weeks he was alone, his wife staying to make preparations for the third daughter’s wedding on November 6th, for which occasion he was to return, afterwards taking her abroad with him.  Unfortunately, just as he started, news was brought him at the railway station that his second daughter, whose brilliant gifts and happy marriage seemed to promise everything for her future, had been stricken by the beginnings of an insidious and, as he too truly feared, hopeless disease.  Nothing could have more retarded his own recovery.  It was a bitter grief, referred to only in his most intimate letters, and, indeed, for a time kept secret even from the other members of the family.  Nothing was to throw a shade over the brightness of the approaching wedding.

But on his way home, he writes of that journey:—­]

I had to bear my incubus, not knowing what might come next, until I reached Luzern, when I telegraphed for intelligence, and had my mind set at ease as to the measures which were being adopted.

I am a tough subject, and have learned to bear a good deal without crying out; but those four-and-twenty hours between London and Luzern have taught me that I have yet a good deal to learn in the way of “grinning and bearing.”