still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his

strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive

forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth.  His

eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the

strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and

the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched.  Afterwards, as he

passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was

wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted

our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to

attest the authenticity of the American eagle.

III.

Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and

from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of

fortune.  I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian

comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton

jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me

one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all

the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived

through that misery.  It is one of the hard conditions of this state that

while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of

bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only

semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied.  As

often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the

salvation, his letter was to me, I failed.  But perhaps he would not have

understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I

could have given a resentment.  His message came after years of thwarted

endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something

in literature.  To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to

make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me

was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my

admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me

in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest

honor.  He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me

where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it

in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont.  There it

remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were

settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my

credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt

when wrong, that I had no money there.  The proof of my error was sent me

in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for"Recent Italian

Comedy."

It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but

then it was not a great deal of money.  The Review was as poor as it was

proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper.  But this was

more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column

for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated

from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a

dollar a thousand words.  However, I was richly content with that, and

would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.

Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on

to Messrs. Trubner& Co., in London.  They had consented to look at it to

oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before

his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it.