His face brightened and he answered briskly: “Calderon’s _Magico Prodigioso_. I am translating some passages in it.” “Oh, read it to us!” Immediately Shelley, shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents that could not interest him, began to translate from the open book, in so masterly a manner with such perfection of form that Trelawny no longer doubted his identity. A dead silence followed the reading. Trelawny looked up and seeing no one asked, “Where is he?” “Who?” said Jane. “Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit no one knows when or where.” The next day it was Shelley himself who took Trelawny to call on Byron. Here the surroundings were very different. A large marble hall, a giant staircase, powdered footmen and surly dogs. Trelawny, like every one else, saw in Byron’s external appearance all the traits with which imagination endows genius, but the great man’s conversation struck him as commonplace. He seemed too to be playing a part, and an out-of-date one—that of a rake-hell of the Regency. He told stories about actors, boxers and hard-drinkers, and of how he had swum the Hellespont. Of this exploit he was very proud. At three the horses were brought round. After riding for a couple of hours, the party dismounted at a small _podere_, pistols were sent for, a cane was stuck into the ground behind the house and a piece of money placed in a slit at the top of the cane. Byron, Shelley and Trelawny fired at fifteen paces, and their firing was pretty equal. Each time the cane or the coin was hit by one or the other. Trelawny was pleased to see that despite his feminine appearance, Shelley could hold his own with men. On the way back they talked poetry, and Trelawny cited a couplet from _Don Juan_ as an example of felicitous rhyming. Byron, won over, brought his horse round to trot beside him. “Confess now,” said he, “you expected to find me a Timon of Athens or a Timur the Tartar, and you’re surprised to find a man of the world—never in earnest—laughing at all things mundane?” Then he muttered as to himself: “The world is a bundle of hay, Mankind are the asses who pull.” * * * Trelawny returned with Shelley and Mary. “How different Byron is to anything one expects of him!” said he. “There’s no mystery about him at all. On the contrary he talks too freely, and says things he had much better not say. He seems as jealous and impulsive as a woman, and maybe is more dangerous.” “Mary,” said Shelley, “Trelawny has found out Byron already. How stupid we were—how long it took us.” “The reason is,” said Mary, “that Trelawny lives with the living, and we live with the dead.” CHAPTER XXXIII THE DISCIPLES