A professor of mine, one of those men who hugs one saying in life, thereon building a false reputation for wisdom, was in the habit of saying, “Accidents are the spice of life.” As it is his only contribution approaching the threshold of the philosopher’s goddess that I heard in the five years of his weary cant, I willingly record it. To me it expresses a truth, albeit five years is a long hunt. Illustrations sometimes improve the text, and this brief paper, by the way, is but a design to enhance the professor’s. It was an accident, pure and simple, that made me wend my way to the Rialto, there to lean against the parapet watching some probably great unknown painting, something that might be anything the imagination cared to conjure up. It was an accident that made an English divine ask me in sputtering French what the painter was working on. It was an accident that made me inform him in common American English that my telescope, by some accidental foresight, was at my lodgings. The divine was a genial man, one of those breaths of spring that we sometimes meet in life. Invited to my lodgings, he fancied a few tiny volumes of the apostle of “sweetness and light” to pass those hours that hang heavily, in all lands save Eden. In my pocket he thrust, as he remarked, “a no ordinary book, one that will hold you as in a vice.” This proceeding was rather remarkable, had he not in the same breath invited me to take a gondola to one of the isles, and there enjoy the pocketed volume. It is delightful to meet a genuine man, speaking your mother-tongue, after weary months of Italian delving. To the little isle we went, an isle known to readers of Byron, as the place where he labored long under Armenian monks to learn their guttural tongue, the monks say “with success.” I knew nothing, in those days, of destructive criticism. After a tour in the monastery, of the ordinary Italian type, I lay down on the green sward under the beneficent shade of a huge palm, wrapped in the odors of a thousand flowers that sleepily nodded to the music of the creamy breakers on the rocky shore. Books have their atmosphere as well as men. Deprive them of it, and many a charm is lost. I drew the little volume from my pocket, and there in that atmosphere, akin to the one in which it was begot, I read of life in summer seas, life that floats along serene and sweet as a bell-note on a calm, frosty night, life “Where the deep blue ocean never replies To the sibilant voice of the spray.”