It was a moment of mingled twilight and moonlight. A glittering path lay from the Cadenabia shore to the Villa Melzi opposite; and, hailing an old boatman, we glided up that golden way to the vine-clustered balcony which I knew at Bellagio under the moon. The air was calm and bland. The water was oily and gleaming. The mountains stood around us dusky and vast in the ghostly light as we went silently over the lake. We landed, and took tea upon the balcony at the hotel whose only rival in Europe for romantic picturesqueness is the _Trois Couronnes_ at Vevey upon the Lake of Geneva. The "magic casement" of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" was ours at Bellagio. The lake murmured with music everywhere. We saw the boats full of people singing choruses, then talking and laughing as they floated away. The sound of instruments, the throb of strings, the sad, mellow peal of horns, filled the air; and long after midnight a band was still playing in the village. About midnight Edmund and Frank bathed in the lake. Their figures were white as marble in the black water, and they struck the calm into sparkles of splendor as they swam out.... The boat which we took to descend the lake to the town of Como had three rowers. The chief, whom I remembered from last year, groaned bitterly over the war, because there were so few strangers. "Trade, you see, is conservative," said I to Edmund. "Como is conservatism itself," he tranquilly replied. "We live upon the strangers," continued Giovanni Battista, the boatman, with a simplicity and truthfulness that made us laugh; "and this year nobody comes. The Italians are driven away, and the foreigners are frightened." He had not been to Como for two months, although his business is plying upon the lake, and his winter depends upon his summer. "The war is bad for all of us," he said, "and after all the Germans are back again." ... Farther on, and nearer Como, the shore is covered with handsome villas, of which the most remarkable for beauty and fame are Madame Pasta's, a magnificent estate, and Taglioni's, which is not yet finished, and the stately Odescalchi. As we passed Madame Pasta's the old boatman shrugged his shoulders and trilled with his voice. "That's the way the money came there," he said, contemptuously. He was clearly of opinion that only the decaying and decayed families whose names he had heard all his life, and whose ancestors his fathers knew, were to be spoken of with praise. "Whose villa is that?" asked I. "Eh! che! nobody's," he replied; "if it were anybody's we should know." At five o'clock we rounded the point over which I had stood upon the height the year before on a still September afternoon hearing the girls sing in a boat below, and so came to the shore at Como.