The barber was a beautifully smiling, richly languaged Sicilian, and he responded in an elegant sympathy with my dismay: “Sì; andato. Me ne vado anch’io, fra pochi giorni. M’impazzo quì. Guardi!” (Yes; gone. I am going, I myself, in a few days. I madden here. Look!) With the last word he touched my arm lightly to make me turn, and pointed to the long plank footway, stilted upon the marshes from one to the other side of the railroad curve, and leading to the boat-house on the bay beyond their wide levels. Midway of this I saw a solitary figure, whose lank length and forward droop I could not mistake. The departing porter looked like the last citizen abandoning the ruins of Persepolis, and I--I felt like Persepolis! VIII. I strive, perhaps in vain, to impart a sense of the slowly creeping desolation, the gradual paresis, that was seizing upon the late full and happy life of our hotel; and I have not strictly observed the order of the successive events. I have not spoken of the swift evanescence of the bell-boys, the first of whom began so jubilantly with me when I came, covenanting to deliver a pitcher of ice-water at my door every morning at ten, and every evening at eight. He was faithful to his trust, and embarrassed me with a superfluity of ice-water, which ten men could hardly have drunk, and lived; but when the economic frame of our hotel began to be shaken, he was early in warning me that he might go at any moment. He was No. 18, but he promised me that No. 10 would see that I was daily and nightly deluged with ice-water, and No. 10 was exemplarily true to me for a day. Then he vanished too, with a grateful sense, I hope, of my folly in bestowing a preliminary half-dollar upon him. But he had made interest for me, I found, with No. 4, and No. 4 deluded me by his fleeting permanency for a week. One morning he told me he was going, and he took a last half-dollar from me with a true compassion for my forlorn case. He was so visibly the last of the bell-boys that he could not assign me to a lower number. For one night the head porter brought my ice-water. Now the night porter brings it, and if he should leave before I do-- But I will not anticipate, as the older romancers used to say. I will not look forward, even in the case of the chambermaids, of whom there have been already three changes, with the prospect next week of having in some of the laundry girls to do up the work. IX.