"Your way, if you will let me," replied Colville. "I was going to your house to ask you to take a walk with me." "Ah, that's good. I was reading of the great siege last night, and I thought of taking a look at Michelangelo's bastions. Let us go together, if you don't think you'll find it too fatiguing." "I shall be ashamed to complain if I do." "And you didn't go to Rome after all?" said Mr. Waters. "No; I couldn't face the landlord with a petition so preposterous as mine. I told him that I found I had no money to pay his bill till I had seen my banker, and as he didn't propose that I should send him the amount back from Rome, I stayed. Landlords have their limitations; they are not imaginative, as a class." "Well, a day more will make no great difference to you, I suppose," said the old man, "and a day less would have been a loss to me. I shall miss you." "Shall you, indeed?" asked Colville, with a grateful stir of the heart. "It's very nice of you to say that." "Oh no. I meet few people who are willing to look at life objectively with me, and I have fancied some such willingness in you. What I chiefly miss over here is a philosophic lift in the human mind, but probably that is because my opportunities of meeting the best minds are few, and my means of conversing with them are small. If I had not the whole past with me, I should feel lonely at times." "And is the past such good company always?". "Yes, in a sense it is. The past is humanity set free from circumstance, and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised." As if he found this rarefied air too thin for his lungs, Colville made some ineffectual gasps at response, and the old man continued: "What I mean is that I meet here the characters I read of, and commune with them before their errors were committed, before they had condemned themselves to failure, while they were still wise and sane, and still active and vital forces." "Did they all fail? I thought some of the bad fellows had a pretty fair worldly success?" "The blossom of decay." "Oh! what black pessimism!" "Not at all! Men fail, but man succeeds. I don't know what it all means, or any part of it; but I have had moods in which it seemed as if the whole, secret of the mystery were about to flash upon me. Walking along in the full sun, in the midst of men, or sometimes in the solitude of midnight, poring over a book, and thinking of quite other things, I have felt that I had almost surprised it." "But never quite?" "Oh, it isn't too late yet." "I hope you won't have your revelation before I get away from Florence, or I shall see them burning you here like the great _frate_."