And now you shall hie with me to Italy. I had missed the over-night Engadine Rapide to Lucerne, and Hooper’s enthusiasm sent me to Dover two hours too early. As it happens, I take a lasting delight in getting the better of the terrible line between London and the channel, which any man may do by catching a fast train slightly in advance of the boat express and carrying his grip from the town station to the pier. He thus avoids the scandalous over-charge of the boat trains, and lays the unction to his soul that he is not a holder of “Doras.” All day long I was looking at scenes familiar to my eyes. Lille, Douai, St. Quentin, Laon--how the old cities of French Flanders and Picardy brought the ghosts of past years trooping before me. Then, as night fell, began that interminable running into and out of frontier stations on rails laid in crescents, so that you are seldom certain where the engine is, and it is hard to persuade your nervous fellow-passenger, who has never taken the journey before, that he or she is not in the wrong train. Thus, accompanied by the babel of funny noises inseparable from French railways, I dozed through a rumbling journey and reached Basle in the early morning. It will perhaps scarce be credited (seeing that I have posed, and justly, as an experienced _voyageur_) that I quitted London without ascertaining the exact locality of the Castello Rondo. At Lucerne I purchased a guide-book to the Italian Lakes, virgin territory to me, notwithstanding all my jaunts in strange lands. I discovered, to my dismay, that the shores of Lake Como cover nearly a hundred miles, while towns cluster round its “efflorescent loveliness” in a fine profusion. Bellagio, Cadenabbia and Como I had heard of, but who was to distinguish Domaso from Dongo, or Colico from Cremia? To add to my annoyance, the writer of the guide-book spread himself on the fact that each jutting peninsula or verdant slope held “castles with turreted towers, peeping out, ever and anon, from the sylvan woods which hide them.” Cheerfully could I have wrung his neck for that sentence. It tortured me until the slow Italian train deposited me at Como at eleven o’clock, which, allowing for mid-Europe time, was slightly in advance of the hour Frank Hooper called at Sandilands House.