It was a matter of debate in our party whether we should stop at Verona. The ayes had it, and twenty-four hours afterward the noes indignantly denied that there had been any opposition, so completely had the dignity and attraction of the place driven away the very recollection of their contumacy. Yet if they had had their way when we left Milan we should have gone straight through to Venice, as the great majority of travellers do. We could not remember that any of our friends had ever told us to go thither or had gone themselves. At the hotel, the Due Torri, there were but two parties besides our own--both, like ours, composed of but two members. We had gone to this inn on Murray's emphatic recommendation. "Very comfortable, excellent in every respect," said that red liar: we found it wretched, and the charges exceeded those at the Hotel Cavour in Milan, which we had just left--one of the finest houses in Europe. There is only one other in the place, which has the forbidding name of the Tower of London; so, in view of our discomfort and the small public, we agreed that we had come to the wrong house. On the day when we went away, however, we fell in with some old acquaintance, fellow-country folk, at the railway station, who had been at the Torre di Londra, and they too thought they had gone to the wrong house. They said it was almost empty; which confirmed us in the belief that the greater proportion of the people who fill the trains and crowd the hotels within a day's journey in every direction pass by this incomparable city. Yet as we paced the broad marble slabs of its pavement, looking right and left, we asked each other, "Why does not everybody talk and write about Verona, rush to it, rave about it?" [Illustration: COURTYARD OF HOUSE IN VERONA]