We laughingly explained to him that the two deceased military men were mere creations of fancy, and all that was taken from reality was the loving and happy wedded intercourse which the book depicts—and this, thank God, had not been sundered by any cruel fate. Mr. Felix Moscheles, a son of the famous musician, and editor of the correspondence between his father and Mendelssohn, now explained to us that he, together with Hodgson Pratt, Cardinal Manning, Lord Ripon, the Bishop of London, the Duke of Westminster, and others, belonged to the directorate of the London Peace Association. Being a permanent resident of London and a naturalized Englishman, he had set himself the task of carrying on propaganda for his peace association whenever he was traveling. His chief specialty was table-d’hôte conversion; but this, he laughingly acknowledged, was generally a wretched failure, or else brought upon him the counter attempts of old women tract distributers to convert him. The preceding winter he had spent with his wife in Cairo, where he had made quite a number of Egyptian studies,—Mr. Moscheles is a painter by profession,—and there he had succeeded in winning over sundry beys to his peace theories. A friend from Berlin had sent him my book, and that had awakened in him an eager desire to make the acquaintance of the unfortunate woman who had suffered so much by war and who had expressed in this book so much that he himself had at heart. Now the day before he had learned quite by accident, in a soirée at the house of Sir Austen Henry Layard, the well-known ex-diplomat, that the author was in Venice, and he could not but pay his respects to her: first as a friend of peace, to thank her for the book, and secondly as a man, to express his sympathy for the poor broken-hearted widow ... and—what disillusions life brings—he is received by the husband of a jocund woman! In the course of the conversation Mr. Moscheles told us that it would have been very agreeable to him if in Venice he could have met with people who would be disposed to form a local section of the Peace Association; but that there was no prospect of it—no one took any interest in the question. He was therefore planning to return to England in two days. “Who knows?” said I. “Perhaps it might be possible to do something in the matter after all. This evening there is a reception in Casa Pandolfi; I will speak about your wish to the marquis, who, to the best of my knowledge and belief, belongs to the Parliament at Rome and to the Peace Association there.”