“I have dined with a prince one day and alone for a shilling in a cook-shop the next. I have twice been entirely destitute of money in places where I had not an acquaintance, and the instant before the last coin was out of my pocket, chances too improbable for a dream have provided for me. One was at Marseilles. I had relied on receiving a letter of credit when I got there. I was disappointed and was at the hotel a week, wondering whether I should find fate working its usual miracle for me. I had only two francs remaining, when a gentlemanly man, who had commenced conversation with me at table, asked me to his room and ended with offering me a seat in his carriage to Nice. The quarantine drove him back, but he had brought me two hundred miles on my route, and knowing my disappointment by my inquiries at the post office, he offered me the use of his banker to any amount and took drafts for the money on my partner in New York. This now is a thing that does not occur once in a century. I have corresponded with Doyne (that was his name) ever since. I find that he is a _religious man_, and from one of the first families in Dublin.” With all his taste for luxury, Willis knew how to make economies, and living was much cheaper then. He never affected a mystery, and in one of his letters to the “Mirror” he explained how it was that he could live in Florence on three hundred dollars a year “exclusive of postage and pleasure,” paying four dollars a month for his apartment and attendance, breakfasting for six cents, and dining “quite magnificently” for twenty-five. Meanwhile a deal of gossip about him was in circulation in America, and the editor of the “Mirror” had to contradict, _inter alia_, a rumor that his foreign collaborator had married the widow of a British nobleman and was faring sumptuously in Rome.