By this time Willis’s literary reputation had penetrated to the London press, though not as yet to the London public, possibly through scattered copies of his “Mirror” letters; and while staying at Smyrna he received “an offer of a thousand dollars a year to write for the London ‘Morning Herald.’ But the articles were to be _political_, and that I had modesty enough to think beyond my calibre. I was to live abroad, however, and go wherever there was a war or the prospect of one. I would much rather write about pictures and green fields.” The not unpleasant hesitation as to his next move was ended at last by the departure from Smyrna of the Yankee brig Metamora, bound for his native Portland with a cargo of figs and opium. The skipper, a Down-Easter, agreed to take him as a passenger, and land him at Malta. At Malta, accordingly, he arrived late in December, after being nearly shipwrecked in a Levanter, and was put ashore through a heavy sea in the brig’s long boat, narrowly escaping being carried all the way to America. The letter to the “Mirror” in which this part of his travels was recorded was lost, and the “Pencillings” leap at once from Smyrna to Milan. He afterwards rewrote the episode, turning it into a capital story (“A Lost Letter Rewritten,” in the “Mirror” for May 14 and June 11, 1836), which figures in his collected writings as “A Log in the Archipelago.” The startling conjunction of East and Down East on board the Metamora suggested, no doubt, some of the incidents in “The Widow by Brevet,” a tale which moves between the poles of Constantinople and Salem, Massachusetts. From Malta he made his way _via_ Italy, Switzerland, and France to England, arriving at Dover on the 1st of June, 1834. While at Florence, Willis had been introduced by Greenough to Walter Savage Landor, who was then living in his villa at Fiesole. Landor entertained him hospitably, and, at parting, made him a present of a Cuyp, for which Willis had expressed admiration, and gave him some valuable letters to people in England. One of these was to the Countess of Blessington, and with it Landor intrusted to his American guest the manuscript of his “Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare,” for delivery to the same lady, under whose superintendence it was duly published the following autumn. He also put into his hands a package whose temporary disappearance was the cause of some blame attaching to Willis. Landor’s own story of the transaction, told in an addendum to the first edition of “Pericles and Aspasia,” is as follows:--