It is ten years now since I left England, so that I can write to you without the prickly heat of moral prejudice. It is a year since I saw you in Venice, you and her. She had her arm in yours and you did not see me. You saw nothing but her, and she saw nothing but you, and it was clear to me that you were enjoying your tenth honeymoon, which is, surely, a far greater thing than the first, if only you can get to it. You came out of St. Mark's, you and she, and I was so close that I could have touched you. I shrank into the shadow and watched you feed the pigeons, and then you had tea on the sunlit side of the Piazza and then you strolled toward the Rialto. I took a gondola to the station and fled to Verona, for I could have no room in your tenth Eden. Verona is the very place for a bachelor, which, I there discovered, I have never ceased to be. Verona belongs to Romeo and Juliet, and no other lovers may do more than pass the day there, salute and speed on to Venice. But a bachelor may stay there many days: he will find an excellent local wine, good cigars built round straws, passable food, and the swift-flowing Adige wherein to cast his thoughts. This I did, with a blessing or two to be conveyed to you in Venice. I hope you received them. The Adige bears thoughts and blessings and sewage with equal zest to his goal, as I would all men might do. I stayed for a month in Verona and I remember little of it but some delicious plums I bought in the marketplace and ate in the amphitheater, spitting the stones down into the arena with a dexterity I have only seen equaled by Matilda in the days of my first acquaintance with her. That is far back now, but there is not a moment of it all that I do not like to remember, and there in the amphitheater I told myself the whole adventure as a story from which I was detached. It moved me more than the house of Juliet, more than all the sorrows of the Scaligers, for it is a modern story and, as Molière said, _"Les anciens sont les anciens et nous sommes les gens d'aujourd'hui."_ _Aujourd'hui!_ To-day! That is the marvel, that out of the swiftly moving, ever changing vapor which is life we should achieve anything so positive. To-day never goes. There is a thing called yesterday, but that is only the dust-bin at the door into which we cast our refuse, our failures, our worn-out souls. There is a thing called to-morrow, but that is the storehouse of to-day, bursting with far better things, emotions, loves, hopes, than those we have discarded. But into to-day the whole passionate force of the universe is poured, through us, through all things, and therefore to-day is marvelous.