"Dearest Uncle Bertram,--If to-day for the first time, in our travels I write to you, take this as a gentle punishment for not having come to our wedding. Take it--no, I must not tell you a falsehood, not even in jest. We--I mean Kurt and myself--regretted your absence greatly, but were angry only with those wretched politics which would not release you just at a time, when, as Kurt explained to me, such important matters were at stake. Take, then, I pray you, my prolonged silence as a proof of the confusion under which I labour, amidst the thousand new impressions of travel, and through the hurry with which we have travelled. Kurt has just four weeks' leave, so we had indeed to make, haste; and, therefore, we steamed direct from Genoa to Naples, calling at Leghorn only, and yesterday evening we arrived there only to leave this morning, and to sail to Capri, favoured by a lively _tramontane_. "I am writing this my first letter upon the balcony of a house in Capri. "Dearest Uncle Bertram, do you know such a house which 'stands amidst orange groves, with sublimest view of the blue infinity of the ocean, a fair, white hostelry embowered in roses'? "The words are your own, and do you know when you spoke them to me? On that first night when I met you in the forest on the Hirschstein hill. You have probably forgotten it, but I remember it well, and all through the journey your words were ever before me; and of all the glories of Italy, I wanted first to see the house which had, since then, remained in your fond remembrance, where you 'ever since longed to be back again,' and the very name of which was always to you 'a sound of comfort, of promise: _Qui si sana!_' "And now we are here--we who need no comfort, we to whom all promise of earthly bliss has been fulfilled, and so drink in the blue air of heaven, and inhale the sweet fragrance of roses and oranges.