"He was awaiting me impatiently, when, having been delayed by your retarded arrival, I at length went in search of him, drawn by that mysterious power which often compels me, against my inclination, even against my will, to do one thing or to leave another undone. So it was in this case. My passing interest in the young man had already vanished; my head was full of quite different things, so that I listened to the history of his life, with which he thought it necessary to preface his confession, with only half an ear. His name is Antonio Michele, and he is the son of miserably poor vine-dressers, in, or in the immediate neighbourhood of, Tivoli. A monk--his parents' confessor--has always behaved with particular kindness towards him. I suspect that the holy man is his father. Scarcely less poor than the parents, he could do little more for his favourite than teach him to read and write, and was forced in other matters to leave him to his fate. It was that of other poor and handsome boys in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. He tended his goats on the hills of the Campagna. Some wandering artists found him, and enticed him to the city to act as model for their sketches. He idled about in the studios of painters and sculptors, on the Scala di Spagna, and the Piazza Barberini, till the day came when the fame of being the handsomest model in Rome--to which he could justly lay claim--no longer satisfied his ambition, and he wanted to become an artist himself. This was not so easy as he appears to have hoped; still in the course of time he might have become a good stone-carver, at least I conclude so, from the fact that a German artist, who had known him in Rome, invited him two years ago to come and work in his studio here. Antonio, who had no longer anything to bind him to Rome and his native place--his parents had fallen victims to the cholera in 1868--obeyed the call, provided only with the good brother's blessing and money for his journey, obeyed it as a man must obey his destiny.