Then I told her that after all we were both young, and this was only a passing cloud across the long summer of life before us, and that after a year I could at least receive her at Palaestro. I need not repeat all that we said and did at the parting. And so ended my last night in Rome, not for two, but for more than three, years. BOOK I THE AWAKENING CHAPTER V I COME TO SCHLOSS REGENSTEIN The copy of a letter written soon after my arrival in Germany to my old friend and correspondent, Rocca, tells at least what I wished my associates at Rome to know of my journey and its surroundings. It is couched in the style much affected by the virtuosi of the day; and although I have come to be ashamed enough of such literary vanities, I allow the letter to stand that it may be a true chronicle of at least one person--myself. “... Pardon indeed, my honored Rocca, that I now write you in mere Italian, and not in Latin. But my books have not yet arrived from Augsburg, and while it is indeed possible I could write in the classic tongue without the immortal illustrations of pure Latinity before me, I fear I might lapse into some monkish idiom unless I could refer to my Cicero and Statius. However, I do not intend to imitate Agrippina and Trajan (not to name Cæsar) and recite my deeds in formal commentaries, but simply to declare that your friend is in good health, and so far as a banished man may be, in good spirits. “Here I am, then, in my mountain eyrie, snug as an eagle above intruding ken. Conceive me too as sovereign lord over all human creatures about me, possessed of right of pit and gallows, and expected to prove my princely blood by administering frequent floggings with my own hand, and accounted not a little lacking in spirit if I fail to crowd my overlarge dungeons with many victims of my capricious displeasure. In short, within my little kingdom I find that I am possessed of all the absolute tyranny of the Grand Turk or the Great Prince of Muscovy. “The tale of my journey over the Alps to Augsburg and Erfurt, I must omit, knowing you have had your surfeit of stories of travellers. I will simply remark that the inns had even as many hungry fleas as I had feared (excelling even their ferocious comrades of Naples), the cookery was bad, the folk we met, even of the better sort, were oafish: and Andrea and his underlings have had their heads repeatedly broken (and have retorted in kind) in brawls with sheep-pated inn servants. Indeed, when I look on my poor Andrea and observe his hang-dog countenance as he goes among these Northerners, I feel that for him the expiation of his sins in purgatory has begun already.