Then comes a discreet knock at my door. It is the interpreter, the guide, the cicerone, the indispensable man, who with touching obsequiousness places his universal knowledge at my disposal for to-day, to-morrow, or all time. Here follows a long enumeration of what custom imposes upon the stranger. There is no question of breaking away from tradition. There stand the monuments, and here are the roads leading to them. One may begin the round by one or another. My liberty is limited to the order in which I shall see them. The rest does not concern me. Here is such and such a picture, there stands such and such a piece of statuary. We shall cross the street or the square where such and such an event took place. A date, the year, and month, and day, are supposed to stamp the facts on my memory. Why did the men of the past choose this precise spot to make history? I have no time to inquire, for in three turns of the wheel I am in another and still more memorable place, where other dates and other names are dextrously driven into the quick of my memory. Galleries follow upon galleries, trips to rivers, to mountains. A glimpse of a cool garden tempts me. How sweet to rest there for a while, and dream! But where is one to find the time, when interpreter and coachman are growing impatient because there is no more than time to go to the Carthusian monastery, and get back before nightfall? The interminable road unfolds before me while I delve into my Baedeker for the history of the monastery. Suddenly the coachman stops, points with his whip at the horizon, and makes an emphatic, incomprehensible speech. A battle was fought there in the time of the Risorgimento. His little cousin's brother-in-law was wounded there, not mortally, though his corporal had his leg cut off. How should one not be proud of such memories? My guide says that his father was fond of telling that he had seen it all from the top of a tower. He begins another version of the story, which is interrupted by our arrival at the monastery, and taken up again on the return journey. Next day in the train I shall have leisure to think over all these things, if the complete confusion in my memory leaves me capacity for anything but stupefaction.