Our prolonged journey permitted my turning the conversation, occasionally, on Colonel Melville. I learned from Evelyn, that her acquaintance with him commenced in rather a romantic manner. He was hunting in their neighborhood, and in taking a leap, his horse fell with him, and he had the misfortune to break his leg. Captain Travers, who witnessed the accident, ordered Melville to be carried to Woodlands, where, unable to be moved without risk, he remained for six weeks confined to his bed. Evelyn tended him through his illness, and a strong sympathy springing up between them, he became a constant and welcome guest at the Abbey, until old Mrs. Travers, lynx-eyed as are most dowagers, perceiving a growing attachment between the parties, persuaded her son to be rude to Melville, and to suspect the prudence of his wife. Provoked at her mother-in-law’s ill-nature, and angry at the unjust aspersions of her husband, Evelyn confessed that she had kept up a clandestine correspondence with the young man, by letter, and also had occasionally met him alone in the park. She added, that, aware of her unhappiness, Melville had presumed even to speak to her of marriage, should she ever regain her freedom. Since her widowhood, however, she told me she had forbidden him ever to allude to the subject of their future union till a decent time should have elapsed since the death of her husband. I was glad to receive her confidence, but thought it my duty to chide her imprudence, in permitting herself, as a married woman, clandestine meetings with an avowed lover. I showed her, that however innocent her feelings and intentions, her husband would have had a right to suspect the worst, adding that even to Col. Melville she had given but too much occasion to think lightly of her discretion, but that I trusted having proved that she loved him to the very verge of imprudence, she would later become to him the most faithful and modest of wives. Whatever reply Evelyn might have made, was cut short by Ella’s exclamation— “See, mama! how lovely!” We looked—and there lay the beauteous Como, with her waters of sapphire, sparkling as if gemmed with a thousand diamonds, in the beams of the mid-day sun, her banks studded with innumerable villas, white as Parian marble. We reached Colico in time to take the steamer to the foot of the lake. At the small town of Como we found the train waiting to convey us to Milan. I will not here detain my readers to describe the fine Cathedral, with its lofty dome, filled with that “dim religious light,” which insensibly recalls us from the multiform distractions of daily life, and disposes the mind to devotion. I pity the man who could enter such an edifice without breathing a prayer, however short, to the Author of all good. I do not envy him, if he could leave that sacred building, and not feel, at least momentarily, the desire to become “a wiser and a better man.”