At a former period the writer of this had the fortune
to serve his country in an Italian city whose great
claim upon the world’s sentimental interest
is the fact that—
“The sea is in her broad, her narrow
streets
Ebbing and flowing,”
and that she has no ways whatever for hoofs or wheels.
In his quality of United States official, he was naturally
called upon for information concerning the estates
of Italians believed to have emigrated early in the
century to Buenos Ayres, and was commissioned to learn
why certain persons in Mexico and Brazil, and the
parts of Peru, had not, if they were still living,
written home to their friends. On the other hand,
he was intrusted with business nearly as pertinent
and hopeful by some of his own countrymen, and it
was not quite with surprise that he one day received
a neatly lithographed circular with his name and address
written in it, signed by a famous projector of such
enterprises, asking him to cooperate for the introduction
of horse-railroads in Venice. The obstacles to
the scheme were of such a nature that it seemed hardly
worth while even to reply to the circular; but the
proposal was one of those bold flights of imagination
which forever lift objects out of vulgar association.
It has cast an enduring, poetic charm even about the
horse-car in my mind, and I naturally look for many
unprosaic aspects of humanity there. I have an
acquaintance who insists that it is the place above
all others suited to see life in every striking phase.
He pretends to have witnessed there the reunion of
friends who had not met in many years, the embrace,
figurative of course, of long lost brothers, the reconciliation
of lovers; I do not know but also some scenes of love-making,
and acceptance or rejection. But my friend is
an imaginative man, and may make himself romances.
I myself profess to have beheld for the most part
only mysteries; and I think it not the least of these
that, riding on the same cars day after day, one finds
so many strange faces with so little variety.
Whether or not that dull, jarring motion shakes inward
and settles about the centres of mental life the sprightliness
that should inform the visage, I do not know; but
it is certain that the emptiness of the average passenger’s
countenance is something wonderful, considered with
reference to Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum,
and the intellectual repute which Boston enjoys among
envious New-Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey
out of our cold metropolis is enlivened by a mystery
so positive in character as the young lady in black,
who alighted at a most ordinary little street in Old
Charlesbridge, and heightened her effect by going
into a French-roof house there that had no more right
than a dry goods box to receive a mystery. She
was tall, and her lovely arms showed through the black
gauze of her dress with an exquisite roundness and
