their ancestors.  The hurrying feet of commerce and curiosity pass rapidly by, leaving it sequestered from the agitations and the turmoils of metropolitan existence.  It is as quiet as a village.  During my stay there rose in its quiet streets the startled echoes of horror at a crime unparalleled in its annals, which, gathering increased horror from the very peacefulness and serenity of the scene, arrested the attention and the sympathy in a degree seldom experienced.  Before narrating that, it will be necessary to go back a little, that my own connection with it may be intelligible, especially in the fanciful weaving together of remote conjectures which strangely involved me in the story.

The table d’hote at the Bayerischer Hof had about thirty visitors—­ all, with one exception, of that local commonplace which escapes remark.  Indeed this may almost always be said of tables d’hote; though there is a current belief, which I cannot share, of a table d’hote being very delightful—­of one being certain to meet pleasant people there.”  It may be so.  For many years I believed it was so.  The general verdict received my assent.  I had never met those delightful people, but was always expecting to meet them.  Hitherto they had been conspicuous by their absence.  According to my experience in Spain, France, and Germany, such dinners had been dreary or noisy and vapid.  If the guests were English, they were chillingly silent, or surlily monosyllabic:  to their neighbors they were frigid; amongst each other they spoke in low undertones.  And if the guests were foreigners, they were noisy, clattering, and chattering, foolish for the most part, and vivaciously commonplace.  I don’t know which made me feel most dreary.  The predominance of my countrymen gave the dinner the gayety of a funeral; the predominance of the Mossoo gave it the fatigue of got-up enthusiasm, of trivial expansiveness.  To hear strangers imparting the scraps of erudition and connoisseurship which they had that morning gathered from their valets de place and guide-books, or describing the sights they had just seen, to you, who either saw them yesterday, or would see them to-morrow, could not be permanently attractive.  My mind refuses to pasture on such food with gusto.  I cannot be made to care what the Herr Baron’s sentiments about Albert Durer or Lucas Cranach may be.  I can digest my rindfleisch without the aid of the commis voyageur’s criticisms on Gothic architecture.  This may be my misfortune.  In spite of the Italian blood which I inherit, I am a shy man—­shy as the purest Briton.  But, like other shy men, I make up in obstinacy what may be deficient in expansiveness.  I can be frightened into silence, but I won’t be dictated to.  You might as well attempt the persuasive effect of your eloquence upon a snail who has withdrawn into his shell at your approach, and will not emerge till his confidence is restored.  To be told that I must see this, and ought to go there, because my casual neighbor was charme, has never presented itself to me as an adequate motive.