Chapter 1
"Thy mother was a piece of virtue, andShe said-thou wert my daughter; and thy father Was duke of Milan; and his only heir A princess;-no worse issued." -Tempest. My uncle Ro and myself had been travelling together in the East, and had been absent from home fully five years when we reached Paris. For eighteen months neither of us had seen a line from America, when we drove through the barriers, on our way from Egypt, vi Algiers, Marseilles, and Lyons. Not once, in all that time, had we crossed our own track, in a way to enable us to pick up a straggling letter; and all our previous precautions to have the epistles meet us at different bankers in Italy, Turkey, and Malta were thrown away. My uncle was an old traveller-I might almost say, an old resident-in Europe; for he had passed no
- Writer
