Yes, yes! He remembered the visit; he had the clearest
recollection of Lenormant--"_un bravo giovane_!" Thereupon, he
directed my attention to a little slip of paper pasted into the
inner cover of the book, on which were written in pencil a few Greek
letters; they were from the hand of Lenormant himself, who had taken
out his pencil to illustrate something he was saying about a Greek
inscription in the museum. Carefully had this scrap been preserved
by the good curator; his piety touched and delighted me.
I could have desired no happier incident for the close of my
journey; by lucky chance this visit to the museum had been postponed
till the last morning, and, as I idled through the afternoon about
the Via Plutino, my farewell mood was in full harmony with that in
which I had landed from Naples upon the Calabrian shore. So hard a
thing to catch and to retain, the mood corresponding perfectly to an
intellectual bias--hard, at all events, for him who cannot shape
his life as he will, and whom circumstance ever menaces with dreary
harassment.
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