The Marchese Lamberto di Castelmare Signor Leandro Lombardoni felt himself to be abundantly repaid for his hour of waiting in the cold street, and for the bajocchi expended on the glass of punch, by the position he occupied at the Circolo all that evening.

He was the centre of every group anxious to gain the earliest information respecting a matter of the highest interest to all the society of Ravenna.

And the matter belonged to a class of subjects respecting which the Conte Leandro was especially desirous of being thought to be thoroughly well-informed, and to have interest in the highest quarters.
The fact was, that Signor Ercole Stadione, the Ravenna impresario, had undertaken a journey to Milan, in the hope of accomplishing a negotiation in which the whole of the smaller provincial city had felt itself deeply interested.

He had gone thither for the purpose of engaging the celebrated prima donna, Bianca Lalli, to sing at Ravenna during the coming Carnival.

The pretension was a very ambitious one on the part of the impresario--or, as it may be more properly said, on the part of the city--for the step was by no means the result of his own independent and unaided enterprise.