I know not why, but it is constantly identified in my mind with some revel which I have perhaps seen in a picture, where several couples are dancing a licentious measure in a long room lit by a number of silver sconces of the debased model common at the end of the seventeenth century.

It is probably a reminiscence of my late excursion that gives to these dancers in my fancy the olive skin, dark hair, and bright eyes of the Italian type; and they wear dresses of exceedingly rich fabric and elaborate design.

Imagination is whimsical enough to paint for me the character of the room itself, as having an arcade of arches running down one side alone, of the fantastic and paganised Gothic of the Renaissance.

At the end is a gallery or balcony for the musicians, which on its coved front has a florid coat of arms of foreign heraldry.

The shield bears, on a field _or_, a cherub's head blowing on three lilies--a blazon I have no doubt seen somewhere in my travels, though I cannot recollect where.