Beautiful Rienzi; or, The secret vendetta — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

8 BRAUTIFUL RIENZI. was passionately pressed to her: soft bosom, then borne, plunging wildly, to a certain cot, where I fell fast asleep, and so missed a last sight of the motherling. Years of childhoo:! were spent under the sunny skies of Italy. I had grown to love my grandparent with all the force of my heart. My studies were all under private tuition; my world lay in my grandparent and our lovely home by the Venetian waters. All fervor, romance, spon- taneous passion, I awaited the hand which should open the page of life to me. It came—the hand of death. My beloved grandmamma slowly, calmly faded, and at the same time my mother, whom I could scarce remember, was sent from her bleak American home to revive in the milder Venice. She it was who stayed me in my great affliction, closed the aged one’s eyes, and presided by the dying bed with gentle cheer. She it was who first directed my s:ck heart to the home across the sea, and to the un- known sister who waited to welcome me. And so my good uncle, Signor Andrea Rienzi, who was a bachelor and a great man in Venice, took care of me, and brought me away from loved Italia and my invalid mother to Liverpool, where ke put me on board a steamer, and under the care of a learned doctor of somethins, who was a philosopher and afraid of women, and so shipped me For my new home. Behold me then at the wharf in New York, sitting very impatiently in the ladies’ saloon of the steamship A waiting for some one to come and claim me. Other ladies had put on their prettiest dresses, and donned their sweetest smiles, and had gone away with husbands, fathers, brothers, and guardians, only giving a hasty hand-shake to friends who had been made in the two weeks at sea, and who would be forgotten in two weeks more. And as I frowned at Ivanilla in the mirror, a figure stood in the door-way of the saloon looking at me; and as the door swayed to and fro she held it open with one arched hand, whilea smile half of doubt and wistfulness dawned on her lips. And her face was beautiful as a dream, her eyes blue as the rippling waters of the Brenta far away in my sunny Venezia, her figure tall and regal like a Cleopatra’s, and CORNUCG OOO S (©)