Excerpt from Mine Is Thine, Vol. 1 of 3: A Novel I humbly desire, dear readers, to please you if I can, and therefore hasten to gratify an aspira tion which lurks in all novel-readers' hearts to get into the thick of the business at once. So come with me and be summarily introduced to one or two principal personages of this little drama. Let us take them unawares, let us surprise them While they sit at meat, - eating, drinking, and (some of them, at least) making merry, on the margin of the Lake of Como, in one of the pleasantest hotels in Europe, the Bellevue, at Cadenabbia. And do thou, old Time, turn back in thy flight a few short years, and suffer us to enter the table-d'hete room of the hotel in question, on the bright evening of an early summer day in 18 vol. I. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.