The Awakening of Zojas Author:Miriam Michelson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II PAOLO ROSSI'S STORY I PAOLO ROSSI, write this memoir that the 3 knowledge of the strangest of mortal experiences may not die with me. Yet so convin... more »ced am I of my enemy's wonderful foresight and the unscrupulous use he will make of his power, that I feel sure no other eye (save his, and then but for one reading,) will ever see this paper. Could I fulfil my intention, this should reach your hands, Raffaelo, to whom it will be addressed. But this man aims at universal dominion; there is no limit to his ambition; is it likely that he will allow a scrap of paper to stand in his way ? I was seventeen years old when my uncle Luigi died; I am now seventy-eight. I shall not live, nor do I care to live, to be seventy-nine. Nearly seventy years of my long life, as I look back upon them, are commonplace, the ordinary career of a comparatively successful man, born of good family, with wealth, influential connections, and a fairly able mind. Were it not for the occurrences of the past ten years my life could add absolutely nothing to the sum of the world's knowledge, for, though respected and deferred to in my time, there have been greater politicians, more successful statesmen than myself, and the name of Paolo Rossi will tell nothing to succeeding generations. But these ten years! As I look back, they seem so crowded with strange experiences that it bewilders me merely to attempt to set them down. The very day my uncle died I mounted to the grotto chamber. My boyish curiosity was so excited, my imagination was so inflamed by that which he had written, that I could not eat nor sleep nor rest till I was satisfied. Indeed, the thought of the sleeping bandit was the only thing that could distract my mind from its burden of sorrow; for I devotedly loved and sincerely mour...« less