losed his eyes. "That, then, is
more than you have done, signor Tuquoque. Look on the Bernina yonder, and
fancy you behold a rout of phantom Goths; a sleepy rout, new risen, with
the blood of old battles on their shroud-shirts, and a North-east wind
blowing them upon our fat land. Or take a turn at the other side toward
Orta, and look out for another invasion, by no means so picturesque, but
preferable. Tourists! Do you hear them?"

Carlo Ammiani had descried the advanced troop of a procession of
gravely-heated climbers ladies upon donkeys, and pedestrian guards
stalking beside them, with courier, and lacqueys, and baskets of
provisions, all bearing the stamp of pilgrims from the great Western
Island.

CHAPTER VI

A mountain ascended by these children of the forcible Isle, is a mountain
to be captured, and colonized, and absolutely occupied for a term; so
that Vittoria soon found herself and her small body of adherents
observed, and even exclaimed against, as a sort of intruding aborigines,
whose presence entirely dispelled the sense of romantic dominion which a
mighty eminence should give, and which Britons expect when they have
expended a portion of their energies. The exclamations were not
complimentary; nevertheless, Vittoria listened with pleased ears, as one
listens by a brookside near an old home, hearing a music of memory rather
than common words. They talked of heat, of appetite, of chill, of thirst,
of the splendour of the prospect, of the anticipations of good hotel
accommodation below, of the sadness superinduced by the reflection that
in these days people were found everywhere, and poetry was thwarted;
again of heat, again of thirst, of beauty, and of chill. There was the
enunciation of matronly advice; there was the outcry of girlish
insubordination; there were sighings for English ale, and namings of the
visible ranges of peaks, and indicatings of geographical fingers to show
where Switzerland and Piedmont met, and Austria held her grasp on
Lombardy; and "to this point we go to-night; yonder to-morrow; farther
the next day," was uttered, soberly or with excitement, as befitted the
age of the speaker.

Among these tourists there was one very fair English lady, with long
auburn curls of the traditionally English pattern, and the science of
Paris displayed in her bonnet and dress; which, if not as graceful as
severe admirers of the antique in statuary or of the mediaeval in drapery
demand, pleads