pped almost in front of him. A
General officer was hat in hand, talking to a lady, who called him uncle,
and said that she had been obliged to decide to quit Verona on account of
her husband, to whom the excessive heat was unendurable. Her husband, in
the same breath, protested that the heat killed him. He adorned the
statement with all kinds of domestic and subterranean imagery, and
laughed faintly, saying that after the fifteenth--on which night his wife
insisted upon going to the Opera at Milan to hear a new singer and old
friend--he should try a week at the Baths of Bormio, and only drop from
the mountains when a proper temperature reigned, he being something of an
invalid.

'And, uncle, will you be in Milan on the fifteenth?' said the lady; 'and
Wilfrid, too?'

'Wilfrid will reach Milan as soon as you do, and I shall undoubtedly be
there on the fifteenth,' said the General.

'I cannot possibly express to you how beautiful I think your army looks,'
said the lady.

'Fine men, General Pierson, very fine men. I never saw such
marching--equal to our Guards,' her husband remarked.

The lady named her Milanese hotel as the General waved his plumes,
nodded, and rode off.

Before the carriage had started, Barto Rizzo dashed up to it; and 'Dear
good English lady,' he addressed her, 'I am the brother of Luigi, who
carries letters for you in Milan--little Luigi!--and I have a mother
dying in Milan; and here I am in Verona, ill, and can't get to her, poor
soul! Will you allow me that I may sit up behind as quiet as a mouse, and
be near one of the lovely English ladies who are so kind to unfortunate
persons, and never deaf to the name of charity? It's my mother who is
dying, poor soul!'

The lady consulted her husband's face, which presented the total blank of
one who refused to be responsible for an opinion hostile to the claims of
charity, while it was impossible for him to fall in with foreign habits
of familiarity, and accede to extraordinary petitions. Barto sprang up.
'I shall be your courier, dear lady,' he said, and commenced his
professional career in her service by shouting to the vetturino to drive
on. Wilfrid met them as he was trotting down from the Porta del Palio,
and to him his sister confided her new trouble in having a strange man
attached to her, who might be anything. 'We don't know the man,' said her
husband; and Adela pleaded for him: 'Don't speak to him harshly, pray,
Wilfrid; he says he has a mot