her gentleman on top received them all rather
grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the
exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English
slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was
of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a
horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted
to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the
red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and
nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and
had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,--

"It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,--
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."

The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our
adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene
of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to
bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after
making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which
might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for
the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to
us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they
are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing
could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor
bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the
Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.

Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences
grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the
conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose
with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found
it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among
us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a
pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces
and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as
a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages
was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty
rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian
frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose
from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lum