tle, and robs the military
career of much of its boasted enthusiasm. The stalwart son of Mars,
who forgets there are such things as danger and fatigue in the exciting
hour of battle, will grumble his discontent at the inconveniences of
the hour of peace. We will leave it to the imagination of the reader
to conceive the feelings, the regrets and misgivings, of our young
heroines as their little vessel set sail from the town of Spezzia for
the fortress of Messina. Although their biographers say nothing of
their voyage, we cannot but imagine it was an unpleasant one.
Although the blue headlands of the Italian coast, and the snow-capped
Apennines in the distance, supplied the place of the compass, and their
calls at the different ports deprived their journey of the painful
monotony of a long sea-voyage, yet the associations, the cloud that
hung over their thoughts, embittered every source of pleasure.

Arrived at Messina, Charles and Henry were quartered in the old
fortress. It was an antiquated, quadrangular edifice, perched high
up on the side of the hill, looking down on beautiful white houses
built one over the other, and descending in terraces to the sea.
Its old walls were dilapidated and discovered by the touch of time,
and threatened every minute, as it afterwards did in the earthquake
of 1769, to commence the awful avalanche of destruction that swept
this fair city into the sea.

The first glimpse of their barracks did not rouse in Henry any
ejaculations of gladness. The old Castello, as the people called it,
ill-agreed with the noble edifices she was wont to call castles in
her earlier days--no lofty battlements crested with clouds; no
drawbridges swung on ponderous chains; no mysterious keeps haunted
with traditionary horrors; no myriads of archers in gold and blue to
rend the heavens with a mighty shout of welcome. Alvira's dream of
military glory was a veritable castle in the air in the presence of
the ruinous, ill-kept, and dilapidated fortress they had come to
reinforce.

Everything around seemed to increase the gloom that hung over Charles's
heart. The ill-clad and poverty-stricken people, squatting in idleness
and dirt in the streets; the miserable shops; the doce far niente so
conspicuously characteristic of Italian towns, were contrasted with
the beautiful and busy capitals Charles and Henry had come from. But
nowhere was this contrast so keen as in their domestic arrangements.
The bleak apar