iere.

Buttons's acquaintance with the language, literature, manners,
and customs of Italy made him appreciate his advantages; the
friendship of the Count prevented Dick from feeling otherwise than
perfectly at home; and as for the Senator, if it had been possible
for him to feel otherwise, his experience of high life at Florence
would have enabled him to bear himself serenely here. His complete
self-possession, his unfaltering gaze, his calm countenance, were
never for a moment disturbed.

The Count had been long enough in America to appreciate a man of
the stamp of the Senator; he therefore from the very first treated
him with marked respect, which was heightened when Dick told him of
the Senator's achievements during the past few weeks. The brilliant
society which surrounded the Count was quite different from that
which the Senator had found in Florence. The people were equally
cultivated, but more serious. They had less excitability, but more
deep feeling. Milan, indeed, had borne her burden far differently
from Florence. Both hated the foreigner; but the latter could be gay,
and smiling, and trifling even under her chains; this the former
could never be. The thoughtful, earnest, and somewhat pensive
Milanese was more to the Senator's taste than the brilliant and
giddy Florentine. These, thought he, may well be a free people.

Moreover, the Senator visited the Grand Cathedral, and ascended to
the summit. Arriving there his thoughts were not taken up by the
innumerable statues of snow-white marble, or the countless pinnacles
of exquisite sculpture that extended all around like a sacred forest
filled with saints and angels, but rather to the scene that lay
beyond.

There spread away a prospect which was superior in his eyes to any
thing that he had ever seen before, nor had it ever entered his
mind to conceive such a matchless scene. The wide plains of Lombardy,
green, glorious, golden with the richest and most inexhaustible
fertility; vast oceans of grain and rice, with islands of dark-green
trees that bore untold wealth of all manner of fruit; white villas,
little hamlets, close-packed villages, dotted the wide expanse, with
the larger forms of many a populous town. He looked to the north and
to the west. The plain spread away for many a league, till the purple
mountains arose as a barrier, rising up till they touched the
everlasting ice. He looked to the east and south. There the plains
stretched away to the