perors,
and ministers had been revealed to the world in the wounding and
imprisonment of his hero--a catastrophe that had instilled into him
a gloomy doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.

He did not deny it, however. It required patience, he would say. Though
he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a church for
anything, he believed in God. Were not the proclamations against tyrants
addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty? "God for
men--religions for women," he muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an
Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army
of the king, had given him a Bible in Italian--the publication of the
British and Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover.
In periods of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the
revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living with
the first work that came to hand--as sailor, as dock labourer on the
quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the hills above Spezzia--and
in his spare time he studied the thick volume. He carried it with
him into battles. Now it was his only reading, and in order not to be
deprived of it (the print was small) he had consented to accept the
present of a pair of silver-mounted spectacles from Senora Emilia Gould,
the wife of the Englishman who managed the silver mine in the mountains
three leagues from the town. She was the only Englishwoman in Sulaco.

Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the English. This feeling,
born on the battlefields of Uruguay, was forty years old at the very
least. Several of them had poured their blood for the cause of freedom
in America, and the first he had ever known he remembered by the name of
Samuel; he commanded a negro company under Garibaldi, during the famous
siege of Montevideo, and died heroically with his negroes at the fording
of the Boyana. He, Giorgio, had reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and
cooked for the general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of
lieutenant, rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He had
cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole campaign; on the march to
Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the American manner;
he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic; he was one of
the four fugitives who, with the general, carried out of the woods the
inanimate body of the general's wife into the farmhouse where she die