ordering him to pay us
attention; but he was away from home, gone to Cagliari in a boat with
the produce of the farm belonging to his convent. Then they visited
the tower of Chia, but could not get in because the door is thirty
feet off the ground; so they came back and pitched a magnificent tent
which I brought from the _Bahiana_ a long time ago--and where they
will live (if I mistake not) in preference to the friar's or the owl-
and bat-haunted tower. MM. T---- and S---- will be left there: T---- an
intelligent, hard-working Frenchman with whom I am well pleased; he
can speak English and Italian well, and has been two years at Genoa.
S---- is a French German with a face like an ancient Gaul, who has
been sergeant-major in the French line, and who is, I see, a great,
big, muscular _faineant_. We left the tent pitched and some stores in
charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.

"Certainly being at the head of things is pleasanter than being
subordinate. We all agree very well; and I have made the testing
office into a kind of private room, where I can come and write to you
undisturbed, surrounded by my dear, bright brass things which all of
them remind me of our nights at Birkenhead. Then I can work here too,
and try lots of experiments; you know how I like that! and now and
then I read--Shakespeare principally. Thank you so much for making me
bring him: I think I must get a pocket edition of _Hamlet_ and _Henry
the Fifth_, so as never to be without them.

"_Cagliari, October 7._

"[The town was full?] ... of red-shirted English Garibaldini. A very
fine-looking set of fellows they are too: the officers rather raffish,
but with medals, Crimean and Indian; the men a very sturdy set, with
many lads of good birth I should say. They still wait their consort
the _Emperor_, and will, I fear, be too late to do anything. I meant
to have called on them, but they are all gone into barracks some way
from the town, and I have been much too busy to go far.

"The view from the ramparts was very strange and beautiful. Cagliari
rises on a very steep rock, at the mouth of a wide plain circled by
large hills and three-quarters filled with lagoons; it looks,
therefore, like an old island citadel. Large heaps of salt mark the
border between the sea and the lagoons; thousands of flamingoes whiten
the centre of the huge shallow marsh; hawks hover and scream amo