entering a room, but very much the reverse; and the little Florentine
world began to recognise that they had got something very much like
a new Corinne among them. But of course I rarely got a chance of
monopolising her as I had done during that first afternoon. We were
however constantly meeting, and were becoming ever more and more close
friends. When the Garrows left Florence for the summer, I visited them
at Lucerne, and subsequently met them at Venice. It was the year of
the meeting of the Scientific Congress in that city.

That was a pleasant autumn in Venice! By that time I had become
pretty well over head and ears in love with the girl by whose side
I generally contrived to sit in the gondolas, in the Piazza in the
evening, etcaetera. It was lovely September weather--just the time for
Venice. The summer days were drawing in, but there was the moon, quite
light enough on the lagoons; and we were a great deal happier than the
day was long.

Those Scientific Congresses, of which that at Venice was the seventh
and the last, played a curious part, which has not been much observed
or noted by historians, in the story of the winning of Italian
independence. I believe that the first congress, at Pisa, I think, was
really got up by men of science, with a view to furthering their own
objects and pursuits. It was followed by others in successive autumns
at Lucca, Milan, Genoa, Naples, Florence, and this seventh and last
at Venice. But Italy was in those days thinking of other matters than
science. The whole air was full of ideas, very discordant all of them,
and vague most of them, of political change. The governments of the
peninsula thought twice, and more than twice, before they would grant
permission for the first of these meetings. Meetings of any kind were
objects of fear and mistrust to the rulers. Those of Tuscany, who were
by comparison liberal, and, as known to be such, were more or
less objects of suspicion to the Austrian, Roman, and Neapolitan
Governments, led the way in giving the permission asked for; and
perhaps thought that an assembly of geologists, entomologists,
astronomers, and mathematicians might act as a safety valve, and
divert men's minds from more dangerous subjects. But the current of
the times was running too strongly to be so diverted, and proved too
much for the authorities and for the real men of science, who were, at
least some of them, anxious to make the congresses really what they
pr