cted. "Now," he said, "Mr Pontifex may go
abroad, and the sooner the better. Let him stay a couple of months."

This was the first Ernest had heard about his going abroad, and he talked
about my not being able to spare him for so long. I soon made this all
right.

"It is now the beginning of April," said I, "go down to Marseilles at
once, and take steamer to Nice. Then saunter down the Riviera to
Genoa--from Genoa go to Florence, Rome and Naples, and come home by way
of Venice and the Italian lakes."

"And won't you come too?" said he, eagerly.

I said I did not mind if I did, so we began to make our arrangements next
morning, and completed them within a very few days.

CHAPTER LXXX

We left by the night mail, crossing from Dover. The night was soft, and
there was a bright moon upon the sea. "Don't you love the smell of
grease about the engine of a Channel steamer? Isn't there a lot of hope
in it?" said Ernest to me, for he had been to Normandy one summer as a
boy with his father and mother, and the smell carried him back to days
before those in which he had begun to bruise himself against the great
outside world. "I always think one of the best parts of going abroad is
the first thud of the piston, and the first gurgling of the water when
the paddle begins to strike it."

It was very dreamy getting out at Calais, and trudging about with luggage
in a foreign town at an hour when we were generally both of us in bed and
fast asleep, but we settled down to sleep as soon as we got into the
railway carriage, and dozed till we had passed Amiens. Then waking when
the first signs of morning crispness were beginning to show themselves, I
saw that Ernest was already devouring every object we passed with quick
sympathetic curiousness. There was not a peasant in a blouse driving his
cart betimes along the road to market, not a signalman's wife in her
husband's hat and coat waving a green flag, not a shepherd taking out his
sheep to the dewy pastures, not a bank of opening cowslips as we passed
through the railway cuttings, but he was drinking it all in with an
enjoyment too deep for words. The name of the engine that drew us was
Mozart, and Ernest liked this too.

We reached Paris by six, and had just time to get across the town and
take a morning express train to Marseilles, but before noon my young
friend was tired out and had resigned himself to a series of sleeps which
were seldom intermitted for mor