ttered Tony to himself; "it owes me some good luck; who
knows but it may pay me yet?"

CHAPTER XLIX. MET AND PARTED

Tony went on his way early next morning, stealing off ere it was yet
light, for he hated leave-takings, and felt that they weighed upon him
for many a mile of a journey. There was enough on the road he travelled
to have interested and amused him, but his heart was too full of its own
cares, and his mind too deep in its own plans, to dispose him to such
pleasures, and so he passed through little villages on craggy eminences
and quaint old towers on mountain-tops, scarcely observing them. Even
Pisa, with its world-known Tower, and the gem-like Baptistery beside
it, scarce attracted notice from him, though he muttered as he passed,
"Perhaps on some happier day I 'll be able to come back here and admire
it" And so onward he plodded through the grand old ruined Massa and the
silent Sarzana, whose palaces display the quarterings of old crusading
knights, with many an emblem of the Holy War; and by the beauteous Bay
of Spezia he went, not stopping to see poor Shelley's home, and the
terrace where his midnight steps had almost worn a track. The road
now led through the declining ridges of the Apennines, gorgeous in
color,--such color as art would have scarce dared to counterfeit, so
emerald the dark green of the waving pines, so silver-like the olive, so
gloriously purple the great cliffs of porphyry; and then through many a
riven cleft, through feathery foliage and broad-leaved fig-trees, down
many a fathom low the sea!--the blue Mediterranean, so blue as to seem
another sky of deeper meaning than the one above it.

He noticed little of all these; he felt none of them! It was now the
third day of his journey, and though he had scarcely uttered a word, and
been deeply intent on his own fate, all that his thinking had done was
to lead, as it were, into some boundless prairie, and there desert him.

"I suppose," muttered he to himself, "I am one of those creatures that
must never presume to plan anything, but take each day's life as I find
it. And I could do this. Ay, I could do it manfully, too, if I were not
carrying along with me memories of long ago. It is Alice, the thought
of Alice, that dashes the present with a contrast to the past, and makes
all I now attempt so poor and valueless."

As the road descends from Borghetto, there is a sudden bend, from which,
through a deep cleft, the little beach and