again to look at him, I saw a private soldier go
up to him and deliver him an official-looking
sealed packet.

"Some Italian fellow's death-warrant," said
a young officer near me, who, chalking the
end of a cue, had just come in from the adjacent
billiard-room to exchange a joke and chat with
a friend of another regiment who was laughing,
with two or three more flaxen-haired Austrians,
over the Scala play-bill.

"Look how he signs the beast's dismissal to
heaven," said the theatre-goer, turning round
towards the general.

The general, who had called for pen and ink,
was signing his name slowly a letter at a time, with
sips of his coffee and a petit doigt of cognac
between each stroke. The fact was, this thick-headed
tyrant of the mess-room, who was now with such
nonchalance signing the death-warrant of a poor
Italian, had been promoted from the ranks for
his severities in Hungary, and could not write
with any very great facility. The Italians scowled
when they saw him write, for the rumour had
gone round the caffè that poor Luigi was to be
shot to-morrow at ten o'clock in the Piazza della
Fontana. The general, who did not do things without
a reason, had probably some motive, known
only to his own dark stern mind, in thus
insultingly and openly signing this death-warrant
of a brave man. The neatly-dressed citizens
in black, with their varnished boots, spotless
gloves, twirling canes, and paper flags, grew
more silent than ever, and talked in even a lower
whisper.

Yet, now and then, a tongue more daring than
the rest would shoot out as if merely at some
waiter's carelessness; or one, biting his red lip
white would call angrily to the waiter for some
chocolate, with a voice that seemed to want the
accompaniment of a blow to give it full effect.
I knew well all these symptoms of suppressed
rage; being of a smouldering nature myself.

Besides, did I not know that in this very city,
not more than a year or two before, the streets,
the wide squares—such free breathing places for
bloody whirlwinds of grape-shot—the shady,
narrow defiles of streets—such snug passes
for barricades of riflemen—had been swilled with
Austrian and Italian blood, meeting and uniting
after death? Had I not been shown the quiet
little street with the grated windows, looking
so peaceful and calm in half sunshine, half
shadow, where, but a few short months before,
there had been a belching volcano of fire, the
delicate, tender women throwing their children out
of their arms to drag out their very pianos and
harps on the heads of the cruel Austrian
soldiers? Had not these white coats fired at
the crowds in churches, chopped down
inoffensive children, bayoneted old men,
murdered women with lacerating whips: in a word,
committed all the cruelties of the old Croat
and the modern Cossack? Had not the very
streets outside echoed with their bullying
cannon, and the insolent trample of the horses
of their hussars? Had not these quiet, subtly
feeling Italians—so passionate in love and
hate, so retentive of kindness, of injury, with
such a great past behind them to rouse their
rage, and such a great possible future before
them to excite their hope—had they not had
fathers shot, and mothers cleft down, and children
piked, and brothers trodden to bloody mud, by the
very men in white who sat yonder with all the
defying pride of conquerors, sipping their coffee
and burning away their reed cigars with all the
idle luxury of soldiers resting from their toil of
blood? Why, I could see now in every face a smile
of pleasure at the vexation the coming fate of the
Milan patriot Luigi seemed to give the loungers
in the caffé of the Cathedral square. Every now
and then the constraint of silence, so deep that
you might almost hear the grey ash of the cigar
fall, and that the spirt of a match sounded in it like
the click of a rifle, was broken by some handsome
young Austrian hussar sweeping his fingers
through the great curving flaxen moustache, which,
soft and golden, swept up nearly to his cheek-
bone, and hoarsely whispering, with a husky laugh,
something about the "verdammter spitzbube,"
by which I knew he meant Luigi, even if he had
not, as he spoke, given a sneering and sweeping
look down the opposite row of sullen Italian faces,
across whose brows you could see the glance
passing, as if it was a sabre slash and had left a
wound.

I was thinking of leaving Milan, being off to
Verona on the morrow to meet the celebrated
Two Gentlemen; I was, on my way to call upon
Shylock in Venice, and Petruchio in learned
Padua, hoping to get round by Milton's Vallombrosa,
and not to leave Italy without seeing poor
Keates's grave, out by the walls near the old
Appian Way at Rome. I had stared till my eyes
were tired, the caffè was getting blue and
vapoury with smoke, and I felt so anti-Austrian
that I longed to get to my quiet hotel bedroom,
and there spout Smollett's fine Ode to Liberty,
and rail at the Austrians at my ease, when,
glancing into an angle of the room to the left
of the general, in the nook formed by the
entrance to the billiard-room, perhaps the quietest
and least obtrusive spot in the whole caffè,
                       I saw a face—
Such a face! Good God! what a living open-air
Hell Earth must be to some men!—to men who
walk with graves gaping round them, to whom
every wall is a mosaic of tombstones, to whom
the sun seems black, and flowers and blue sky
are hateful, and loving women and tender angel
children are things to shake the fist at, in
the hopelessness and bitterness of unchanging
misery and despair! This was the face of such a
purgatorial man—a living heart dumb: his eyes
were rayless; his pale, bloodless lips were
clenched together immovably, like those of a
strong, stoical man under the surgeon's knife; no
part of his waxen face moved but his eyes—
his eyes! shall I ever forget them? His restless,
bloodshot eyes, that swept over the room
and prowled about suspiciously round every head:
angrily on this one, indifferently on the other:
but at last ever coming and focussing down with