to change his residence to another and more
famous town in the North of Italy. He parted
from the poor prisoner with a sorrowful heart,
as from a doomed man for whom, there was no
release but Death.

The Englishman lived in his new place of
abode another half-year and more, and had no
tidings of the wretched prisoner. At length,
one day, he received from the Advocate a cool
concise mysterious note, to this effect. "If you
still wish to bestow that benefit upon the man
in whom you were once interested, send me fifty
pounds more, and I think it can be ensured."
Now, the Englishman had long settled in his
mind that the Advocate was a heartless sharper,
who had preyed upon his credulity and his
interest in an unfortunate sufferer. So, he sat
down and wrote a dry answer, giving the Advocate
to understand that he was wiser now than
he had been formerly, and that no more money
was extractable from his pocket.

He lived outside the city gates, some mile or
two from the post-office, and was accustomed to
walk into the city with his letters and post them
himself. On a lovely spring day, when the sky
was exquisitely blue, and the sea Divinely
beautiful, he took his usual walk, carrying this letter
to the Advocate in his pocket. As he went
along, his gentle heart was much moved by the
loveliness of the prospect, and by the thought
of the slowly-dying prisoner chained to the
bedstead, for whom the universe had no delights.
As he drew nearer and nearer to the city where
he was to post the letter, he became very
uneasy in his mind. He debated with himself,
was it remotely possible, after all, that this sum
of fifty pounds could restore the fellow-creature
whom he pitied so much, and for whom he had
striven so hard, to liberty? He was not a
conventially rich Englishman—very far from that
—but he had a spare fifty pounds at the banker's.
He resolved to risk it. Without doubt, GOD has
recompensed him for the resolution.

He went to the banker's, and got a bill for the
amount, and enclosed it in a letter to the Advo-
cate that I wish I could have seen. He simply
told the Advocate that he was quite a poor man,
and that he was sensible it might be a great
weakness in him to part with so much money on
the faith of so vague a communication; but that
there it was, and that he prayed the Advocate
to make a good use of it. If he did otherwise
no good could ever come of it, and it would lie
heavy on his soul one day.

Within a week, the Englishman was sitting
at his breakfast, when he heard some suppressed
sounds of agitation on the staircase, and
Giovanni Carlavero leaped into his room and fell
upon his breast, a free man!

Conscious of having wronged the Advocate
in his own thoughts, the Englishman wrote him
an earnest and grateful letter, avowing the fact,
and entreating him to confide by what means
and through what agency he had succeeded so
well. The Advocate returned for answer through
the post. "There are many things, as you
know, in this Italy of ours, that are safest and
best not even spoken of—far less written of.
We may meet some day, and then I may tell
you what you want to know; not here, and
now." But, the two never did meet again. The
Advocate was dead when the Englishman gave
me my trust; and how the man had been set
free, remained as great a mystery to the
Englishman, and to the man himself, as it was to
me.

But, I knew this:—here was the man, this
sultry night, on his knees at my feet, because I
was the Englishman's friend; here were his
tears upon my dress; here were his sobs
choking his utterance; here were his kisses
on my hands, because they had touched the
hands that had worked out his release. He had
no need to tell me it would be happiness to him
to die for his benefactor; I doubt if I ever saw
real, sterling, fervent gratitude of soul, before
or since.

He was much watched and suspected, he said,
and had had enough to do to keep himself out of
trouble. This, and his not having prospered in
his worldly affairs, had led to his having failed
in his usual communications to the Englishman
for—as I now remember the period—some two
or three years. But, his prospects were brighter,
and his wife who had been very ill had recovered,
and his fever had left him, and he had bought a
little vineyard, and would I carry to his
benefactor the first of its wine? Ay, that I would
(I told him with enthusiasm), and not a drop
of it should be spilled or lost!

He had cautiously closed the door before
speaking of himself, and had talked with such
excess of emotion, and in a provincial Italian
so difficult to understand, that I had more than
once been obliged to stop him, aud beg him to
have compassion on me and be slower and
calmer. By degrees he became so, and
tranquilly walked back with me to the hotel. There,
I sat down before I went to bed and wrote a
faithful account of him to the Englishman:
which I concluded by saying that I would bring
the wine home, against any difficulties, every
drop.

Early next morning when I came out at the
hotel door to pursue my journey, I found my
friend waiting with one of those immense bottles
in which the Italian peasants store their wine
—a bottle holding some half-dozen gallons—
bound round with basket-work for greater
safety on the journey. I see him now, in the
bright sunlight, tears of gratitude in his eyes,
proudly inviting my attention to this corpulent
bottle. (At the street corner hard by, two high-
flavoured able-bodied monks—pretending to talk
together, but keeping their four evil eyes upon
us.)

How the bottle had been got there, did not
appear; but the difficulty of getting it into the
ramshackle vetturino carriage in which I was
departing, was so great, and it took up so much room
when it was got in, that I elected to sit outside.
The last I saw of Giovanni Carlavero was his
running through the town by the side of the
jingling wheels, clasping my hand as I stretched