eye full of humour and a mouth expressive of good nature and bonhomie.  His appearance in the proscribed uniform might have been considered by Austria, if her police authorities could have appreciated the fun of the thing, as wholesomely calculated to throw ridicule on the hated institution.  He was utterly unassuming, and good-natured in his manner, and when seen in his ordinary black habiliments looked more like a well-to-do Jewish trader than anything else.

As for the social aspects of these Scientific Congresses, they were becoming every year more festive, and, at all events to the ignoramus outsiders who joined them, more pleasant.  My good cousin and old friend, then Colonel, now General, Sir Charles Trollope, was at Venice that autumn.  I said on meeting him, “Now the first thing is to, make you a member.”  “Me! a member of a Scientific Congress!” said he.  “God bless you!  I am as ignorant as a babe of all possible ’epteras and ’opteras, and ’statics and ’matics!” “Oh! nonsense! we are all men of science here!  Come along!”—­i.e., to the ducal palace to be inscribed.  “But what do you mean to tell them I am?” he asked.  “Well! let’s see!  You must have superintended a course of instruction in the goose-step in your day?” “Rather so!” said he.  “Very well, then.  You are Instructor in Military Exercises in her B.M.  Forces!  You are all right!  Come along!” And if I had said that he was Trumpeter Major of the 600th Regiment in the British Army, it would doubtless have been equally all right.  So said, so done!  And I see his bewildered look now, as the four huge volumes, about a load for a porter, to which he had become entitled, together with medals and documents of many kinds, were put into his arms.

Ah! those were pleasant days!  And while Italy, under the wing of science, was plotting her independence, I was busy in forging the chains of that dependence which was to be a more unmixed source of happiness to me, than the independence which Italy was compassing has yet proved to her.

Those chains, however, as regarded at all events the outward and visible signs of them, had not got forged yet.  I certainly had no “proposed” to Theodosia.  In fact, to the very best of my recollection I never did “propose” to her—­or “pop,” as the hideous phrase is—­any decisive question at all.  We seem, to my recollection, to have come gradually, insensibly, and mutually to consider it a matter of course that what we wanted was to be married, and that the only matter which needed any words or consideration was the question, how the difficulties in the way of our wishes were to be overcome.