Riding the wild horses and chasing the wild cattle of the Pampas, his eyes covering the immense spaces untrodden by man, this corsair of five-and-twenty drank deep of the innocent pleasures of untamed nature, when not occupied in fighting by land or sea, with equal fortune; or rather, perhaps, with greater fortune and greater proof of inborn genius as commander of the naval campaign of the Paran[=a] than as defender of Monte Video.  No adventures were wanting to him; he was even imprisoned and tortured.  In South America he found the one woman worthy to bear his name, the lion-hearted Anita, whom he carried off, she consenting, from her father and the man to whom her father had betrothed her.  Garibaldi in after years expressed such deep contrition for the act which bore Anita away from the quiet life in store for her, and plunged her into hardships which only ended when she died, that, misinterpreting his remorse, many supposed the man from whom he took her to have been already her husband.  It was not so.  Shortly before the Church of San Francisco at Monte Video was burnt down (some twenty years ago), the marriage register of Garibaldi and Anita was found in its archives, and a legal copy was made.  In it she is described as ’Dona Ana Maria de Jesus, unmarried daughter of Don Benito Rivevio de Silva, of Laguna, in Brazil.’  The bridegroom, who during all his American career had scarcely clothes to cover him, parted with his only possession, an old silver watch, to pay the priest’s fees.  Head of the Italian Legion, he only took the rations of a common soldier, and as candles were not included in the rations, he sat in the dark.  Someone reported this to the Government, who sent him a present of L20, half of which he gave to a poor widow.

When the first rumours that something was preparing in Italy reached Monte Video, Garibaldi wrote a letter offering his services to the Pope, still hailed as Champion of Freedom, and soon embarked himself for the Old World, with eighty-five of his best soldiers, among whom was his beloved friend, Francesco Anzani.  Giacomo Medici had been despatched a little in advance to confer with Mazzini.  At starting, the Legion knew nothing of the revolution in Milan and Venice, or of Charles Albert having taken the field.  Great was their wonder, therefore, on reaching Gibraltar, to see hoisted on a Sardinian ship a perfectly new flag, never beheld by them out of dreams—­the Italian tricolor.

So Garibaldi returned at forty-one years of age to the country where the sentence of death passed upon him had never been revoked.  Before the law he was still ‘a brigand of the first category.’  Nor was he quite sure that he would not be arrested, and, as a precaution, when he cast anchor in the harbour of his native Nice, he ran up the Monte Videan colours.  It was needless.  Throngs of people crowded the quays to welcome home the Ligurian captain, who had done great things over sea.  Anita was there; she had preceded him to Europe with their three children,