sked him how he
felt, and then, seeing the difficulty with which the boy replied, he
went on to tell how he himself had discovered him on the side of the
Lagoscuro at nightfall, and carried him all the way to the Tana. 'The
luck was,' said he, 'that _you_ happened to be light, and _I_ strong.'

'Say, rather, that _you_ were kind-hearted and _I_ in trouble,' muttered
the boy, as his eyes filled up.

'And who knows, boy, but you may be right!' cried he, as though a sudden
thought had crossed him; 'your judgment has just as much grounds as
that of the great world!' As he spoke, his voice rose out of its tone
of former gentleness and swelled into a roll of deep, sonorous meaning;
then changing again, he asked--'By what accident was it that you came
there?'

Gerald drew a long sigh, as though recalling a sorrowful dream; and
then, with many a faltering word, and many an effort to recall events as
they occurred, told all that he remembered of his own history.

'A scholar of the Jesuit college; without father or mother; befriended
by a great man, whose name he has never heard,' muttered the other to
himself. 'No bad start in life for such a world as we have now before
us. And your name?'

'Gerald Fitzgerald. I am Irish by birth.'

The stranger seemed to ponder long over these words, and then said: 'The
Irish have a nationality of their own--a race--a language--traditions.
Why have they suffered themselves to be ruled by England?'

'I suppose they couldn't help it,' said Gerald, half smiling.

'Which of us can say that? who has ever divined where the strength lay
till the day of struggle called it forth? Chance, chance--she is the
great goddess!'

'I'd be sorry to think so,' said Gerald resolutely.

'Indeed, boy!' cried the other, turning his large, full eyes upon the
youth, and staring steadfastly at him; then passing his hand over his
brow, he added, in a tone of much feeling: 'And yet it is as I have
said. Look at the portraits around us on these walls. There they are,
great or infamous, as accident has made them. That fellow yonder, with
that noble forehead and generous look, he stabbed the confessor who gave
the last rites to his father, just because the priest had heard
some tales to his disadvantage; a scrupulous sense of delicacy moved
him--there was a woman's name in it--and he preferred a murder to a
scandal! There, too, there's Marocchi, who poisoned his mother the day
of her second marriage. Ask old Pipp