ance has produced since
Voltaire;--and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence,
the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not
responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence
was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two
diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other
hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause
the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled
by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the
diligence at Civita Vecchia.

The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in
vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port,
where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the
short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had
leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our
engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical
Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia
five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and
depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached
Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand,
there had been the land, soaked and sodden,--wild, shagged with
scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and
visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at
an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable
dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like
satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning
dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the
land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On
the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and
threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast,
heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace.

We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence
over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to
Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs'
worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew
it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have
lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for
the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for