rk Ages are
returning.

It was an hour past noon when the _diligence_, with its polyglot
freight, drove up to the harrier. There gathered round the vehicle a
white cloud of Austrian uniforms, and straightway every compartment of
the carriage bristled with a forest of hands holding passports. These
the men-at-arms received; and, making them hastily up into a bundle, and
tying them with a piece of cord, they despatched them by a special
messenger to the Prefect; so that hardly had we entered the Porta
Vercellina, till our arrival was known at head-quarters. There was
handed at the same time to each passenger a printed paper, in which the
same notification was four times repeated,--first in Italian, next in
French, then in German, and lastly in English,--enjoining the holder,
under certain penalties, to present himself within a given number of
hours at the Police Office.

It was under these conditions,--a pilgrim from a far land,--that I
appeared at the gates of Milan. The passport detention seemed less an
annoyance here than I had ever felt it before. The beauteous city,
sitting so tranquilly amidst the sublimest scenery, seemed to have
something of a celestial character about it. It looked so resplendent,
partly by reason of the materials of which it is built, and partly by
reason of the sun that shone upon it as an Italian sun only can shine,
that none but pure men, I felt, might dwell here, and none but pure men
might enter at its gates. There were white sentinels at its portals;
rows of white houses formed its exterior; and in the middle of the city,
floating above it,--for it seemed to float rather than to rest on
foundations,--was its snow-white temple,--a place too holy almost, as it
seemed, for human worship and human worshippers; and then the city had
for battlements a glorious wall, white as alabaster, which rose to the
clouds. Everything conspired to cheat the visitor into the belief that
he had come at last to an abode where every hurtful passion was hushed,
and where Peace had fixed her chosen seat.

"All right," shouted the passport official: the gensdarmes, who guarded
the path with naked bayonet, stepped aside; and the quick, sharp crack
of the postilion's whip set the horses a-moving. We skirted the spacious
esplanade, and saw in the distance the beauteous form of the Arco della
Pace. We had not gone far till the drum's roll struck upon the ear, and
a long glittering line of Austrian bayonets wa