at the very first
sight of him I was persuaded that he was a gentleman.

"You are Captain Fyffe?" he said, with a marked Italian accent.

"That is my name," I responded.

"You are possessed of mine," he answered. "Permit me that I shake hands.
I read in your English _Times_ this morning of the arrival of the Conte
di Rossano. I have seen my friend, and, so far as I know, I am the
only survivor of the enterprise in which he lost his liberty. I lose no
moment in coming here to pay my homage to the disinterested valor which
gave my compatriot his freedom, I am, sir," he bowed and extended his
hands with a smiling humility--"I am, sir, this many years a pensioner
on the bounty of Miss Rossano. She knows me as a comrade of the father
whom she has always until now thought of as lost to her. She has
pencilled for me a line or two on the back of my card."

I held the card still, and, turning it over, I read: "This brave and
loyal gentleman is my father's one surviving friend. He wishes to know
you. V. R."

I looked up after reading this brief but expressive message, and the
face of the gaunt spectre who stood before me was flushed, and his
head was in the air, as if he had read it with me, and was proud of the
testimony it conveyed on his behalf.

I asked him to be seated, and gave him to understand that anybody
carrying such a recommendation was welcome. He held out a long, lean
hand, and when I gave him my own stooped over it and kissed it.

"Sir," he said, "you have done more than restore an individual to
liberty. You have reanimated a cause: you have inspired a people. There
are a thousand of us at this hour in London to whom the name of the
Conte di Rossano is a legend and an inspiration. Twenty years ago he
was our leader--a spirit of the subtlest and most indomitable. A soul
without fear, and of resource astonishingly varied. 'You have restored
him to us, and before a month is over his name will ring through Italy.
We are preparing for such a rising as we have never made. For years our
names have been written on the sands of failure. We shall write them
to-morrow on the lasting granite of success."

He talked with any amount of fire and vigor, and in a voice pitched so
high that he might have been haranguing a multitude. He gesticulated
with the shabby old hat and the slim walking-stick as if he had been
wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled
under the tight buttons of his ragged o