at me
at the other, and to say to Georgy in a low voice whenever he handed her
anything, 'What does master think of datter 'rangement? Is he
content?'. . . If you could see what these fellows of couriers are when
their families are not upon the move, you would feel what a prize he is.
I can't make out whether he was ever a smuggler, but nothing will induce
him to give the custom-house-officers anything: in consequence of which
that portmanteau of mine has been unnecessarily opened twenty times.
Two of them will come to the coach-door, at the gate of a town. 'Is
there anything contraband in this carriage, signore?'--'No, no. There's
nothing here. I am an Englishman, and this is my servant.' 'A buono mano
signore?' 'Roche,'(in English) 'give him something, and get rid of him.'
He sits unmoved. 'A buono mano signore?' 'Go along with you!' says the
brave C. 'Signore, I am a custom-house-officer!' 'Well, then, more shame
for you!'--he always makes the same answer. And then he turns to me and
says in English: while the custom-house-officer's face is a portrait of
anguish framed in the coach-window, from his intense desire to know what
is being told to his disparagement: 'Datter chip,' shaking his fist at
him, 'is greatest tief--and you know it you rascal--as never did en-razh
me so, that I cannot bear myself!' I suppose chip to mean chap, but it
may include the custom-house-officer's father and have some reference to
the old block, for anything I distinctly know."

He closed his Lodi letter next day at Milan, whither his wife and her
sister had made an eighty miles journey from Genoa, to pass a couple of
days with him in Prospero's old Dukedom before he left for London. "We
shall go our several ways on Thursday morning, and I am still bent on
appearing at Cuttris's on Sunday the first, as if I had walked thither
from Devonshire-terrace. In the meantime I shall not write to you again
. . . to enhance the pleasure (if anything _can_ enhance the pleasure) of
our meeting . . . I am opening my arms so wide!" One more letter I had
nevertheless; written at Strasburg on Monday night the 25th; to tell me
I might look for him one day earlier, so rapid had been his progress. He
had been in bed only once, at Friburg for two or three hours, since he
left Milan; and he had sledged through the snow on the top of the
Simplon in the midst of prodigious cold. "I am sitting here _in_ a
wood-fire, and drinking brandy and water scalding hot, with