hes reappear, not less characteristically, in what his next
letter told of a couple of English travellers who took possession at
this time (24th of May) of a portion of the ground floor of the
Peschiere. They had with them a meek English footman who immediately
confided to Dickens's servants, among other personal grievances, the
fact that he was made to do everything, even cooking, in crimson
breeches; which in a hot climate, he protested, was "a grinding of him
down." "He is a poor soft country fellow; and his master locks him up at
night, in a basement room with iron bars to the window. Between which
our servants poke wine in, at midnight. His master and mistress buy old
boxes at the curiosity shops, and pass their lives in lining 'em with
bits of parti-coloured velvet. A droll existence, is it not? We are
lucky to have had the palace to ourselves until now, but it is so large
that we never see or hear these people; and I should not have known
even, if they had not called upon us, that another portion of the ground
floor had been taken by some friends of old Lady Holland--whom I seem to
see again, crying about dear Sydney Smith, behind that green screen as
we last saw her together."[104]

Then came a little incident also characteristic. An English ship of war,
the Phantom, appeared in the harbour; and from her commander, Sir Henry
Nicholson, Dickens received, among attentions very pleasant to him, an
invitation to lunch on board and bring his wife, for whom, at a time
appointed, a boat was to be sent to the Ponte Reale (the royal bridge).
But no boat being there at the time, Dickens sent off his servant in
another boat to the ship to say he feared some mistake. "While we were
walking up and down a neighbouring piazza in his absence, a brilliant
fellow in a dark blue shirt with a white hem to it all round the collar,
regular corkscrew curls, and a face as brown as a berry, comes up to me
and says 'Beg your pardon sir--Mr. Dickens?' 'Yes.' 'Beg your pardon
sir, but I'm one of the ship's company of the Phantom sir, cox'en of the
cap'en's gig sir, she's a lying off the pint sir--been there half an
hour.' 'Well but my good fellow,' I said, 'you're at the wrong place!'
'Beg your pardon sir, I was afeerd it was the wrong place sir, but I've
asked them Genoese here sir, twenty times, if it was Port Real; and they
knows no more than a dead jackass!'--Isn't it a good thing to have made
a regular Portsmouth name of it?"

That w