ere!"

His first experience in a foreign tongue he made immediately on landing,
when he had gone to the bank for money, and after delivering with most
laborious distinctness a rather long address in French to the clerk
behind the counter, was disconcerted by that functionary's cool enquiry
in the native-born Lombard-street manner, "How would you like to take
it, sir?" He took it, as everybody must, in five-franc pieces, and a
most inconvenient coinage he found it; for he required so much that he
had to carry it in a couple of small sacks, and was always "turning hot
about suddenly" taking it into his head that he had lost them.

The evening of Tuesday the 16th of July saw him in a villa at Albaro,
the suburb of Genoa in which, upon the advice of our Gore-house friends,
he had resolved to pass the summer months before taking up his quarters
in the city. His wish was to have had Lord Byron's house there, but it
had fallen into neglect and become the refuge of a third-rate wine-shop.
The matter had then been left to Angus Fletcher who just now lived near
Genoa, and he had taken at a rent absurdly above its value[78] an
unpicturesque and uninteresting dwelling, which at once impressed its
new tenant with its likeness to a pink jail. "It is," he said to me,
"the most perfectly lonely, rusty, stagnant old staggerer of a domain
that you can possibly imagine. What would I give if you could only look
round the courtyard! _I_ look down into it, whenever I am near that side
of the house, for the stable is so full of 'vermin and swarmers' (pardon
the quotation from my inimitable friend) that I always expect to see the
carriage going out bodily, with legions of industrious fleas harnessed
to and drawing it off, on their own account. We have a couple of Italian
work-people in our establishment; and to hear one or other of them
talking away to our servants with the utmost violence and volubility in
Genoese, and our servants answering with great fluency in English (very
loud: as if the others were only deaf, not Italian), is one of the most
ridiculous things possible. The effect is greatly enhanced by the
Genoese manner, which is exceedingly animated and pantomimic; so that
two friends of the lower class conversing pleasantly in the street,
always seem on the eve of stabbing each other forthwith. And a stranger
is immensely astonished at their not doing it."

The heat tried him less than he expected, excepting always the sirocco,
whi