ccommodation. Few men take pleasure
in acquitting their own debts, fewer still like to pay those of their
neighbors, and Grounsell set about the task in anything but a pleasant
manner. There was one redeeming feature, however, in the affair.
Jekyl's schedule could not have extracted a rebuke from the severest
Commissioner of Bankruptcy. His household charges were framed on the
most moderate scale of expenditure. A few crowns for his house-rent,
a few "Pauls" for his eatables, and a few "Grazie" for his washing,
comprised the whole charge of his establishment, and not even Hume would
have sought to cut down the "estimates." Doubtless more than one half of
the demands were unjust and extortionate, and many were perhaps already
acquitted; but as all the rogueries were but homoeopathic iniquities
after all, their doses might be endured with patience. His haste to
conclude the arrangements had, however, a very opposite tendency. The
more yielding he became, the greater grew their exactions, and several
times the treaty threatened to open hostilities again; and at last it
was full an hour after Jekyl's departure that Grounsell escaped from
durance, and was free to follow George Onslow to Pratolino.

With his adventures in the interval the reader is sufficiently
acquainted; and we now come back to that moment where, bewildered and
lost, he sat down upon the bench beside the high-road.

CHAPTER II. A SAD HOUSEHOLD

It was already past noon when Grounsell reached Florence. He was delayed
at the gate by the authorities examining a peasant's cart in front of
him,--a process which appeared to take a most unusual degree of care
and scrutiny,--and thus gave the doctor another occasion for inveighing
against the "stupid ignorance of foreigners, who throw every possible
impediment in the way of traffic and intercourse."

"What have they discovered now?" cried he, testily, as in a crowd of
vehicles, of all sorts and sizes, he was jammed up like a coal-vessel in
the river. "Is the peasant a revolutionary general in disguise? or has
he got Bibles or British cutlery under the straw of his baroccino?"

"No, Eccellenza." (Every one in a passion in Italy is styled Eccellenza,
as an "anodyne.") "It's a sick man, and they don't know what to do with
him."

"Is there a duty on ague or nervous fever?" asked he, angrily.

"They suspect he's dead, Eccellenza; and if so, there's no use in
bringing him into the city, to bring him out agai