up to the delight of
making aloud those comments on the ladies which he had hitherto stifled
in his breast. Sometimes he would feign himself too deeply taken with a
passing beauty to remain quiet, and would make his friend follow with
him in chase of her to the Public Gardens. But he was a fickle lover,
and wanted presently to get back to his caffe, where, at decent
intervals of days or weeks, he would indulge himself in discovering a
spy in some harmless stranger, who, in going out, looked curiously at
the scar Tonelli's cheek had brought from the battle of Vicenza in 1848.

"Something of a spy, no?" he asked at these times of the waiter, who,
flattered by the penetration of a frequenter of his caffe, and the
implication that it was thought seditious enough to be watched by the
police, assumed a pensive importance, and answered, "Something of a spy,
certainly."

Upon this Tonelli was commonly encouraged to proceed: "Did I ever tell
you how I once sent one of those ugly muzzles out of a caffe? I knew him
as soon as I saw him,--I am never mistaken in a spy,--and I went with my
newspaper, and sat down close at his side. Then I whispered to him
across the sheet, 'We are two.' 'Eh?' says he. 'It is a very small
caffe, and there is no need of more than one,' and then I stared at him
and frowned. He looks at me fixedly a moment, then gathers up his hat
and gloves, and takes his pestilency off."

The waiter, who had heard this story, man and boy, a hundred times, made
a quite successful show of enjoying it, as he walked away with Tonelli's
fee of half a cent in his pocket. Tonelli then had left from his day's
salary enough to pay for the ice which he ate at ten o'clock, but which
he would sometimes forego, in order to give the money in charity, though
more commonly he indulged himself, and put off the beggar with, "Another
time, my dear. I have no leisure now to discuss those matters with
thee."

On holidays this routine of Tonelli's life was varied. In the forenoon
he went to mass at St. Mark's, to see the beauty and fashion of the
city; and then he took a walk with his four or five young friends, or
went with them to play at bowls, or even made an excursion to the main
land, where they hired a carriage, and all those Venetians got into it,
like so many seamen, and drove the horse with as little mercy as if he
had been a sail-boat. At seven o'clock Tonelli dined with the notary,
next whom he sat at table, and for whom hi