of this sort, but he probably saw, as your clever
adventurer _will_ see, with half an eye, that I could be no use
to him--that I was a wayfarer like himself on life's highroad; and
prudently turned round on his side and went to sleep again.

There is no quality so distinctive in this sort of man or woman--for
adventurer has its feminine--as the rapid intuition with which he seizes
on all available people, and throws aside all the unprofitable ones. A
money-changer detecting a light napoleon is nothing to it. What are the
traits by which they guide their judgment--what the tests by which they
try humanity, I do not know, but that they do read a stranger at first
sight is indisputable. That he found out Cornelius O'Dowd wasn't a
member of the British Cabinet, or a junior partner in Baring's, was, you
may sneeringly conjecture, no remarkable evidence of acuteness. But why
should he discover the fact--fact it is--that he'd never be one penny
the richer by knowing me, and that intercourse with me was about as
profitable as playing a match at billiards "for the table"?

Say what people will against roguery and cheating, rail as they may at
the rapacity and rascality one meets with, I declare and protest, after
a good deal of experience, that the world is a very poor world to
him who is not the mark of some roguery! When you are too poor to be
cheated, you are too insignificant to be cherished; and the man that is
not worth humbugging isn't very far from bankruptcy.

It gave me a sort of shock, therefore, when I saw that my friend took
this view of me, and I strolled down moodily enough to the Chamber of
Deputies. Turin is a dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds
that he must serve a seven years' apprenticeship before he gets any
footing in its stiff ungenial society--for of all Italians, nothing
socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the
courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular
Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the
less so, perhaps, that their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon
that ever disfigured a human mouth. Of course this is an efficient
barrier against intercourse with strangers; and though French is spoken
in society, it bears about the same relation to that language at Paris,
as what is called pigeon-English at Hong-Kong does to the tongue in use
in Belgravia.

When I reached the Palazzo Carignan, as the Chamber