er was
an alliance more dearly paid for. We ourselves are not a very compliant
or conciliating race, but we can remember what it cost us to submit to
French insolence and pretension in the Crimea; and yet we did submit to
it, not always with a good grace, but in some fashion or other.

Here comes my Garibaldino again, and with a proposal to go down to Genoa
and look at the Italian fleet. I don't suppose that either of us know
much of the subject; and indeed I feel, in my ignorance, that I might be
a senior Lord of the Admiralty--but that is only another reason for
the inquiry. "One is nothing," says Mr Puff, "if he ain't critical" So
Heaven help the Italian navy under the conjoint commentaries of myself
and my friend! Meanwhile, and before we start, one word more of Turin.

A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.

Here I am at the "Feder" in Turin--as dirty a hotel, be it said
passingly, as you'll find out of Ireland, and seventeen long years it
is since I saw it first. Italy has changed a good deal in the
meanwhile--changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my
old acquaintance, the Feder! There's the dirty waiter flourishing his
dirtier napkin; and there's the long low-ceilinged _table-d'hote_ room,
stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little
grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their
rolls in chocolate, and puffing their "Cavours," with faces as innocent
of soap as they were before the war of the liberation. After all,
perhaps, I'd have no objection if some friend would cry out, "Why, Con,
my boy, you don't look a day older than when I saw you here in '46, I
think! I protest you have not changed in the least. What _elixir vitae_
have you swallowed, old fellow? Not a wrinkle, nor a grey hair," and so
on. And yet seventeen years taken out of the working part of a man's
life--that period that corresponds with the interval between after
breakfast, we'll say, and an hour before dinner--makes a great gap in
existence; for I did very little as a boy, being not an early riser,
perhaps, and now, in the evening of my days, I have got a theory that a
man ought to dine early and never work after it. Though I'm half
ashamed, on so short an acquaintance with my reader, to mention a
personal incident, I can scarcely avoid--indeed I cannot avoid--relating
a circumstance connected with my first visit to the "Hotel Feder."

I was newly m