They took me into the guard-house and
searched me, but they found no sedition on me. They found a small piece
of soap (we carry soap with us, now,) and I made them a present of it,
seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity. I continued to say Hotel
d'Europe, and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young
soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something. He said he
knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent
him away with me. We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it
appeared to me, and then he got lost. He turned this way and that, and
finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder
of the morning trying to find the city gate again. At that moment it
struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way.
It was the hotel!

It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there
that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the
government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly
and from country to city, so that they can not become acquainted with the
people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies
with friends. My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant. I
will change the subject.

At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has
any knowledge of--the Leaning Tower. As every one knows, it is in the
neighborhood of one hundred and eighty feet high--and I beg to observe
that one hundred and eighty feet reach to about the hight of four
ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a
very considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire to,
even when it stands upright--yet this one leans more than thirteen feet
out of the perpendicular. It is seven hundred years old, but neither
history or tradition say whether it was built as it is, purposely, or
whether one of its sides has settled. There is no record that it ever
stood straight up. It is built of marble. It is an airy and a beautiful
structure, and each of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns,
some of marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that were
handsome when they were new. It is a bell tower, and in its top hangs a
chime of ancient bells. The winding staircase within is dark, but one
always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally
gravitating