eaten with the
Barmecide; but his pale, handsome face, finished off so gracefully by
the white, pointed beard, still met you, courteous and unruffled, the
idea of an exiled doge, or a Rohan in disgrace. Once only I saw him
moved--when the landlord of our inn, a vast bloated _bourgeois_, smote
the Count familiarly on the shoulder, and bantered him pleasantly on the
brilliant prospects of his eldest son. It was not unkindly meant,
perhaps, but the old man shrunk away from the large fat hand as if it
hurt him, and turned toward us a look piteously appealing, which was not
lost on myself or Livingstone. When mine host, later in the evening,
shook in his gouty slippers before an ebullition of Guy's wrath, excited
by the most shadowy pretext, I wonder if he guessed at the remote cause
of that outpouring of the vials? Count Massa did, for he smiled
intensely, as only an Italian can smile when amply revenged.

One instance more to close a long digression. I have read of a baron in
the fifteenth century who once in his life said a good thing. He was a
coarse, brutal marauder, illiterate enough to have satisfied Earl Angus,
and as unromantic as the Integral Calculus. He was mortally wounded in a
skirmish; and when his men came back from the pursuit, he was bleeding
to death, resting against a tree. When they lifted him up, they noticed
his eyes fixed with a curious, complacent expression on the red stream
that surged and gurgled out of his wound, just as a _gourmand_ looks at
a bumper of a rare vintage held up to the light. They heard him growl to
himself, "_Qu'il coule rouge et fort, le bon vieux sang de Bourgogne_."
And then he fell back--dead.

O Publicola Thompson! Phoesphor to the Tower Hamlets and Boanerges of
the platform--will you not allow that, amid a wilderness of weeds, this
one fair plant flourishes under "the cold shade?"

CHAPTER XXII.

"Shy she was, and I thought her cold;
Thought her proud, and fled over the sea;
Filled I was with folly and spite,
When Ellen Adair was dying for me."

When I came to Livingstone's chambers on the following morning, I found
him alone. His head was resting listlessly against the back of the vast
easy-chair in which he was reclining, and his face, thrown out in relief
against the crimson velvet, looked haggard and drawn. The calumet--not
of peace--was between his lips, and the dense blue clouds were wreathing
round him like a Scotch mist. On a tab