ric-a-brac shop. I did not know how or why
it was that I was treated with such great respect, as if with fear, by
the conductor, and by all on the road. I was _en route_ all night, and
in the morning, very weary, I went to a hotel, called a commissionaire,
and bade him get my passport from the police, and have it _visee_, and
secure me a passage on the boat to Leghorn. He returned very soon, and
said with an air of bewilderment, "Signore, you sent me on a useless
errand. Here is your passport put all _en regle_, and your passage is
all secured!"

I saw it at once. The kind fatherly care of the great and good Navone
had done it all! He had watched over me invisibly and mysteriously all
the time during the night; on the road I was a pet child of the Roman
police! The Vehmgericht had endorsed me with three crosses! Therefore
the passport and the passage were all right, and the captain was very
deferential, and I got to Florence safely.

In Florence I went to the first hotel, which was then in what is now
known as the Palazzo Feroni, or Viesseux's, the great circulating library
of Italy. It is a fine machicolated building, which was in the Middle
Ages the prison of the Republic. From my window I had a fine view of the
Via Tornabuoni--in which I had coffee since I concluded the last line.
There were but three or four persons the first evening at the
_table-d'hote_. One was a very beautiful Polish countess, who spoke
French perfectly. She was very fascinating, and, when she ate a salad,
smeared her lovely mouth and cheeks all round with oil to her ears. Some
one said something to her about the manner in which the serfs were
treated in Poland, whereupon she replied with great vivacity that the
Polish serfs were even more degraded and barbarous than those of Russia.
Which remark inspired in me certain reflections, which were amply
developed in after years by the perusal of Von Moltke's work on Poland,
and more recently of that very interesting novel called "The Deluge." If
freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell, it was probably, from a
humanitarian point of view, with joy.

There was, however, at the same hotel a singular man, a Lithuanian Pole
named Andrekovitch, with whom I became very intimate, and whom I met in
after years in Paris and in America. He had been at a German university,
where he had imbibed most liberal and revolutionary ideas. He
subsequently took part in one or two revolutions, and was exiled.