sal
accent, "How is your health, stranger? I hope I see you pretty well?"

"Quite so, I thank you," said the other cordially, as he moved a chair
towards him.

"You've made a considerable tour of it [pronounced 'tower'] since we
met, I reckon. You were bound to do Lombardy, and the silkworms, and
the rice-fields, and the ancient cities, and the galleries, and
such-like,--and you 've done them?"

The Englishman bowed assent.

"Well, sir, so have I, and it don't pay. No, it don't! It's noways
pleasing to a man with a right sense of human natur' to see a set of
half-starved squalid loafers making a livin' out of old tombs and ruined
churches, with lying stories about martyrs' thumb-nails and saints'
shin-bones. That won't make a people, sir, will it?"

"But you must have seen a great deal to interest you, notwithstanding."

"At Genoa, sir. I like Genoa,--they 're a wide-awake, active set there.
They 've got trade, sir, and they know it."

"The city, I take it, is far more prosperous than pleasant, for
strangers?"

"Well now, sir, that ere remark of yours strikes me as downright narrow,
and, if I might be permitted, I 'd call it mean illiberal. Why should
you or I object to people who prefer their own affairs to the pleasant
task of amusing us?"

"Nay, I only meant to observe that one might find more agreeable
companions than men intently immersed in money-getting."

"Another error, and a downright English error too; for it's one of your
national traits, stranger, always to abuse the very thing that you do
best. What are you as a people but a hard-working, industrious, serious
race, ever striving to do this a little cheaper, and that a little
quicker, so as to beat the foreigner, and with all that you 'll stand
up and say there ain't nothing on this universal globe to be compared to
loafing!"

"I would hope that you have not heard this sentiment from an
Englishman."

"Not in them words, not exactly in them terms, but from the same
platform, stranger. Why, when you want to exalt a man for any great
service to the state, you ain't satisfied with making him a loafer,--for
a lord is just a loafer, and no more nor no less,--but you make his
son a loafer, and all his descendants forever. What would you say to a
fellow that had a fast trotter, able to do his mile, on a fair road, in
two forty-three, who, instead of keeping him in full working condition,
and making him earn his penny, would just turn him out in a pa