picturesque, but preferable. Tourists! Do you hear them?"

Carlo Ammiani had descried the advanced troop of a procession of
gravely-heated climbers ladies upon donkeys, and pedestrian guards
stalking beside them, with courier, and lacqueys, and baskets of
provisions, all bearing the stamp of pilgrims from the great Western
Island.

CHAPTER VI

A mountain ascended by these children of the forcible Isle, is a
mountain to be captured, and colonized, and absolutely occupied for
a term; so that Vittoria soon found herself and her small body of
adherents observed, and even exclaimed against, as a sort of intruding
aborigines, whose presence entirely dispelled the sense of romantic
dominion which a mighty eminence should give, and which Britons expect
when they have expended a portion of their energies. The exclamations
were not complimentary; nevertheless, Vittoria listened with pleased
ears, as one listens by a brookside near an old home, hearing a music
of memory rather than common words. They talked of heat, of appetite, of
chill, of thirst, of the splendour of the prospect, of the anticipations
of good hotel accommodation below, of the sadness superinduced by the
reflection that in these days people were found everywhere, and poetry
was thwarted; again of heat, again of thirst, of beauty, and of chill.
There was the enunciation of matronly advice; there was the outcry
of girlish insubordination; there were sighings for English ale, and
namings of the visible ranges of peaks, and indicatings of geographical
fingers to show where Switzerland and Piedmont met, and Austria held her
grasp on Lombardy; and "to this point we go to-night; yonder to-morrow;
farther the next day," was uttered, soberly or with excitement, as
befitted the age of the speaker.

Among these tourists there was one very fair English lady, with long
auburn curls of the traditionally English pattern, and the science of
Paris displayed in her bonnet and dress; which, if not as graceful
as severe admirers of the antique in statuary or of the mediaeval in
drapery demand, pleads prettily to be thought so, and commonly succeeds
in its object, when assisted by an artistic feminine manner. Vittoria
heard her answer to the name of Mrs. Sedley. She had once known her as
a Miss Adela Pole. Amidst the cluster of assiduous gentlemen surrounding
this lady it was difficult for Vittoria's stolen glances to discern her
husband; and the moment she did discern him