at whose table it was served, paid it a well-deserved tribute of admiration, but lamented the unskilfulness of the hand which had cleaned it:  “How stupid to cut it to the very throat!  See what a gap!” I laughed in my sleeve and held my tongue.  It was a frightful gap, to be sure,—­but not bigger than was necessary to admit of an oilskin-covered parcel, a pound at least in weight, a parcel full to the brim of treasonable matter, revolutionary pamphlets, regulations of secret societies, and what not.  My John Dory was a horse of Troy in miniature.  But Turin stood this one better than Troy the other.

Turin was, or seemed to me, gloomy and chilly at that time, though the season was mild, and the sky had cleared up.  Jesuits, carabineers, and spies lorded it; distrust was the order of the day.  People went about their business, exchanged a hasty and well-timed sciao, (schiavo,) and gave up all genial intercourse.  Far keener than the breath of neighboring snow-capped Mount Cenis, the breath of despotism froze alike tongues and souls.  How could buttered toast, emblem of softness, thrive in so hard a temperature?  I left as soon as I could, and with a feeling of relief akin to joy.

I was in no haste to revisit Turin, nor, had I been, would circumstances have permitted my doing so.  The fish had a tail for me as well as for many others, and a very long tail too.  Most of the years intervening between 1831 and 1848 I had to spend abroad,—­out of Italy, I mean.  Time enough for reflection.  Plenty of worry and anxiety, and difficulties of many a kind.  Rough handling from the powers that were, cold indifference from the masses.  A flow of gentle sympathy, now and then, from a kindred heart or two,—­God bless them!—­a live spring in a desert.  A hard apprenticeship,—­still, useful in many ways, to develop the sense of realities, to teach one to do without a host of things deemed indispensable before to keep the soul in tune.  I declare, for my part, I don’t regret those long years of erratic life.  I bless them, on the contrary; for they opened my eyes to the worth of my country.  The right point of view to take in physical or moral beauty, in its fulness, is only at a distance.

The great convulsion of ’48 flung wide the gates of Italy to the wanderer, and I returned to Turin.  I had left it at freezing-point, and I found it at white-heat.  Half Europe revolutionized,—­France a republic, Vienna in a blaze, Hungary in arms, Radetzky driven out of Milan, a Piedmontese army in Lombardy,—­there was more than enough to turn the heads of the Seven Sages of Greece.  No wonder ours were turned.  Serve a splendid banquet and pour out generous wine to a shipwrecked crew who have long been starving, and ten to one they will overfeed themselves and get drunk and quarrel.  We did both, alas!—­and those who are drunk and quarrel are likely to be overpowered by those who keep sober and united.  We were divided about the sauce with which the hare should be dressed, and, in the heat of argument, lost sight of this little fact, that a hare, to be dressed at all, must first be caught.  The first reverses overtook us thus occupied.  They did not sober us; quite the contrary; we fell to doing what Manzoni’s capons did.