and minute, unsleeping watchfulness, lest she should dash her foot against a stone, was never absent from his mind.  She had become his real self, his genuine ego to all intents and purposes.  And his talk and thoughts were egoistic accordingly.  Of his own person, his ailments, his works, his ideas, his impressions, you might hear not a word from him in the intercourse of many days.  But there was in his inmost heart a naif and never-doubting faith that talk on all these subjects as regarded her must be profoundly interesting to those he talked with.  To me, at all events, it was so.  Perhaps had it been otherwise, there would have been less of it.

We were to reach Camaldoli the first night, and had therefore to leave Florence very early in the morning.  At Pelago, a little paese—­village we should call it—­on the Arno some fourteen or fifteen miles above Florence, we were to find saddle-horses, the journey we were about to make being in those days practicable in no other way, unless on foot.  There was at that time a certain Antonio da Pelago, whose calling it was to act as guide, and to furnish horses.  I had known him for many years, as did all those whose ramblings took them into those hills.  He was in many respects what people call “a character,” and seemed to fancy himself to have in some degree proprietary rights over the three celebrated Tuscan monasteries, Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Vernia.  He was well known to the friars at each of these establishments, and indeed to all the sparse population of that country-side.  He was a very good and competent guide and courier, possessed with a very amusingly exaggerated notion of his own importance, and rather bad to turn aside from his own preconceived and predetermined methods of doing everything that had to be done.  George Eliot at once made a study of him.

I am reminded, too, as I write, of the great amusement with which my old and highly-valued friend of many years, Alfred Austin, who long subsequently was making the same excursion with me and both our wives, listened to an oration of the indispensable Antonio.  One of his baggage horses had strayed and become temporarily lost among the hills.  He was exceedingly wroth, and poured forth his vexation in a torrent of very unparliamentary language. “Corpo di Guida!” he exclaimed, among a curious assortment of heterogeneous adjurations—­“Body of Judas!” stooping to the ground as he spoke, and striking the back of his hand against it, with an action that very graphically represented a singular survival of the classical testor inferos! Then suddenly changing his mood, he apostrophised the missing beast with the almost tearful reproach, “There! there now!  Thou hast made me throw away all my devotions!  All!  And Easter only just gone!” That is to say, your fault has betrayed me into violence and bad language, which has begun a new record of offences just after I had made all clear by my Easter devotions.