“Agostino, this has breathed you?”

“It has; it has, my dear and best one!” Agostino replied.  “But here is a good market-place for air.  Down below we have to scramble for it in the mire.  The spies are stifling down below.  I don’t know my own shadow.  I begin to think that I am important.  Footing up a mountain corrects the notion somewhat.  Yonder, I believe, I see the Grisons, where Freedom sits.  And there’s the Monte della Disgrazia.  Carlo Alberto should be on the top of it, but he is invisible.  I do not see that Unfortunate.”

“No,” said Carlo Ammiani, who chimed to his humour more readily than the rest, and affected to inspect the Grisons’ peak through a diminutive opera-glass.  “No, he is not there.”

“Perhaps, my son, he is like a squirrel, and is careful to run up t’other side of the stem.  For he is on that mountain; no doubt of it can exist even in the Boeotian mind of one of his subjects; myself, for example.  It will be an effulgent fact when he gains the summit.”

The others meantime had thrown themselves on the grass at the feet of their manifestly acknowledged leader, and looked up for Agostino to explode the last of his train of conceits.  He became aware that the moment for serious talk had arrived, and bent his body, groaning loudly, and uttering imprecations against him whom he accused of being the promoter of its excruciating stiffness, until the ground relieved him of its weight.  Carlo continued standing, while his eyes examined restlessly the slopes just surmounted by them, and occasionally the deep descent over the green-glowing Orta Lake.  It was still early morning.  The heat was tempered by a cool breeze that came with scents of thyme.  They had no sight of human creature anywhere, but companionship of Alps and birds of upper air; and though not one of them seasoned the converse with an exclamation of joy and of blessings upon a place of free speech and safety, the thought was in their hunted bosoms, delicious as a woodland rivulet that sings only to the leaves overshadowing it.

They were men who had sworn to set a nation free,—­free from the foreigner, to begin with.

(He who tells this tale is not a partisan; he would deal equally toward all.  Of strong devotion, of stout nobility, of unswerving faith and self-sacrifice, he must approve; and when these qualities are displayed in a contest of forces, the wisdom of means employed, or of ultimate views entertained, may be questioned and condemned; but the men themselves may not be.)

These men had sworn their oath, knowing the meaning of it, and the nature of the Fury against whom men who stand voluntarily pledged to any great resolve must thenceforward match themselves.  Many of the original brotherhood had fallen, on the battle-field, on the glacis, or in the dungeon.  All present, save the youthfuller Carlo, had suffered.  Imprisonment and exile marked the Chief.  Ugo Corte, of Bergamo,