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A SHORT RESPITE 298 revolving, and the light of the shining piston-rods, I thought, as has been thought before in many a modern household, Is not the servant a finer thing than the master ? And then there came back to me my vision of the great Canal, with its gliding fires at night and its moving masses by day, and I asked myself, After all, what do these marvels mean? They mean that bitter beer is crossing the globe to India, and that curry and chutnee are crossing the globe to England. This kind of interchange is the physical reality of commerce, and the company round me were samples of the moral results of it. Such are the glories to which modern progress is tending. At Brindisi, however, I escaped in a great mea-sure from surroundings whose meaning to me was so little cheering. The bulk of the passengers were going all the way by sea, and of those who dis-embarked there were only a few who took their places in the same train as I did. My own route was to Bologna, and from Bologna to Florence ; and the sight of Italy, as I looked to right and left of me, soothed my mind with a return of the old world. Bologna, as I wandered through its dim red streets next morning, intensified this effect. The air of its arcades was electric with a sense of the past, and the bells jangled from its towers with the voice of other centuries. Again in the train to Florence, crossing by night the Apennines, the past also came to me in the breath of the wild gorges, in the voices of the

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