Afterwards, in the Italian legion of the Republic struggling against the
encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he had taken part, on great plains, on the
banks of immense rivers, in the fiercest fighting perhaps the world had
ever known. He had lived amongst men who had declaimed about liberty,
suffered for liberty, died for liberty, with a desperate exaltation, and
with their eyes turned towards an oppressed Italy. His own enthusiasm
had been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty devotion, on
the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed language of proclamations.
He had never parted from the chief of his choice--the fiery apostle of
independence--keeping by his side in America and in Italy till after
the fatal day of Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors,
and ministers had been revealed to the world in the wounding and
imprisonment of his hero--a catastrophe that had instilled into him
a gloomy doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.

He did not deny it, however. It required patience, he would say. Though
he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a church for
anything, he believed in God. Were not the proclamations against tyrants
addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty? "God for
men--religions for women," he muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an
Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army
of the king, had given him a Bible in Italian--the publication of the
British and Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover.
In periods of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the
revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living with
the first work that came to hand--as sailor, as dock labourer on the
quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the hills above Spezzia--and
in his spare time he studied the thick volume. He carried it with
him into battles. Now it was his only reading, and in order not to be