with the blood of old battles on their shroud-shirts, and a North-east
wind blowing them upon our fat land. Or take a turn at the other side
toward Orta, and look out for another invasion, by no means so
picturesque, but preferable. Tourists! Do you hear them?"

Carlo Ammiani had descried the advanced troop of a procession of gravely-
heated climbers ladies upon donkeys, and pedestrian guards stalking
beside them, with courier, and lacqueys, and baskets of provisions, all
bearing the stamp of pilgrims from the great Western Island.




CHAPTER VI

A mountain ascended by these children of the forcible Isle, is a mountain
to be captured, and colonized, and absolutely occupied for a term; so
that Vittoria soon found herself and her small body of adherents
observed, and even exclaimed against, as a sort of intruding aborigines,
whose presence entirely dispelled the sense of romantic dominion which a
mighty eminence should give, and which Britons expect when they have
expended a portion of their energies. The exclamations were not
complimentary; nevertheless, Vittoria listened with pleased ears, as one
listens by a brookside near an old home, hearing a music of memory rather
than common words. They talked of heat, of appetite, of chill, of
thirst, of the splendour of the prospect, of the anticipations of good
hotel accommodation below, of the sadness superinduced by the reflection
that in these days people were found everywhere, and poetry was thwarted;
again of heat, again of thirst, of beauty, and of chill. There was the
enunciation of matronly advice; there was the outcry of girlish