when he requested them to stop for a moment beside a convent gate, that
he might get a cup of wine. But the Dominicans would not give the
satirist of their illustrious order a cup of water.

"If you will not give me refreshment," exclaimed he, in an angry tone,
"give me wherewithal to buy it. I demand a hundred sequins."

The prior himself was at the window above his head; and the only answer
was a sneer, which was loyally echoed through every cloister.

"Let me have your bayonet for a moment," said the stranger to one of his
guard. He received it; and striking away a projecting stone in the wall,
out rushed the hundred sequins. The prior clasped his hands in agony,
that so much money should have been so near, and yet have escaped his
pious purposes, The soldiers took off their caps for the discoverer, and
bowed them still lower when he threw every sequin of it into the shakos
of those polite warriors. The officer, to whom he had given a double
share, showed his gratitude by a whisper, offering to assist his escape
for as much more. But the stranger declined the civility, and walked
boldly into the presence-chamber of the sublime podesta.

The Signer Dominico Castello-Grande Tremamondo was a little Venetian
noble, descended in a right line from Aeneas, with a palazzo on the
Canale Regio of Venice, which he let for a coffee-house; and living in
the pomp and pride of a _magnifico_ on something more than the wages of
an English groom. The intelligence of this extraordinary stranger's
discoveries had flown like a spark through a magazine, and the
_illustrissimo_ longed to be a partaker in the secret. He interrogated
the prisoner with official fierceness, but could obtain no other reply
than the general declaration, that he was a traveller come to see the