"It brought my master money, but me aches and pains as many as you will,
and at last the fever. When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to ask
for more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that service. I think the
signor would have given it,--but the signora! So I left, empty as I came,
and was cook on a vessel to New York."

This was the black and white of the man's story. I lose the color and
atmosphere which his manner as well as his words bestowed upon it. He told
it in a cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of a poor devil
which had interested him, and might possibly amuse me, leaving out no
touch of character in his portrait of the fat, selfish master,--yielding
enough, however, but for his grasping wife, who, with all her avarice and
greed, he yet confessed to be very handsome. By the wave of a hand he
housed them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close shut, kept by servants
in white linen moving with mute slippered feet over stone floors; and by
another gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the forest in
which he hunted those vivid insects,--the luxuriant savannas, the gigantic
ferns and palms, the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the
invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, of inexpressible
sadness in his half-ignorant mention of the exiles at Cayenne, who were
forbidden the wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gunboats
keeping their coasts and swooping down upon every craft that left the
shore. He himself had seen one such capture, and he made me see it, and
the mortal despair of the fugitives, standing upright in their boat with
the idle oars in their unconscious hands, while the corvette swept toward
them.

For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down. He had that lightness of
temper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those from