dear
Hillard,—The day after I wrote you from
Venice I inscribed my name for a place in the
malle-postefor that evening as far as
Milan.
We started at eight o'clock; it poured down cataracts: my companions, a countess, and an honest father with his son, a boy of fourteen, going to a school in
Switzerland to prepare for trade by learning book-keeping, geography, history, arithmetic, and to speak English, French,
German, and
Italian.
All that night we rode in the midst of a tremendous storm.
It is exciting to rattle over the pavements of villages, towns, and cities in the dead of night; to catch, perhaps, a solitary light shining from the room of some watcher, like ‘a good deed in a naughty world;’ and when as you arrive at the gates of a city, the
