Here comes my Garibaldino again, and with a proposal to go down to Genoa and look at the Italian fleet. I don’t suppose that either of us know much of the subject; and indeed I feel, in my ignorance, that I might be a senior Lord of the Admiralty--but that is only another reason for the inquiry. “One is nothing,” says Mr Puff, “if he ain’t critical” So Heaven help the Italian navy under the conjoint commentaries of myself and my friend! Meanwhile, and before we start, one word more of Turin. A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO. Here I am at the “Feder” in Turin--as dirty a hotel, be it said passingly, as you’ll find out of Ireland, and seventeen long years it is since I saw it first. Italy has changed a good deal in the meanwhile--changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my old acquaintance, the Feder! There’s the dirty waiter flourishing his dirtier napkin; and there’s the long low-ceilinged _table-d’hôte_ room, stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their rolls in chocolate, and puffing their “Cavours,” with faces as innocent of soap as they were before the war of the liberation. After all, perhaps, I’d have no objection if some friend would cry out, “Why, Con, my boy, you don’t look a day older than when I saw you here in ‘46, I think! I protest you have not changed in the least. What _elixir vitæ_ have you swallowed, old fellow? Not a wrinkle, nor a grey hair,” and so on. And yet seventeen years taken out of the working part of a man’s life--that period that corresponds with the interval between after breakfast, we’ll say, and an hour before dinner--makes a great gap in existence; for I did very little as a boy, being not an early riser, perhaps, and now, in the evening of my days, I have got a theory that a man ought to dine early and never work after it. Though I’m half ashamed, on so short an acquaintance with my reader, to mention a personal incident, I can scarcely avoid--indeed I cannot avoid--relating a circumstance connected with my first visit to the “Hotel Feder.” I was newly married when I came abroad for a short wedding-tour. The world at that time required new-married people to lay in a small stock of Continental notions, to assist their connubiality and enable them to wear the yoke with the graceful ease of foreigners; and so Mrs O’D. and I started with one heart, one passport, and--what’s not so pleasant--one hundred pounds, to comply with this ordinance. Of course, once over the border--once in France--it was enough. So we took up our abode in a very unpretending little hotel of Boulogne-sur-Mer called “La Cour de Madrid,” where we boarded for the moderate sum of eleven francs fifty centimes per diem--the odd fifty being saved by my wife not taking the post-prandial cup of coffee and rum.