"Ah, you cannot understand," he said, as if I had no power, even if I had a right, to put my tongue in; "it is no reproach to you; but a young man who has never been among such things ought to thank his good stars, and keep out of them. You English are so stiff, you can allow for no ideas. You think that all the world must have the same right and wrong as you have." "Now, Signor Nicolo," I replied, with admirable self-control, for I began to know all about him now, by the lights that break in as we go on in the dark, "if ever there was an Englishman, you are one." He looked at me steadily with eyes almost too dark for a pure-bred Englishman, and then seeing that I meant to make him proud he became proud, as he ought to be. "Ah, yes!" he said first, from the force of habit, and then he went on, as became his birth-right. "Sir, I am an Englishman, and as proud of it as you are. But we are not popular among the smaller nations, because they have a lower standard. We give them everything in the way of trade, and they have not the calibre yet to enter into it. And I am very much afraid that they won't have that, till they have taken every farthing out of us. In spite of all lessons, we carry on still, as if all the world were full of our own ideas. And what comes of that? They believe through thick and thin that our only ambition is to rob them. My business lies chiefly on the Continent, and therefore I am Signor Nicolo." Feeling the truth of this sad state of things, I took the hand he offered me. It was not his fault, but that of our blind rulers, that to do any business he must be of foreign blood. Still it was a new light shed upon me, for hitherto my belief had been that people unlucky enough to have to live upon the land, had to bear the brunt of that British suicide endowed with the catch-penny name Free-trade. "Now, I am in this difficulty," continued the Signor, still employing the gesticulation he had learned; "on no account would I offend Prince Imar,--a Prince he is, whether he likes it not,--while on the other hand, I may be guilty of his death, if I stand upon scruples. And that would be a very poor requital, for I owe him my life, and am proud to owe it to a man so great and magnanimous. Crotchety perhaps, as all great men are, and sometimes even more than that; but take him all round, such a man as you won't see in a long day's ride, Mr. Cranleigh." "That is the opinion I have formed of him. A man of the first magnitude in body, mind, and character. As yet I know very little of him; but one is struck with such a rarity at once, just as----" "As I might be with an enormous diamond. But I am surprised to hear you say that you know him so little. I suppose he keeps himself very much to himself, down there. It was I who arranged that place for him."