studying the dock regulations and harbour laws, his mind was busy about this other perplexing question. An _appartemento_! Was he never, he wondered, with an impatience that was almost comic in the humiliation and depression it caused him, to have a sitting-room again? never to get a meal save in public, in the grim _sala_ of the Leone, or in a gaudy restaurant with little marble tables; never even a cup of tea to himself in his own place, as an Englishman loves to have it; never to have a carpet under his feet, but cold tiles; and nothing in the world that looked like home? He kept all this to himself, and tried hard to grasp at the laws and regulations about the free port of Leghorn, and its etiquettes and its dues; but his inner soul was crossed all the time by impulses of ill-humour and disappointment which he could with difficulty restrain. It is always difficult, after a period of agitation and excitement, to settle down again and resume a steady routine; and Harry could not think of this kind of settling with anything but annoyance. The inn was not any better. His little sleeping-room there was not so good as Paolo’s. In the _sala_ there was always a sense of dinner combined with cigars; and in the other parts of the establishment the smell was of cigars impregnated with soup and divers odours of the kitchen. And these were the only places where he, with his English habits, had a chance of sitting down! He sighed for his little parlour, with its Kidderminster carpet, and red moreen curtains, at Liverpool. It was a palace to the _appartamento_, or anything that seemed possible here.