To-day I met the Captain. I went up on the bridge to speak to him. I find his name is Arnssen. He has risen from the ranks, his father having been a large haberdasher in Copenhagen and a town councillor. I wish I could say the same of the First Mate, who is the scapegrace son of a great English family, though he seems to feel no shame. Arnssen and I would soon become fast friends were it not that his time is occupied in managing the ship. He is just such an one as makes the strength of our British Mercantile marine. He will often come and walk with me on the deck, on which occasions I give him a cigar, or even sometimes ask him to drink wine with me. He tells me it is against the rules for the Captain to offer similar courtesies to his guests, but that if ever I am in Ernskjöldj, near Copenhagen, and if he is not absent on one of his many voyages, he will gratefully remember and repay my kindness. I said to the Captain to-day, putting my hand upon his shoulder, “Sir, may one speak from one’s heart?” “Yes,” said he, “certainly, and God bless you for your kind thought.” “Sir,” said I, “you are a strong, silent, God-fearing man and my heart goes out to you--no more.” He was silent, and went up on the bridge, but when I attempted to follow him, he assured me it was not allowed. Later in the day I asked him what he thought of the Roman trouble. He answered, “Oh! knock their heads together and have done with it.” It was a bluff seaman’s answer, but is it not what England would have said in her greatest days? Is it not the very feeling of a Chatham? I no longer speak to the First Mate. But in a few days I shall be able to dismiss the fellow entirely from my memory, so I will not dwell on his insolence. _Leghorn, Oct. 5, 1873._ Here is the end of it. I have nothing more to say. I find that the public has no need of my services, and that England has suffered a disastrous rebuff. The fleet has retreated from Apulia. England--let posterity note this--has not an inch of ground in all the Italian Peninsula. Well, we are worsted, and we must bide our time; but this I will say: if that insolent young fool the First Mate thinks that his family shall protect him he is mistaken. The press is a great power and never greater than where (as in England) a professor of a university or the upper classes write for the papers, and where a rule of anonymity gives talent and position its full weight.[53] IX. Lambkin’s Address to the League of Progress Everybody will remember the famous meeting of the Higher Spinsters in 1868; a body hitherto purely voluntary in its organisation, it had undertaken to add to the houses of the poor and wretched the element which reigns in the residential suburbs of our great towns. If Whitechapel is more degraded now than it was thirty years ago we must not altogether disregard the earlier efforts of the Higher Spinsters, they laboured well each in her own sphere and in death they were not divided.