Our party was enormous and a tremendous responsibility for me, who foolishly undertook to pilot it; for, in addition to ourselves, who knew a little French and Italian, there were two maids who knew none, one of them being the children's nurse, and the other Mrs. Wynne's new maid, who was advertised for as not objecting to going abroad, and replied that she was "fond of travail." I pass over the horrors of the journey. No one who vividly remembered his railway experiences would ever go to Italy again; but Providence has a kindly way of blurring them or relegating them to a distant background behind Italian joys. One quaint experience the last stage offered. In the confusion of Bologna's crowded platforms, and the absence of any official who knew anything, and the lateness of our train, and the changing into the next, which was, like all Italian trains, packed with passengers before we could reach it, there had been no opportunity that I considered safe to buy any refreshments. As, therefore, the appalling journey lengthened out between Bologna and Rimini, where the line hits the Adriatic coast and thereafter clings to it for many miles, we were all conscious of the pangs of hunger. In despair I explored the train for food, hoping against hope, and came upon a peasant in a corner with a basket at his feet from which oozed a thick fluid. That it would prove to be inedible I was confident; but none the less I asked him what it was, and behold, when he opened the mouth of the basket it was eggs. To his immense astonishment I led him to the compartment which we had at last obtained, and, to his greater surprise, he watched us each consume one or more of his eggs broken into the cup of a pocket flask. Even Naomi, whose horror of a raw egg amounts in England to a mania, took one; even the children took one, with a reverence and distortion proper only to medicine. The strange part of the story, which otherwise lacks all the elements of excitement, is, that when I offered the man some money he refused it. It had given him pleasure to be of use to us, he said. He would on no account accept any payment. Noble egg-merchant of Rimini, may you have many children, and may they have many children, and so come to repopulate and regenerate Italy! But, he said, if we really wished to make some return, he would greatly esteem a taste of the liquor which the flask contained and which some of us had poured into the broken eggs. I therefore handed him a cup of the national beverage of Caledonia, which he took at a gulp, and the last we saw of our good Samaritan was his honest, sunburned face in spasms of astonishment at its strength, and the last we heard of him was his strangling gasps as he fought with the unaccustomed draught. I looked for him after in Rimini but never saw him more.