The room which I was to occupy was a long, low, narrow sort of store-room, at one end of which was a basin and a ewer of water, and the invalid arm-chair of green leather framed in iron, now grown rather rickety, the present for which the ladies of England subscribed when their idol was wounded at Aspromonte. That was to be my bed. The floor and all the various odds and ends in the room were covered with a rich coat of dust. It was plain that Penelope and her handmaidens, if she had any, had been too busy in the kitchen to pay any attention to such details as the sweeping of a makeshift bedroom. I could have written my name in large letters anywhere upon any scrap of furniture. But when I put out my candle, hoping to sleep, then I realized I was not alone. The dust was literally full of fleas; they attacked me in battalions; I slew them by the score, but their widows and orphans and brothers came on undismayed, undefeated, to avenge their deaths. Never save once, in the cave of the Seven Sleepers at Ephesus, where I had taken refuge from a storm, did I see such an army of hungry cohorts. I tried to comfort myself by thinking of Eothen’s famous chapter and Thackeray’s “White Squall,” when, “All the fleas in Jewry Began to bite like fury”— but it was all in vain. I prayed for the morning, which was long in coming. When at last I did arise and once more gripped Garibaldi’s hand, the miseries of the night were forgotten in the thought, that to me, humble as I was, it had been given for a few short hours to be in sympathetic touch with one of those rare beings whom God, for His own purposes, had anointed to be above his fellows. But it was sad to think that this all too short visit, this happy experience, must fade into the mist of memory like a dream, but not a dream sent out of those ivory gates of which I spoke a while ago, but a dream from out of the horn gates, a dream true and real, a very precious dream to be treasured for all time. CHAPTER XXXII 1873 WESTWARD