“He is already at liberty,” said he, as he continued to pile the coin in little heaps of ten each. “Every step you took since you arrived at Naples was known to me. I knew the moment you came, the hotel you stopped at, the visit you paid to your minister, the two hours passed in the Bank, your departure in the diligence; and the rascal you engaged for a guide came straight to me after he left you. My police, _signor mio_, is somewhat better organized than Count Cavour's,” said he, with a laugh. The mention of the Count's name reminded me at once to sound him on politics, and see if he, and others like him, in reality interested themselves as partisans on either side. “Of course,” said he, “we liked the old dynasty better than the present people. A splendid court and a brilliant capital attracted strangers from all quarters of Europe. Strangers visited Capri, Amalfi, Paestum; they went here and there and everywhere. And they paid for their pleasures like gentlemen. The officials, too, of those days were men with bowels, who knew every one must live. What have we now? Piedmontese dogs, who are not Italians; who speak no known tongue, and who have no other worship than the house of Savoy.” “Might I venture to ask,” said I, obsequiously, “how is it that I find a man of your acquirements and ability in such a position as this?” “Because I like this life better than that of an 'Impiegato' with five hundred ducats a year! Perhaps I don't follow it all from choice. Perhaps I have my days of regrets, and such like. But for that, are you yourself so rightly fitted in life--I ask at random--that you feel you are doing the exact thing that suits you? Can you say, as you rise of a morning, 'I was cut out for this kind of existence,--I am exactly where I ought to be'?” I shook my head in negative, and for some seconds nothing was said on either side. “The score is all right,” said he, at last. “Do you know,”--here he gave a very peculiar smile; indeed, his face, so far as I could see, beneath the shadow of his hat and his bushy beard, actually assumed an expression of intense drollery,--“do you know, I begin to think we have made a bad bargain here!” “How so?” asked I. “I begin to suspect,” said he, “that our prisoner was worth a much heavier ransom, and that his friends would willingly have paid four times this sum for him.” “You are entirely mistaken there,” said I. “It is the astonishment of every one that he has been ransomed at all. He is a good-for-nothing spendthrift fellow, whom most families would be heartily glad to be rid of; and so far from being worth a thousand pounds, I believe nine out of ten parents would n't have paid as many shillings for him.” “We all liked him,” said he. “We found him pleasant company; and he fell into all our ways like one of ourselves.” “A scamp was sure to do that easier than an honest man,” said I, forgetting, in my eagerness, how rude my speech was.