After passing through a long, straggling suburb, not remarkable for anything but its squalor and poverty, we reached the seashore, and continued to skirt the bay for miles. I had no conception of anything so beautiful as the great sheet of blue water seen in the freshness of a glorious sunrise, with the white-sailed lateener skimming silently along, and reflected, as if in a mirror, on the unruffled surface. There was a peaceful beauty in all around, that was a positive enchantment, and the rich odors of the orange and the verbena filled the air almost to a sense of delicious stupefaction. Over and over did I say to myself, “Why cannot this delicious dream be prolonged for a lifetime? If existence could but perpetuate such a scene as this, let me travel along the shore of such a sea, overshadowed by the citron and the vine,--I ask for no more.” The courier or conductor was my only companion,--an old soldier of the first empire, who had fought on the Beresina and in Spain,--a rough old sabreur, not to be appeased by my best cigars and my brandy-flask into a good word for the English. He hated them formerly, and he hated them still. There might be, he was willing to believe, one or two of the nation that were not cani; but he had n't met them himself, nor did he know any one who had. I relished his savagery, and somehow never felt in the slightest degree baffled or amazed by his rudeness. I asked him if he had heard of that unlucky countryman of mine who had been captured by the brigands, and he said that he had heard that Stoppa meant to roast him alive; for that Stoppa did n't like the English,--a rather strong mode of expressing a national antipathy, but one, on the whole, he did not entirely disapprove of. “Stoppa, however,” said I, assuming as a fact what I meant for a question,--“Stoppa is a man of his word. If he offered to take a ransom, he'll keep his promise?” “That he will, if the money is paid down in zecchin gold. He 'll take nothing else. He 'll give up the man; but I 'd not fancy being the fellow who brought the ransom if there was a light piece in the mass.” “He 'd surely respect the messenger who carried the money?” “Just as much as I respect that old mare who won't come up to her collar;” and he snatched the whip, as he spoke, from the driver, and laid a heavy lash over the sluggish beast's loins. “Look here,” said he to me, as we parted company at Corallo, “you 're not bad,--for an Englishman, at least,---and I 'd rather you did n't come to trouble. Don't you get any further into these mountains than St. Andrea, and don't stay, even there, too long. Don't go in Stoppa's way; for if you have money, he 'll cut your throat for it, and if you have n't, he 'll smash your skull for being without it. I 'll be on the way back to Naples on Saturday; and if you'll take a friend's advice, you'll be beside me.”