by his wretched health. He had, as his whole behaviour during the sojourn in the Two Sicilies showed, a thorough appreciation of the masqueradings and buffooneries and practical jests which are to the Neapolitan part of his everyday life, and to the grave Sicilian an occasional recreation. These water-mazes are very popular with the rich; and in some instances, like the present, immense sums are spent on their construction: indeed, they form the staple of amusement at an excursion to an unfamiliar palace or villa, where only one or two are in possession of the knowledge where the traps lie. You are safe nowhere: the shower may be lying in wait for lovers in a retired walk, or for a whole company on the most frequented lawn. But the water is laid on more lightly for the most part than Donna Rusidda laid it on for Will. Will was in high dudgeon; he had no liking for practical jests at any time, and this being put into a ridiculous and humiliating light before the woman he loved, maddened him. If it had been a man who had played the jest upon him he would have thrashed him first, and fought a duel to the death afterwards--if the thrashed person wished to carry the matter further. And though the Admiral had taken no part in the jest, his very presence, had he been any other man, would have been sufficient for hot-headed Will. But the Admiral was to him hardly a human being,--he reverenced him so, and owed him such a debt of gratitude; and so there was nothing for it but to walk behind them with his laced hat and blue coat, and the nankeen breeches whose fit had been his pride, for they could hardly have been closer if they had been carved in marble, looking like shrunk grapes. The Admiral, by this, was woefully sorry for him; for that great man did not forget small things, and it was in his mind that only in the few days that they had been back in Naples had Will possessed a lieutenant's uniform of his own, and that the English tailor to the Sicilian court charged as exiles will who leave their homes not to save their lives but to fill their purses. It brought to his mind a boyish figure which he had seen only six months since standing outside his state-room door getting well dripped in his new midshipman's rig, because he would not come in under the lee of his mother till he had received the command of his officer. He remembered also that the little fair slip of a mother was none too well clad to come aboard a ship tossing at her anchors in a stiff cold gale off St. Helen's, and that that same little mother had said to him, "You will take care of him, Sir Horatio ... I do not mean in the face of the enemy, but I have only a slender purse; his father was killed when he was a lieutenant." The Admiral's money was always burning holes in his pockets, and he made up his mind _instanter_ to present Will with a new outfit, so that what he had on might dry for his second best.