If learning should ever bring him money, he meant to reclaim the old place, which in the meanwhile could not be in safer hands; but on this he did not reckon, and while he looked down on the sordid poverty that only prompted his neighbors to sell butter and milk, and take toll from visitors coming to see the faded frescos or old armor in their ruinous dwellings, he saw with very different eyes the probable future of another kind of poverty before him: the pittance and privations of a student’s lot, the obscure life of a professor or the uncertain one of a discoverer; but withal the glorious counterweight of intellectual life, the wealth of vigor and progress, and stimulated, restless thought, doubling and trebling his interests, and making akin to himself all the mental processes or achievements all over the world, which would come of a few years’ study and the sacrifice of his home. Far more patriotic and far more proud was this youth who sold his inheritance than the indignant vegetators around him, who all felt the honor of their order insulted by his unheard-of deed, and their country deprived of another son unworthy of her because he could see in Germany something more than a barbarous, hereditary tyrant and enemy! So it came about that the good Salviani kept a hotel in Carpeggio tower, the walls of which had always been kept in good repair, and which was easily furnished, at no great expense, from the contents of various lumber-rooms and a little intelligent help from the local carpenter, who, like most Italians, had an intuitive understanding of the artistic. Tourists who had stopped here for a night or two; artists who had established their sketching headquarters here; Italians of some fortune who passed here on their way to their inland _villeggiature_; anglers and peddlers, friars, and even commercial travellers of various nations who had begun to experiment on the rural population hereabouts; pilgrims to the two neighboring shrines hardly known beyond twenty miles around, and yet the boast of the neighborhood for nearly four hundred years; wine merchants from the next cities—these and many more could witness to the satisfactory way in which Salviani kept the only hotel in Macchio. And of course his prices were moderate—indeed, to a foreigner they seemed absolutely ridiculous; and he always made it a point to give an Englishman or an American plenty of water, having found that by experience a salve to the fault-finding spirit, and his young master having also accustomed his old attendant to it by requiring it himself ever since his boyhood. Foreigners with a “turn” for antique furniture spent more time roaming the old chambers than they did eating at the landlord’s excellent, if strictly national, table (for Salviani, knowing that he was ignorant of foreign dishes, never attempted to drive away his guests by bad imitations). The tower was very high and uncommonly large in proportion; in fact, it reminded you rather of two Cecilia