"You are Giacomo?" said I, as he entered; and I ought to mention that in air and appearance he was a large, full, fine-looking man, of about eight-and-thirty or forty, dressed in very accurate black, and with a splendid chain of mosaic gold twined and festooned across his ample chest; opal shirt-studs and waistcoat buttons, and a very gorgeous-looking signet-ring on his forefinger aided to show off a stylish look, rendered still more imposing by a beard a Grand Vizier might have envied, and a voice a semi-tone deeper than Lablache's. "Giacomo Lamporeccho," said he; and though he uttered the words like a human bassoon, they really sounded as if he preferred not to be himself, but somebody else, in case I desired it. "Well, Giacomo," said I, easily, and trying to assume as much familiarity as I could with so imposing a personage, "I want you to afford me some information about these accounts of mine." "Ah! the house accounts!" said he, with a very slight elevation of the eyebrows, but quite sufficient to convey to me an expression of contemptuous meaning. "Just so, Giacomo; they appear to me high,--enormously, extravagantly high!" "His Excellency paid, at least, the double in London," said he, bowing. "That's not the question. We are in Lombardy,--a land where the price of everything is of the cheapest. How comes it, then, that we are maintaining our house at greater cost than even Paris would require?" With a volubility that I can make no pretension to follow, the fellow ran over the prices of bread, meat, fowls, and fish, showing that they were for half their cost elsewhere; that his Excellency's table was actually a mean one; that sea-fish from Venice, and ortolans, seldom figured at it above once or twice a week; that it was rare to see a second flask of champagne opened at dinner; that our Bordeaux was bad, and our Burgundy bitter; in short, he thought his Excellency had come expressly for economy, as great "milors" will occasionally do, and that if so, he must have had ample reason to be satisfied with the experiment. Though every sentiment the fellow uttered was an impertinence, he bowed and smiled, and demeaned himself with such an air of humility throughout, that I stood puzzled between the matter and the manner of his address. Meanwhile he was not idle, but running over with glib volubility the names of all the "illustrissimi Inglesi" he had been cheating and robbing for a dozen years back. To nail him to the fact of the difference between the cost of the article and the gross sum expended, was downright impossible, though he clearly gave to understand that any inquiry into the matter showed his Excellency to be the shabbiest of men,--mean, grasping, and avaricious, and, in fact, very likely to be no "milor" at all, but some poor pretender to rank and station.