There was something to me unusually touching in the aspect of the friendless young foreigner, as well as in the circumstances in which I found him. He had a cast of thought and maturity in his face which hardship, isolation, and self-dependence, seemed to have anticipated years in producing; for his slender and stripling figure, and the unshaven down upon his lip, bespoke him still in an early stage of youth. After a word or two of compassion, I passed on. But his dashed and disappointed look at separation followed me: my conscience chid me for resting in a cold gratuity to one so dejected, yet so sensitive to relief--a spring of gladness for whom my acquaintance with his native language, it appeared, could so easily unseal. He was a stranger, weary, friendless, cheerless, and necessitous--unsusceptible of those mitigations of suffering which even the poorest experience among their own people and their own kindred. I was hastening to my unshared, ’tis true, but far, therefore, from joyless lodgings, an abundant board, a radiant fire, a storm and snow proof apartment, furnished with all the appliances of comfort which winter covets; and would they be diminished by the admission of this homeless, and, from his countenance, I dare certify, guileless wanderer, to share for a time their influence? No. I have it in my power to interpose one bright spot in his life of hardship and privation, to suspend for a while the yearnings with which doubtless, at this hour of dreariness and suffering, he turns in thought to the scenes of his but recent childhood in his own lovely land, to the sunny azure skies the joyous vine-clad hills, the playmates that even now, perhaps, at the close of a bright and genial day, are clustering in merry meeting for the evening song and dance, his father’s cottage, his mother’s caress. “Yes, I will turn back,” exclaimed I, “and enable him, if ever he rejoin the social circle in his own ardent home, to tell his eager listeners a trait of kindness and sympathy shared in the far off frigid country of the north.” As I concluded, I again stood before him, as with a shiver and a sigh the poor lad was about raising his organ upon his shoulder again; and, telling him that I had been in and loved the land from which he came, that I was fond of its people, and of their music too, and wished to talk with and hear him play at leisure and in comfort by my own fireside, asked him to accompany me to it. A smile of gladness lighted up his pale expressive face as he gratefully declared his readiness; and a car passing at the moment, I hailed it, and in a few seconds, young Carlo Girardi--for that he told me was his name--his chattering and half perished marmoset, his muffled music mill, and my enlivened and approving self, were rattling rapidly to my lodgings. I found him a fine, intelligent, unhacknied lad, to whose fervid heart my partial knowledge of his native tongue secured