He called a waiter, and charged him to have his letter posted at once. The man said he would give it to the _portier_, who was sending out some other letters. He returned, ten minutes later, with a number of letters which he said the portier had found for him at the post-office. Staniford glanced at them. It was no time to read them then, and he put them into the breast pocket of his coat. XXII. At the hotel in Trieste, to which Lydia went with her uncle before taking the train for Venice, she found an elderly woman, who made her a courtesy, and, saying something in Italian, startled her by kissing her hand. “It's our Veronica,” her uncle explained; “she wants to know how she can serve you.” He gave Veronica the wraps and parcels he had been carrying. “Your aunt thought you might need a maid.” “Oh, no!” said Lydia. “I always help myself.” “Ah, I dare say,” returned her uncle. “You American ladies are so--up to snuff, as you say. But your aunt thought we'd better have her with us, in any case.” “And she sent her all the way from Venice?” “Yes.” “Well, I never did!” said Lydia, not lightly, but with something of contemptuous severity. Her uncle smiled, as if she had said something peculiarly acceptable to him, and asked, hesitatingly, “When you say you never did, you know, what is the full phrase?” Lydia looked at him. “Oh! I suppose I meant I never heard of such a thing.” “Ah, thanks, thanks!” said her uncle. He was a tall, slender man of fifty-five or sixty, with a straight gray mustache, and not at all the typical Englishman, but much more English-looking than if he had been. His bearing toward Lydia blended a fatherly kindness and a colonial British gallantry, such as one sees in elderly Canadian gentlemen attentive to quite young Canadian ladies at the provincial watering-places. He had an air of adventure, and of uncommon pleasure and no small astonishment in Lydia's beauty. They were already good friends; she was at her ease with him; she treated him as if he were an old gentleman. At the station, where Veronica got into the same carriage with them, Lydia found the whole train very queer-looking, and he made her describe its difference from an American train. He said, “Oh, yes--yes, engine,” when she mentioned the locomotive, and he apparently prized beyond its worth the word cow-catcher, a fixture which Lydia said was wanting to the European locomotive, and left it very stubby. He asked her if she would allow him to set it down; and he entered the word in his note-book, with several other idioms she had used. He said that he amused himself in picking up these things from his American friends. He wished to know what she called this and that and the other thing, and was equally pleased whether her nomenclature agreed or disagreed with his own. Where it differed, he recorded the fact, with her leave, in his book. He plied her with a thousand questions about America, with all