Meanwhile he was practising at the bar in a desultory fashion. Sometimes he pleaded in the lower courts as an "advocate of the poor," and was much in demand for his attention and skill. According to the etiquette of the profession, he read in the rooms of a barrister, who limited his interest to seeing that his pupils sat with a book in front of them. The vacations were generally spent in a little country villa at San Secondo, in the Bisagno valley, within sight of a house which the Ruffinis occupied; and he shared in attentions to the Ruffinis' mother, who was now his spiritual guide and dearest friend, or went on botanical walks or shooting expeditions in the lovely hill country. He did not do much of the shooting himself, and when he was more than fifty, he remembered with remorse a thrush that he had mangled when sixteen. His interests became more and more absorbed by politics. His Genoese home no doubt encouraged this, for the nobles and the working-classes were still unreconciled to Piedmontese rule, while the liberals of the middle classes looked on the annexation only as a step to some wider Italian state. But the local environment was only a minor influence, and Mazzini would doubtless have become a conspirator, had he lived in any other town of Italy. About the time that he began to write in the _Indicatore Genovese_, he was admitted into the Society of the Carbonari. The Carbonari were at this time suffering from the decadence, which sooner or later palsies every secret society. They had grown out of Neapolitan Freemasonry in the days of the French rule, and when, after Napoleon's fall, reaction came and the old dynasties returned, they swept into their ranks the mass of discontented men, who, with very varying political ideals, were at one in resenting the small tyrannies, the bigotry and obscurantism of the princes, who had come back from exile to misgovern and sometimes to oppress. The high level of their tenets, their appeals to religion and morality, the esoteric symbolism of their rites, the vague democratic sentiment that was often only skin-deep, had made them a vast Liberal organisation. Since they had made and wrecked the revolutions of Naples and Piedmont seven years before, they had kept the skeleton of their party together with considerable skill and persistency. But the conspiracy had changed its character. It was no longer a purely Italian society, for the exiles had carried it into France and Spain, and the headquarters were now at Paris, where Lafayette and the Orleanist conspirators were using it to upset the Legitimist monarchy and dreamed of a league of Latin countries to balance the Holy Alliance. In Italy the democratic sentimentalism had left it, it had lost touch with the masses, and its leaders were mostly middle-aged men of the professional classes, who discouraged young recruits, and had no wish to step outside their meaningless small formalisms and barren talk of liberty.