I ate nothing, but was in the first boat that went ashore. I had excused myself from making one of the party at the opera, after giving all necessary directions, and on pretence of going to a chemist’s to make a purchase I separated myself from Ulrica, Gerald, and Lord Stoneborough in the Via Grande, the principal thoroughfare. How next to act I knew not. Keppel had expressed his intention of sending a box on board, and there could be no doubt that it would contain some explosive destined to send the Vispera to the bottom. At all hazards the yacht must not sail. Yet how was it possible that I could prevent it without making a full statement of what I had overheard? I entered the pharmacy and purchased the first article that came into my mind. Then, returning into the street, I wandered on, plunged in my own distracting thoughts. The soft, balmy Italian night had fallen, and the white streets and piazzas of Leghorn were filled, as they always are at evening, with the merry, light-hearted crowds of idlers: men with their hats stuck jauntily askew, smoking, laughing, gossiping, and women, dark-haired, black-eyed, the most handsome in all Italy, each with a mantilla of black lace or of some bright-colored silk as a head-covering, promenading and enjoying the refreshing fresco after the toil and burden of the day. None in all the world can surpass in beauty those Tuscan women--dark, tragic, with eyes that flash quickly in love or hatred, with figures perfect, and each with an easy, swinging gait that a duchess might envy. It was Suor Angelica who had once repeated to me the rhyme that one of our old Florentine writers had written of them,-- “S’è grande, è oziosa; S’è piccola, è viziosa; S’è bella, è vanitosa; S’è brutta, è fastidiosa.” Every type indeed is represented in that long single street at night--the dark-haired Jewess, the classic Greek, the thick-lipped Tunisian, the pale-cheeked Armenian, and the beautiful Tuscan, the purest type of beauty in all the world. Once again, after those years, I heard as I walked onward the soft sibillations of the Tuscan tongue about me, the gay chatter of that city of sun and sea, where although half the population are in a state of semi-starvation their hearts are still as light as in the days when “cara Livorno” was still prosperous. But, alas! it has sadly declined. Its manufactures, never very extensive, have died out, its merchant-princes are ruined, or have deserted it, and its trade has ebbed until there is no work for those honest brown-faced men who are forced to idle upon the stone benches in the piazza even though their wives and children are crying for bread.