Wifeless, homeless, chagrined by the thought that Italy had waged her war of independence only to be beaten, Garibaldi began his second wanderings. A real _Odyssey_ we may call it, with its strange happenings. For a year the hero of Rome earned a bare livelihood making candles in Meucci’s factory on Staten Island; then he shipped for Central and South America; captained a cargo of guano from Lima to Canton, and a cargo of tea back to Lima; brought a ship laden with copper, round Cape Horn to Boston; and finally, in May, 1854, he dropped anchor at Genoa, where the government no longer feared his presence. With the proceeds of his mercantile ventures, he bought Caprera,--a mere rock, which juts out of the Tuscan Sea, near the northern tip of Sardinia. There, “like some tired eagle on a crag remote,” he dwelt five years, apparently oblivious to the passing current of events, and wholly intent on coaxing a few vines and vegetables to grow on his wind-swept rock. Early in 1859 a messenger summoned Garibaldi from his hermitage to Turin. This summons was not unexpected. For months the world had regarded war in Italy as inevitable, and now war was on the point of breaking out. How had this come to pass? After her defeat in 1849, Piedmont, the little northwestern kingdom of four million souls, had sturdily set about reforming herself. She stood firmly by the constitutional government adopted in 1848; she strengthened her army and her navy; she took education out of the hands of the Jesuits; she encouraged commerce, industry, and agriculture. Thus she proved to Europe that Italians could govern themselves by as good a political system as then existed; to all the other Italians, groaning under Austrian, or Bourbon, or Papal tyranny, she proved that they might look to her to lead the Italian cause. This marvelous attainment was due primarily to Count Cavour, the statesman who, since 1850, had been almost continuously prime minister of Piedmont; and, in the second place, to Victor Emanuel, the shrewd, honest, chivalrous King, worthy to be the visible symbol of Italy’s patriotism. But Cavour had realized from the beginning that, however strong he might make Piedmont, she would not be able singly to cope with Austria: four millions against thirty-five millions--the odds were too great! So he labored to bring Piedmont into the stream of European life; he allied her to France and England in the Crimean War; and now, at the beginning of 1859 he had persuaded Napoleon III to march the armies of France into Italy to join Piedmont in expelling the Austrians.