I do not remember how or why, but the night after I left Florence I had to lie over at Pisa, where I came near being robbed of what little money I had at a miserable, cheap _trattoria_, not far from the famous Leaning Tower. I found a fierce-moustached bandit of a fellow in my room in the middle of the night, stealthily approaching the head of my bed, and scared him away, I shall always believe, by the bad Anglo-Italian in which I expressed my sense of surprise and concern at his untimely and extraordinary conduct. Two days afterward I took a fourth-class, that is, deck passage on the French steamer, sailing down the Mediterranean from Leghorn. I stayed a week at Rome, and came very near staying much longer. It was, indeed, by a miraculous chance that I ever left the Eternal City. I had not money enough to pay the Pontifical tax on departing travellers. It is too long a story to tell here, but I slipped through the fingers of the police, and, arriving at Leghorn again, I had not the ten cents to pay the boatman to take me ashore from the steamer. My trunk, by the way, I had left at Leghorn before starting for Rome; so that was out of danger, and came properly to hand afterward. As my lucky star would have it, an American bark was lying at anchor in the bay. It was the first time I had seen the “star-spangled banner” for two years, and I flew to it for protection. I directed the boatman to take me to the American ship. Standing in the bow of the smaller craft, as soon as she reached the greater one I sprang up the side, and the boatman sprang after me. He detained half of my coat, but I reached the deck, where I kept him at bay with a belaying-pin till some one on the ship was roused; for it was early in the morning. The ten cents were paid over to the clamorous Italian by a hearty tar, who was moved to see an American in distress, “with his mainsail carried away,”--I think that is the way the tar phrased it. The captain of the ship was a warm-hearted old fellow from down in Maine. He offered to take me home before I asked him. I had a boyish love of independence, and proposed to work. He said he wouldn’t be bothered with me; he would take me as his only passenger. We settled the matter at last by my contracting grandly to owe him fifty dollars in “greenbacks.” Our vessel was about twenty years old, and laden with rags and great blocks of marble. We had a terrible storm in the Mediterranean, in which we came near going down. The old craft seemed, however, to have some secret understanding with fate; for, having shifted her cargo, she floated, wellnigh on her beam-ends, the rest of that desolate ten weeks through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.