Lewes, too, was a most delightful companion, the cheeriest of philosophers! The old saying of "_Comes jucundus in viâ pro vehiculo est_," was especially applicable to him. Though very exhaustible in bodily force, he was inexhaustible in cheerfulness, and above all in unwearied, incessant, and minute care for "Polly." In truth, if any man could ever be said to have lived in another person, Lewes in those days, and to the end of his life, lived in and for George Eliot. The talk of worshipping the ground she trod on, and the like, are pretty lovers phrases, sometimes signifying much, and sometimes very little. But it is true accurately and literally of Lewes. That care for her, at once comprehensive and minute, unsleeping watchfulness, lest she should dash her foot against a stone, was _never_ absent from his mind. She had become his real self, his genuine _ego_ to all intents and purposes. And his talk and thoughts were egoistic accordingly. Of his own person, his ailments, his works, his ideas, his impressions, you might hear not a word from him in the intercourse of many days. But there was in his inmost heart a _naïf_ and never-doubting faith that talk on all these subjects as regarded _her_ must be profoundly interesting to those he talked with. To me, at all events, it was so. Perhaps had it been otherwise, there would have been less of it. We were to reach Camaldoli the first night, and had therefore to leave Florence very early in the morning. At Pelago, a little _paése_--village we should call it--on the Arno some fourteen or fifteen miles above Florence, we were to find saddle-horses, the journey we were about to make being in those days practicable in no other way, unless on foot. There was at that time a certain Antonio da Pelago, whose calling it was to act as guide, and to furnish horses. I had known him for many years, as did all those whose ramblings took them into those hills. He was in many respects what people call "a character," and seemed to fancy himself to have in some degree proprietary rights over the three celebrated Tuscan monasteries, Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Vernia. He was well known to the friars at each of these establishments, and indeed to all the sparse population of that country-side. He was a very good and competent guide and courier, possessed with a very amusingly exaggerated notion of his own importance, and rather bad to turn aside from his own preconceived and predetermined methods of doing everything that had to be done. George Eliot at once made a study of him.