I had said of his great rival that he had struck a blow at the prestige of the English aristocracy, from which it would never recover, and he asked with a quickened interest what that might be, and when I replied that it was by his putting himself at the head of it, he thought a moment and replied, nodding his head, "That is true." He was very fond of talking with the people of the valley, who are Italians, and his Italian was better than one is accustomed to hear from English people, even from those who live in Italy.

We passed a fountain one day, at which a washerwoman was washing her linen, and he stopped to talk to her, and asked her, among other questions, if she had always been a washerwoman.

No, she replied, she had been a _blia_ (nurse) once.

He was struck by her pronunciation of the word _blia_ and walked on; but presently he said, "I thought that that word was pronounced _bala_" and, when I explained that there were two words--_blia_ which meant a nurse, and _bala_, which came from the same root as our "bailiff," and meant a charge, custody,--he seemed annoyed, and made no more remarks during the continuation of our climb.

It was evident that he was vexed, not at me, who corrected him, but at his not having known the trivial detail of a language efficiency in which he prided himself on.