About the same hour of the same evening which we have just chronicled, a group of persons sat under some spreading chestnut-trees beside a brawling little rivulet at the Bagni de Lucca. They were travellers, chance acquaintances thrown together by the accidents of the road, and entertained for each other those varied sentiments of like and dislike, those mingled distrusts, suspicions, and beliefs, which, however unconsciously to ourselves, are part of the education travelling impresses, and which, when long persevered in, make up that acute but not always amiable individual we call “an old traveller.”
We are not about to present them all to our reader, and will only beg to introduce to his notice a few of the notabilities then present. _Place aux dames!_ then; and, first of all, we beg attention to the dark-eyed, dark-haired, and very delicately featured woman, who, in half-mourning, and with a pretty but fantastically costumed girl beside her, is working at an embroidery-frame close to the river. She is a Mrs. Penthony Morris, the wife or the widow--both opinions prevail--of a Captain Penthony Morris, killed in a duel, or in India, or alive in the Marshalsea, or at Baden-Baden, as may be. She is striking-looking, admirably dressed, has a most beautiful foot, as you may see where it rests upon the rail of the chair placed in front of her, and is, altogether, what that very smartly dressed, much-beringed, and essenced young gentleman near her has already pronounced her, “a stunning fine woman.” He is a Mr. Mosely, one of those unhappy young Londoners whose family fame is ever destined to eclipse their own gentility, for he is immediately recognized, and drawlingly do men inquire some twenty times a day, “Ain't he a son of Trip and Mosely's, those fellows in Bond Street?” Unhappy Trip and Mosely! why have you rendered yourselves so great and illustrious? why have your tasteful devices in gauze, your “sacrifices” in challis, your “last new things in grenadine,” made such celebrity around you, that Tom Mosely, “out for his travels,” can no more escape the shop than if he were languishing at a customer over a “sweet article in white tarlatan”? In the two comfortable armchairs side by side sit two indubitable specimens, male and female, of the Anglo- Saxon family,--Mr. Morgan, that florid man, wiping his polished bald head, and that fat lady fanning with all her might. Are they not English? They are “out,” and, judging from their recorded experiences, only dying to be “in” again. “Such a set of cheating, lying, lazy set of rascals are these Italians! Independence, sir; don't talk to me of that humbug! What they want is English travellers to fleece and English women to marry.” Near to these, at full length, on two chairs, one of which reclines against a tree at an angle of about forty degrees, sits our Yankee acquaintance, whom we may as well present by his name, Leonidas Shaver Quackinboss; he is smoking a “Virginian” about the size of a marshal's bâton, and occasionally sipping at a “cobbler,” which with much pains he has compounded for his own drinking. Various others of different ranks and countries are scattered about, and in the centre of all, at a small table with a lamp, sits a short, burly figure, with a strange mixture of superciliousness and drollery in his face, as though there were a perpetual contest in his nature whether he would be impertinent or amusing. This was Mr. Gorman O'Shea, Member of Parliament for Inchabogue, and for three weeks a Lord of the Treasury when O'Connell was king.