In a short time the Count and Dick had driven to the hotel, where the former pressed upon the Senator and Buttons an invitation to his house. They were not allowed to refuse, but were taken away, and before they fairly understood the unexpected occurrence they were all installed in magnificent apartments in the Palazzo Gonfaloniere.
Buttons's acquaintance with the language, literature, manners, and customs of Italy made him appreciate his advantages; the friendship of the Count prevented Dick from feeling otherwise than perfectly at home; and as for the Senator, if it had been possible for him to feel otherwise, his experience of high life at Florence would have enabled him to bear himself serenely here. His complete self-possession, his unfaltering gaze, his calm countenance, were never for a moment disturbed.
The Count had been long enough in America to appreciate a man of the stamp of the Senator; he therefore from the very first treated him with marked respect, which was heightened when Dick told him of the Senator's achievements during the past few weeks. The brilliant society which surrounded the Count was quite different from that which the Senator had found in Florence. The people were equally cultivated, but more serious. They had less excitability, but more deep feeling. Milan, indeed, had borne her burden far differently from Florence. Both hated the foreigner; but the latter could be gay, and smiling, and trifling even under her chains; this the former could never be. The thoughtful, earnest, and somewhat pensive Milanese was more to the Senator's taste than the brilliant and giddy Florentine. These, thought he, may well be a free people.
Moreover, the Senator visited the Grand Cathedral, and ascended to the summit. Arriving there his thoughts were not taken up by the innumerable statues of snow-white marble, or the countless pinnacles of exquisite sculpture that extended all around like a sacred forest filled with saints and angels, but rather to the scene that lay beyond.
There spread away a prospect which was superior in his eyes to any thing that he had ever seen before, nor had it ever entered his mind to conceive such a matchless scene. The wide plains of Lombardy, green, glorious, golden with the richest and most inexhaustible fertility; vast oceans of grain and rice, with islands of dark-green trees that bore untold wealth of all manner of fruit; white villas, little hamlets, close-packed villages, dotted the wide expanse, with the larger forms of many a populous town. He looked to the north and to the west. The plain spread away for many a league, till the purple mountains arose as a barrier, rising up till they touched the everlasting ice. He looked to the east and south. There the plains stretched away to the horizon in illimitable extent.
"What a country! All cleared too! Every acre! And the villages! Why, there are thousands if there is one! Dear! dear! dear! How can I have the heart to blow about New England or Boston after that there! Buttons, why don't somebody tell about all this to the folks at home and stop their everlasting bragging? But"--after a long pause--"I'll do it! I'll do it!--this very night. I'll write about it to our paper!"
.
IN WHICH BUTTONS WRITES A LETTER; AND IN WHICH THE CLUB LOSES AN IMPORTANT MEMBER.--SMALL BY DEGREES AND BEAUTIFULLY LESS.
But all things, however pleasant, must have an end, so their stay in Milan soon approached its termination.