On arriving at years of indiscretion, our hero began to display a tendency to "seven-up," Old Sledge, and other card-inal virtues, calculated to fit him for playing his cards right in future years. Just about this time, too, his parents resolved to send him to school, and it is as the young scholar we must now regard him.
Behold him, then, at his tasks, in a red shirt amputated at the neck, and two yellow patches (the badge of Sardinia) flaming from the background of his seat of learning. He readily mastered the Greek verbs and roots, comprehended liquorice root, studied geography, etymology, sycorax, and mahogany; could decline to conjugate the verb toby, and quickly knew enough about algebra to prove that X plus Y, not being equal to Z, is minus any dinner at noon, and plus one of the tightest applications of birch that ever produced the illusion of a red-hot stove in immediate contact with the human body.
CHAPTER III.
GARIBALDI GOES TO SEA.
Just before the breaking-out of the rebellion at Rome, the trade in garlic and domestic fleas took a sudden start, and the Po was crowded with vessels of all nations—especially the halluci-nations. One day, young Garibaldi was in the act of stabbing a barrel of molasses to the heart with a quill, on Pier 4, P. R. (Po River), when he was descried by the captain of a fishing-smack, detailed by Government to watch the motions of the English fleet.
"Boy, ahoy!" says the Captain.
The future liberator of Italy dropped his murderous quill, wiped his nose with a pine shaving, and answered, in trumpet-tones:
"You're another!"
So delighted was the captain with this noble reply, that he flogged the whole starboard watch at the gunwales, ordered a preventer backstay on the kedge-anchor, leaped ashore to where Garibaldi was standing, and offered to make him familiar with the seas, and a second Cæsar. Garibaldi replied that he had already been half-seas over, but would not object to another cruise. He said he had traveled half-seas over, "on his face," and would now travel the other half on a vessel. He went. The vessel proved to be a vessel of wrath, and Garibaldi became so familiar with the cat-o-nine-tails, that he soon mused upon a plan for deserting the ship.
CHAPTER IV.