carbonaro or quill-driver in existence, no matter how many malicious and equivocal jokes he made on the subject of the “horizontal.” Especially he liked it in the evening, when with his little lamp on the stand beside him and his long-lost and now restored Maria alight between his lips he enjoyed the ineffable excellencies of his reclining-chair. True, his nose felt frozen, and the hands that held his book⁠—he was still reading Ocean Steamships ⁠—were red and cramped from the cold. He looked through the arch of his loggia over the darkening valley, jewelled with clustered or scattering lights, and listened to the music that drifted up nearly every evening for almost an hour. There was a concert below, and he could hear, pleasantly subdued by the distance, familiar operatic selections, snatches from Carmen , Il Trovatore , Freischütz