Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/52

7, 1860.] Ambrogio (somewhat confused in his mind by the blow he had received) to be conveyed into Sienna in a cart, and there he was beheaded. Before his death, he had entreated that his helmet might be restored to him, but this, his last request, was cruelly denied him. A few days afterwards there was a truce between the people of Sienna and the people of Florence, and the body of Messer Ambrogio, in full armour save the helmet, was restored to the Florentines. It was buried with great pomp in San Teodoro.”

The Italian told him that it was a recognised tradition in Tuscany, that the spirit of Ambrogio haunted that old Livornese villa: that the departed warrior was ever in search of some substitute for his lost helmet; and that, in his opinion, it had undoubtedly appeared to him. Uncle John did not mention his own conclusions; but from that time he was an altered man, and gave up Voltaire. K.

had been traversing the London Road, which leads out of Shrewsbury by its eastern suburb, skirting every now and then the silvery Severn, meandering through a park-like country, when my companion turned the horse’s head down a bye-road on the right, which speedily led us amid some undulating pastures. “And now,” said he, as the carriage jerked over a ridge in the road; “now—we are in the Roman City.”

I looked around me. There were undulating fields and crops of turnips, hedge-rows and trees—an English landscape, pure and simple, such as we meet with everywhere in the luxuriant western counties. “But where have the Romans left their mark?” I asked, half incredulously. My companion pointed with his whip to a dark object a little in advance—a weather-beaten wall which rose, a massive and significant ruin, in the midst