Another young applicant, whom I will call
Carlo D., came to us to ask relief. What he
chiefly needed was clothing. This, indeed, is
the most general want. Many of the wounded
men are unable to leave the hospitals, even when
convalescent, for want of the barest necessaries
of clothing.

Carlo D.'s father had been an advocate in
good practice. The young man himself had
received the education of a gentleman. He
appeared before the lady who benevolently gives
the use of her house for the purposes of the
committee, pale, suffering from a frightful wound,
and absolutely in rags. So deplorable is his
condition, that the Countess M. and her nieces
then and there levy contributions on the
wardrobes of the gentlemen of their family, and
proceed to alter, to cut, and to sew together
some garments to protect the wounded boy
from the cold.

He stood there silent, gazing from one to
another of the kind women who, scarcely less
agitated than himself, were endeavouring to
supply his wants. Suddenly the poor boy
clasped his hands before his face, burst into a
passion of tears, and sobbed out, " Oh, I am
ashamed! I am ashamed!"

Here is a young heart not altogether destitute
of self-respect, I venture to submit! His
countrywoman, relating the story with tears of
sympathy, strange to say expressed no astonishment
at the existence of such a feeling in an
Italian breast. She evidently considered it to
be a natural ebullition, and one which she
perfectly comprehended; which fact leads us, I
suppose, to the inference that self-respect is not
entirely an exotic in Italy after all! But stay.
If it be not self-respecting to acknowledge
a benefit, then I must confess that such a
humiliating thing as open, ungrudging gratitude
does exist amongst these children of the
South. If to be ashamed of giving thanks for
what one is not ashamed of receiving, to ask
surlily, to accept sulkily, and secretly to hate
the hand outstretched in charity-- if these
things be any evidence of self-respect, then,
alas! I am bound to acknowledge that that
kind of independent spirit I have not hitherto
found in Italians. Only yesterday, at a full
assembly of our committee, a wounded man,
who had received succour, craved admission to
the presence of the ladies. Of course to ask
for further aid? By no means.

For what possible purpose, then? Simply to
show himself to them in the decent clothing
which they had substituted for his blood-stained
tattered garments; to give them the pleasure of
seeing with their own eyes the result of their
good work, and to thank them for their timely
help as best he knew how. Yes; this young
man (who had been, by the way, a cavalry
soldier in the regular army, and had been
discharged as consumptive!) came and stood before
us in a square soldierly attitude, and expressed
in his mobile Italian face the thanks which his
tongue had not courage or skill to utter. Of
so poor and base a temper was his spirit, that
he actually conceived it to be no degradation to
his manhood to appear before these benevolent
women in the clothes with which their charity
had furnished him!

That the poor help the poor is an old
observation, and, I believe, equally applicable to all
countries. Here, in Florence, we have met
with touching instances of its truth. Many of
the wounded volunteers, whose case is not so
desperate as to require hospital treatment, find
shelter under the roof of friends, themselves so
poor as to be obliged to labour hard for their
daily bread. Food sufficient to sustain life, and
a roof over their heads, is seldom denied to
them. Medical care they receive gratuitously
at the hands of that profession of healing which
honourably distinguishes itself in works of
benevolence all the world over. But clothing!
There is their difficulty, and in this respect the
ladies' committee is able to be peculiarly useful.
More than one instance has occurred of an
applicant coming to us in a suit of clothes
borrowed from a friend, which friend, we were
given to understand, was, meanwhile,
necessarily condemned to a very close retirement in
his chamber! Some one asked me the other
day, with a shade of contemptuous incredulity,
"Well, but what has become of the clothes
these volunteers had before? They did not,
surely, proceed to the campaign totally naked!"

Quite true. They were clothed, though
probably not well clothed. But garments clotted
with gore and mud, burnt by powder, and
slashed by bayonet-thrusts, are neither pleasant
nor comfortable wear. In many cases the men
were taken off the field with scarcely a rag left
on them. The majority of these volunteers
belong to the class which we English emphatically
designate as "working men." To a working
man in full employ, the purchase of a suit
of clothes is matter for long consideration and
weeks of saving. To a man who has (whether
judiciously or injudiciously I do not here
discuss) thrown himself not only out of present
work, but out of the groove in which he was
likely to find it, the acquisition by his own
efforts of warm winter clothing is simply an
impossibility.

The spirit of the men in hospital, whether
here or in Rome, is, by all accounts, excellent.
One man, on being asked if he had not suffered
terribly in undergoing a severe operation,
replied, " Oh, it was bad. But the doctors are
very skilful and very quick. The pain is not
the worst. The real hardship in hospital is to
see your comrades suffer. That is terrible."

Could the bravest British tar who ever fought
under Nelson have spoken more manfully, and,
at the same time, tenderly? Not that these
poor lads are made of the same stuff as Nelson's
hearts of oak were made of. Physically, they
are smaller, slighter, and weaker. Morally,
more impressionable and impulsive. Habitually,
less accustomed to measure their lives by a
standard of duty. Still there is in them some
nobleness which has been brought forth by
suffering, and the encounter with death.