Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

the worship and service of liberty.When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship tradingto La Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo, then underthe command of Garibaldi. Afterwards, in the Italianlegion of the Republic struggling against the encroachingtyranny of Rosas, he had taken part, on great plains, on thebanks of immense rivers, in the fiercest fighting perhaps theworld had ever known. He had lived amongst men who haddeclaimed about liberty, suffered for liberty, died for liberty,with a desperate exaltation, and with their eyes turnedtowards an oppressed Italy. His own enthusiasm had beenfed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty devotion,on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed language ofproclamations. He had never parted from the chief of hischoice—the fiery apostle of independence—keeping byhis side in America and in Italy till after the fatal day ofAspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors, andministers had been revealed to the world in the woundingand imprisonment of his hero—a catastrophe that hadinstilled into him a gloomy doubt of ever being able to understandthe ways of Divine justice.He did not deny it, however. It required patience, hewould say. Though he disliked priests, and would not puthis foot inside a church for anything, he believed in God.Were not the proclamations against tyrants addressed tothe peoples in the name of God and liberty? ‘God for men—religions for women,’ he muttered sometimes. In Sicily, anEnglishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuationby the army of the king, had given him a Bible in