They had been born to him late, years after the boy had died.

Had he lived he would have been nearly as old as Gian' Battista--he whom the English called Nostromo; but as to his daughters, the severity of his temper, his advancing age, his absorption in his memories, had prevented his taking much notice of them.

He loved his children, but girls belong more to the mother, and much of his affection had been expended in the worship and service of liberty.
When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading to La Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo, then under the command of Garibaldi.
Afterwards, in the Italian legion of the Republic struggling against the encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he had taken part, on great plains, on the banks of immense rivers, in the fiercest fighting perhaps the world had ever known.

He had lived amongst men who had declaimed about liberty, suffered for liberty, died for liberty, with a desperate exaltation, and with their eyes turned towards an oppressed Italy.

His own enthusiasm had been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty devotion, on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed language of proclamations.
He had never parted from the chief of his choice--the fiery apostle of independence--keeping by his side in America and in Italy till after the fatal day of Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors, and ministers had been revealed to the world in the wounding and imprisonment of his hero--a catastrophe that had instilled into him a gloomy doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine justice.
He did not deny it, however.