The Village Commune, Vol. 1 (1881): a machine-readable transcription

Ouida (1839-1908)

Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

The Village Commune (Vol. 1)

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(frontis)

        

A VILLAGE COMMUNE

BY

OUIDA

L'ETAT C'EST MOI"

(front)
LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

A VILLAGE COMMUNE

CHAPTER I.

Tasso. A village white as a seashore stone; lying along a river green as the Adige; with low mountains in sight across a green table-land of vine and chestnut, olive and corn; with some tall poplars by the water, and a church with a red brick bell-tower, and the bell swinging behind its wooden cage. Across the fields and along the side of the hills are scores of other villages; narrow roads run between them all in a network hidden under vine leaves; and some hundreds of house-roofs make up together what is called the Commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda. Of this commune the chief place, because the largest village, is Santa Rosalia. Santa Rosalia in Selva; so called because thus named in days when the woods had covered it up as closely as a blackbird's nest is covered with the long leaves that it builds in; Santa Rosalia in

Selva, a simple, honest, fresh, and most rural place, with sunburnt women plaiting straw upon its doorsteps, and little naked children tumbling about like Loves escaped from the panels of Correggio; with the daffodils and the odorous narcissus growing in spring-time everywhere among the grass and corn, and in the autumn the ox-carts going with the tubs of gathered grapes slowly down its single street: a street without a paving-stone, and without a shop except the butcher's stall and the grocer's, and one little old dim penthouse-like place where in the gloom an old woman sells cakes and toys and rosaries.

        The bright green country lies close about Santa Rosalia, and indeed is one with it, and in summer so overlaps it, and roofs it in, with vine-foliage and clouds of silvery olive leaf that nothing is to be seen of it

except the bell-tower of its chief church, San Giuseppe, with a statue of the saint upon its roof pointing heavenward.

        Things had always come and gone easily in Santa Rosalia in the old days, and even in the new. With revolutions and the like it had had nothing to do. It never talked politics. When men who had remembered wine ten centimes a flask found it rise to a hundred they scratched their heads and were puzzled; being told it was the cost of liberty, they took the explanation simply as a matter of fact, and thought liberty was a name for the vine disease.

        When the church was whitewashed, and the trattoria was turned into the Caffè Vittorio Emanuele, and the conscription placards were pasted on the bridge, and the Imperial taxes established themselves in a brand-new stucco-plastered public office

next the butcher's, with a shield upon it, bearing a white cross on a red ground, Santa Rosalia did not take much notice: everything grew dear indeed, but some said it was the gas away in the city did it, and some said it was the railway, and some said it was the king, and some said it was all the fault of liquid manure; but still nobody troubled much about anything, and everybody continued to go to mass, and do his best to be happy, until--the events took place that I propose to record.

        The Commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda, whose centre is the village of Santa Rosalia, is, like all Italian communes, supposed to enjoy an independence that is practically a legislative autonomy. So long as it contributes its quota to the Imperial taxes, the Imperial Government is supposed to have nothing to do with it, and it is considered

to be as free as air to govern itself; so everybody will tell you; and so inviolate is its freedom that even the Prefect of its province dare not infringe upon it--or says so when he wants to get out of any trouble.

        Anybody who pays five francs' worth of taxes has a communal vote in this free government, and helps to elect a body of thirty persons, who in turn elect a council of seven persons, who in turn elect a single person called a syndic, or, as you would call him in English, a mayor. This distilling and condensing process sounds quite admirable in theory. Whoever has the patience to read the pages of this book will see how this system works in practice.

        Now in Vezzaja and Ghiralda the thirty persons do nothing but elect the seven persons, the seven do nothing but elect the one person, and the one person does nothing

but elect his secretary; and the secretary, with two assistants dignified respectively by the titles of Chancellor and Conciliator, does everything in the way of worry to the public that the ingenuity of the official mind can conceive. The secretary's duties ought to be simply those of a secretary anywhere, but by a clever individual can be brought to mean almost anything you please in the shape of local tyranny and extortion; the chancellor (cancelliere) has the task of executing every sort of unpleasantness against the public in general, and sends out by his fidus Achates, the Usher, all kinds of summons and warrants at his will and discretion; as for the conciliator (giudice conciliatore), his office, as his name indicates, is supposed to consist in conciliation of all local feuds, disputes, and debts, but as he is generally chiefly remarkable for an absolute ignorance

of law and human nature, and a general tendency to accumulate fees anywhere and anyhow, he is not usually of the use intended, and rather is famous for doing what a homely phrase calls setting everybody together by the ears. It being understood that all these gentry are men who, in any other country would be butchers, or bakers, or candlestick makers, it is readily to be understood likewise that they are not an absolutely unmixed boon to the community over which they reign; at their very best they have been book-keepers or scriveners, or bankrupt petty tradesmen who have some interest with the prefect of the province or the syndic of the commune, and as they usually are, all three alike, little Gesslers in temperament and almost uncontrolled in power, it is easy to imagine that their yoke is by no means light upon the necks of their

neighbours and subjects, and that they dance the devil's dance, humorously, over its finances and its fortunes. Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and may be you love it a good deal more.

        Tyranny is a very safe amusement in this liberated country. Italian law is based on that blessing to mankind, the Code Napoléon, and the Code Napoléon is perhaps the most ingenious mechanism for human torture that the human mind has ever constructed. In the cities its use for torment is not quite so easy, because where there are crowds there is always the fear of a riot, and besides there are horrid things called newspapers, and citizens wicked and daring enough to write in them. But always in the country, the embellished and filtered Code

Napoléon can work like a steam plough; there is nobody to appeal, and nobody to appeal to; the people are timid and perplexed; they areas defenceless as the sheep in the hand of the shearer; they are frightened at the sight of the printed papers, and the carabinier's sword; there is nobody to tell them that they have any rights, and besides, rights are very expensive luxuries anywhere, and cost as much to take care of as a carriage horse.

        Now and then the people find out their rights, and light a barrel of petroleum with them, and are blamed: it is foolish, no doubt, and it is terrible, but the real blame lies with their masters, who leave them no other light than the petroleum glare. That they do not use their petroleum for anything except their household lamps is due to the patience and the docility of the people; it is

not due to the embellished and filtered version of the Code Napoléon, nor to the administrators of it.

        Santa Rosalia is a rambling place, straggling along one side of the green impetuous river; of course it possesses what it calls a piazza, and makes a sort of pretence at being a town; but the grass grows long in its stones all over the place, and its folks are as rustic as villagers can be. There were never very many people in the lowly borgo, but the few there were, at the time of which I write, dwelt in good harmony together.

        There was Luigi Canterelli (always called Gigi) who dealt in all kinds of useful things from hammers to pins, from drugs to broad beans; there was Ferdinando Gambacorta (known only as Nando), who was plumber and cartwright and carpenter all in one; there was Leopoldo Franceschi (Poldo), who

was locksmith, blacksmith, whitesmith, and farrier; there was Raffaelle Dando (Faello) who was the big butcher, and there was Alessandro Montauto (Sandro) who was the little one; there was Vincenzio Torriggiani (Cencio) who was the tailor of the community and might be seen sitting all day long cross-legged and hard at work on his threshold and for ever ready for a gossip; there was Filippo Rasselluccio (Lippo) who was the baker and also trafficked in grain and seeds; there was Guiseppe Lante (Beppo) who had a trattoria and wine shop, and would roast you a dozen thrushes or fry you a dozen artichokes against all the cooks in Christendom. There was Leonardo Mariani (Nardo) who kept a paint and oil and brush shop, and also kept the post-office after his own manner, which was to spread the letters out upon his counter and let them lie there till

somebody should come in who would be going the way to which they were addressed, and would consent to take them thither. There was the apothecary, of course, il dottore Guarino Squillace, who was paid by the commune about 20l. a year to look after its bodies; and there was Dom Lelio, the Vicar of San Guiseppe, who was paid about twenty shillings a month by the State to look after its souls; and there was the miller, Demetrio Pastorini, who dwelt on the river, and had handsome sons and daughters to the number of seven, and there were a great many other very poor people, nondescripts, getting their bread anyhow; and outside the village there were of course all the small gentry and many contadini and fattori who dashed through the place on fiery horses or in jingling break-neck bagheri, those bastard offspring of a cart and a gig.

        Santa Rosalia had been made into the centre of a new commune some decades ago; but though wine had become ten times the old price, and taxes had become fifty times heavier, Santa Rosalia had not felt its new shoe pinch very terribly, for its syndic had been a very just and excellent person (as does sometimes actually happen), a certain Marchese Palmarola, as simple as Cincinnatus and as gentle as S. Frances. But unhappily for Santa Rosalia, Palmarola had died of tertian fever one hot summer time, and another and different person had been elected in his place, the Cavaliere Anselmo Durellazzo. The Marchese had seen to everything himself; had never signed a paper or a form without reading it, and enquiring into the case that required it; had let many foolish and cruel regulations be dead letters, and had never been known to be unjust to either

rich or poor. Most people are unjust to one or the other. But then the Marchese had been a Catholic and a gentleman, and so had been silly enough to believe in such an antiquated thing as moral responsibility.

        The Cavaliere Durellazzo had not these scruples; he had been a wax candle manufacturer on a large scale in a city, and though the Church had helped to make his fortune, he was much given to laughing at it; with his millions he had purchased estates in the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda, and the Giunta thought there was nobody better for a syndic; he thought so too. He was a fat, easy-going, sleepy man, and as soon as he came into office signed some hundreds of blank forms to save himself all trouble; he cared for nothing except playing dominoes and begin bowed to by his peasantry. As he had passed all his

life in bowing himself, it was a new sensation.

        The commune under the Cavaliere Durellazzo soon got into disorder; complaints were made to the thirty, and the thirty made them to the seven, and the seven made them to the one. The Cavaliere Durellazzo looked around him, and bethought him of a remedy which should involve no trouble to himself. He summoned Messer Gaspardo Nellemane, who was then employed in the Municipality of the nearest city and soon into the sunlight of Santa Rosalia, there came a tall, trim, erect figure, clad in town-made clothes, who was commended to the respect of the commune in general as the new secretary.

        Messer Gaspardo Nellemane was a man of some seven-and-twenty years; he was well made, and had a dark and rather handsome face, in which the Hebrew origin attri-

buted to him displayed itself somewhat strongly. He was quite a grand personage in Santa Rosalia; he dressed in city fashion, and he had a great many rings, if he did not always wash his hands, and the way in which he smoked his cigar, wore his hat, and kicked a dog out of his path was quite that of a very fine gentleman.

        Messer Nellemane had begun life in a little dusky den of pots and pans, and odds and ends of iron and brass that we call chincaglierie, and there had tumbled about, a dusty child, amongst the rust and rubbish, till, seeing he was sharp little boy, his old father sent him to school, and from school he went to a notary's office as clerk, and from there had mounted up into the Civil Service of Italy, until here he was, a great man, in Santa Rosalia, with twice as much as the apothecary, and four times as much as

the vicar, as official salary, and bed and board beside, not to mention any such windfalls as might drop to him in the due course of a just administration.

        Messer Gaspardo Nellemane lived in two little rooms, very bare of furniture, and was waited on by the man that swept out the Communal Palace, and ate white beans fried in oil, and salt fish, and had a bit of kid on highdays and holydays, just like any other unit of the modest public. But Messer Gaspardo, though he smoked two-centime cigars and drank a thin wine at a few pence a flask, was an ambitious man; he saw no reason why he should not become a deputy, and even a minister before he died, and indeed there was no reason whatever. He was only a clerk at fifty pounds a year; but he had a soul above all scruples, and a heart as hard as the millstone.

        In station he was only a humble though energetic official, carrying out the supreme will of the Guinta, just as young Bonaparte seemed a mere general carrying out the will of the Republic. But genius has its supremacy wherever it may dwell, and Messer Nellemane in real truth moved the Guinta as though they were automatic figures and he their central spring. The Guinta gathered round a council table every week, and believed they did business; but, in point of fact, they only looked through the spectacles that Messer Nellemane provided. Messer Nellemane saved them a great deal of trouble, and they were grateful.

        There stood the Palazzo Communale in the midst of sunny Santa Rosalia, a square bald ugly building, dirty and naked and always dusty-looking, with its plaster crack-

ing, and its paint peeling, and Santa Rosalia was told that this ugly building was their temple of liberty and equity; liberty public and private, equity that was no respecter of persons, but impartial and incorruptible; and inside the Palazzo Communale Messer Nellemane had it all his own way, and thence did rule the commune 'with suavity and moderation' as he himself would say, when he would speak of his administration, as he took a bibita at evening in the door-way of the little humble caffè which was proud to house so great a man; a caffè where the Secretary and the Conciliator and the Chancellor sat and played cards, and drank little strong essences together, most nights, in that perfect accord which characterized their public and private career. They never quarrelled: not they: one held

the sheep, another sheared it, and a third gathered the wool; if they had once quarrelled they might have let go of the sheep.

        Messer Gaspardo Nellemane sometimes thought that he could very well have held and sheared and gathered, all by himself, for he was clever, and his friends, the Conciliator and the Chancellor, were not distinguished for intellect.

        The Conciliator was a fat bald man, who in remote days had been a priest, a cook, a taverner, a cheesemonger, and found all trades fail; he like his glass and was generally half asleep: the Chancellor had been an apothecary's prentice once upon a time, and had got into trouble for mistaking the dog Latin on his pots and bottles, and giving the wrong drugs; he was small and thin and very

timid, and had but one passion, artichokes in oil.

        Messer Gaspardo Nellemane was of a different mould to his colleagues, whom he called so affectionately his dear Tonino and his beloved Maso; his was a master mind, and his own master the Syndic, the most worshipful Signor Cavaliere Durellazzo, never dared say a word of dispute or reproof to him, but, when he drove into Santa Rosalia once a week or once a month, nodded and blinked, and assented to everything, and muttered 'Va bene, va benissimo' to all the acts and deeds, the elaborate judgements and obsequious explanations of his secretary. So Messer Gaspardo Nellemane ruled and reigned in Santa Rosalia in Selva, as a number of precisely similar people so rule and reign still, all over the land, in this year of grace 1880.

        The public creates the bureaucracy and is eaten up by it; it is the old story of Saturn and his sons. Messer Gaspardo was a very insignificant atom of the European bureaucracy, it is true; but he was big enough to swallow the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda.

        All the commune detested him, yet all the commune cringed to him. The commune had appointed the thirty, and the thirty had appointed the seven, and the seven had appointed the Syndic, Cavaliere Durellazzo, and Cavaliere Durellazzo had appointed Messer Gaspardo; and when once this clever rider was upon the patient mule's back, nobody in all Vezzaja and Ghiralda was clever enough to get him off again.

        Government, according to Messer Nellemane, and many greater public men have

thought the same before him, was a delicate and elaborate machinery for getting everything out of the public that could be got; the public was a kid to be skinned, a grape to be squeezed, a sheep to be shorn; the public was to be managed, cajoled, bullied, put in the press, made wine of in a word; wine for the drinking of Messer Nellemane. Messer Nellemane was not a minister yet, but he thought himself a minister.

        He was only a clerk indeed, at a slender salary, and ate his fried tomatoes publicly in the little back room of the caffè; but he had the soul of a statesman. When a donkey kicks, beat it; when it dies, skin it; so only will it profit you; that was his opinion, and the public was the donkey of Messer Nellemane.

        Messer Nellemane had blessed Santa-Rosalia for about three years and a half when

the first of the incidents that I am about to narrate took place, and changed the fates of some very poor people; the sort of people that the world will sometimes deign to read about if Georges Sand or George Eliot write of them, but who, outside a story-book, are absolutely uninteresting and insignificant.

        Messer Nellemane had been dining at three o'clock in the balmy afternoon of a lovely spring day, and was strolling along the left bank of the Rosa river: the bank where the houses were not.

        Messer Nellemane this day was in a complacent frame of mind; he had been inspecting the roads with his friend Pierino Zaffi, who was the engineer of the commune; an engineer who knew too little even to be employed on a railway. Happily for him, however, he had gone to school with Messer Nellemane, and had in his

boyish days lent Messer Nellemane little sums of money; so, when an engineer was wanted for the commune on the old one dying, Messer Nellemane had said, 'There is Pierino Zaffi, a man with capabilities to bore the Gran Sasso, and drain the Maggiore. It might be well if we could secure his services;' and the Syndic had said, 'Va, bene, va benissimo.' So Pierino Zaffi had also been put upon the civil list of Vezzaja and Ghiralda.

        There was a very heavy tax for roads in the commune; everybody who paid fifty-francs-worth of rent had to contribute; the total amassed was considerable.

        Now the roads were very bad in Vezzaja and Ghiralda, and Pierino Zaffi was there to make them better, and the big lump sum taken from the public for that purpose was there too. But for Pierino Zaffi to mend

the roads, and for the money to be spent on them, would have been much too simple to be statesmanlike; they went quite another way to work, did these two school-friends. They put up the roads to auction; here are the roads to be mended; the roads will go to the lowest bidder; how much for the roads? Then a miller stepped forward and said he would take them in hand for 400 francs per annum; he was scouted. Then a stonemason said he would do them for 350; he too, was put aside contemptuously. Then a contractor from the city said he was willing to offer 200; and he was dallied with coyingly because he was a contractor; and after much higgling, bidding, screaming, and disputing, the stonemason made final offer of 140 francs per annum for the roads, and got them.

        The stonemason's views as to the mending

of roads were simple: he had all the flint that was chipped off, and all the rubbish that was shot, in his yard emptied at different places on the highways, and when he happened to possess neither chips nor rubbish he did nothing at all.

        Goers to and fro upon the roads cursed the state of them; horses and mules fell into their holes, and wheels jolted to pieces over their ruts. The stonemason stolidly replied that if he did not keep the roads well the engineer could say he did not, and see to it. Then the engineer was summoned, and made an inspection, and breakfasted with the stonemason, and drank Vino Santo and was made comfortable in every way, and sent in a report which affirmed that it was impossible that the roads could be better. 'There!' said the stonemason, and entrenched himself safely behind the report, while Messer Nelle-

mane read the report to the Guinta, and the Syndic said, 'Va bene, va benissimo.' And as for the roads, Messer Nellemane had looked at the green corn in the fields, and Messer Pierino had looked at the clouds in the sky, and both had declared themselves as to the state of the roads most satisfied, most gratified, nay, actually surprised with the excellence of them. Mules only broke their legs because they were obstinate, and wheels only came off because they were rotten; that was the fault of the mules and the wheels, clearly: the state of the roads was excellent.

        This is how roads are managed in Vezzaja and Ghiralda. Municipal government is a blessing, and the greatest guarantee of freedom--so we are told.

        Meanwhile, where did the rest of the public taxes for the roadkeeping go, when

the stonemason's hundred and forty francs were deducted? This was a question nobody in Vezzaja and Ghiralda ever thought of asking. The patience of the taxpaying public all the world over is wonderful. It is probable that this donkey-like quality is what makes statesmen also all the world over, and especially chancellors of exchequers, so contemptuous of the public. They treat is as Sganarelle treats his wife.

        Messer Nellemane had been with Messer Pierino on one of these tours of inspection and had come back in a good humour; the Vino Santo had been admirable, and the thrushes and the hare-with-herbs had been done to a turn. In a genial frame of mind, therefore, Messer Gaspardo strolled homeward by that pretty river, the Rosa, which is a bright stream, green as a lizard's back, rough and roaring in winter times of flood,

clear and shallow in summer seasons, with broad stretches of pale yellow sand.

        The Rosa is an historic river, though a narrow one; who will may read in ancient chronicles of holy pilgrimages made along its banks, and unholy war waged upon its shores, of Guelf and Ghibelline fording its waters, and of Spaniard and German engulfed in its flood.

        But of these old tales Messer Nellemane thought not; for the past he had a boundless scorn; how stupid were those barons and troopers of middle ages who could only roast a Jew's feet, or use the thumbscrew to an usurer! how superior for the same ends were taxes, tribunals, and the law! Messer Gaspardo Nellemane was, like many other modern philosophers, quite convinced there had never been any times so good as the present.

        He sauntered along, his Cavour cigar in

his mouth; the sun was going towards the west, the Lombardy poplars fringing the river-banks shook in a slight breeze; elsewhere it was dusty and unpleasant, but by the river there were coolness, shadow, and no dust.

        Suddenly the eyes of Messer Nellemane lighted on--a contravention. His eye brightened at the sight as a warhorse's at the panoply of troops. What he saw was an old man cutting osiers on the margin of the now shallow Rosa; near him a girl was beating linen in the water, and a youth a little way off was sifting the river shingle.

        The old man, Filippo Mazzetti, always called Pippo, was a basket-maker and mender of rush chairs, and weaver of the wickerwork of wine and oil flasks. He was certainly very poor as the great world counts poverty, but he was as happy for all

that as a cricket in the corn. He had a little house of his own, his very own, as the children say, that hung over a bend in the water, and he always managed to have a pound or two of meat on Sundays, and his canes and osiers could be had merely for the gathering.

        The maiden beside him was the daughter of his dead son; she was the pride of his soul and the apple of his eye. She was called Viola, for that name of Shakespeare's shy, bold, sweet heroine is one common amongst the country people here, and she was like the Sibilla Persica * as a human face can be like an immortal thought. She had a very noble and pensive face, and when she went to cut osiers and willows with her father, and bore the green bundle of the reeds, or a red sheaf of maple wands,
___________________

Of Guercino.

upon her head, she was as full of grace and unconscious grandeur as though she had been a daughter of Cæsars.

        She could not read a line, and her feet were usually bare, and she was hard at work from sunrise to sunset; but she had the old Hera-like beauty, the antique sculptural calm. Her grandfather had kept her strictly, and she had never stirred out without him; a little shrivelled old man, very small and very sunburnt, who looked beside her like a withered bough beside an amaryllis. She was devoted to him, and he to her, and here in Santa Rosalia their innocent lives had passed quite peaceably and painlessly until this spring day, as he went by the river, Messer Nellemane by ill fortune saw her washing linen there, Pippo cutting reeds the while, and the miller's eldest son, Carmelo

Pastorini, knee-deep in the water, shovelling up and shifting shingle.

        Messer Gaspardo Nellemane stopped, espying, as I have said, that thing whose sight was beatitude and yet exasperation to him--a contravention. He had made a code of little by-laws, all brand-new and of his own invention; he thought administration should be persecution; if it did not perpetually assert itself who would respect it? He had made everything punishable that could be possibly distorted into requiring punishment.

        Every commune has the right to make its own by-laws and Messer Gaspardo had framed about three hundred and ninety and the Giuntà sleepily and indifferently had assented to them, and the worshipful Syndic, Cavaliere Durellazzo, had looked them over and said, 'Va bene, va benissimo,' and so in

Santa Rosalia all the secretary's regulations had been adopted and become law. Quite recently he had incorporated into these regulations the law that nobody must cut canes or reeds in the Rosa without permission of, and payment to, the commune. L'État c'est moi, and its pocket is mine too, was always in the thoughts of Messer Nellemane.

        So he went down to the edge of the stream, and said, quite affectionately to old Pippo, because the maiden was so handsome, 'My dear friend, what you are doing there is against the law unless indeed you have paid for a permit, and I think you have not. Can you show me your license?'

        Old Pippo, who was rather deaf and a little surly-tempered, grunted, and went on cutting. Messer Nellemane spoke a little more sharply.

        'My friend, do you hear? It is ex-

pressly forbidden by the regulations of the municipal police to do what you are doing. There is a fine for the first offence and a very heavy penalty if it be repeated--'

        'Four hundred years and more my fathers cut reeds in the Rosa,' said Pippo, looking up at last and sticking his pipe in his trouser band.

        'We do not accept degraded precedents as any justification for infraction of the laws of the commune,' said Messer Gaspardo, who loved very long words, for they proved that he was an educated man and did not speak like the vulgar.

        'Eh?' said Pippo, who was easily frightened and yet timidly disposed to stand up for a right that was like an heirloom, only the long words worried and puzzled him so that he thought he must have done murder, or sinned against the Holy Ghost,

without knowing it. 'Scusi tanto, Signore,' he said in his confusion. 'But everybody gathers the reeds; my father and grandfather--and what shall I do for my baskets?'

        'Petition for a permit, and if it be accorded you, pay for it,' said Messer Nellemane, sharply. 'If you cut them after this, you will be summoned and fined.'

        Pippo scratched his head in bewilderment. Young Carmelo, knee-deep in the water washing his shingle, looked at Viola washing her father's shirt and saw she was trembling and staring with alarmed distended eyes up in the face of the great man.

        'It is an old right,' said Carmelo, boldly shouting to the clerk of the commune. 'It is a right of the people, like these shingles here; the river is common to us all.'

        'The people have no rights when the

majesty of the law abrogates and abolishes them,' replied Messer Nellemane with dignity, which is perhaps the truest word he ever spoke, and wrote in the note-book which he always carried: 'Carmelo of the Casata Pastorini appears to be of a contumacious and disputative character; mem: to be watched.' He was about to utter words more severe, when he chanced to look down and see the beauty of Viola's upraised face. Messer Gaspardo Nellemane was human in all his greatness; he was dazzled for a moment, and weakened by the lustre of her humid and frightened eyes: he knew that she was old Pippo's granddaughter, but he had never noticed her before.

         He changed the intended phrase into a milder one.

        'You are warned, Mazzetti, and warned by me,' he said, with a charitable condescen-

sion in his tone. 'As you were in ignorance of the municipal regulations, I will not report you this time, but beware of another infringement on the law: see Article 6 of Rule XIV. of the Communal Code of Vezzaja and Ghiralda. Buon' sera, buon' riposo.'

        Then he went on his way along the river bank with benignity.

        'May I carry them in, think you?' said old Pippo in doubt and fear, fondly regarding his cut rushes.

        'I would not care for him and his laws,' said young Carmelo, plunging his arms down into the shingle with a contemptuous laugh on his bright fresh face. 'He was made yesterday, and the river was here before any of us, and is meant for us.'

        'That is all very well, Carmelo,' said Viola, timidly. 'But that gentleman has all his own way, and he has three guards at his

beck and call, and with a few fines they ruin you: look at poor Nanni.'

        Giovanni, the cobbler, who had sat at his stall in the open air, as his father had done before him all his life, had been smitten hip and thigh by Article 20 of the new regulations that had come in with the clerkship of Messer Nellemane which forbade anybody to sit outside on the pavement and encumber it. As old Giovanni was an obstinate and obtuse old man, and persisted in believing the stones before his door were his own, and persisted also in cumbering them very much with his board and his chair and his tools, the commune had summoned him over and over again, and finally added up his fines for contumacy and contravention to such a big total that Nanni, who made about a franc a day and lived on it, could no more pay the sum than he could have built St. Peter's.

        So that the usher of the commune visited him and finally sold up his poor pots and pans and sticks of furniture, and the foolish old fellow was so hurt by this that he smoked himself to death with his last pinch of charcoal, and was found stiff and stark on his bare floor, for of bed and bedding they had left him naught.

        Nanni had been a merry kindly old soul, and his death had been a shock to the people of his village, for he had made or mended the Sunday shoes of the place for half a century.

        'I do remember Nanni,' said the young man, with a dark frown upon his face. 'These new-fangled laws killed him; and as for the "gentleman," as you call him, if anyone thrashed him they would do a good work.'

        'Oh hush!'said Viola, looking affrighted

after the figure of Messer Gaspardo as it passed along the opposite bank.

        'Had I best carry them in or leave them?' said Pippo in the same perplexity, looking wistfully up from his green bundles.

        The miller's son let fall his shingles back into the water, and with a stride or two through the clear stream reached the bundles, hoisted them on his shoulders and went away with them to Pippo's house, a score of roods' distance down the river. Messer Gaspardo, who had glanced back, saw the action; he noted it in his note-book and walked onward.

        The river was all golden and green in the late afternoon; here and there was the red flame of a knot of tulips; a lovely silence and radiance were over all the scene as the sun sunk to its setting. Messer Gaspardo went on down the bank of the

Rosa and looked very dark and very grim against the shining light of the evening skies.

        Viola gazed after him and felt afraid, terribly afraid; she wished he had not seen Carmelo Pastorini take the osiers on his back. The young man indeed was indifferent; he was very young and bright and brave; he had drawn a lucky number and so been free with only forty days in the army, and able to stay at home with his father at the little watermill on the Rosa; he feared nothing. But Pippo and Viola feared everything, yet knew not what they feared: it is a ghostly burden of dread, that which the honest poor carry with them all through their toiling hungry days, the vague oppressive dread of this law which is always acting the spy on them, always dogging their steps, always emptying their pockets.

        The poor can understand criminal law and its justice and its necessity easily enough and respect its severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law, and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not break their spirits, it curdles their blood and they become socialists, nihilists, internationalists, anything that will promise them riddance of their spectre and give them vengeance.

        We in Italy are all of us afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the syndics with their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices, and petty cruelties, that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed and torch in hand!

CHAPTER II.

a thief to catch a thief; he had been a blackguard all his youth; but as he loafed about in Santa Rosalia, snaring birds and running errands, Messer Nellemane, with the shrewd eye that was so useful to him, had discerned in this loafer the making of an officer of the State; and so strongly recommended Bindo to his master, Durellazzo, that the Syndic had said, 'Va bene, va benissimo,' when it was proposed to clothe vagabond Bindo in hodden grey, with a belt and a short sword, and a feather in his hat, and make a rural guard of him in the interests of the commune; the zeal of Bindo being stimulated to boiling point by the fact that he was promised half of every fine that he could impose upon the violators of the new code of Vezzaja and Ghiralda.

        This zealous functionary Messer Gaspardo now called to him and said:

        'What character does the eldest son of the miller Pastorini bear?'

        Bindo, who more than once in years before his promotion had had a drubbing from the Pastorini for stealing corn, replied promptly:

        'He is a savage character, disrespectful to authority, and masterful.'

        'A dangerous character? I thought as much. Has he ever been in trouble?'

        Bindo shook his head sorrowfully; the Pastorini, father and sons, were quiet, God-fearing, sturdy, honest fellows; just the people to vex and disappoint beyond measure a guardian of morals and of manners, who was to have half the fines he could manage to impose.

        'That mill of theirs--does it profit them?'

        'Alto, signore! There is nobody else

to grind anything for five miles down the river.'

        'And it belongs to them?'

        'It has belonged to the Pastorini hundreds of years.

        'With that boschetto beside it?'

        'Exactly, illustrissimo.'

        'You may go, my dear Bindo,' said his superior, who liked to be called illustrissimo. 'But keep your eye upon Carmelo Pastorini, for he seems to me a sullen unsympathetic rebellious young man, and in these days of socialism one never knows.'

        Bindo pulled his curly forelock respectfully and withdrew, leaving behind him a list of the day's contraventions of Messer Nellemane's code, which comprised and forebade nearly every action that a man, or a child, or a dog, or a horse, or an ass, or a goat, or a cow or a duck, or a hen, could be

likely to perform upon a public highway; and since it treated as high treason nearly every primitive pleasure and habit and custom that this rustic world had ever been wont to indulge in, it was not very difficult for a vigilant officer like Bindo, always walking about with his eyes and ears wide open, to furnish his employer with a list of transgressions as long as the list of Don Giovanni's amours.

        Bindo Terri preferred the ways of virtue to the ways of vagabondage; instead of being put in prison he put in other people, which combined the charm of variety with the fascination of power. It was a more lucrative path too; if people did not wish their lives molested, their habits interfered with, and their dogs poisoned, they slipped some francs at intervals into Bindo's hand; and those butchers, bakers, and cattle-

dealers, and corn-factors who wanted to cheat the State of its revenues, and not pay fines on their sales, became a very considerable source of income to him, for he knew admirably when, and (for a consideration} how, to shut his far-reaching eye with a wink.

        When you have not quite 20l, a year as your official income, it is understood that you must supply the vacuum left somehow. When the commune paid Bindo five hundred francs a year for his invaluable services, and gave him half the fines, the Guinta said virtually to him, 'Rob, oppress, be bribed, get your bread out of the public;' and he did get, not only his bread, but his wine, and his cigars and his sweethearts.

        Very naturally he took into his especial hatred all honest folks, and folks careful to pay the taxes and obey the laws; they were quite unprofitable to him.

        As Messer Gaspardo Nellemane did not make his code to render people virtuous or comfortable by its regulations, but to fill the municipal money-box by its infractions, so his myrmidon, the wily Bindo, did not walk about with his eyes open in hopes of seeing the law observed, but in hopes of seeing it broken. The big butcher on the piazza carried his dead bullocks away to the distant city without paying a farthing duty upon them, because he was wise enough to have a complete understanding with Bindo; whereas the little butcher by the turn of the river never would have any such understanding, persisting in saying stupidly that Bindo, in his unregenerate and unofficial days, had stolen tripe and pork chops off his stall a hundred times; whereby naturally his fines and his payments for every head of cattle, swine, or kids, fell heavily upon him.

        What will you? Corruption is the natural law of all official life, all the world over, and why should Bindo be a solitary exception to the universal rule?

        'Via!' said Bindo, with his tongue in his cheek and his feathered hat on one side, whenever anybody hinted to him that his hands were not so clean as was desirable in a guardian of the public morality and decorum.

        Now Bindo had always hated the whole family of the Pastorini; in their little mill on the water with its great black wheels churning below, and its tall green poplars rising above, they had always dwelt harmlessly, honestly, and in peace with heaven and their neighbours. They paid their imposts regularly; cheated no one; bided at home, and were well liked by all; the sons working hard and rarely being seen inside a

wineshop; a family to be peculiarly abhorrent to an officer of the State who received half the fines imposed on noisy or disobedient people.

        Therefore the heart of Bindo Terri bounded within him when he heard these few pregnant words from his chief. He was a capable and ingenious youth, and of considerable powers of invention; in his mind's eye in an instant he saw Carmelo--Carmelo, clean of limb and clean of conscience, honest, frank, quiet, sober, everything in a word, that was detestable,--brought before the tribunal and going from the tribunal to prison.

        'Why not?' said Bindo; and his soul was joyful.

        Meanwhile Messer Gaspardo sat down to the calm enjoyment of his list, lighting a long cigar.

        It was a list that delighted his soul and fortified it; there were contraventions for keeping trees too low of branch, for letting children play upon the sacred steps of the communal palace, for letting dogs run loose, for letting plants stand upon window-sills, for emptying pails of water into the gutter, for having a chair and a chat on the pavement, for anything and everything that the enlightened regulations of Vezzaja and Ghiralda had forbidden.

        'How perverse are the public!' though Messer Nellemane, as he ran his eye over the papers. He wanted a model public; a public that doffed its hat to him, chained its dogs, never laughed or quarrelled, drilled its children like small police sergeants, and respected his code as if it had come from heaven. Yet he would have had but little enjoyment out of even this model public,

could it have been created for him, for he would have had nobody to punish, and no fines to put in that municipal money-box which it was his profession to fill and his perquisite to empty. Like all other great men he was happiest in stormy waters, so he folded up the list with marvel at the people's perversity, and betook himself to the caffè of Nuova Italia, where he supped cheaply off a salad and some liver, and played dominoes afterwards with the Conciliatore Maso, who always made a point of losing the game to him. Anyone who wished to be in Messer Gaspardo's good graces lost the game to him.

        Santa Rosalia lies along the Rosa river, and its little humble houses open out in the centre on to a clear space, where the beautiful old church with its tapering campanile faces the hideous new communal palace; a

broad space of dust and desolation stretching between the two and being called by courtesy the piazza. Pippo and the other old men, and even younger ones, by remembrance of their childhood, could call to mind the time when the piazza had been shaded by broad plane trees and limes, and in the centre of it had stood a very old and large stone fountain, the delight of the people and the dogs, the horses and cattle that drank and their babies that played at it.

        But an earlier Giunta, the first-born of Freedom, had cut down the trees and sold them; and Messer Nellemane coming, and finding the fountain a nuisance because everyone gathered about it, and he did not think with Mr. Ruskin that the sight of women, loitering with their bronze pitchers round a fountain, at daybreak or twilight, in Italy, is one of the most poetic sights on earth, had

it taken to pieces and carried away, and the water sent back to the river. The people groaned, mourned and protested all they dared, but the Giunta willed it, and the Syndic said, 'Va bene, va benissimo.'

        So the fountain became a thing of the past, and the labour for its destruction was entered for a considerable sum in the communal expenses under the heading of 'Works for the salubrity and decoration of Santa Rosalia.' An ugly waste ground, filled with rubble and rubbish, was all the people got in its place; and as for the old stones, some did say they were re-erected in a rich Russian's villa fifty miles away, Messer Gaspardo knowing the reason why. A gardener of the neighbourhood swore to his neighbours that he had seen them there, and that he had heard they were the carved work of some great ancient sculptor; but Messer Nellemane said they

had all been broken up to mend the roads, and had been of no value for aught else whatever, so the subject had dropped, as most inquiries into public wrongs or expenditures of public money do drop, and though Santa Rosalia mourned for its lost fountain it mourned altogether in vain, and the Giunta unanimously considered that the piazza looked very much better bare; both trees and fountains beget humidity, they thought, and why should they not do in Rosalia just what was doing in Rome? As little dogs always imitate the big ones, so villages love to copy great cities.

        No one ever dared to name the stones to Messer Nellemane, who had given his word that they were broken up and under his feet and the cart-wheels, and nobody ever knew that he bought five thousand francs' worth of foreign scrip soon after they disappeared

because these little purchases were made for him by a cousin who was a money changer in the town of Allesandria: a shrewd 'Ebreo,' with greasy clothes and sallow skin, who will in all probability end as a baron and a banker. This evening, however, when he had eaten his supper Messer Nellemane did not think of scrip or anything mundane; he thought of Viola Mazzetti.

        Her grandfather's little stone house, called the Casa della Madonna on account of a blue and white china shrine set above its entrance, built in the thirteenth century, and strong and sturdy, though low and small, stood at the corner of the piazza sideways to the river, and with the unpaved road that served the borgo as a street alone separating it from the water. The door and the kitchen window turned to the piazza; and when Messer Nellemane sat on the opposite

side of the square, he could see the house very well.

        Messer Nellemane, all the while he smoked, and read the gazette, and played at dominoes, kept his eyes upon the cottage, and he could see the Rosa river also very clearly, and down it for a long way, and he saw young Carmelo come leaping along the opposite bank under the poplars and service trees, and wade lightly across the shallow, and leap ashore and run in without knocking through Pippo's door.

        And Messer Nellemane, who could not see through stone walls despite his omniscience, followed him in thought angrily, since the beauty of the maiden had allured his own fancy and desire.

        While he pursued these discontented reflections and played dominoes alternately with his beloved friends, Maso and Tonino,

and the clear autumn evening began to grow grey and tinged with sadness, Carmelo Pastorini whispered to Viola while old Pippo first smoked and then snored. Carmelo was a handsome fair lithe young fellow, wonderfully like the Faun of the capital, and just as admirably made; here and there amongst the populace one may see the old classic faces and figures almost unaltered, and men who have never stooped over desks and have always in childhood gone barefoot have much of the old perfect symmetry and ease of attitude, and stand well and nobly.

        'How ill you march!' said one of his officers once to a Tuscan in his conscript days, and the Tuscan answered the officer, who was kind to him, 'Signor Capitano, how can anyone walk well with a great strap across the breast and leather on the feet? If I might take off my boots and carry my

knapsack on my head, then I would walk against any man:' and the first act of that youth's liberty when he had been set free was to kick his boots off into space.

        Barefoot now, and decked in blue homemade linen, for the weather was warm, Carmelo leaned against the little window of the room and murmured to Viola, who was bending her beautiful dark face over her straw plaiting, but smiling a little, though seriously.

        They were sweethearts in an innocent calm fashion; they had neither of them anything in the world, but that did not trouble them; Carmelo could always work at his father's mill, and Viola had no fear of poverty. The spouse of St. Francis had always been her guest, and was no terror for her.

         Men and maidens marry improvidently

enough in this country, but most of them are happy in their marriages, and the children tumble up, round and blithe as little rabbits, and all goes well; or does go well, till the shadow of the Law falls like the shadow of death across the sunny thresholds.

        These two were not to marry yet awhile, nay, they had scarcely spoken of it; the courtship was timid and reverent on Carmelo's part, rather than impassioned, for Viola had a saint's look about her, and saintly thoughts and ways, and old Pippo was a man not to be gainsayed in his own household, and he had said, 'adagiò, adagiò,' meaning that they were young and there was no great hurry. Demetrio Pastorini, the father, said the same, and so their lives went gently on in a sweet pastoral that was happier, and less troubled, than even triumphant passion.

        This evening, however, in the twilight Carmelo waxed bolder.

        'Why should we not marry as the others do!' he whispered, and Viola smiled ever so little, and old Pippo spoilt it all by waking up suddenly, and shouting: 'Not cut the osiers in the Rosa? Everybody's always cut them, for twice then thousand years. Who's that new meddlesome fool with his rules and his rates and his rubbish?'

        'Hush,grandfather!' said Viola, timidly, for she remembered the death of old Nanni, and from their window she could see across the river on to the piazza, and the desolate place where the fountain had been, and also could see Messer Gaspardo Nellemane playing dominoes on his green iron chair before the caffè with thin Tonino losing to him, and fat Maso looking on at the game. Messer Nellemane across the river

also could see her; and when Carmelo had been sent away at eight o'clock, and they had eaten their bit of supper, and she had lighted a lamp for her grandfather to have a glimmer by which to finish a reed-bottomed chair wanted by the priest on the morrow, he could see still the better the bent brown head of the girl, and studied it critically, as a virtuoso might have studied a canvas of candlelight effect of Ostade or Van Steen. It was almost as beguiling and delightful to him as the guard Bindo's list of misdeeds and misadventures.

        Viola was beyond dispute the loveliest girl in the place. Those onyx-coloured eyes, those dreamy lids, those curved red lips, those elastic and symmetrical limbs, would have made her a beauty anywhere at a court or in a studio, and had enough of physical exuberance, combined with maiden-

like simplicity, to touch the inmost heart of a man who would, with all his will, have been a voluptuary had it not cost so much, and had he not loved his place still better than his passions. Still there was no harm in looking at her, he thought; and look he did, until her grandfather's piece of plaiting being done she put her light out, closed the shutter, and left only a little dark stone house facing the great man of the commune.

        Then Messer Nellemane flung the end of his cigar away with a lordly air, pushed back his iron chair, and strolled homeward.

        'One could marry her to Bindo,' thought this very prudent person, as he walked away through the white moonlight past the glancing Rosa water.

CHAPTER III.

        In the cities and in the little towns the old custom has quite passed away, and even in many villages the wedding-night of April

nd May goes by without remembrance or celebration. But in the simpler and more remote country places 'Ben venga Maggio' is still said as Guido Calvacanti said it, and the time is one of harmless feasting and of tender song. In Santa Rosalia it still lingered thus, and on the memorable night the lads of the borgo went along the Rosa banks and out amongst the fields from house to house, bearing the May, and called themselves the Maggiaioli; singing the ancient song:
Or è di Maggio e fiorito è il limone,
Noi salutiamo di casa il padrone,
Or è di Maggio e gli è fiorito i rami,
Salutiam le ragazze co'suoi dami.
Or è di Maggio che fiorito è di fiori,
Salutiam le ragazze co'suoi amori. *

___________________

Lo! Now the lemons are all in flower in May,
Come too are we; we give the house and host good-day.
Now is the month of May, with blossoms on the boughs;
We salute the maidens, salute their lovers' vows.
Here is all the Maying, bud, and fruit, and flower,
We salute the maidens, their love and all its power!

        This year Carmelo carried the May, a green sapling hung with flowers and lemons, and his next brother, Cesarellino (little Cæsar), bore the traditional basket of nosegays to throw to the maidens. Other youngsters were with them, with red and yellow tulips in their hats, and gay-coloured shirts, and mandolines slung on their shoulders, and they went from door to door with their salutation and song, and in turn received wine and cakes garnished with red ribbons, and now and then money, which, making the sign of the cross, they put aside to be spent in prayers for the poor souls in purgatory.

        Messer Nellemane, as he sat in the window of his room in the communal palace, saw the group of youths as they came along by the water, and he recognised the face of Carmelo, as the young man bore aloft the

lemon-hung tree and shouted with a fresh and mellow voice the
Or è di Maggio che fiorito è di fiori and stopped before the little Casa della Madonna, where they tossed their flowers through the open window, and Viola, smiling, brought them out the sweet cakes. The brow of the spectator of this innocent pastime grew dark.

        'What pagan folly!' he muttered as he saw. 'What childishness and benightedness in this age of reason!'

        Surely it need not be allowed?

        It could be put down under the head of disturbance, or unauthorised festival, or public meeting without permission of the council.

        The law has smitten almost all these innocent revellers to the dust; carnival is scarce more than a name; on Ognissanti indecent crowds push laughing and jostling

over the dead; the Feast of St. John is suppressed, and replaced by the Feast of the Statute, and almost every procession of the Church is smothered by a dirty, jesting, brawling mob, impatient for fireworks and drink.

        Messer Nellemane impatiently consulted his law-books and his own code, and found at least fifty-five different rules and regulations, any one of which would serve, and suffice to break down the leafy crown of the offending Maio.

        Until ten o'clock of the night the peace of his evening was disturbed by the chanting of the old serenade, no near, now far, the vibration of the guitar, the sounds of laughter, the unpleasant knowledge that people were enjoying themselves without having applied for and paid for legal permission.

        'Next year!' he muttered vengefully, as the singing died away and the village grew dark with night and slumber. Carmelo went to his bed drowsy and happy, with the Maio tree set up outside the mill-door in the starlight.

        On the morrow was the weekly council of the Seven presided over by the One; and as Messer Nellemane was the mainspring and central lever, the brains and the heart and the nerves of this council-chamber, he was too much engrossed to give a thought to the little house with the china Madonna.

        He had to exercise great tact at these meetings, for he was only a secretary, and was only supposed to take notes and read reports. But with an air of extreme deference and unimpeachable modesty he knew how to make his views adopted, and how in the presence of the Syndic to prompt him, and in his absence

to replace him. Ostensibly the famous rules for the Polizia Igiena e Edilità of Santa Rosalia were a product of the minds of the Thirty, filtered through the Seven, and delivered as pure essence by the One, to the Prefect of the province, and ratified by him and by the Minister of the Interior. But actually these laws had all flowed from that fount of wisdom, the mind of Messer Nellemane. He had spent laborious days and wakeful nights in the gestation and production of them; they had cost him months of anxious thought; for when your problem is how to wring pence out of penniless pockets it requires meditation and deliberation; and Messer Nellemane being anxious not to leave a loophole unwatched by the law, passed as many vexed and studious hours as a mathematician or a physiologist. When accomplished, he had to see his work accredited as

that of his masters: but this he bore patiently, knowing that most of the fruits of it would be his.

        This day the council was long.

        The Guinta consisted of two nobles, of two small gentry, of one lawyer, one doctor, and one usurer, the latter a rich person who had purchased a house on the Pomodoro road outside Santa Rosalia, one by name Simone Zauli. This day the usurer, who in power outweighed all his six colleagues, as he had the notes-of-hand or the mortgages of each of them in his pocket, was absent. In his stead the nobles were angry about the state of the roads and had come in person to the meeting, a thing they did not do once in a twelvemonth. Their horses were hurt and their bodies were shaken by the state of the roads, and they appeared at the council irascible. It cost Messer Nelle-

mane a whole morning of invention and adulation to appease them and bring them back to their old belief that his friend Pierino Zaffi was the first engineer in the world.

        Having succeeded at last in doing this by great ingenuity and infinite lying, the meeting broke up: the Cavaliere Durellazzo said 'Va bene, va benissimo,' which he always did, as if he were a cockatoo; and Messer Gaspardo Nellemane had far too many minutes to make, and entries to write, and letters to dispatch, to have any thought of Viola or Carmelo.

        But the next morning he was free, and excused himself even from his habitual noon-day attendance at the Palazzo Communale by alleging an errand to the city; under pretext of which he had himself shaved, oiled, and curled by the barber, and then, dressed

in his best, wended his way to Pippo's house, having seen old Pippo wending his to the priest's with the rush chair.

        The door stood open and he entered with a polite 'Scusi, signorina mia.'

        Viola was washing lettuces and herbs.

        Of course she was a poor, unlettered, and almost ragged girl, but she had beautiful arms which were shown by her rolled-up sleeves; she had a beautiful bust which her kerchief, loosely pinned, adorned; she had a lovely face with a great cloud of raven hair; and even thus, seen at a tub with her lettuces, a painter would have fallen at her feet, and perhaps some great princes would too.

        She coloured all over her face beholding Messer Gaspardo Nellemane, dressed like a marquis, curled, perfumed, and gloved.

        'Scusi tanto, signorina mia,' he said

again, and wished her a good-day with many fine phrases. Viola laid down her lettuces, and pushed him a chair and stood before him, very shy, timid, and afraid.

        'I called to speak to your father,' said Messer Nellemane, rejecting the chair with many flourishes. 'I wished to explain to him that this cutting of osiers in the river--'

        'Ah!' said Viola, with a gasp; and she grew very pale, and her great eyes were like a frightened doe's. Her visitor hastened gallantly to explain farther; and added:

        'Is in direct violation of our civic laws. But I came to say the Messer Filippo being so old a resident, and, having heard that his forefathers, as he said, always enjoyed that privilege, I think a point may be stretched in his favour and exception. I myself will see the Syndic on the matter,

and--well, ahem! I will see that he is not troubled about this thing; indeed I will give him a permission myself if he will call for it, free of charge, any day at noon in the municipality.'

        Viola murmured something quite unintelligible: but her eyes thanked the gracious tyrant who promised to spare her humble home, and he thought himself repaid. She was mute, indeed, and shy, even to stupidity; but Messer Nellemane was not ill-pleased at that; he deemed it a tribute of simplicity to his own greatness and attractions; and his bold, bright, black eyes, round like a bird's fastened on her with such ardour that the maiden felt bewildered, and wished vaguely that her grandfather were at home.

        Messer Nellemane, however, was in no haste to be gone; leaning on the back of the chair that he refused otherwise to

occupy, he wove grandiloquent phrases and sugared flatteries into a medley such as had never astounded the ear of this simple maiden, and confused her sadly.

        Carmelo never talked like that; and Viola saw with surprise, and a vague apprehension, that her guest had shut the door behind him on his entrance.

        Messer Nellemane, nevertheless, did not quite declare his passion, but he paid her compliments that made her cheeks glow like a damask rose, and set her brain spinning; his hand touched hers, and pressed it and he murmured, with his moustache brushing her wrist:

        'Fear nothing for your grandfather, carina. With such a face as yours you would get him grace for far heavier transgressions than robbing the river of its reeds.'

        At that moment a dog dashed in chasing

the pig; the pig frightened the hen; the hen flew into the flour-bin; and Messer Nellemane's eloquence and courtship came to an undignified end, as Viola, grateful for the interruption, hurried to the harried sow, and drove it to its quarters in an inner closet. Messer Nellemane looked on with a troubled brow. A pig in a dwelling-house! It was Contravention of Art. 3 of Rule CCCL. of the Regulations!

        The author of the rules for the Polizia Igiena, e Edilità of the commune could not fail to feel every fibre of his being morally offended and set up on edge like a porcupine's quills, and yet--he was in love. He bent hurriedly before Viola and the pig, and left the house in the confusion of public duty met and routed by personal inclination.

        'If it were not for her--good heavens!

they transgress every law!' he thought, as he put on his hat and walked to where the diligence waited, and, entering the shaky vehicle, rolled through the sea of olive foliage along the narrow roads towards the city which lay afar off in the sunshine, against the opal and pearl of the morning skies; its domes and towers gleaming in the golden mist like a New Jerusalem.

        When Pippo returned, his granddaughter told him of the visit. With the suspiciousness that is so oddly rafted into these easily pleased and docile natures, Pippo stared and swore a little and scratched is head, and said, 'What can he be a'wanting?'

        Viola turned away because she felt her cheeks were hot; be a maiden ever so innocent, she feels the approach of a coarse passion, and trembles at it though unconsciously.

        'Leave to cut the reeds? Give me leave?' cried the old man with great contempt. 'Lord! they'll talk of leave to let the grass grow, leave to let one's lungs breathe--leave to see, and speak, and cough, and laugh next! Lord! The whole world's crazed.'

        Viola set his soup before him; hot water with bread in it, some garlic, and a little parsley.

        'Will they let us drink our soup, I wonder?' grumbled the old man. 'Shall we have to pay a tax for that next? Don't you let that prying jack-in-office come spying here again. The saints above us! In my young days he'd have been knifed before he could have turned the place into a nest of wasps and snakes like this. Leave to cut the osiers! You'll have to ask leave to wear your own hair next!'

        And he scalded himself with his broth in his haste and his wrath.

        Viola went away inside their little back kitchen and cried a little, with a vague dread and pain upon her. She could not forget the bold admiration of Messer Gaspardo's black eyes, and she was afraid.

        She did not say anything of her fears to her grandfather, nor to the young man Carmelo; she was of a reticent, prudent, serene nature, and she thought it could do no good to tell anyone, but might produce danger and dissension.

        Meanwhile her old grandfather, having scalded himself with his soup, cooled himself with a draught of watered wine, acid as vinegar, and, after giving himself his wonted midday sleep, went outside, taking some rushes to plait, and sat on the threshold with his chair on the pavement, disregardless of

the municipal rules and the fate of law-breaking Nanni.

        It was a lovely afternoon, and waned into a lovely evening in the village; the swallows were coming home, the shadows were lengthening, the sweet smell of the rosemary and the vine flowers was fresh on the wind. The people had ceased working, and stood and leaned against their doors, or out of their windows, and gossiped; all was as peaceful as a pastoral: only along the sunny dust a dark shadow went, and the people looked askance at it, and it took all mirth out of the jests, drove all tranquility from the hearts; it was the shadow of the oppressor rusticorum; it was the figure of Bindo the guard, walking to and fro with a carabinier and looking for contraventions.

        To the rich it may seem nothing: this going of the guard to and fro, this system

of inquisition and condemnation that comes up with the sun and never ceases with the fall of the merciful night. To the rich it is nothing; it scarcely ever touches them: they live behind their own gates, and if ever they are fined send their lawyers to pay the fine. But to the poor--with their threshold, their cradle, and their club, with their dogs and their babies tumbling together on the pavement, with their hard-gathered gains hidden under a brick or in a stocking, with all their innocent bewildered ignorance of the powers of the law, with all their timid patient helplessness under oppression, with all their unquestioning submission to great wrong in fear lest resistance should bring them wrongs still greater--to the poor this figure of the poice-spy for ever in their midst, observing their coming and going, seizing on every industry and pittance,

watching the lighting of their candles, the gambols of their children, the usage of their tools, the frolics of their dogs, the trailing of their house-creepers, all to one single end and object--'Contravention'--to the poor I say this figure of the tyrant of the tribunal darkens the light of the sun in this our Italy, hushes the laughter of the home and fills the leisure moment of the toilsome day with a weariness and carking care never to be thrown aside. The rich make these petty laws, and the parasites of the public offices carry them out; they are as thorns in flesh already bruised; they are as the gadflies' bite in wounds already open. In vain do the poor suffer these things: no one cares.

        When the Socialist burns or the Nihilist slays, then wise men wonder!

        Blind and mad, no doubt, are the Socialists and the Nihilists, but as blind and

as mad are the rulers of the people who treat the honest citizen like the criminal, and of the innocent acts and careless sports of his children and his beasts make whips to scourge him by his own hearthstone.

        The law should be a majesty, solemn, awful, unerring; just, as man hopes that God is just; and from its throne it should stretch out a mighty hand to seize and grasp the guilty, and the guilty only. But when the law is only a petty, meddlesome, cruel, greedy spy, mingling in every household act and peering in at every window pane, then, the poor who are guiltless would be justified if they spat in his face, and called it by its right name, a foul extortion.

        Bindo lounged about in the village streets (taking care to have a carabinier and the carabinier's musket at his elbow) and looked out for all whom he might devour; were

there a ladder leaning against a wall, a child at play on this bare piazza, a log of wood outside a door, a dog disputing with another dog, any trifle of the hundred and one trifles entered as cardinal sins on the books of Santa Rosalia--then was Bindo happy, and happy also Messer Gaspardo Nellemane.

        Bindo used a wise discretion, it is true; and so did Messer Nellemane, as in the matter of the big and little butchers. Filth stank unrebuked before the pizzicheria door, because some good cheese and some toothsome pasta found its way thence to certain cupboards as a mere compliment of Easter; the apothecary's Spitz snarled on unchidden up and down the street, for that worthy knew well the panacea that lies in gilded pills; and the baker had his fuel in a heap before his door, and sold short weight, and adulterated his flour with ground

peas and acorns, because the baker had been wise enough at Christmas to offer to Messer Nellemane some fine contraband tobacco and brandy (a present, he said, from France), and to Bindo had said, 'If you like a fila of white bread every morning you know you are always welcome; we are such old friends, I could not take your money,'

        Of course, the pizzicheria man, and the apothecary, and the baker, all thought the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda admirably managed, or at least were bound to say so. They were the discreet, judicious, docile, reasonable people of the place. 'Why was not everybody the same?' thought Messer Nellemane and his colleagues and his myrmidons.

        Now many of these people of Santa Rosalia were of ancient lineage and place;

there were many families very poor, but who lived where their forefathers had done in centuries passed away. Pippo was one of these. In that house his forbears had dwelt for many generations, and there was a rivulet of water that passed through his wash-house and out at his door in which he himself had seen his great-grandfather soak the canes and osiers before him; his great-grandfather who had been an old man when Murat's horsemen had been stabbed in the church of San Guiseppe.

        This spring rose somewhere in the earth of his strip of herb and fruit garden, and had been allowed to run through the house and out of it and across the road to the river. Everybody always thought that it was the saint's blessing which had made the spring run there, just where there was a basket-maker and rush plaiter always want-

ing to soak his willows and reeds. It never occurred to anybody that the little old house had been built over it for that use purposely.

        This bright evening Bindo Terri, sauntering about with poisoned cates in his pocket for the dogs, and sharp eyes roaming everywhere in search of misdemeanors, caught sight of the water running merrily across the road, a narrow shallow brooklet, pleasant to see and carrying cleanliness with its presence. Water running out of a house and across a public roadway! Bindo was not sure whether it was a crime against the code, but he was quite sure that, if not, it ought to be. He opened his book of the Regulamenti Municipali which he always carried with him carefully; and though he was not a good scholar he could spell through its clauses. He studied it now, travelling with his finger under each word as the peasant-

manner is in all countries. He found, as he expected, printed in Rule CCLVIII. of his beloved code, that it was forbidden to throw or let run any water on any public way. Bindo certainly had never read Shakespeare and never heard of him, but he said to himself, 'Twill serve.'

        Pippo was sitting weaving in the doorway.

        'Stop that water,' said zealous Bindo.

        'Eh?' said the old man, in amaze.

        'You must stop that water; water must not run across a highway,' said Bindo with stern authority. Pippo stared the more.

        'God set it runnning there, and I doubt He won't stop it for you, jackanapes,' said the old fellow to the young one.

        'You must cover it in, or drain it,' said Bindo, getting into a high official rage. 'It is against the law to have water in the public

road. One has to step into it or step across it. You must cover it or drain it, or I shall report you.'

        'Youngster,' said peaceable Pippo, very patiently, 'that water has been running as many years as the world is old; my father's fathers let it run and thanked heaven for it, and so do I. Go your ways, Bindo Terri, and don't you come teaching a man sixty-six years old.'

        For a guard to be called youngster! The insult made Bindo livid, and, had he dared, he would have crammed one of his poisoned polpetti down the throat of the offender.

        He muttered some unintelligible words, at which old Pippo irreverently whistled, and he went on up the little street, if street it could be called, since it had no pavement, but only a path of cobble stones, and on one side of it was the gray-green Rosa.

        'Dear Lady and all the saints!' cried Pippo to his neighbour: 'that young popinjay is saying now that water mustn't run as God set it running! I suppose our heads mayn't wag on our shoulders next!'

        'Have you anything to show that the water may run?' said the neighbour nervously. He was the cooper Cecco (Francesco Zagazzi), a timid meagre man, who had just had to pay a fine because his dog had sat outside the door instead of inside it, the dog being a terrier so small as scarcely to be discerned without a magnifying glass.

        'Lord's sake, Ceccino,' said Pippo, fairly in a rage. 'The water's run three hundred years if one. Do you think the Almighty asked Bindo Terri's leave before he set the world a-going?'

        The neighbour spat with anxious face into the dust. 'Almighty made dogs with four legs

and didn't glue them down on their behinds,' he said wistfully. 'But according to Bindo Terri--'

        'Bindo Terri have an apoplexy smite him!' shouted Pippo, which is the Italian way of saying 'you be d___d;' and he bundled together all his osiers and withes and went in and screamed to Viola; 'Child, do you hear this? They're calling on me to stop the water! The Almighty's own stream, set a-bubbling in the beginning of the world, is to be stopped! That's a sight worse than telling me not to cut osiers!"

        Viola grew pale.

        'Bindo must have been joking, grandfather.'

        'Lord knows!' said Pippo with a gasp. 'The world's topsy-turvy and the scum's all atop, when Bindo Terri can go about cheeking and trouncing a man of my years.'

        'You must speak him fair, grandfather,' said the girl, uneasily.

        'Nay, nay, that I'll never do,' said the little old man. 'I'll break his head. Stop that stream of water? Stop the sun a-shining, stop the wind a-blowing, stop the moon a-rolling! Why they're daft.'

        'No, they aren't daft,' said the neighbour who had been fined for his terrier, and he shook the ashes out of his pipe very sadly. 'They're not daft; they're very sharp; they are too sharp for us, and that's the fact. Haven't you any bit of paper that'd show you might have the water?'

        'Bit of paper? Bit of paper?' said Pippo, with a sort of ferocity. 'It ran for my father, and it ran for my grandfather, and it ran for my great-grandfather, and that's enough for me. Bit of paper? Who talks about a bit of paper? The brook is mine.'

        'Perhaps they will forget all about it,' said Viola, with an effort at consolation.

        'Bit of paper?' echoed Pippo, unheeding. 'Do you want a bit of paper to let the church stand in the square? Do you want a bit of paper to let the stars go on their courses? Bit of paper? The water runs through the house and out again and it's a free thing, a free thing.'

        The neighbour shook his head.

        'If you haven't got a bit of paper--'

        All the world to him was made up of bits of paper, he had been so often summoned and fined; happy people had bits of paper that released them from everything; unhappy people had bits of paper that condemned them for everything; to this much harassed man the world was chaos, and only this one idea was to be grasped out of its confusion. Pippo told him fiercely

that his mother had been a female ass, and his father a galley-slave; but the neighbour bore the insult meekly, and went into his own door saying, 'that they never would let him alone about that water unless indeed he had a bit of paper--'

        The populace, as I have said, can very well understand the law that punishes it when it thieves, when it slays, when it forges, when it fires; it can understand its chastisement well enough, and does not question the justice of it. But the law that punishes it for sitting in the sun, for running with a dog, for letting its child whip a top, for stopping its tired horse to rest in the shade of a wall, for letting its starved goat crop a bit of wayside grass that is nobody's and so is everybody's property, this it does not understand; at this it grows stupid and sullen as poor puppies do when cruel keepers beat them,

and thus the guards get their fines, and the galleys their captives, and the graveyards their nameless tombs.

        Bindo Terri went on into the piazza, and as the carabinier, who was no friend to him, told him somewhat roughly that he himself must loiter no more but go and look round the outlying country for the thieves that everywhere are ready to rob hen-roosts and granaries, the rural guard was disinclined to adventure his person alone amongst the populace, and went into the smaller Caffè of Nuova Italia, and called for wine and tobacco, and sat down and played cards with some kindred spirits.

        'Diamine!' said Gigi Canterelli (he was the grocer, and dealt beside in drugs and paints, and also had a sort of trattoria in his back-parlour), standing on the sill of the shop and speaking in a low

tone as the figure of Bindo, deserted by the carabinier, was seen disappearing through the Caffè doors. 'Diamine! many's the time I've kicked and cuffed that rascal when he was but a monellino, for stealing plums and treacle, and knives and string. The saints bless us! And now he takes a turn at us all and does not gorget old grudges! The other week or two past, ay, what did he do, think you?' added Gigi, turning to a young soldier just come off his term of service, who had been buying some gunpowder of him. 'The law bids me stick a light outside my door of a night (the Lord know why--for there aren't a child twenty miles round that couldn't find me blindfold), but, however, there's the law, and I am not saying anything against it; I suppose the wiseacres made it for some good reason or another, and every night of my life I've lit that lamp since the

order about it came in when we were all made free. But that night, it maybe a month ago, there was such a lot of folk in my shop, and they were all talking about the murder of the goldsmith in the city, and what with one thing and another, having nigh a score to serve at once (and one said the man had been murdered with a knife, and the other said he was shot, and another would have it he was strangled, and another said no, he had been brained with a hammer), I clean forgot the lamp--first time in fifteen years! I know the time because that order about lamps came in just the year after we got our liberty. Well, I forgot to light the lamp. Next morning comes that upstart, Bindo Terri, to me: says he, "What is your name?" "I should think you know it," I say; and I think to myself your breeches have felt my switch times enough when you were a

pickle. "Don't answer me," says the upstart as bold as brass. "What is your name?" "Luigi Canterelli," I say to him, feeling like a fool seventy years old, I, and having smacked that rogue often for robbing me! "Luigi Canterelli," says he, as though he were the Pretore in his black cap; and writes it down! Sure as fate, upon the morrow a summons comes to me--"contravention"-- and bidding me go up before the Conciliatore, and the hue and cry out after me if I do not, and the pains of the Upper Court threatened! Then when I go, there is the blackguard himself witness that my shop was black when the moon came up, and twenty-seven francs in all are run up against me: and if I had said a word of the treacle and the string and the pocket-knife of the old time, the jackanapes would have been down on me for disrespect to an officer of the law. Oh! Lord save us!'

        Gigi spat solemnly into the dust and filled his pipe which had gone out in his oratory.

        'We're all fools,' the young ex-conscript said gloomily. 'What have I had? Black bread, and ne'er enough of that, and set freezing in a cotton jacket up in Milan, in March, because the fellows down in Sicily had put on cotton jackets and so must we; though Sicily's as hot as hell, they say, and Milan's just an ice-house; and I all the while was sore needed at home here, and father has had to pay a labourer all three summers because I was taken away!--ugh!'

        A friend nudged his elbow; Messer Nellemane in high silk hat and city-cut coat was sauntering by; Messer Nellemane looked the young soldier in the eyes.

        'You are no patriot, my lad,' he said severely. 'I fear you have been but an

indifferent soldier. You were a clod; the government made you a man. Be grateful!'

        The young man coloured; he was wounded and ashamed; he was a peasant who had been taken by the conscription just as a young bullock is picked out for the shambles, and he had never understood why very well; his heart had been always with his fields, his homestead, his vines, his sweet-heart; he had hated the barrack life, the dusty aimless marches, the drilling and the bullying, the weight of the knapsack and the roar of the guns; he had been a youth ere the government had made him a machine: he had not actively or outwardly rebelled, but he had hated it all, and he had come back to his native place, a harder, a crueller, and a moodier lad than he had left it; and when he thrummed his old mandoline by the farmhouse door, it

had no longer any music for him; it seemed to him as if the beating of the drums had got into his ears and deafened him--and Messer Nellemane told him to be grateful. He looked down, shuffled his feet, doffed his hat, and was silent.

        Messer Nellemane spoke with the serenity of one who never had served. Fortune, which took pleasure in favouring him, had made his mother a widow, when the time had come for him to enter his name, and he had been an only son, and so exempt from all military service.

        'Never you mind; you're better than he is any day, the cursed Jew quill-driver,' muttered old Gigi to the young soldier; but the lad scowled and lounged away down the river-side moodily.

        If the enemy had come into his country he would have held his own hamlet against

them to the last gasp; but to be drafted off to Milan, to wear a fool's jacket and eat black bread while the fields were half tilled, and the old people sore driven, and the girl of his heart got married to some other man--no, he was not a patriot if, to be one, he must have been a contented conscript.

        Yet he had ducked a Frenchman in the Mincio for calling Italians cowards. Messer Nellemane might not have done so much; unless, indeed, a Minister had been looking on, and the valour would have been likely to bring him promotion.

        The next morning Bindo Terri, amongst other contraventions, presented on his list the case of old Fillippo and the running water. Messer Gaspardo drew his pen through it.

        'Wait awhile,' he said to his zealous servitor. 'Of course no water must run across the road. You are quite right; it is

a nuisance, and expressly forbidden; but you have spoken to Mazzetti, and we will give him time. He is an old inhabitant, and should be dealt with gently. We must warn, counsel, recommend, at first; and use our power afterwards if the person be refractory and obstinate. We must not be too harsh.'

        Bindo Terri stared, disappointed and almost inclined to be rude to his chief patron. He could insist on his list of offenders being dealt with according to the regulations if he had chose. But in his heart he was sorely afraid of Messer Gaspardo, who was so good to him; so he grumbled a little under his breath, and consoled himself with going out of the municipality and buying some bullock's liver to cook at home with phosphorus to make up into balls to fling about over the country roads to destroy all dogs that might be trotting innocently on their way to

their homes, or their fellow-dogs, or sitting at their master's gates to guard his fields and vineyards. He had no right to throw it in the daytime, even the regulations did not allow that; but there was nothing to prevent him doing so; and if, as now and then happened, a sheep passing amidst a flock touched the foul thing in the dust, and was taken with what its shepherd thought a fit, the amusement to Bindo was complete, when he watched from behind a hedge the beast's agony and the shepherd's dismay.

        Messer Nellemane, although he drew rein to his myrmidon's zeal, in heart approved of it, of course. A spring of water bubbling across a public pathway was to him a thing of horror: was what a stole and rochet are to a stern Protestant, or a shot fox is to an Englishman; and there indisputably the little spring was, whimpering out from Pippo's garden

door, and making a little silver thread in the dust. It was just one of those lawless, easy-going, illegitimate things, births of ancient customs and indolent privileges, which it was the scope of all the Regulations to reach, sweep away, and utterly destroy. In truth, the water outside Pippo's gate made so slight a show as it ran to the river, that in passing over it, it had never struck the eyes of Messer Nellemane; he had seen it, but he had thought it the leak of a pipe or the accident of the hour. Now, however, it assumed to him all the awful blackness, all the unspeakable insolence, of a contravention. The Inquisitors are dead, but their souls live again in the Impiegati. *

        For the present, however, he stifled his feelings, and only kept the water in memory, to use if need be; just for all the world as
___________________

Clerks of the civil service or of any public works.

Torquemada would have kept the torture; and he continued his courtship, stealthily, so that Santa Rosalia might know nothing of it, but boldly, so far as he dispensed with all hesitating preliminaries and plunged in media res, with all the disregard of delicacy that became a great man condescending to notice a poor maiden. He did not, however, to his surprise, make much way in the maiden's good graces. He could never manage to see her alone; old Pippo was almost sure to be there, till Messer Nellemane longed to throttle him with his own reeds; or, if he were absent, there was the next-door neighbour, the cooper's wife with her tribe of children, or some of the Pastorini girls, or Viola's great-aunt by the mother's side, a little withered rosy-cheeked old apple of a woman, who called him Excellenza and opened her little black eyes wide at seeing

such a grand personage come to the cottage.

        Nobody was ever alone in Santa Rosalia; all doors were open, and all work was done to a chorus of chattering voices. Gossip is the very staff of life to all Italian communities, and the scanty bread and the watered wine are made up for by the delight of endless talk. The talk is of Lippo's cow that has calved, of Tina's baby that has cut its teeth, of Dina's girl that is to marry at Pasqua; of the vicar's new surplice, of the fattoressa's new gown, of the chances of oil being cheap and of flour being dear, of all sorts of little odds and ends of local tittle-tattle that are to them as the scandals of the Jockey Club, the combinations of Worth, the actions of the Porte, or the speeches of Prince Bismarck, are to us.

        Viola had never been alone in all her life; her grandfather thought no woman ever

should be; but her new admirer fancied that all these people round her were precautions taken against himself, and waxed very angry accordingly.

        He did not want all the neighbourhood to talk of his courtship of this poor old man's granddaughter, and he knew very well that if you only fling an acorn in the dust one day people, the next, will swear to a grove of oaks against you.

        The Italian tongue chatters like a magpie's; if they did not let the steam off thus they would be less easily ruled than they are; but no great talker ever did any great thing, yet, in this world.

        Messer Gaspardo Nellemane was by no means an immoral man; he was rather cold of temperament, and being a wise person he saw how often a little naughty story when it gets afloat about a public career is to it as

fatal as the rift in the lute. He had a wholesome horror of ever being compromised by foolish frivolities; he was an ambitious man, and these wayside dallyings had but little temptation for him. Nevertheless, Messer Nellemane was not a saint, and the beauty of Viola, granddaughter of Pippo, was seductive to him.

        Marry her? No; he did not mean to marry; not until he should get some better post than this of Santa Rosalia, and be able to discover some heiress of a wax candle-maker, or a strozzino, or an oil merchant, whose money would help to make him a deputy, since he fully intended some day to jump from the office-stool of the municipality to the benches of Montecitorio. No; he had no thought of marrying Viola, but she was very handsome, very beautiful, and there was docile Bindo Terri ready to take any-

thing off his hands, from a frayed coat to a tarnished love. Bindo Terri would marry her--for a consideration.

        Messer Gaspardo, though only a clerk, had all the ideas of a gentleman.

        As it chanced Corpus Domini fell late in May that year, and of course there were to be processions all over the country, and every girl, however penniless she might be, would find a white or a blue frock, and perhaps a bit of tulle for a veil, and would walk with the Host as it was borne under an umbrella between the mulberry trees that lined the dusty roads and through the gardens of the neighbouring villas.

        Viola was very poor, and her clothes, though clean, were always sorely patched and frayed; so Messer Gaspardo thought it good policy to go down into the city himself and choose a most delicate print of the Madonna's

own azure, and a wreath of white roses and some shoes, shoes with bright silvered-looking buckles, just such as the ladies wore; and making all these up into a parcel when he got home, he left them himself on the table of old Pippo's cottage when Pippo and his daughter were absent.

        On the roll of print he had pinned a card,-- 'Con ossequie teneri all più bella del mondo: dal suo devoto.--G.N.'

        He knew the right road to the female heart. Viola chanced to see the parcel when alone; her grandfather being outside smoking pipe with a neighbour. She coloured very much, and then grew very pale. She could just spell out the words on the card. She hastened up the steep stone staircase to her own little miserable room and hid the packet under the sheet on her bed. She had only just caught a glimpse of

the blue print, and the white wreath, and the buckles; and they had made her tremble as though she had seen the face of a ghost.

        She was keen in all her simplicity as her people almost always are, and she had that doubt which always underlies their sanguine temper. If Carmelo saw these things he would be capable of flinging them at their giver's head and saying perilous words in the very palace of the municipality itself.

        Even her old grandfather--

        Her heart sank like a stone in the deep sea as she thought of the forbidden rushes and the running water at the threshold.

        'If I spoke him fair?' she said to herself with her country-folk's belief in fair words as a panacea for all evils and ills, and a talisman against all peril and enmity.

        'May I go and see the aunt 'Nunziatina this evening?' she asked of Pippo. Her

great aunt lived at the other end of Santa Rosalia ; the same little apple-cheeked old woman who had stared at Messer Nellemane; she was poor, nay, she was penniless; she shared a room with three others and lived frankly on alms; very honest begging it was; she went round from house to house with a big basket, and got bread and broken meats, and a little money, and now and then a flask of wine, and then she sung her Jubilate. Everybody knew and liked her in this place where she lived all her life, and knew very well that she had not a soldo in the world; her husband had been a day-labourer, and when he had chopped his hand off, in cutting a hedge of oakscrub and myrtle, and had died of mortification, the old Annunziata had been left destitute.

        The Government which forbids begging,

and lands those who do beg in prisons, has as yet provided no poor-law; so eighty-year old 'Nunziatina had no choice but to trot round with her basket, or to die silently of hunger. Many do the latter--and nobody cares.

        Want seems sadder in this light and lovely land, where life requires so little to make it happy and to fill its needs, than it does in the dark grim North, where fog hides the suffering multitudes and cold is the tyrant of all. Here, give but a little bread, a little oil and wine, and life can sparkle on cheerily as the firefly burns in the cornfields; but alas! even that little, thousands and tens of thousands have not, and so perish.

        Messer Nellemane, and his kind, know the reason why.

        'May I go and see 'Nunziatina?' said Viola, and her grandfather nodded ascent;

she went and got the parcel from under her bed and went out with it.

        'What have you got there?' said Pippo.

        'The cloth I have spun; auntie can sell it better than I,' said Viola, thinking nought of a little fib for peace' sake, though she coloured as she spoke, for she was of a straightforward and truthful nature.

        The old man ambled by her side on his little lean shrivelled shanks, for he never let the girl go through the village alone.

        Arrived at the dwelling of Annunziata he let his granddaughter go upstairs, while he stayed below, chatting with the carpenter who owned the cottage, and dwelt in the ground-floor of it, and let the rest to lodgers.

        The cottage stood on a bit of waste land by a bend in the river; some poplars made a pleasant murmur near; some geese and goats strayed about on the worn grass.

        'The Giunta cuts the trees down come Ognissanti,' said the carpenter with a groan.

        'By Bacchus!' cried Pippo, who never tasted any wine better than vinegar.

        'They'll cut our toe-nails off next,' sighed the carpenter.

        'They would if they could get a centime a toe!' assented Pippo, and told his grievances as to the rushes and the stream.

        Meanwhile, Violas upstairs told her story to her grand-aunt; a little old square figure with a straw hat on, and a very short skirt, and old leather boots like a ploughman's, and a cheerful sunburnt ugly pleasant face.

        'Dear our Lady! But it is beautiful stuff for a gown!' cried the old woman, fingering the blue print as reverentially as if the had been the holy wafer. 'Eh, eh! I opened my eyes at him the other day! I thought,

thought I, "Yon master comes not for naught!"'

        'But I cannot keep it,' said Viola, with a flush on her cheeks and a little tone of inquiry in the words.

        The old woman said at once: 'No, my joy; you would do ill to keep it,'

        They had been all of them very upright and unstained folks in both these families from which Viola Mazzetti sprang, and their women had always been honest and chaste.

        'Maybe though, he means it in all honour?' said 'Nunziatina doubtingly, and thinking to herself: 'She is so handsome, the child; why not?--and after all, though a great man here, he was a tinker's son, they say; and when all is told he is but a clerk.'

        Viola shook her head, and her cheeks grew red. The maidens of the poor soon learn what evil means.

        'No, no; he is a bad man,' she said with a slight shudder. 'And besides, if he did mean well, I must keep faith with Carmelo.'

        'The lad has spoken out, then?'

        'Yes; we shall marry when the fathers say we can.'

        'That is another thing,' said the old woman. 'Now what is it you want me to do, my dear; for there is something, I can see?'

        'I thought this,' said Viola. 'I thought, I cannot go to Messer Gaspardo; that would never do; I never scarce stir by myself, and grandfather would be furious; and besides, I want him to know nothing, and Carmelo nothing either; so I thought, if you would take the parcel back to Messer Gaspardo, and thank him, and speak him fair, and tell him I am betrothed, I thought that might be the

best way? You can see him any day they say, at the communal palace; and we must try not to offend him, because he can hurt people so much, and he is already angry at things grandfather has done.'

        The old woman chuckled a little, for she was a merry soul, though she was eighty-four and had not a penny on earth, and when she should die would be buried in a deal box by the parish.

        'A pretty figure am I for a palace!' she said with a laugh as bright as a robin's song. 'But let us talk it over, my dearly beloved, and may the dear saints counsel us!'

        They did talk it over, turning the matter inside out, and in every possible light, Italians like to do on all occasions; the girl was harassed and oppressed by this love-gift; the old woman was rather flattered and amused.

        'Pray speak him fair,' Viola begged of her amabassadress as old Pippo called her to go down. 'Pray be humble and pretty of language to him, because he can do father so much harm!'

        'Pooh, he can't eat us,' said the old woman, who had a spirit of her own. 'And he won't be the first man, my dear, that has found himself forestalled by a better than himself with a handsome maiden!'

        Viola could neither smile nor blush.

        'He can do everybody so much harm!' she said anxiously with a sigh. The dread of Gaspardo Nellemane was like a hand of lead upon her, 'Do speak him fair, dear, pray do!'

        'Never fear,' said the old fool merrily. 'He can't do me any mischief, my child. Who has nothing loses nothing. Does not the proverb say so? Why should you be

angry with the young man? He means no harm, I will warrant.'

        'Viola! come down I say! Your tongue will reach to the town and go twice round the cathedral!' roared Pippo impatiently from below; and the girl went down the cottage stairs heavy of heart, and wondering how her grand-aunt's errand would speed. She could not shake off the memory of Messer Gaspardo's bold black eyes.

        But at the cottage-door they met Carmelo driving a cart of his father's home, empty, having taken sacks of flour to a neighbouring hamlet; and she and her grandfather to up into the cart behind the good old grey horse Bigio with its jingling bells, and so sped cheerfully past the poplars and along the river; and in the gaze of their lover's honest beaming eyes she was half though not wholly cured of her fears, and

repaid a hundredfold on the loss of the dress and the rose-wreath and the shoes with the shining buckles.

        In the forenoon 'Nunziatina took the parcel in her alms-basket and trotted with her stick to help her through Santa Rosalia to the municipal building, and then boldly asked for Messer Nellemane. She was a bright-hearted, high-couraged, old woman, and had that sturdy independence which still extant among the old people who are too old to be able to learn to cringe before the national curse of municipal law.

        She cared nought for all the greatness of Messer Gaspardo, and fought valiantly with Tonino and Maso and Bindo, all of whom tried to shut their doors on her, and at last, in sheer despite of them, she stumped up the stone stairs in her hobnailed boots that were three times too large for

her, and at ten of the clock precisely stood in the august presence.

        Messer Gaspardo welcomed her quite charmingly; he knew she was the grand-aunt of Viola Mazzetti. He was seated in state, ready to receive anybody, as was his wont from ten to twelve, with a long writing-table before him, covered with papers, and the green blinds shut against the sun, and maps of the district and books of the Penal Code and the Civil Code around him; and really he might almost have been taken for the Prefect of the Province, so grave and majestic an embodiment of the Law did he look.

        'I am glad to find your excellency all alone,' said the bright little old woman, laying down the big parcel on the writing-table, for she thought to herself, 'I am told to speak him fair, and nothing will please

him like a grand title, that makes me look like an ass to use it.'

        'All the country is always talking of all it owes to your illustrious self' (and that is true, she thought, because every living soul is always cursing and abusing him from morning till night), 'and never should I have ventured, a poor old beggar as I am, to intrude upon you, only that I have to speak to you about my sister's granddaughter--

        'Speak on,' said the secretary, but his eye grew annoyed and startled; this was by no means what he wished; to have his admiration of Viola made a subject of discussion in her family was the last thing that consorted with his desires or designs. 'The girl has been boasting already,' he thought angrily, and gave a malediction to the vanity of woman.

        'You admire Viola, they tell me, and so

indeed it seems, since you send such fine presents, signore mio,' continued the crafty 'Nunziatina, and waited for him to reply.

        Messer Gaspardo gnawed his moustachios irritably.

        'Everyone admires a beautiful girl,' he said at last, with an uneasy laugh. 'You must not conclude too much from that--'

        'No, no, sir, not I, ' said the old woman very cheerfully, but her little sunken still bright brown eyes plunged their regard into his and read him, down to the secrets of his innermost soul. 'Gentlemen like you have a kindly way of paying compliments that mean nothing; oh, nothing at all; and my Viola is a girl of a great deal too much sense to have put meaning into anything you said or did. Only as she is very grateful to you for such courtesy, and could not come very well to say so, she bade me speak for

her; and do you be very sure, sir, that none the less thankful is she, though her feeling as to what is right makes her send your pretty things back by me, sir.'

        Therewith 'Nunziatina took out of her basket all the gifts that had represented with Messer Nellemane the pearls of Faust, and laid them very respectfully down on his table.

        Messer Nellemane grew of a sickly colour. He was pallid with rage. He half rose from his seat.

        'What, woman!' he stammered; 'what? Are you mad? Do you dare to insult me?'

        'No, no, sir; never a thought of it,' said wily Annunziata; 'no more of it than you had in buying those pretty things for the child to wear on Corpus Domini; a kindly thought, just like a gentleman--'

        'Why then--why --' still stammered

Messer Gaspardo, still aghast with wrath and wonder.

        'Why, sir?'--the little old woman drew herself up quite straight, with both her hands on her elm-stick--'Why, sir, because it is not meet for maidens, and motherless maidens, to take gifts from those too much above them to mean honest marriage, or have nay thought except a foolish sport that may divert the man but does destroy the woman. City girls, I know, are ready for that sort of play, but our girls are not. That is all I wanted just to say, and thank you kindly, Signore Gaspardo; for I am quite sure you had no thought of harming Viola. And now let me take away the inconvenience of myself, and bid you a very good day.'

        With that Italian phrase of peasant farewell which here was no figure of speech, for she was indeed the greatest discomfort to

him that had ever fallen across his prosperous career, the little old woman in her straw hat and her short petticoats bowed to him, with that grace which