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)

        All chapters occur as DIV0. All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.

        All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as ’.

        Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —.

        The "New Novels" opposite the title page has been omitted.

        The "List of Books" following p. 357 has been omitted.

• French
• Italian
• Latin

• 1996-06-10
  Kathryn Benedict, editor.
  
  • finished data entry, basic encoding and proofing.
  
  
• 1996-08-14
  Perry Willett, general editor.
  
  • finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.
  
  

(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 oftentimes even the humblest and the very aged keep in the land where Art once ruled supreme, and trotted out of his room and down the stone stairs with a little tranquil chuckle.

        She had said nothing of Viola's betrothal; the Italian courtesy and caution alike lay down as a fixed rule for rich and poor, that you should never say a disagreeable thing under any pretext or pressure.

        'He will learn it soon enough, ' she thought, 'and he is a bad man, and a dangerous; the devil dwells under his eyelids.'

        To her granddaughter, however, she only said cheerfully, 'I put it to him politely, my dear, and thanked him; and I hope you will hear no more of his nonsense.'

        For she reasoned with herself of what use was it to tell the child her own fears? She thought it would be of more use to buy a real wax candle instead of a bit of kid, the first time anybody should give her some coppers, and burn it before the Madonna up in the old oak-tree of the church of San Romualdo upon the slopes behind her dwelling-place; a shrine which had been set in the trunk of that old tree no one well knew how many hundreds of years before, and at which were wrought still many marvellous cures, and many infinite kindnesses of the Holy Virgin to true believers. The candle that very week she did buy with the first money she got on her rounds, and it twinkled its life out in the hot May day until at night the little white moths burned themselves up in it by scores, and it dwindled into darkness as the stars

began to gleam and the nightingales to sing.

        But whilst her holy candle burned under the holy ilex trees, the fires of an unholy rage burned in the breast of Messer Nellemane. He felt he had been checkmated, and checkmated by a little old trot in a ragged petticoat who, he felt, had been jeering at him with her illustrissimo. His own grandmother, indeed, still living in the township of his birth, was not one whit less ragged or impecunious than was 'Nunziatina. But he always strove to forget his grandmother as he strove to forget his father's old iron and rusty brass, for it was not meet for a man on the highway to a political party and a ministerial greatness to cumber himself with these remembrances. He sent his mother, indeed, now and then a banknote in a registered letter, but it was always

on the understanding that she never of her own accord recalled her existence to him.

        A retentive memory is of great use to a man, no doubt; but the talent of the oblivion is on the whole more useful.

        The fire of his rage consumed him, and he was the more angry because at the moment he knew not how to smite those who mocked at him.

        An hour or two later, however, he carelessly said to Bindo Terri:

        'That old woman who came to bring me a petition to-day--she is a professional mendicant?'

        Bindo watched his chief's face anxiously to get his cue, but could read nothing.

        'La 'Nunziatina?' he said, hesitatingly. 'No, Signore, I would not call her that; everybody knows her; she has been always

like this; she goes from house to house, and out to all the villas in turn--'

        An angry glisten of Messer Gaspardo's eyes told his faithful servitor that he had gone on the wrong tack: he hastened to make amends.

        'A beggar, of course, she is,' he added. 'I think she has been one twenty years. I remember her as long as I remember anything, and she always lived by charity. A lady did get her awhile ago permission to get taken in at Montesacro; but the old cranky, crazy creature said she could not live shut up: if she could not walk her dozen miles a day she would die--so she said. Yes: to be sure, illustrissimo, she is a beggar.'

        'A vagrant!'

        Messer Nellemane shrugged his shoulders and sighed over the degeneracy of a public

which would still continue to find patrons to support and pamper mendicancy. He fell into deep meditation. In the 395 Regulations framed for the Polizia, Igiena, and Edilitià of the commune there was one terrible void: there was nothing at all said about beggars.

        'They can find means to maintain all these creatures, and yet they declare they cannot support the imperial and local taxes!' he said aloud to his subordinate; by his 'they' meaning the landowners of the district, men of long descent, patrician appearance, and courtly manner, whose rank was the bitter envy of Messer Nellemane, whist their poverty was the object of his equally bitter scorn.

        Bindo Terri sighed too, and put up his hands to express his own equal regret and horror. Himself, he knew very well that

most of the people who gave alms to Annunziata were people of the poorest sort; peasants or homely folk, such as masons, carpenters, smiths, and the like; but he saw that it would not suit his chief's mood then to say so.

        'There is nothing about beggars in it?' he said questioningly, turning over the leaves of his beloved and revered Regulations.

        'Not as yet,' said Messer Nellemane. 'The good Cavaliere Durellazzo is, perhaps, too lenient to the vagrant classes.'

        The good Cavaliere Durellazzo was just then sitting in a straw chair, with a wide straw hat on, smoking a cigar made, for the most part, of straw, on the sands of a summer resort on the Mediterranean, and no more troubled himself about his commune when away, than he did when at home in it.

CHAPTER IV.

chestnut, and the acacia, all grew in amity together, sheltering in spring time millions of primroses, and of many another wee wood-flower.

        Santa Rosalia is in a lovely pastoral country; the country that seems to thrill with Theocritus' singing, as it throbs with the little tambourine of the cicala; a country running over with beautiful greenery, and with climbing creepers hanging everywhere, from the vine on the maples to the china-rose hedges, and with the deep blue shadows and the sun-flushed whiteness of the distant mountains lending to it in the golden distance that solemnity and etherial charm which, without mountains somewhere within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of freedom it is scarred and wounded; great scar patches stretch here and there where woods have been felled

by the avarice illumined in the souls of landowners; hundreds and thousands of bare poles stand stark and stiff against the river light, which have been glorious pyramids of leaf, shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill like the ballons of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn of forest and even of undergrowth, lift a bare, stony front to the lovely sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower, or of fern, find bed there.

        Such is Progress.

        This convent of Francesca Romana had been 'appropriated' in the sacred name of liberty, and the nuns had been all sent here and there, back to their families if they had any, and out to weary loneliness if they had not, and the dowers they had given the Church had gone to the coffers of the

Government, and enriched contractors, and engineers, and ministers.

        The old home of these Olivetine Sisters itself was despoiled, much as it would have been by an invading army that was allowed loot. Its crucifixes, its ivories, its carvings were sold by the State to curiosity dealers, and its frescoes, by Sodoma and the Carracci, were cut off the walls and disposed of to a foreign nation.

        All this had been done before Messer Nellemane's time, although done by men so closely like to Messer Nellemane that they might have been his elder brothers.

        The deserted building, when he had come into the village, had stood on the hill like a wrecked city; majestic still, since its old walls, all faced with marbles and porphyry, would have yielded to nought save cannon; and it tall bell-tower, exquisite in its

slenderness and symmetry, and its ivory-like whiteness, had still pointed heavenward from his green throne, though its bells had been torn down and melted to help make a bronze statue of one of Messer Nellemane's elder brothers away in the city, where it was called the Monument of a Soldier of Liberty, and had Fame and Peace seated together at its base.

        The building was an empty shell, and while the Government were always meaning to turn it into an institute, a barrack, a powder magazine, or a laboratory, the years had slipped away, and damp and drought alternately were changing it into a ruin. But the forest beauty about it was still untouched when Santa Rosalia first beheld Messer Nellemane; and when he had been a little time upon that office stool of which he intended to make a starting point

to a future ministry of State, he cast his eyes upon this shattered temple of superstition. To his amazement the timber on the hillside had been all left standing.

        All those instincts which always made him feel it was his destiny some day to become a minister of finance, or of the interior, rose up in his breast.

        What waste of the public purse! And what a commission awaiting for somebody! Messer Nellemane, of all things this world held, loved best a job. The official mind always loves a job. Moreover, he detested trees, as he detested dogs. As dogs were only endurable when chained up, so, to him, trees were only tolerable when sawn into lengths and neatly planed.

        The official mind, with which he had been created, viewed with abhorrence the unministerial and improvident existence

permitted to that once sacred wood, whilst the convent it surrounded had been dealt with as free thought can always deal with such monuments of superstition.

        Messer Nellemane made a humble suggestion on the matter to Cavaliere Durellazzo; the Syndic made a communication to the Giunta; the Prefect of the province was seen and whispered with; the Prefect went down to Rome and whispered with the Minister of Public Works, who was his friend. It was suddenly discovered that there was a great need of oak wood in the dockyards, though they were building ships of nothing but iron; soon it was decreed that the trees which had sheltered and graced the bigotry of the past should fall to help fill the treasuries of the present.

        The Ministry entrusted the direction of the sale to the Prefect; the Prefect en-

trusted it to the Syndic of Vezzaja and Ghiralda, the prefectorial commission being, a thing understood; of course, no one speaks of such matters. The Syndic entrusted it in turn to his secretary, the syndical commission being, of course, equally understood; and the Giunta also being understood, without words, to have each of them an interest in the ultimate proceeds.

        But it may be taken for granted that, when the various commissions, first of the big Ministers down in Rome, and then of the big Prefect down in the adjacent city, and then of all the lesser personages concerned, not omitting Messer Nellemane himself, who took all the trouble of it under the rose, were all shaved off the sum total brought by the sale of that wood to the State, the nation never bought timber dearer for its dockyards.

        However, everybody was very pleased except a few artists who tried to make a noise about it, as those troublesome beings always do, and the people of the commune in general, who were not consulted and did not count.

        The particulars of the sale were amongst those official things which never issue out of pigeon-holes, and concerning which blue books, yellow books, all books parliamentary, are silent in all countries.

        The trees fell; the giants of the centuries crashed down under the axes or under fire; the hares, the birds, the myriads of innocent pretty, forest life that had lived under them so long, fled away or were ruthlessly destroyed; cartloads of timber went to burn in the furnaces of public works or rot away in the ship-yards; and Messer Nellemane, through his trusty cousin, some

foreign scrip; indeed everybody concerned in the sale bought something.

        The convent stood bare and drear upon its desolated hillside, and above the river, rose a great slope, naked, scarred, frightful, with charred holes yawning where the primrose tufts and the blue irises had blossomed in that same springtide.

        Messer Nellemane looked up at it now, and felt it had been a work worthy of him, and one fully in the spirit of the age.

        It was really quite equal to the pulling down of Tell's chapel and of Milton's house; to the destruction of the walls of Augsburg and the towers of Nurnberg; to the levelling of the Spanish Houses of Brussels and of the gates and the bastions of Gall, of the Grand Chatelêt of Paris and of the Tabard Inn of old London; he felt that it might take its place proudly amidst all the greatest destruc-

tion wrought by Progress and Economy in this noblest and most æsthetic century, by means of its chiefs and excecutants, the Municipalities.

        In the old time architects and artists had wrought here diligently, reverentially, lovingly, in the name of God and of the arts; but Messer Nellemane, though he had never heard of Sainte Beuve, would have quite agreed with him, that, 'Dieu, ce n'est pas français,' and for his own part would have been as ready to affirm that Art was no longer in the Italian dictionary.

        In the old time European municipalities thought that they existed for the ends of patriotism and the glory of their cities; they built for the honour of God and the love of their country. But nowadays all that is changed; a municipality is only a

selection of persons intent on their own interests; the motto of each is 'my policy's myself;' whether old walls are pulled down or new ones put up, gold comes off the mortar for the town-councilmen, the contractors, and the commissioners, and they can never understand why everyone is not as satisfied as they are. Whether the question be one of demolition or construction, all they look for is what it will bring.

        Whether trees fall in Kensington Gardens or the Cascine, whether old churches are pulled down in Rome or in Paris, whether new street make hideous Venice or Vienna, whether gardens are chopped to pieces on the Pincio or in the Bois, there is always somebody who pockets something sub rosâ, and instead of Jacques Coeur or the Fugger, or William of Wykham, or Alan Walsingham, we have officers of Public Works as avaricious

as Harpagan, as dull as Prudhomme, and more ruthless than Attila.

        They are always amazed that you are not contented.

        If you want a handsome structure, can you not make a large glass frame for a market or an exhibition, or raise a fine sugar-white gimcrack in plaster and stucco, that you can call a war office, a church, a college, or a palace at your pleasure?

        The bureaucratic and the municipalic mind cannot comprehend any higher joy than destroying, reconstructing, and pocketing the proceeds of both operations.

        Our friend Messer Nellemane had been born with the bureaucratic and municipalic organs both largely developed in his brain, and within his narrow confines he contrived to compass vast things, and his heart was always comforted as he looked up at the

bald gneiss and sand where the convent oaks once had stood; but, as woe would have it, taking this night his favourite stroll past ruined Santa Francesca, he saw two shadows in the evening light, and all his comfort fled. The shadows were far below him, and were entwined one with another, like two young acacias that have grown up and leaned together; they were moving slowly over the long grass under the lines of the silver poplars by the watermill.

        His heart gave a leap of rage, and his ruddy face grew livid.

        He recognized in the happy murmuring lovers under the trees, Viola and young Carmelo. His passion was stung to the quick, and his pride and his vanity were wounded yet more deeply. 'She rejects me!' he thought, and no emperor flouted by a peasant maid, and seeing a rustic lout pre-

ferred, could have felt himself more grossly and with greater ingratitude insulted.

        True, the old shop of rusty iron was not so much above the mill as an origin; but then Messer Nellemane was now a servant of the State, nay, rather, an integral piece of the State itself, as a cog-wheel is a piece of the great machine it helps to work; and he thought himself a very great personage.

        He walked now above the river on the bare ridge beneath Santa Francesca, and saw the lovers strolling below, through the poplar wood, with the big white dog of the mill, Toppa, strolling as well in front of them, and all his soul burned within him with rage and jealous chagrin.

        He could see the brown wheel churning in the water; he could see the flour sacks leaning against the fence under the hedge of elders; he could see the jay in its cage

amongst a passion flower that covered all the house wall; he could see the snowy head of the old miller himself, leaning out of a little square window, and calling orders to the boy who was waiting with the mule-cart at the gate; and he could see the lovers loitering in the sunset warmth by the river; lovers, who thought to live all their days out there peacefully under that same roof, and leave their children to come there after them, and get their bread by the same old wooden wheels churning the same green waters where the green leaves grew.

        He stood on the heights above, and looked down on the tranquil little scene;--with a curse.

CHAPTER V.

        Viola would not have been a daughter of Eve, had she not thought longingly, on the eventide before this great feast, of Messer Nellemane's blue gown and white wreath. What would not the other girls have said if they could but have seen her in that beautiful dress, and with the buckles shining on her feet!

        She never wished that she had kept them, but she often did wish that they could

have been the gift of the grandfather, or of Carmelo.

        The procession was the great day of the year in Santa Rosalia, as in every other village and little borgo round. Messer Nellemane, who was a libero persiero, yearned to have it suppressed; he thought it degrading and idiotic. Like a true Liberal thinker he was of opinion that as there should be no distinctions for the rich, so there should be no diversions for the poor. He would have forbidden banners, music, colours, lights, public services, and gatherings of all sorts, except for Liberal purposes, under threat of heavy pains and penalties, but he had no power; the Government has not quite made up its mind as yet to do away with any time-honoured custom, and he, without the Government, was helpless, for this was an imperial matter.

        So all day long, every Féte Dieu, the tolling and chiming of bells, the aspect of villagers clad in their festal array, the sounds of chanting, the scent of incense, the sight of banners, pursued him, and made him irritable and unhappy; so unhappy that even the number of contraventions, generally to be gleaned on a day when people were too merry and too engrossed to chain up their dogs and shut up their children, could not altogether console him. Besides, even Bindo was so carried away by the influence of long habit that he was himself not so watchful as usual on this day, when the girls were all looking their best in their white or blue gowns, and most houses had open doors and a full table, and at nightfall there was dancing and illuminations in the piazza.

        This summer the procession was especially

hateful and foolish in Messer Gaspardo's sight; was more than ever loathsome to him, since Viola Mazzetti did not wear his gown, and his garland, and his shoe-buckles, but came out in her humble grey skirt and bodice, that were to her loveliness like the dark leaves to the mangolia flower, and had never as much even as a silver pin set in her hair.

        Old Pastorini, too, was the capo of the feast, and managed everything, and in the village band Carmelo beat the drum; beat it indeed with more zeal than discretion, so that it could always be heard high above every other instrument at every moment, but was very much praised, and looked very handsome and bright as he did so.

        Messer Nellemane found all this too much for him, so he rose early on this day, and

went on business to the great city, twelve miles away under the mountains, and let Santa Rosalia have its fooling since he had no power to stop it.

        And Santa Rosalia had it; very peacefully and piously at first, and then very good-naturedly and gaily, mingling the sacred and the profane in an innocent jumble, singing the O Salutaris one moment devoutly as they followed the Host, and the next, humming waltz music merrily as they jumped round in the dance.

        Italian merrymaking is no longer pretty; the sense of colour and of harmony is gone out of our people, whose forefathers were models of Leonardo and Raffaelle, and whose own limbs, too, have still so often the mould of the Faun and the Discobolus. Their merrymaking has nothing of the grace and brightness of French fairs, nor even of the

picturesqueness and colour of the German feast and frolics; even in Carnival, though there are gaiety and grotesqueness, there are little grace and little good colouring. Yet the people enjoy themselves; enjoy themselves for the most part very harmlessly, and very merrily, when they forget their tax-papers, their empty stomachs, and their bankrupt shops.

        The village enjoyed itself this day of the Feast of God, though its piazza was very dusty, and its band very out of tune, and its food and its drink as thoroughly bad as they could be. But it was Corpus Domini, and everyone was happy; and when the long procession had said its last prayer the trescone began in the square, and every house was hung with crescents of light.

        Messer Nellemane, being compelled to return by the last diligence that ran to Santa Rosalia from the town to which he had gone

to escape from the ceremonies and festivities, found himself at ten of the night in a still crowded piazza as he descended from his rickety conveyance. The Municipality was black as crepe; that he could ordain; but every other house round the place was twinkling with the flame of lighted oil in little iron sconces; the very same sconces that had been used in the Cinque Cento to celebrate feasts and frays and saints' days.

        The lights were blazing brightly; the music was sounding jocundly, the youths and the maidens were going round and round, laughing and chattering as they jumped. The drum stood on a pavement with the honest dog of the mill guarding it, and Carmelo was dancing with Viola, while old Pippo and the miller, sitting on two rush chairs beside the dog and drum, looked on smiling and beating the time.

        A shining sky was over them all; the river glistened in the strong moonlight; the air was heavy with the scent of the lilies and the stocks, the carnations and the roses in the gardens around. Saint Rosalia was in festa, and the two old men, warmed by a little more wine than usual, were saying one to another.

        'They might as well wed at once? They will never be richer, and there is no time like youth.'

        Messer Nellemane did not hear the words of the old men, but he saw the young dancers.

        He went on sullenly, with his hat drawn down over his brows, pushing his way through the crowd without any of the somewhat pompous politeness of demeanour which marked him usually.

        He slammed his door, and went to his

bed, and shut his shutters to shut out the shining heavens, the fragrant air, the glittering little lights; but the laughter, and the music, and the joyous blithe-hearted murmur that rose up from the dancers below the shutters, he could not exclude; and he cursed them.

        For the first time his liberi pensieri were distasteful to him and unsatisfactory; for atheism makes a curse a mere rattle of dry peas in a fool's bladder as it makes a blessing a mere flutter of breath. Messer Nellemane for the first time felt that the old religion had its advantages over agnosticism; it gave you a hell for your rivals and your enemies!

        In the next week there came a little party up to the Municipality of Santa Rosalia. They were Pippo and his granddaughter and the two Pastorini, father and son. They were

in festal attire; Pippo wore new dark blue hempen clothes, and had his jacket on one shoulder, and his shirt well ruffled up above his trouser-band; the miller was in his Sunday suit, all grey; Carmelo had a pink shirt and a blue necktie and a jay's-wing in the band of his wide-awake; and Viola had a gown of pale dove-coloured stuff that she had bought in the town of Pomodoro for her wedding, and had her dead mother's string of seed-pearls about her throat; her pale cheek was as red as a rose, and but for her grandfather's stout hold on her arm she would never have found feet to bear her up the flight of steps.

        Bindo Terri, lounging in the entrance, saw the little group, and thrust his tongue into his cheek and spat on the stone. Pastorini the elder, who was the stoutest-hearted of the quartette, asked for the most worshipful the Syndic.

        Bindo whistled.

        The Chancellor, who was inside the door, and who was busy eating little black figs and whittling a stick, said the Most Worshipful was at the Bagni for his health, but there was in his stead and equal to himself for all intents and purposes of business the Most Estimable his secretary, Messer Gaspardo Nellemane.

        Viola changed from her soft warmth of colour to a great pallor.

        The miller said stoutly: 'Then his Most Estimable the secretary let us see. It is a matter that brooks no delay, eh, son of mine?'

        Thereat Demetrio Pastorini laughed, and chuckled, and winked, being a merry man, and the Chancellor bade them go on up the stairs, and on the landing place, at a door to the right, they might enter, he said; then he

returned to eating his figs and throwing the skins on the floor of this august place where children were forbidden to play.

        They went on up the staircase, and at the door the elder Pastorini rapped with his staff.

        'Enter!' said the voice of the high functionary of state within, and they entered and stood in the presence of Messer Nellemane.

        A single gleam, like the glitter of a steel mirror in moonlight, lit up cruelly and fiercely the eyes of the rejected lover of Viola; he guessed their errand.

        A moment more, and the evil light ceased to shine in his regard; he smiled a pleasant and condescending smile of patronage.

        'Ser Fillippo, good-day--Signora mine, you look as fair as the morning. Signore Pastorini, what can I do for you? But I

divine your errand--nay, before as an official I execute your business, let me as a friend wish you all happiness.'

        The men were subdued, fascinated, deceived; they thought what a good comrade this tyrant of the community could be; the maiden alone was not blinded; she had seen the first, fell, fierce gleam of her village Faust's eyes, and it had stabbed her like a knife. The smile that had replaced it was no lovelier to her than would have been the hissing jaws of a swamp-snake.

        Her heart was heavy, but she curtseyed and thanked him.

        Messer Nellemane said some more polite words and well-turned assurances of friendship, and old Pippo thought, 'He'll never go against me for the rushes and the water now--after all this.'

        Then the Syndic's secretary proceeded

with the Syndic's work of registration and wore an unruffled brow.

        The intended marriage of Pastorini Carmelo, aged twenty-two, and Mazzetti Viola, aged seventeen, was formally announced in print, and stuck up, for all the commune to see, behind a dirty glass in a dirtier frame with those admirably delicate and spiritual formularies which modern governments deem necessary for the hedging in of the divinity of love.

        Then Viola took off her pearl-coloured gown and went to make some bread, and Carmelo tucked up his sleeves and went forth to work amongst the sacks till nightfall, and both knew that when the round moon should want and grow a slender horn once more in the summer skies, the day of days would dawn for them.

CHAPTER VI.

        'I never knew the like when I was young; there were always four feet of water even in the Leone month, ' * said Demetrio Pastorini, scratching his head wofully as he gazed down on the sun-dried wheels and the shallows that showed all the pebbles and the sand, the water weeds and the little fishes.

        'Lord a-mercy!' said Pippo, 'when we were young, things were let alone as God made them; now they're always messing and muddling, and thinking as how they could have built the world a deal better.'

        'I suppose it's that,' said the miller sorrowfully. 'Never when I was young was Rosa dry. As fast as wheat was cut in midsummer, 'twas ground by us.'

        'It's along of the meddling and muddling,' said Pippo. 'Why Lord! they do
___________________

The month of August is always called in Italy the month of the Lion.

say that beyond Pomodoro on Tagliafico's ground they are threshing wheat with a kettle on wheels!'

        Old Pastorini sighed: he was a better educated man than old Pippo, and he knew that into the quiet, sweet, pastoral lands there were coming the 'buzzing and muzzing' of those unsightly machines which are the best friends of socialism, being the gain of the proprietor, and the curse of the peasantry, everywhere throughout Europe.

        He had never heard of Virgil and of Theocritus, but it hurt him to have these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling the wheat loose from its husk with bounding limbs and tossing manes; the great arched doorways, with

the maidens sitting in a circle breaking the maize cone from its withered leaves, and telling old world's stories, and singing sweet fiorellini all the while; the hanging fields broken up in hill and vale with the dun-coloured oxen pushing their patient way through labyrinths of vine boughs and clouds of silvery olive leaf; the bright laborious day, with the sun-rays turning the sickle to a semi-circlet of silver, as the mice ran, and the crickets shouted, and the larks soared on high; the merry supper when the day was done, with the thrill and thrum of the mandolini, and the glisten of the unhoused fireflies, whose sanctuary had been broken when the bearded barley and the amber corn fell prone; all these things rose to his memory; they had made his youth and manhood glad and full of colour; they were here still for his sons a little while, but when his sons

should be all men grown, then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their foul vapours would have poisoned the golden air.

        He roused himself, and said wearily to Pippo, 'There is a tale I have heard somewhere of a man who sold his birthright for gold, and when the gold was in his hands, then it changed to withered leaves and brown moss; I was thinking, eh? That the world is much like that man.'

        'Truly,' said Pippo, who did not very well understand. 'But what has the world to do with us? We have done well enough without it.'

        The miller shook his head, and turned from the shallow waters.

        'It is all "world" now: that is the worst of it. There is no country, or soon there will be none. Even Rosa water is running away, you see!'

        Pippo went home to his daughter, and said : 'The end of all things is a'coming: Rosa is drying up; I do not see how you can marry if the mill stops. To be sure you could always live in this house, and Carmelo could always be a bracciante.'

        Viola's eyes filled: she did not mind how poor Carmelo and she might be, but she thought it would be such a terrible shame to him to be a bracciante--a day labourer--everybody looks down on these, and nobody is one that can, by any means, avoid it.

        Viola never contradicted her father; but she slipped away, and went inside San Giuseppe, which stood in the piazza, and

prayed to that Bohemian S. John who is the patron of all running water, to set the Rosa flowing again, and the tears ran down her cheeks as she prayed.

        Messer Nellemane met her straight, face to face, as she came out of the church and he out of the caffè: he took off his hat with the sweetest smile.

        'When is the giorno felice?' he asked.

        She murmured some unintelligible words, coloured hotly, and ran towards her own door, her little yellow dog Raggi, who had been in the church with her, scampering in front.

        'A dog loose!' said Messer Nellemane to his myrmidon Bindo, who was near. Bindo muttered sheepishly that it was 'such a little one.'

        'Little or large; what is the use of rules if they be not enforced?' said the

uperior, very sternly. 'A little dog may bite or go mad just as easily as a large one.'

        'And that is true, signore,' said Bindo. 'And besides they never pay any tax for this one.'

        Messer Nellemane made a note of the fact, and the next day took the tax-gatherer to account for leniency and inattention.

        When in the evening the great man sat on his usual green iron chair in front of the Nuova Italia with his comrades and colleagues, fat Maso and thin Tonino, he saw the young Pastorini, Carmelo, with his two brothers, stop the mill-house mule before Pippo's house, and Viola come out to talk to them on the doorstep.

        There is the miller's cart,' said Messer Nellemane to his colleagues. 'By the way,

I hear, the mill has not worked for a month. The Rosa up there is so dry.'

        'It never used to be dry. It used to be a very deep stream,' said the Chancellor. 'I cannot tell the reason of it, unless it be that drying up the Lago di Giglio has scorched this up too.'

        Messer Nellemane gave him a glance of scorn: the Lily lake had been a beautiful piece of water which had been drained, as a speculation, by a rich man, and the draining had been called progress and patriotism, though it had destroyed great beauty of scenery, and been the ruin of some three hundred families of freshwater fishermen. All the syndics and their councils had admired the work exceedingly.

        'It is very injurious for the interests of the province,' continued Messer Gaspardo, 'to be dependent thus on the caprices of a

river. It would be a great thing if a steam-mill could be established.'

        'Ouf!' said little Tonino, opening wide his eyes. 'And what would become of the Pastorini?'

        'The interests of the few must always be subordinate to those of the many,' answered Messer Nellemane, with his usual excellence of phrase and opinion. 'It is quite absurd in these practical times for a whole commune to be dependent for its bread on the accident of a river being full of water. We must see what can be done in the matter. Of course,' he added, 'it would at the moment be very hard upon the miller and his family; but someone must always suffer for any great work, and the cause of progress is sacred,'

        'Just so,' said Maso and Tonino in concert, being always convinced, if not en-

lightened, by the magnificent words of Messer Nellemane.

        'There was some talk of such a mill before the Cavaliere went to the baths,' said their instructor, though he had never until that moment ever thought of such a thing. 'And, certainly, if the river continue to run dry like this, something must be done. The miller is not very well off as it is, I believe; and this is an improvident marriage that he is making for his son.'

        'They won't have many beans in their pot,' giggled Maso, who was a vulgar man.

        'Alas! no,' said Messer Nellemane, who was never vulgar, with an air of regret. 'It is these hasty and impecunious marriages that bring about the beggary of the nation. They ought to be forbidden by the law. The State forbids suicide; why not also forbid an ill-judged marriage?'

        'What would the women say?' chuckled the vulgar Maso.

        'They have no voice in politics,' said Messer Nellemane, coldly: he was a very literal man, and never saw a joke in anything. The land of Pasquin and of Polichinello has ceased to laugh.

        'What a minister he would make!' said Maso admiringly to Tonino, when their great man had left them to go and read the 'Diritto,' which had come to him by the evening's post: the little girl of Nando running over with it obsequiously.

        'Ah, he would indeed!' assented Tonino; but there was no great warmth in the assent: Messer Nellemane always beat him at dominoes, and hurt him both in pride and pocket.

        That night, as it chanced, old Annunziata was coming home alone along a path across

the fields from one of the farmhouses in the hills. The massaja there had been very good to her, and had given her some eggs; not to eat, for Annunziata would have thought that wild extravagance indeed, except at Pasqua, but to sell for her own profit.

        On this path, dark with twilight and the thick canopy of overhanging pines, the old woman was accosted by a drunken fellow--a smith from the forge above at Sestriano--who shook her, jeered at her, and carried away her basket of eggs. The poor old soul went bruised and weeping down towards Santa Rosalia; she mad made a good fight for it with her oaken stick, but she had got blows in return, and had lost her eggs.

        She met Carmelo Pastorini as she neared the village, and told him what that drunken

lout, Pompéo of Sestriano, had done to her. Carmelo listened with all his bright face lit up in a radiance of wrath, and before she could stop him had dashed up the hill path, had overtaken the staggering scoundrel, and had rescued the basket, though the eggs were all smashed in the dispute for them.

        But Carmelo thought that he would not tell her that: he had a little money of his own, allowed him by his father--very little--for tobacco and his clothes: he had a franc left, and he strode farther up the hill, and bought a dozen eggs at the first farmhouse that would sell them. 'It will be only to go without a pipe for a week or two,' he thought; for he spent one centime a day on his tobacco.

        Annunziata was home again in her chamber with the other old women by the time Carmelo reached Santa Rosalia, and

she had to get out of bed and speak to him, as he threw a stone at her shutter.

        'I have got back your eggs, 'Nunziatina,' he shouted to her. 'Let me down a bit of string, and you can draw up the basket.'

        The old woman, laughing and crying with joy, did as he bade her, and the eggs were drawn slowly upward against the white wall in the silvery moonlight.

        'Thou art a dear good lad,' she cried, 'and Viola is a lucky maiden.'

        Carmelo laughed, and called back.

        'Do not tell on the poor devil, mother. He was drunk--'

        'Not I,' said Annunziata. 'I wouldn't put a poor toad in the lock-up for a bag of gold if he took it of me--not I.'

        'Good night,' said Carmelo, and went away, humming to himself,

Nel mezzo del mio petto è una ghirlanda,
E ne l'ho scritto il nome di Viola,
Quattr'angioli del ciel suonan la banda. *

        But as not a mouse squeaks in its own hole without all the country-side chattering about it, this encounter with Pompéo of Sestriano got wind, and all the village was talking of it next day. The story ran here and there like a jack-o'-lanthorn in a swamp, and, of course, grew in the telling.

        In consequence the carabiniers, at Messer Nellemane's instigation, visited Pompéo at his forge in Sestriano, and visited Carmelo at his father's mill, and great fuss and noise were made about it, and the two men and the old woman were summoned to the Municipality.

___________________

Around my breast there is a garland,
And on it's writ the name of Viola,
And four angels of God make melody!
        Every lover of course substitutes the name of his beloved.

        The old woman, trembling like a leaf for her very life, for she had never been called up by the police in all her years, made light of it, and said she 'was sure that 'Péo had but done it as a joke.'

        'The law does not recognise jokes,' the law said to her by the august voice of Messer Nellemane, who was examining her.

        Pompéo himself declared that he had no remembrance of anything at all; and most likely spoke genuinely, for he had been very much the worse for wine; and when he had awakened on the hillside at morning had not been able, in the least, to recollect how he had come there.

        When Carmelo was examined he laughed outright.

        'Péo was drunk,' he said, 'and I knocked him down to get Viola's aunt's basket away from him, but he heeled over as if he were

made of straw and fell on the grass under the vines, and there I left him. I broke none of his bones, you see, and I hoped nobody would know anything.'

        'The Law knows everything,' said Messer Nellemane, with a frown, 'and for concealing a theft there is a very heavy penalty, and the interests of public justice require--'

        Annunziata, beholding the blanched, scared, stupid face of the sottish smith, felt all her courage and her charity burn in her.

        'Holy Mother! sir, most illustrious, I mean,' she cried in desperation, 'there wasn't a bit of harm of any sort done, and I am certain the poor fool took them from me not knowing; and he wouldn't hurt a hair of my head if he were sober; and the eggs were all safe and sound, and nobody could go against anyone when the eggs were all got back; and as for me, not a soul would I put in

prison if they cut the gown from off my waist; not I.'

        'Woman!' thundered Messer Nellemane, losing his benignity before these atrocious principles, 'do you dare to insult the majesty of the Law? Abstract justice is alone fit to govern any human action. You have a duty to society --'

        'Me, sir!' cried Annunziata, and muttered to herself, 'Well-a-day! one does live to come to something.'

        'Which must be above all personal considerations. Let us examine for a moment to what your astounding, your inexcusable, laxity of principle would lead. You would actually establish the frightfully immoral fact that, if stolen goods were returned intact, the theft would be condoned, effaced, become as though it had not been! You ignore entirely the moral heinousness of the crime. You

take the low and debasing view that the only thing of importance in a theft is the pecuniary loss it may inflict! Whether your goods were returned to you safe, or were destroyed, is altogether beyond the question. What moral teachers have you had, woman?'

        Annunziata dimly comprehended that her morality was impugned, and her little black eyes blazed with righteous rage.

        'I have been a decent person all my days, sir,' she said with a resentful fierceness in her voice. 'I was a good wife while my poor man lived, and since he died, thirty year or more ago, never have I done a thing he'd be ashamed to see.'

        Messer Nellemane paid no attention to her whatever, but continued his dissertation, to which Carmelo listened with a merry grin upon his face, Pompéo stupidly with open mouth, and the Chancellor, the Conciliator,

and Bindo Terri, with his colleagues, in attitudes expressive of righteous awe and overpowering admiration. Finally, Messer Nellemane, unwillingly felt that no judge would sentence with any severity for an offence non-proven, and prosecuted against the aggrieved person's will; yet, reluctant to let them escape altogether, he decided that after this unofficial examination that the Sestriano smith should be summoned to appear at Pomodoro, to be there judged for drunkenness and attempted theft, and that the miller's son should pay a fine of twenty francs for having taken the law into his own hands in lieu of summoning the police, an offence against the Code.

        Carmelo made a wry face. Every farthing could be ill afforded by his father.

        'Those are the dearest eggs that were ever laid, mother!' he whispered to Annunziata.

        The old woman wrung her hands.

        'And that poor soul to go to prison for me! Oh dear, oh dear! And the gentleman won't hear a word that I say!'

        So that bright summer day was clouded over for them all.

        'You will have to be witnesses at the trial of Pompéo,' said the guard Bindo, with keen relish, to them, as the old woman and Carmelo went down the municipal steps.

        'Nay, I'll never say a word against him, poor creature. When the wine's in the wit's out,' said Annunziata.

        'I'll say again what I said in there,' added Carmelo, 'and that's just the truth; he went over at a touch like an owl in noonday. And as for you Bindo, if you had against you all the witnesses that see you in the caffès, would you wear that fine popinjay's hat and jacket long, I wonder?'

        Bindo growled and muttered something about his wish that Carmelo and all his people should be burnt.

        'Sia brucciato!!' remains a favourite imprecation in the language, having been transmitted no doubt from the day when heretics and Hebrews and all such sinners were sent to the stake.

        Carmelo went onward, disregarding the storm he had raised, and singing at the top of his voice the stornello:
Io benedico lo fiore d'amore,
Rubato avete le perle al mare,
Agli alberi le fronde, a me il core. *

        What did Bindo's wrath or the punishment of hanging over the drunken head of Pompé of Sestriano matter to him? He was
___________________

I bless the flower of Love,
It has stolen the pearls from the sea,
It has stolen the leaves from the trees,
It has stolen the heart from me!

not more selfish than another, but he would not have been a youth and a lover if he had had room for any other thought long together than that of his approaching nuptials.

        The papers of the marriage had been long enough behind the wire cage and the dusty glass of the communal palace, and the time had rolled on until now on the first day of July he would be wedded to Viola, and only forty-eight hours separated him from that morn. He ran along the village laughing and singing, with a fresh rose stuck behind his ear and a fresh ribbon round his hat, and reached the house with the white and blue Madonna, and went in and sat in the window-sill, looking down on the girl's hands as they plaited, whilst Pippo worked and smoked his pipe on the threshold.

        'You were so good to 'Nunziatina,' said

Viola, raising eyes to his that were wet with tears of pleasure.

        'Che!' laughed Carmelo, swinging his shapely bare feet against the wall of the window. 'Won't she belong as much to me as to you? She shall never want a basket of eggs while I live.'

CHAPTER VII.

        The favourite mission of Bindo was to poison dogs. Messer Gaspardo hated dogs; hey had an unfortunate way of smelling at him which made people laugh and remember the old saying that a dog can smell a rogue, and hurt his dignity in his own sight and that

of others. Moreover, courage does not characterise the tyrant always; though Atilla was brave, Messer Nellemane was not. He was afraid of dogs; and he had made it Article I. of Rule I. in his Regulations that a free dog was never to be seen in all the length and breadth of Vezzaja and Ghiralda.

        But there will always be dogs loose, all Regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, for there is no population anywhere in which everybody is a poltroon. So, as loose dogs still trotted about the commune, and led their pretty, merry, brisk lives under his very eyes, in impertinent disregard of Article I., Rule I., Messer Nellemane had at once bethought himself of poisoning them. Phosphorus was cheap and deadly, so were rat-poisons, and when fried with liver as Bindo fried them, and thrown about in the dust of the highway, they stretched many a gallant hound low, and left

many a puppy rigid and swollen after an agony more terrible than the hanged malefactor suffers; whilst for those that his poisoned polpetti did not slaughter he wore out the lives of the owners thereof with summonses without end and fines without mercy.

        It grew to be the general belief in Vezzaja and Ghiralda that you had better stab a man than keep a dog, and you would pay less for doing it, too.

        Carmelo, like most sons of the soil, was fond of his dog, a fine curly white fellow, strong and young like Carmelo himself, who was called Toppa because he scared away robbers. Toppa, by choice, kept close about the mill, and in that little boschetto of poplars which had belonged to the Pastorini longer than men could remember; for he was a good and dutiful dog, and knew that if he

went roaming, thieves might break in and steal. Therefore Toppa rarely fell under the head of a contravention, since even Article I., Rule I., could not assert that a man's dog must not be loose upon his own property.

        Nevertheless, on Toppa the evil eye of Bindo had often fallen, for Bindo had been pinned by Toppa more than once in unregenerate days before becoming a functionary of the State; and moreover, Messer Nellemane had said, 'That dog at the mill looks dangerous; he barks when anyone passes;' which hint sufficed for the guard now that to natural cruelty was united the thirst of personal animosity. At dawn, whilst the mists of earliest morning were still white on the river and the hills, he walked warily within sight of the little wood by the mill, intent alike on hurting Carmelo and pleasing

his patron. Toppa was lying with his head between his paws on the grass on the bank; he kept wide awake all night from his strong principle, and now when the sun had risen, knew that he might slumber and dream in peace without peril to the homestead.

        Nevertheless, when he heard a step fall upon the thick dust of the road, Toppa, although he was no longer sentry, performed a sentry's part and rose, and ran, and looked. He kept within his own boundary, as he had been taught to do, being a very faithful dog, and only looked; a cat may look at a king, says the old saw, but in Vezzaja and Ghiralda a dog must not look at a guard.

        Bindo spoke not a word, but he threw something he held in his hand from the road where he stood into the grass beneath the poplars, near the dog.

        Toppa was at no time very well fed, no dog is in the country; and he had not eaten since sunset. His nostrils smelled an odour savoury and sweet to them. The thing lay in his own grass, within a foot of him; he drew close to it and smelt it closer; it was a fried slice of liver rolled up in a tempting way. He ate it. Almost in an instant he staggered, strove to vomit, became convulsed, gasped, and gave a strangled, hollow moan, then turned round giddily, as men may when drunk, and fell prone on the dewy grass.

        Bindo leapt to him, seized him by the skin of his throat and back, and dragged him into the highway; the dog was quivering, rolling, panting in agony as the poison burned and tore his entrails.

        Leaving him there, Bindo slunk away. Toppa lay in the dust, mute in his death throes;

his snowy, curly body swelling and writhing, his bright brown eyes protruding, his tongue forced out, his lambs paralyzed; suffering as men deem it too cruel to make murderers suffer. Within a stone's throw of his master and his friends, he could not raise a cry, he could not move a limb. The burning hellish poison had its way, tearing, consuming, killing him.

        Presently the mists began to yield to the lovely light of the fuller day; and in the sunshine on the lonely road Toppa lay dead; foam on his lips, a little blood upon the dust that he had vomited even as he died.

        His happy, harmless, honest life was done.

        A few moments later Carmelo, who seldom forgot the dog, came out under the poplars to call him for a bit of bread; he

called in vain; knowing that Toppa never wandered away, and was ever alert to answer his voice, he stepped across the strip of woodland, meaning to whistle down the road. His eye fell on the dead body in the dust. He threw himself on his knees beside it. One glance told him the truth; one instant he gave to grief, passionate as though he had seen a brother perish.

        Then on his feet he leapt; with a great shout to all the saints of heaven for justice, he ran fleet as a deer down the road to see who was in sight; the name of Bindo Terri sprang to his lips, and the figure he saw afar off flying in the dust was Bindo's.

        Swift as the hurricane the young fellow tore in the wake of the guard, who now was spurred with a dire terror, and ran not knowing what he did. With one last bound

like that of the hound on to the wolf, Carmelo seized Bindo in his grasp.

        'You have killed my dog!'

        'I? No--no--no!'

        'You have!' swore Carmelo, with an oath, and shook the slenderer form of the guard in his grip.

        Bindo gathered up a desperate courage.

        'I have not killed him, no. He may have picked up poison on the road--it is the law, the law allows it.'

        Carmelo's hand closed on his throat.

        Without a word the more, he dragged him to the edge of the wood where some wood was lying for fencing, and with his other hand snatching a stave of oak, swung Bindo Terri backwards and forwards, striking him on the head, the arms, the shoulders, with the wood the while; men were at work in the vineyards beside

the road; they screamed, and ran, and caught the arm of the young Pastorini, and, being five to one, wrenched him asunder from the trembling frame of Bindo, being willing enough to see harm wrought on the body of the guard, but afraid of the law if they looked on at the death of one of its myrmidons, and Carmelo, left alone, would have killed in that rude justice which a righteous vengeance is.

        The moment that the vine-dressers freed him, Bindo Terri staggered away, sick, bleeding, bruised, and nearly dead with fright. Carmelo struggled in vain in the hold of five strong men.

        'He has killed Toppa!' he gasped, his eyes bloodshot, his muscles straining, his whole body writhing to be free.

        'Ay, ay! has he done that?--and he merits death himself,' muttered the eldest of

the peasants. 'But they will have the law on you, and worse for touching him, the vile little villain, that the snakes must have spawned.'

        'My dog! My dog!' moaned Carmelo, as his passion dissolved into an agony of grief, and his eyes filled with blinding tears, and dully and stupidly he went back to where the dead dog lay, and sat down by him in the dust, and wept.

        The men stood around silent and sorrowful, but sorely afraid.

        Bindo Terri was a poisoner and a scoundrel, but the arm and the shield of the law were over him, and made him sacred, as religions of old made sacred the snake and the toad.

        The law here ordains that you cannot be arrested for anything you do, unless you be taken in the act, even though the deed be

clearly proved against you. But there are sins so heinous as to be beyond this mercy, as the crimes in the Latin documents of the Vatican are beyond pardon, human or divine. Carmelo's was such a crime.

        You may lay a sacrilegious finger on the Host with more ease than on the person of a municipal guard. Nay, there is more fuss when one is touched than when the King is shot at: if Passavanti had tried to assassinate a guard instead of a sovereign, he would not have been let off the scaffold so easily as he was. Therefore, when Bindo Terri picked himself up, staggered into the house of the elder guard, Angelo, which was within a rood of the millhouse, an there fell down, groaning aloud that he had been murdered by the devil Carmelo, the elder man flew, as one possessed, down the road to the picket of the carabiniers, and brought them to the

spot to avenge a foul and inexcusable assault whose end would be sooner or later death; and clamoured and roared and raved, while Bindo, dying Bindo, raved with him, and forced the gendarmes to go and seize the assassin. Law can stretch at either end when wanted.

        The carabiniers, with their sabres and their white belts flashing in the sun, strode straightaway, therefore, to the mill upon the Rosa and laid hands on the youth, who sat on the bench of his house under the trees with the dead dog at this feet, and his father and brothers and neighbours gathered around him in sad sympathy.

        'But to-morrow is his marriage-day!' stammered the old father, half mad himself with rage and sorrow.

        The carabiniers laughed a little grimly and pulled Carmelo up roughly by his arms,

and marched from the door, pushing him with them. In their hearts they sympathised with both the Pastorini, but it was not their place to say so.

        'I did what I had a right to do,' muttered the lad firmly. 'He killed my dog: I beat him, the poisoner, the devil; I would have beaten him till he could not have stood: I had the right.'

        'You had no right even to complain. Your dog was the offender; he was on the public road,' shrieked the elder rural guard Angelo, and shook off the miller and thrust Carmelo on between the gendarmes.

        'I will go with you without force,' said the youth haughtily. 'I have no fear; I was in the right.'

        And he walked steadily, only turning and pausing once to say to his father, who followed him:

        'Do not come; stay and bury Toppa. Bury him just there by the porch. He will know we pass in and out, and he will not feel alone. And tell Viola not to mind; it will go well with me; no judge will keep me for a moment when he hears how it all came about.'

        The carabiniers behind his back looked at one another and raised their eyebrows satirically. They knew well how the Law would deal with this brave young fellow.

        They took him through the village to the lock-up of the place.

        Early though it was, everyone was astir, and all had heard that Bindo Terri had been thrashed by the younger Pastorini; some had heard that Bindo was dead outright; not a soul regretted his fate if it were so; but not a soul either dared to say what they felt

or stretch the hand of friendship to the prisoner.

        Only old Gigi Canterelli stepped bravely out of his shop and cried to him, 'My lad, if you want a little money or a good word, remember I am here, and send for me.'

        But no one else said a syllable.

        Carmelo was thankful that as the way to the prison led through the centre of the piazza they did not pass the house of Pippo; he trusted that Viola would know nothing until his sister could reach her and soften the blow to her by tender modes of narration, as women know how to do one with another.

        But sad mischance would have it that in the centre of the square he met old Pippo carrying three rush chairs on his back, which he let fall in the extremity of his amaze.

        God's mercy, lad, what hast been

doing?' he called to his son-in-law of the morrow; and he began to tremble wofully. Carmelo trembled too, for the sorrow that he caused.

        'Grandfather,' he said tenderly; it was the first time he used the name; 'do not be alarmed. Bindo Terri killed Toppa, and I have avenged him; that is all. The good judge will judge me innocent.'

        'O Lord, O Lord!' groaned Pippo, all in a palsy of fear and sorrow; 'what matters of being innocent? If you touch a hair of the head of those slave-driving, venomous, viperous jackanapes it is all over with you, all over with you! And to-morrow your wedding-day, and my girl at home stitching the veil; O Lord, O Lord!'

        The carabiniers hurried Carmelo onwards. 'A pestilent, seditious, foul-mouthed old tongue that fellow has,' said they to one

another; and they thrust the young Pastorini with scant mercy into the place of detention; a square bare cell with a brick floor, damp and dirty, and a barred door and a little grated casement high up in the wall.

        'But take me to the judge!' cried Carmelo; 'take me somewhere to be heard!'

        'All in good time,' said the carabiniers, and banged the door to on him, and drew the bolts outside it.

        Meanwhile, Viola, sitting in the doorway with the little brook running babbling over the stones in front of her, was stitching some orange-blossoms she had picked off a tree on to the veil she would wear on the morrow; she was singing in a soft low voice one of the love-songs of the country:
Al piè d'un faggio in sull'erba fiorita
Aspetto, aspetto, che giù cada il sole;
Perche quando sarà l'aria imbrunita
Appunto allor vedrò spuntar il sole,
Levarsi quel bel sol che m'ha ferita,
Che mi ha ferita e che guarir mi vuole.
E questo sol, ch'io dico, è il mio bel damo,
Che sempre io gli riprico io t'amo, io t'amo,
E questo sole è il giovanettin bello
Chi a Ferragosto mi darà l'annello. *

        She was happy. The fear of her powerful tempter and enemy had passed away from her, and the future smiled at her with the eyes of love and faith. A life of labour, of poverty, of fatigue awaited her, but also a life of sunshine, of affection, of peace; to the first she was well used, the second seemed to her heaven.

___________________

At foot of hill, amidst the flow'ring grass,
I wait, I wait, until the sun shall set;
Because, when all the air is dusk and dark,
Scarce will the drooping sun the night have met,
Than will arise that sun which wounded me,
Which wounded me, and now my cure will bring;
And this fair sun, I tell thee, is my love,
To whom, in echo, 'Love, O Love!' I sing.
And this fair sun is that most beauteous youth
Who, August dawn'd, will bring to me the ring!
        Ferragosto is literally--first of August.

CHAPTER VIII.

        So the long hours rolled on, and Carmelo remained in the dirty cramped little den behind the barred door. His father and

brothers and poor sad old Pippo came to visit him, and the Pastorini paid for him to be kept apart from any other malefactors, and Gigi Canterelli sent him a smoking dish to break his fast with, and a flask of wine. But Carmelo could scarce touch either, and had hardly a word to speak except over and over again he said,

        'Is Toppa buried?--Viola is not angry that I avenged him?'

        No other ideas save these seemed to be in his brain; he was dull, and yet fierce; quite changed from the gentle and grave, yet blithe and simple, lad that he had always been.

        'God forbid I should say that you did wrong; who would not have struck a blow for the poor dog?' said his father weeping. 'But oh, the pity of it, to see one of my honest sons in these thieves' den!'

        For the Pastorini youths had never had a stain or slur upon their name, and for many a generation the men at the mill had been law-abiding, God-fearing, and most dutiful sons of the soil.

        'I did right!' said Carmelo doggedly, and his brothers all echoed, 'Yes, you did right. But alas!--alas!--'

        Meanwhile Messer Nellemane stood by the bedside of Bindo, who had taken to his bed at once, and groaned, and shivered, and vowed all his bones were broken, and the complaisant apothecary rolled him up in wadding soaked in almond oil, and pretended he might die; Messer Nellemane, tenderly regretful and benevolently compassionate, bent over the sufferer and said in benignant tones:

        'My poor, poor fellow! This is all your reward for a too zealous love of duty, and of

course you never touched the dog at all; is it not so?'

        Bindo opened wide his eyes, and almost grinned in his employer's face; then, recollecting himself, gasped as though his breath were failing him.

        'Not I, Signore; he was stiff and stark, poor beast, when I came upon the road.'

        'Precisely, ' said Messer Nellemane. 'That will be put in evidence. The Pastorini have long borne you a grudge, you say, and took this excuse to pay it off on you. A shocking case. A most brutal assault.'

        He shook his head as he spoke, above the bed of the victim, and the pliant apothecary shook his.

        'Contusion of the vertebra,' he murmured, 'and sympathetic action may supervene in the heart and lungs, and then--'

        'Hush! he has youth on his side,' said Messer Nellemane tenderly, and stroked the curly head of the guard as he might have stroked a child or a puppy, had he not happened to hate both pups and children.

        When he left the sick chamber, taking the parish doctor with him, the invalid sat up in bed and shouted to the old woman who waited on him.

        'Give me my pipe and a beaker of that Vin Santo, and fry me some tripe and artichokes, and hand me the Book of Fate.'

        The Book of Fate was the teller of dreams and foreteller of lucky numbers for the public lottery, and with this favourite literature, and his tobacco, and his wine, the murderer of Toppa passed a brave and merry day, even though he was supposed to be upon his death-bed, and was wrapped up in oil, and had begged to see the priest, and had

all the sycophants of the place (which, to do Santa Rosalia justice, were not many), coming perpetually about his door, and asking whether he was out of danger.

        At home Viola was passing the bright hours weeping and kneeling before her little clay figure of the Mother of the Poor.

        Old 'Nunziatina was seated beside her, rocking herself to and fro on her elm staff.

        'My candle was no good!' she moaned, 'and yet I spent all I had!'

CHAPTER IX.

        Pomodoro-Carciofi was a twin township, as Buda-Pest is a twin city; it was very small, very dusty, very ugly; there were a good many dyers in it, and the smell of the dye was in its atmosphere; it had a noble campanile and some fine frescoes of Luini's, but nobody ever came to look at them; it had also had an altar-piece of the Memmi's, but one fine day somebody had sold that, and it being everybody's, and so nobody's, business to punish the thief, it went unpunished, and a large oleograph was stuck up by the municipality in place of the Memmi, and the townsfolk liked it better because it had more colour in it.

        The court of law was in a dull, grim, stone house that looked upon a blind wall at the back of the church that rejoiced in the oleograph; and ugly square room, which had been newly whitewashed, was the

audience and judgment chamber; and here all criminal cases of the rural commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda were tried and decided by the young attorney who administered the law to some ten thousand persons in all matters, from a fifty-franc debt to murder, arson, and theft, and who had for his salary about as much as one gives one's groom, and not half what one gives one's coachman.

        The country is divided into districts; each district has its own Pretore, who unites in his one ill-paid person the onerous duties of county-court, civil, and criminal judge. In England the first of these offices is deemed worth as many hundreds a year as it gets pounds here. That, notwithstanding such treatment, the Preture-ship is sometimes filled by very excellent and upright men, is a credit to the legal fraternity of Italy; it is no thanks to the administration. A man

has the peace, the purse, the virtue, the liberty, almost the life, of a whole community in his hands, and he is paid less than a groom or gardener!--as a jewel in a toad's head is a just man in this office.

        The country Pretore can be harassed by the King's Proctor, and his verdicts can be protested against in the city courts, but for the main part, and certainly over all the poor classes of his districts, he is unresisted and his decrees are inviolable. Aristides in so onerous a position could scarcely mete out perfect justice. I have known, as I say, admirable and excellent persons in this post, and I respect them deeply; but they are rare exceptions, naturally, and in the lonely country places the Pretore exercises a power that is practically irresistible, and that would be a perilous temptation to a Solon.

        A crowd had got about the law court this

day, for the rumour had run like wildfire that the miller's son at Santa Rosalia had murdered the rural guard. His father and brothers, and Gigi Canterelli had come over to see if they could aid, or speak for, him, and they had brought poor old half-frantic Pippo with them; beside these there were the apothecary and Bindo's friends, and also the Public Minister, as the little lawyer is called who prosecutes for the Municipality, and there were also the Chancellors and the Conciliators of both borough and village.

        Messer Nellemane stayed at home; he was never seen in person to appear against any member of the commune, in great cases or small. He always said this with a deprecating smile, that it did not become one who served them in the capacity he filled, to sway the balance of justice either way.

        Nevertheless, he was very good friends

with the Pretore of Pomodoro and Carciofi; a young advocate, fussy and bustling, and of as shrewd a nose for promotion as ever a dog of the south for truffles; a young advocate who hated Pomodoro and all belonging to it, and its musty court, and its simple population, and the scanty forty pounds a year it gave him, but who, nevertheless took them all as stepping stones. In the future he, too, meant to be a statesman.

        This day the young man, who was a little, sallow, sharp-eyed creature, by no means imposing, even though he donned a black robe and black cap, just as those that Portia wore, took a violent aversion at first sight to Carmelo as the accused, between the carabiniers, was marched in front of the Pretore's desk.

        This day should have been the youth's

nuptial day, and his heart was aching, and his blood burning, and his face was very pale; nevertheless he walked erect, and with a firm step trod the steps of the Pretura between the carabiniers with their clanking swords.

        Carmelo was the true peasant of his country; with shapely limbs and throat, like a young gladiator's, and a handsome face, with the features regular, and the blue eyes large, and the skin delicate, though of a healthy, sun-tanned hue.

        This bold and picturesque-looking lad, who faced him with hardihood and even haughtiness, displeased the young judge, who was himself a city-bred, saturnine, and dissipated weakling. He felt at once assured that this miller's son was a dangerous and violent character, and he listened with willing ear to all the invectives against the

accused made by the lawyer, who prosecuted on the behalf of the municipality.

        The Pastorini had never known that they ought to bring a lawyer, and old Pippo, in an agony, pulled Gigi Canterelli's coat, and whispered:

        'There's a notary against him--there's a man of law against him. O Lord! O Lord! he's no more chance than a lamb when it's hung up by the heels, head downward!'

        'Eh!' muttered Gigi with a sigh, 'in our old times one young fellow fought it out with another, when there was any bone to pick, and no one meddled; it was the best man won; now, Lord save us! if but two cats set up their backs and spit, there's law about it.'

        'Order there! Silence!' cried the usher; and the case for the prosecution went on glibly till, listening to it, the brains

of the Pastorini, father and son, reeled and almost gave way.

        Carmelo began to say to himself in amaze, 'Am I indeed this villain double-dyed?'

        For the advocate of the commune, instructed sub rosâ by Messer Nellemane, was a very eloquent-tongued man indeed, who, having little to do, and very small means indeed, had always his oratory ready bottled and almost bursting, like ginger-beer upon a summer's day.

        When he had done his plea for the prosecution, and had resumed his seat, there was no one to answer or refute him.

        Carmelo and his friends knew too late the terrible blunder they had committed in their ignorance of having no other man of law there to reply him.

        The examination of the accused began.

        Carmelo, answering as to his age and name, and parentage, added then in a firm voice,

        'Bindo Terri poisoned my dog; I beat him; yes, if I had killed him I should have done no wrong; he is a beast; he is a devil; he tortures brutes and men--'

        'Silence!' said the Judge. 'You can vilify no one. You are only to answer my questions, one by one, as I put them to you.'

        'But he is right! He is right!' shrieked old Pippo, pressing forward to the bar, behind which he and the rest of the public were hemmed it. 'He is right! He is right! By the word of Christ our Saviour! Bindo Terri wanted to stop my brook running; wanted to make me pay for the good God's own clear spring water--'

        'Take that fool out of court,' said the

Pretore, and old man was carried out struggling and screaming for justice.

        Then the cross-examination of Carmelo began again in such an endless intricacy of questions that the boy's head whirled. Wiser and more worldly-trained intelligences than his have been confused, and blurred, and bewildered out of their own sense of memory and certitude of fact by the brow-beating of such an interrogation.

        Did he see Bindo Terri poison his dog? No: he did not see it; but the guard poisoned all the dogs he could get at; that anyone knew; the guard poisoned Toppa, certainly, certainly. So he kept on saying, again and again, almost stupidly; and the tears welled into his eyes, and began to fall down his cheeks, thinking of the dead dog, and of the maiden sitting weeping at home on the

day that should have been her marriage morn.

        The Pretore and, after him, the lawyer for the prosecution tormented him over and over again to much the same purport. All Carmelo could say was, 'he poisoned the dog; he poisoned the dog.'

        That was all he could say.

        He had no proofs.

        His father begged to speak for him, but was told it was not permitted. Gigi Canterelli, with the moisture in his eyes, begged, too, to testify to his excellent nature and great amiability; and the Vicar of Santa Rosalia entreated to be heard as to the youth's good and kindly character, his docility and his honesty, as one who had known him from his infancy upward.

        But this latter witness harmed him rather than benefitted him in the eyes of

the Pretore, who a libero pensiero; and, being thus liberal in principle, would have garotted all priests, melted down all church bells, and smashed the crucifix in every household.

        He said, snappishly, that the preliminary examination was not a time for the testimony of an amicus curiæ to be admitted in evidence; such could be heard at the trial itself; and then, after very busily looking over his notes, and conferring with his Chancellor, and muttering, and scribbling, and frowning, and believing that he looked like Jules Favre, whom he had seen in a fortnightly visit to Paris, the young Pretore summed up in a voice shrill and stern, and said that he had never heard of a more unprovoked, brutal, and infamous assault, that there had evidently not been the very slightest excuse or provocation for it, and

that as the evidence of the most excellent the apothecary went conclusively to prove that the life of Bindo Terri had been imperilled, and that the said Bindo Terri still lay prostrate in a state that might at any moment bring about a fatal end, and in which it was quite impossible to be able to examine him personally, he deemed it inconsistent with the interests of justice and the safety of the public to leave the accused at liberty, guilty, by his own confession, as he was; therefore he would order Pastorini Carmelo to be kept in durance and surveillance until such time as his trial could be fully heard, and sentence given upon him.

        There was a murmur of dissent amongst the crowd.

        His father shook like a leaf. His brothers muttered curses deep and fierce.

        Carmelo stood like one scared; his eyes

wide open, his face flashing crimson, his nostrils breathing hard, as though he were out of breath from running.

        'In prison, I!' he cried in a loud voice. 'And why is he let go free, the thief, the spy, the poisoner?'

        'Remove him,' said the Pretore sharply, with a frown; and the guards, taking him by each arm, forced him away.

        When a little later, when other causes had been heard, the Vicar, a fine-looking and white-haired old man, ventured on a private remonstrance with the young judge, the young man took him sharply up.

        'Impossible!' he answered. 'It was a clear assault, a ruffianly assault; and made upon a functionary of the law. The law must be respected. It must make examples.'

        So the friends of Carmelo could only drive wearily back in the rickety diligence

from Pomodoro to Santa Rosalia with aching hearts and weary bodies; and old Pippo, staggering in, white with lime dust of the road, and hoarse with weeping, could only cry like a child, and sob out in broken whispers the story of this cruel day.

        Carmelo himself was detained in the prison of the town, and Viola could only lay aside her bridal gown with the orange petals to keep it sweet, and heads of lavender and dried rose leaves, withered like her hopes and joys.

        Bindo Terri was so elated that it was all the apothecary could do to keep him from jumping out of bed and skipping down the stairs into the street.

        'But you are in danger of your life,' screamed the Æsculapius, throwing his arms about the victim; and Bindo grinned from ear to ear, showing teeth as white as lilies.

        'Let's crack a flask over the good news,' said he, and Æsculapius drank with him.

        Meanwhile his master, in the caffè of Nuova Italia, was smoking serenely, and wore a serious and sorrowful cast of countenance.

        'A very sad thing to befall an honest family,' said Messer Nellemane. 'But the Law must be respected, and all violence must be repressed.'

        The brigadier to whom he spoke assented with his lips, not with his heart; he had been a brave soldier in his day, and did not love his work of torturing the poor, in accordance with the rules of Polizia Igiena e Edilità.

        'He was a good youth, this Carmelo,' he said hesitatingly; 'never have I seen him in brawl or trouble of any kind, nor ever the worse for drink, nor ever in bad houses; his momentary passion overcame him.'

        'The Law does not recognize passion,' said Messer Nellemane coldly, and the brigadier dared say no more lest he should be reported to his commanding officer, away in the city, as lax in his discipline and an aider and abettor of offenders.

        Thus does a single strong will govern others.

CHAPTER X.

        The Ministry had been defeated on the burning question of a poll-tax on cows, their husbands, and their children. The Ministry was convinced that all the bovine race should be taxed per head at the place they lived in,

as well as taxed at the gates when driven through them for sale, and taxed at the market when changed into meat; all bulls, cows, and calves were to pay a poll-tax of twenty francs a head annually, and as this was considered to hurt the agricultural interest which a progressive Ministry naturally considered of no account at all, it had been asserted that the tax would be accepted and become law.

        There was, however, in the Chambers an ex-notary who cared not all for bulls, cows, and calves, and as little for the agricultural interest, but cared very much for himself. He had been Home Minister once for six weeks; he had ceased to be it on account of a ridiculous fuss that was made in the papers about his buying a piano with the public money for a lady whose character wa light as a syllabub; naturally he always

burned to become it once more, and have his own way with pianos and all other articles, including the nation. So he had turned against his old friends, who had not supported him loyally in the matter of the piano, and had set up for himself in business, as it were, and had a separate set of principles and a separate little party, which was to the Chamber in general as is the gadfly to the horse.

        With the separate little party he vigorously attacked the cow-tax; bulls, he said, might be called on to support their share in the maintenance of the national expenses, but cows, never! He drew such a touching picture of the cruelty in taxing the milk-giving mothers of the herd, to whom so many human infants, bereft of their natural food, owed life itself, &c., that the ladies in the gallery all wept, and the few gentlemen

in the Chamber who owned land took heart of grace, and these being further strengthened by the very large minority who hated the Ministry for the best and fiercest of all reasons, that they wanted to be in its place, the bill was thrown out amidst hooting and groaning and screaming, and the Ministry desired, or at least offered, to resign.

        But the King, who was tired of death of all parties, and of their squabbling, told the House to go to the country, and dissolved Parliament. Thereupon all the attorneys, adventurers, and Jews became hopeful and riotous, and the few gentlemen very anxious, being sadly conscious that every year they grew less and less influential against the noise and the intrigues of the others.

        Now Pomodoro had the right to send a deputy for the district in which the

commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda was situated, and Pomodoro had two candidates, one the Marchese Roldano, and the other one Luca Finti, a lawyer. Roldano was a stately, gracious, and very kindly gentleman, who had led a life as simple as it was dignified; he had represented Pomodoro many years. Luca Finti was a very clever Neapolitan rogue, who had been in Parliament for other places, could talk a forest-tree into sawdust, as the people said, and was the Liberal, though not the Ministerial, candidate.

        The Cavaliere Durellazzo, not a very wise man, had been set by his Prefect in the city, a not easy task. The existing Prefect was of course a Ministerialist; Prefects always are, and in consequence are changed as quickly as signals on a railway. With regard to the elections in the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda, the Prefect was in sore trouble.

The commune, like the province, was reactionary, and had always returned the Marchese Roldano, whose brother was a cardinal and whose father had been a Grand Duke's prime minister. Opposed to the Marchese was this Lucia Finti, one of the Dissidenti who had slipped into the contest before the Ministerialists had put forward their own candidate. If Vezzaja and Ghiralda, and the other two communes which with it made up the Collegio of Pomodoro, divided up the little liberal feeling there was by setting up a man all their own, the divided liberal votes would of a certainty let in the reactionary Roldano.

        Luca Finti had got a start, and had trumps in his hand, through the good-will of the strozzino Zauli, in whose strong boxes mortgages and other engagements of nine-tenths of the country gentlemen of the pro-

vince were locked up in safety. The Prefect thought he saw nothing for it but to wink at the Finti election and undermine the Finti principles. To get at the Marchese in any such a manner was hopeless. So the Prefect coquetted with the Dissidente, and the Dissidente coquetted with him; Messer Luca Finti being an adept at this kind of political flirtation.

        As for his principles, indeed, they were of small compass, and could be put in a handbag and left behind, if need be, by accident. He knew very well that he who would travel quickly and scale heights rapidly must carry but little of such baggage.

        Although at this moment in the full flower and fury of dissent, he was a very clever man, and had made the Ministry feel that he would no longer rebel and fume if it were worth his while not to do so, and had also made the

conservative side believe that with a little persuasion and profit he would not be averse to join his guerilla forces to their veteran phalanx, and march with them against his old comrades.

        So the task set before the Cavaliere Durellazzo, as before the other syndics concerned in this election, was to get Messer Luca Finti elected without in any way compromising the Ministry, and in such a manner that at the end of it the Prefect would be able to issue a manifesto describing his own perfect impartiality, and his willingness for every one to act up to conscientious convictions, however opposed to his own those convictions might be.

        The Cavaliere Durellazzo ostensibly accepted this onerous enterprise, but it was his secretary who mapped out all the secret campaign.

        Moltke, with the ordnance map of France before him, never had graver meditations or finer combinations than had Messer Gaspardo Nellemane now. A little persuasion here, a little pressure there, a hinted threat, a well-timed bribe, a final compression of that punishment-collar which the municipalities put on the throat of the people, and all this to be done under the rose, behind the mask of a strict non-intervention--he never had been happier or of more importance.

        As he was a servant of the State, he ought to have had no vote and nothing whatever to do with the elections; but, as Italy does not at present see the force of this great truth, all her prefects and syndics meddle and make in all elections, and all her clerks, guards, and servants of all kinds can vote, and the result is the Montecitorio we all behold and admire.

        Messer Nellemane had at once discerned the fitness of Signor Luca Finti, and Signor Luca Finti had at one discerned the talents of Messer Nellemane. To be sure, Messer Nellemane was only the petty clerk of a petty commune, but then Luca Finti had once been only a clerk too, and some said had been things much worse, like Sir Pandarus in 'Troilus and Cressida.'

        So there was a fellow-feeling between them, and even had there not been, Messer Nellemane would have supported the candidate that he was ordered to support in his own efficient, adroit, and quiet way, which burrowed unseen like a mole in the ground.

        Now Vezzaja and Ghiralda was an agricultural country like nearly all the rest of Italy, and it was very unwilling that anyone should represent it who should put that

abhorred tax upon the cows, therefore the present election required all the tact and resources that a vigorous and active intelligence could command, and strained the powers of the Government well-wishers to the uttermost.

        The Marchese Roldano, moreover, was much respected in the province, and lived like a patriarch in his great old castellated villa, amidst his olive orchards and his chestnut woods, and was not easy to defeat.

        So Messer Nellemane secretly toiled by day and night for he return of Signor Finti, and was so busy that he scarcely remembered Viola, except when he passed the door and saw her sitting spinning or plaiting within, very pale, very wasted, very weary-looking; and at such times his black eyes would gleam as if gas were lighted behind them, and he would feel a thrill of rage, a glow of triumph:

but at other times he was too occupied to think of her.

        He even thought with a shudder that he might have compromised his public career for a woman! for a poor girl going barefoot in the shallows of the Rosa water!

        In the lives of great men love can claim but a second place.

        Messer Gaspardo and Messer Luca had many a colloquy together, and found their views of a surprising harmony. When all your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if not to your practice.

        Messer Luca Finti was hand-and-glove with the ex-minister who had got into trouble about the piano, and promised if only he should be returned for Pomodoro to do great things for Messer Nellemane, who, for

his part, being shrewd enough to know that a man's civility only lasts as long as his need of you, took care to know a great deal about the Finti method of canvassing, which would not have looked well in the light of public opinion; while he also conceived and mainly carried out the grand design by which all the brigade of carabiniers throughout the province was moved about from town to town rapidly and bewilderingly, so that they scored their votes for full six candidates in six different collegie, with great success for the Ministerial party and the cow-tax, and placed the Prefect and all his grandeur for ever in the debt of the humble secretary of the village commune.

        Not that the cow-tax, though thundered against by the conservative party, was spoken of either, by any of the ministerials canvassing in the province; they knew

better; they made florid and beautiful speeches full of sesquipedalian phrases, in which they spoke about the place of Italy among the great Powers, the dangers of jealousy and invasion from other nations, the magnificence of the future, the blessings of education, the delights of liberty, the wickedness of the Opposition, the sovereign rights of the people; and said it all so magnificently and so bewilderingly that the people never remembered till it was too late that they had said nothing about opposing the cow-tax or indeed any taxes at all, but listened, and gaped, and shouted, and clapped; and being told that they could sit at a European congress to decide on the fate of Epirus, were for the moment oblivious that they had bad bread, dear wine, scant meat, an army of conscripts, and a bureaucracy that devoured them as maggots a cheese. What is political

eloquence for, if not to make the people forget all such things as these?

        Messer Luca Finti, who had that many-sidedness of mind that he could have found equally brilliant arguments either for or against any measure that he might have deemed it expedient to support, cared far more to injure the aristocratic party than to damage the Government; the Government, indeed, having been his own party till his leader had been annoyed about the piano. His single object was to get returned; once returned, he, with the other Dissidenti, would trust to their natural talents to worry themselves into office, either by re-union with their whilom friends, or coalition with their eternal foes. Therefore, he had quickly taken the Prefectorial hint not to commit himself on the cow-tax in either way; a discreet neutrality was all that was asked of

him, and that was difficult enough in face of the rampant rage of the country proprietors. But Luca Finti, who had once been a little, naked, idle rogue by his native shores of Amalfi, could trust to his mother wit to dazzle out of all remembrance of the main question of the elections, the elective body of the Collegio of Pomodoro. He told them, instead, that it had been only the tact and wisdom of the Dissidenti that had saved them from being involved in the impending war between Russia and China.

        Russia and China, he said, were to be left to fight it out, but when the fight was over, Italy would allow no treaty to be made that would compromise her rights, and would lay a claim to a portion of Mongolia, as a precaution against the influence of France in Cochin-China.

        Here, again, he was loudly applauded.

Not a notion had they of where, or what, Mongolia was, but it was something to be got for nothing, and which the French folks would dislike: that was enough. Not to fire a shot, not to draw a sword, but to get an acquisition of territory, and give the victors of Solferino a slap in the face; this seemed to his audience very clever indeed. Only one demurring voice was heard, which screamed, 'Will the Mongolians take the grapes out of the country? The French merchants came buying them up last year, and it's a shame.' But this speaker who was a vinaio, was hushed down as a rusty and dull conservative.

        To sell your grapes to foreigners, and have none at all at home is a spirited commerce, and fine free trade; that the poor souls around are all poisoned with cheap chemicals in the absence of wine,

is only an evidence of all that science can do.

        Messer Luca Finti said nothing about the grapes, but he would up with a great deal about Gambetta; one of the dyers nudged another and said, 'That's the King's brother, isn't it?' and the other replied, 'No, No; 'tis the German that took Paris;' and much edified, the assembled voters listened to the sonorous declarations of the new candidate.

        When the Marchese Roldano said to them in their own homely phrase:

        'Dear friends; bread is dearer in Italy by fifteen centimes a chilo than it is in Paris. I think that fact is more consequence to you than M. Gambetta:'

        Then the hungry stomachs applauded indeed, but the hungry stomachs were not the voters; and the dyers, and shopkeepers, and small proprietors who had the votes

were of opinion that, though, no doubt bread was very dear, yet to talk about it did not make pretty speechifying, and said to one another, that if Italy got that bit of Mongolia then, no doubt, bread would come down like winking.

        Oratorical dust is easily thrown in the eyes of all multitudes, but never so easily as here.

        The Marchese called a few of them together in his own room and showed them a map.

        'He is laughing at you,' he said to them. 'Look where the Mongolian Empire is, and Russia and China.'

        But the map did not convince them. 'If we get it for nothing, without fighting, Mongolia will be a good thing,' they said stubbornly, and the idea grew in Pomodoro that the Marchese was a poor spirit, and unworthy to represent them.

        As they were used to be led by the priests, so they were now led by the placemen.

        The advantage of the exchange was questionable.

        Signore Luca Finti made his oration successfully in the Pretura of Pomodoro, speaking in the same chamber where Carmelo had been brought to judgement, since it was the largest in that town; and the good folks who heard him, understanding about one half that he said, and dazzled by the other half, imbibed only the conviction that they were the glory and wonder of Europe, and said one to another that to be sure the Marchese Roldano had never told them all these fine things.

        Then the agents of Signore Finti, sitting there as mere auditors, muttered to their neighbours that it was the interest of the nobility everywhere and at all seasons to keep the people ignorant; and this idea

worked its way into the shaven heads of the Pomodorians and stirred their vanity as yeast stirs the flour, and made them say one to another in the streets in the evening, as they lounged and smoked and chattered, that it was a very fine thing to be a great nation, and to have ships bigger than any that could be boasted of even by that great buccatone * and buscatore, + England.

        The Pomodorian mind was not wide, nor was it brilliant; it understood wine, oil, and dyes, but there it closed; it thought England was somewhere down Rome way, as it thought Austria was somewhere over the hills; it still believed in the priest's blessing on the fields, in the poisonous nature of frogs, in the weather prophecies of its calendario, in hydrophobia being as common as catarrh, and in other things of a like en-
___________________

* Hypocrite.

lightenment; it did not in the least know what a congress meant, nor where the Epirus was, and it had a vague notion of Europe as of a disorderly place beyond seas where you sent pictures and wine when you had more than you wanted of either.

        Yet so strong is the power of vanity, and so strong is the power of oratory, that Pomodoro voted by a big majority for Messer Luca Finti, because he had told them he would make them a Power, though he had never said he would cheapen bread, extinguish conscription, or lighten any of the burdens with which the land is laden, as a pack-mule is 'chinked' on the march.

        Great is the might of words--above all, is it great in Italy.

CHAPTER XI.

away much of the grain of the neighbouthood. Old Pastorini had gone to an attorney in the town and put his son's cause in his hands, seeing how badly for want of a lawyer things had fared with Carmelo; but the lawyer had said, 'After the elections: after the elections,' and no more could be got out of him, though he accepted his preliminary fees.

        'After the elections,' said the miller with a tremulous sigh to his son, in the few times he was allowed to visit the prison.

        Carmelo shook his head.

        He had known men innocent of any crime kept in prison for months and months, without being allowed a trial; it is probably by way of compensation that assassins and thieves are allowed very often to go scot free for months and months without being had up to justice.

        Carmelo had changed greatly; the lithe, active, bright-eyed, sunburned youth, always at work in the air, up when the dusk of dawn veiled the earth, accustomed to spend his blithe strength in healthy labour, was shut up here as a young lion is shut up in a cage, and grew pallid, shrunken, hollow-eyed; a sullen dull anger slumbered in his eyes, and a listless despondency had replaced this calm yet buoyant spirits.

        But there was no one to take any heed of that. Even the lawyer retained for him, who visited him once and asked him some rapid questions, said impatiently: 'There are a hundred causes to be heard before yours. I doubt if you will get sentence before All Saints' Day.'

        For though the attorney had taken up his cause, being tempted by the sight of the elder Pastorinis' well-thumbed national notes,

he did not much care for it; he felt that it was not very nice work, to defend a lad unpopular without.the municipal powers, and who was guilty of having assaulted a guard. These cases get a lawyer in bad odour.

        In the room in the Carcere where he was spending his wretched hours, of no use or profit to himself or to mankind, Carmelo, through the open window, barred close high up in the wall, could hear the roar of the assembled people inside the Pretura, as they were applauding this speech which was Greek to them. The Pretura was opposite to him, and not many metres divided the one building of Law from the other.

        He had heard from his gaoler what was going on; why the town was in such tumult night and day; and he knew that one of

the Liberals was standing against the old, white-haired, regal-looking Marquis.

        'Perhaps if he be elected he would do something for us,' thought Carmelo wistfully. 'Perhaps he would take away all those clerks and guards, and say the poor dogs might use the legs God gave them?'

        And Carmelo's heavy heart rose a little, and he felt a little hopeful and glad when his gaoler told him, at twilight, that Luca Finti was elected Deputy for Pomodoro by so large a majority that no ballot was needed.*

        When the twilight deepened into night bands played, rockets went off, fireworks threw their many-coloured reflections into the prison cell, where Carelo sat on his wooden bench.

___________________

Unless one of the candidates has two-thirds of the votes, there is a ballot after the polling.

        Pomodoro drank too much, and fought a little, and rejoiced greatly, having a vague serious idea that it had done something very fine indeed in electing the advocate from Naples.

        'Shall we be any the better?' said Carmelo doubtfully to his gaoler, a chatty, good-humoured man, who was sorry for him.

        The gaoler shrugged his shoulders.

        'He is going to give us gas and a tromböi.' *

        'Gas! We had never vine disease, nor rose disease, till there was gas in the city,' said Carmelo, and here he did not exaggerate; for in Italy neither were known until gas works were introduced.

        The gaoler shrugged his shoulders again.

        'Our people want it. He says he will get it.'

___________________

Tramway.

        'And besides? --'

        'Well, nothing much besides, except that we are to be a bigger nation than England or any in Europe.'

        'What is England?' said Carmelo.

        'It is a place where the poor souls have no wine of their own, I think,' said the gaoler. 'And they make cannons and cheese. You see their people over here now and then. They carry red bibles, and they go about with their mouths open and catch flies, * and they run into all the little old dusty places; you must have seen them.'

        'And why do we want to have anything to do with them?'

        'They will come in ships and fire at us if we are not bigger and stronger than they,' said the gaoler. 'We must build iron
___________________

The bocca aperta of the English physiognomy is always a great diversion to all Italians.

houses, that float, and go on the sea, and meet them.'

        'What is the sea?' said Carmelo; for how should he know, he who never had been out of the confines of Santa Rosalia.

        But the gaoler was not very sure himself, and so said sharply he 'had no time for talk,' and withdrew the pewter plate that had carried in his prisoner's supper, and fastened the bolts and bars roughly, and then went out to see the fireworks, and talk about England with people who did not ask inconvenient questions.

        He found everybody excited and enraptured about the gas that was to come to them through the mediation of the new Deputy. They did not know in the least why they wanted it; they had none of them anything to do after dusk; they had their own pure olive oil to burn, that hurt no

eyesight, and gave a sweet pale light that suited the summer nights. But they thought that gas and a tromböi were signs of progress and prosperity. There are many wiser people who make the self-same error.

        The railway hissed and roared twenty miles off them, where the city was; they knew that would never come nearer to them; but they saw no reason why they should not rejoice in a tall brick chimney, staring black and foul, and straight and frightful, up against their bright blue skies, and a hideous engine tearing up, and tearing along, their winding country lanes. Other towns, no bigger than theirs, had these blessings; and Signore Luca Finti had promised the same to them.

        Meanwhile Messer Luca Finti was sitting supping with the Syndic of Pomodoro and the Giunta, and as the Syndic of Santa

Rosalia was indisposed, his excellent locum tenens and secretary was invited in his stead, at the new Deputy's request, and tasted the sweets of a just reward.

        In the piazza of Santa Rosalia the news was received in another spirit.

        Messer Nellemane had worked for Messer Luca Finti, and that one fact was quite enough for the community that enjoyed the many blessings of his reign.

        A morning or two after the elections, Viola was sitting at her door with Raggi by her side.

        Raggi (an abbreviation of sunbeam), so named because she was of a light yellow colour, was a little dog that the girl had found seven years before, stray and miserable in a vine path, with a little tattered red coat adhering to her body, which showed that she must have been a runaway dancing dog.

        Raggi was never claimed by any master,

and had long made the joy of Viola's life; the tricks and saltatory talent that Raggi, when rested and recovered, voluntarily displayed, proved that her career must have been professional, while her large liquid eyes had a sadness which betokened that she had had her share in those vicissitudes and maltreatments which no artistic career is ever without. Raggi had quickly become the idol of all the children of Santa Rosalia, and was a very happy little dog, though she always remained timid. She was not old, but she would still waltz if any guitar or accordion were sounding, and would walk erect, and beg, and beat an imaginary drum in the prettiest way possible. This morning she was sleeping on her mistress's skirts; and that was what she now liked to do best of all.

        As she slept there and Viola plaited, not lifting her eyes from the tress of straw, there

passed by the door Angelo Saghari; the old man who had been rural guard of the place ever since Viola could remember; who had never molested anybody, and had always seemed as harmless as the old grey cat that dozed amongst the twine and sugar of Gigi's general shop. But old Angelo had been threatened with dismissal for supineness, and had been fired to emulation of Bindo's deeds by the fact that half the fines went into the pocket of the guard who was sharp enough to smell out a contravention; from a quiet, good-natured, neighbourly soul he had become as suspicious, spiteful, and cunning an old spy as could be manufactured by the infusion of the spirit of the communal code. The blood of his aged veins was turning sour because Bindo and his colleague were always getting the fines instead of himself, and so angry was he now that woe betided any

luckless child who spun a top, or any hapless dog that wagged a tail, within a rood of Angelo.

        As he went grumpy and glum, because of these things, his sword hanging at his side, with which he could hack a dog handily, though he never dared draw it on a thief, his eyes spied out little yellow-haired Raggi asleep on her mistress's gown.

        The dog was certainly not chained; the dog had not even a collar; the grey hairs of Angelo stood erect with horror.

        He had known Raggi seven years, and had stood and laughed a hundred times to see her waltz, and beat the drum, to divert the children in the piazza. But now he only beheld in Raggi an object for contravention. As to Napolean all men were food for powder, so, to those imbued with the communal code, all living things are food for fines. Can a

fine be screwed out of them? that is the only question.

        He went up to Viola, therefore, and said roughly: 'Your dog is loose!'

        Viola looked up and laughed, despite the sadness of her heart.

        'Raggi? Why it is Raggi! Are they going to tell me to tie Raggi? That would be too cruel; why Raggi is the darling of everybody. What would the children do without her? Though, to be sure, she is a little rheumatic and stiff now, poverina--'

        Angelo was frowning heavily, and writing with a pencil in his book.

        'I have a right to seize the dog, and I have a mind to do it for your impudent answers,' he said harshly. 'The dog is loose. It is an offense against the laws of the commune, as you are very well aware. Your father will be summoned --'

        'But, Angelo!' cried Viola in stupefaction, not believing her own ears. 'Raggi is just as she has been for seven years and more. What has she done? What can you mean? You have patted and petted her yourself all these years, and laughed so to see her dance--you are joking!--'

        'You will find it no joke,' said Angelo harshly, feeling a little ashamed of himself. 'Your dog can be no exception to the rest. Your father will have to pay, and if I see the beast loose again, I shall take it to the guard house, and it will be killed unless you pay twenty francs. You are warned.'

        Then Angelo shuffled off, feeling that Bindo himself could not have said or done better. Viola took the little yellow dog up in her arms and kissed it convulsively and sobbed over it.

        'Oh, Raggi! What has come to the

world that we are all treated like galley slaves, and you poor pretty things like wild beasts!' she murmured over the dog; and it seemed to this gentle and pious girl that she could spring at the cruel hearts of all these men, and stab them to death for the sheer sweet sake of justice.

        For it is the noblest natures that tyranny drives to frenzy.

        'Dominiddio!' cried Pippo when he came home. 'I'd throttle Angelo sooner than I'd throttle an adder. Oh, the vile old creature, when he has known me all my life, and saw you baptised with the holy water! Lord, Lord! how are we to live? Was not life hard enough to the likes of us at all times? Is Raggi a wolf or a bear? Can a dog live tied down with a string as you tie a call-bird to a trap? They are mad! They are all gone clean mad, and it is we who

have to bear all the brunt of it. The gentlemen can't know of it. The gentlemen can't know.!'

        The gentlemen did know of it, however, well enough, and when they sat at their weekly meeting, listened to the reports read by Messer Nellemane, and applauded the zeal of the rural guards. None of the gentlemen lived in Santa Rosalia itself, and when they drove through it they like to have no wooden disc rolling from a child's hand across their road, no dog barking at their gigs' wheels; and cared very little by what means their laws were enforced, or what poor household was sold up under their rules. For thorough, absolute, selfish indifference to the wrongs and the sorrows of the people, there is nothing comparable to the apathy of an Italian of the new régime. It is an apathy so obtuse, so self-complacent,

and so pachydermatous, that one longs sometimes to see it blasted and shaken into ruins by the roar and leap of an avenging people.

        Angelo kept his word, and Pippo was summoned for having Raggi loose, or, according to the amenities of the printed papers, was invited to make amends for a transgression.

        Poor old Pippo, being advised by his timid neighbour, Cecco the cooper, to do anything for peace and quietness, went and submitted by being fined two francs, and had to go without wine for a week.

        'Two francs because Raggi slept on your gown!' he said to his daughter twenty times a day; it seemed to him an oppression so monstrous that the world had never seen one like it.

        Viola, trembling for the safety of Raggi, put an old bit of ribbon about the neck of the dog, and tied a long string to it; but

no municipality being wholly able to change the nature of animals, and it being quite impossible to perpetually pin a dog to your side, Raggi walked about the piazza, and went to her playmates the children with the string trailing behind her, and more summonses rained in on Pippo.

        Not summonses alone, moreover, for there came with them a taxpaper which claimed on account of Raggi, seven years' tax at six francs the year, and all the spese attending delay added thereto; in all, some seventy odd francs. With this came documents for various contraventions concerning the cutting of the reeds and the running of the brook, condemning Filippo Mazzetti in contumacy for not having attended to the various calls for these great and punishable offences; and the sum total of this was so terrible that the old man, when it was read to him

by his daughter, dropped down, white as a sheet, and stared with gasping breath and suffocating heart, till the terrified maiden screamed that he was in a fit, and all the neighbours ran in to help.

        Pippo was not in a fit: but when one after another these papers rained in upon him with their inexorable demands, the buoyant, brave, ignorant, harmless life of him seemed to collapse under a great terror, as a bird sinks down that is stoned.

        He had never complained of his lot, though it had never been a good one; he had never thought it hard to have to labour for his bread all the year round; he had accepted his destiny cheerfully, never quarrelling with God or man about it; but now the docility of his soul turned and writhed, and he called out against his fate, and he rose at every dawn with a great fear,

like ice, at his heart. For what does ruin mean to the poor man? It means death; a slow, long death of hard-drawn hunger.

        Gentlemen who so lightly make your rules, and pass your fines, do ever you remember that? I think not; I hope not; for your oblivion is your sole excuse, though such oblivion is accursed, and if ever there be justice or judgment, it scarce will hold you guiltless.

        Ten days were given wherein to pay these charges: six of these days Pippo spent wandering wearily to and fro, up and down, telling his woes now to this neighbour, now to that, staring on the documents which he could not read, and wondering what on earth he could do. He could see no right at all which could force him to pay these penalties. He had done nothing that he had not been accustomed to do all the

years of his life; how could he understand that all these charges had become due, just because a few men gathered together and said they were so? Dogs had been free, the rushes had been free, the water had been free, ever since Pippo could remember; why should they be taxed, and forbidden, and made sins of, just because those communal clerks and guards liked to have it so?

        The justice of moral laws even the galley-slave will admit; but the justice of municipal laws no poor man recognises, as indeed there is no reason why he should, since none of theses laws serve him.

        There was no sense in it at all; it was only done to put money in the purses of rogues: Pippo, though a simple docile soul, rebelled.

        Life had never been anything wonderful to him; he had always worked hard and eaten little; he had never seen anything

beyond the vine-paths about Santa Rosalia and the dusty stones of Pomodoro: wiser people might have wondered that he ever cared to take the trouble to get up of a morning and pull his breeches on, so very little did each day offer to him. But Pippo never wondered; he enjoyed his life very much when he was let alone; he had been very fond of his womenkind; he had once been a bright young fellow with lute and song, and light limbs to dance with, and he had not forgotten all that time; when he could lie in the shade at noontide, and get a little beaker of wine, and chat about nothing cheerily, and smoke his pipe, and hear his village news, Pippo was perfectly happy, and did not want to end his life as Nanni had ended his, with a pinch of charcoal, in a shuttered room, on a bare floor.

        It was not much of a life, to be sure;

and as wearing away now like a waning light on St. John's Eve; but it was a fresh, simple, pleasant, little life, spent on the edge of the bright Rosa water, and amongst the waving beds of reeds; it seemed to Pippo that he would hear the sough of the rushes and see the glint of the river-reaches even when he should be put away in a deal box against the church wall, or, as the priests said, should be in heaven.

        When Dom Lelio would preach about heaven, Pippo sitting at mass on his wooden chair, would nod and shut his eyes, and dream of paradise, and would never be able to get any other idea of it than that shining water, those waving reeds, and the blue clear sky beyond them.

        And he had always said to himself, 'Come what may, God will leave me the river;' and it had always been a great

happiness to him tho think that this little cot, overlooking the river that he loved, would be dwelt in by him till the saints should bear him across another and a darker stream.

        But now,--if he must borrow on it--Pippo felt that nevermore would it really be his own again.

        'You borrow twopence on a thing you have, and from that minute those two pennies will eat and eat and eat you till they swell like turkey poults at Ceppo, only it's you who burst for it, not they,' had Pippo's wife always said to him; and the truth of the saying remained in his mind.

        Yet what was he to do?

        No doubt to you gentlemen, it is very absurd to want these few francs; you and I give as much for a plant, for a plate, for a chair, for a teacup; to face ruin because you

cannot find it seems ridiculous, and yet it was ruin to Pippo.

        If he did not pay, the Law would seize his rickety tables, and his earthen pumpkins, and his copper pots, and would sell them, and sell his house over his head, and his bed from under him. He had done no harm whatever, and he owed not a farthing; yet he would be treated as if he were the blackest thief, the most shameless debtor, and all the few rags and sticks that he owned in the world would go under the hammer.

        Pippo sat on this threshold and leaned his grey head on his hands, and could not understand it. 'If I had done anything,' he said again and again; and, stupid old fellow that he was, could not see the crime.

        'They'll fine the butterflies next, I suppose, for flying,' he thought wearily, as

those golden, and azure, and tortoise-shell, and white flowers of the air spread their wings against him, or floated through the light above the rushes.

        'Could Carmelo's father help us?' asked Viola wistfully; but Pippo shook his finger in denial. He knew that the elder Pastorini had debts of his own from bad trade and the law costs attending his son's trial. For some years the mill had brought in but slender returns, and the Pastorini were generous folks, and never grudged a neighbour a place at their board. This open-handed way of living was well enough in the old times; but nowadays taxation sits like a ghost at every homely table.

        No; old Pippo would not borrow of friend, nor of one whose son would wed his granddaughter. So he sat all alone on the settle in his little stone porch, and totted it

all up after his own manner with a bit of chalk. He could not read or write, but he knew the look of figures, and he could sum up correctly. Many men, here, know arithmetic very well who do not know the alphabet. They learn it in self-defence against cheating.

        He had all these hateful papers in his hand; papers wordy, and covered all over with writing, which was as Greek to him, but he could understand one thing in them--the sum he was condemned to pay. There was twenty-three, and then there was twenty-five, and then there was thirty-two, and then there was forty, and besides these were five different sums of ten francs each; these last five were for the reed-cutting; and then there was the seventy for Raggi. He told them all up once more, as he had told them all up twenty times before, and he made them in all two hundred and forty-three

francs, and the total made his head reel, his eyes swim, his stomach sicken; he could no more get that sum than he could get a gold chariot and six white horses.

        'What will happen if I don't pay?' he asked of Cecco for the fiftieth time; and Cecco answered , 'They will sell you up; sell you up as they did Nanni;' and Pippo groaned.

        Gentlemen, what would you feel if every week, or month, some power of the State could call on you for a thousand pounds, and if you failed to pay it could seize on your estates? Gentlemen, you do not remember it, but the five francs, or the five shillings to the poor is as that thousand pounds would be to you; nay, more, for the seizure of the large sum would be to you at worst a lost superfluity, some luxury, some purchase, some pleasure the less, but to the

poor the loss of the little sum may be the loss of bread in health, of medicine in sickness, of the meat that is strength, of the clothing that is decency; the loss of the little sum may be the loss of the one frail plank that stands between poverty and death.

        Think of this now and then, gentlemen who make the laws at ease, all the world over, and break the hearts and destroy the homes of the poor with the fines that the English magistracy, the French mayoralities, and the Italian municipalities alike so dearly love to wring from the poor man, standing ignorant, helpless, and utterly unconscious of wrong-doing before these mockers of the majesty of Law!

        What with pondering over the summonses about Raggi, and the summonses about the reeds in the river, and the summonses about the brook-water, old Pippo was fairly crazed.

He went about the village, shouting like a dazed creature, 'My fathers cut the reeds before me hundreds of years; and hundreds of years the water has run, and God sent it; and the little yellow dog, why, she is known to every man jack of them, and all the babies play with her. What have I got to pay for? what have I got to pay for?'--

        And his neighbour always said to him,

        'You must always pay if you haven't got a piece of paper. We'll soon have to pay for drawing our breath, or lighting our pipes. I always told you, you should have got a bit of paper.'

        'But I can't pay,' said Pippo, shoving his hat on the back of his head, and hitching up the band of his linen trousers with a little puckered, woebegone face, and his tears only not falling because they were dried by his rage.

        'If I earn a dozen soldi a day, it's the best as I ever do; and, to be sure, the girl plaits, but plaiting isn't what it was since all those machine-made hats came in, and it's barely enough for her dress that she makes at it; and there's nought besides, nought; and its almost as dear to make your bread as buy it now the grist-tax is on; and wine, Lord! wine that I remember twenty years ago you might have almost for the asking of it, there is now up to a franc, and not seldom a high as one-thirty --who's to pay, who's to pay, with victuals and drink what they are?'

        'If you haven't got a bit of paper you must pay,' said the neighbour, into whose head long years of municipal despotism had hammered this one fact. 'The house is your own, aren't it? You've always said so. Well, you'll have to get something on that.'

        'Jesus, help me!' groaned Pippo, to whom the Galilean was not dead.

        The house was certainly his; he was not very clear how; but his forefathers had dwelt in it, and he had been born in it; and in an old iron chest with rusty locks there were some old 'bits of paper' that he had been always told established his right to it. But to raise money on it! Pippo did not know much, but he had always heard that attorneys and strozzini * were the legitimate children of the devil. True, everybody was everywhere raising money in these days; he heard say that all the big lands were writ down in the Mortgage Archives in the city, and half the little estates too; but to Pippo's old-fashioned ideas it seemed quite as shameful to get money on your bit of ground as to carry your pots and pans up to the Mone di Pietà.

___________________

Usurers.

        He came of that stock of homely, honest, independent peasantry that is still existent in Italy, as in France and England, but which all the new-fangled laws and schools are doing their best to destroy in each of these countries. To borrow, Pippo thought, was quite a thievish thing, and as bad and as mean as to send your girl to her nuptials without her share of house linen and her decent string of pearls.

        Then he had not an idea what his little house was worth: whether twenty pence or twenty million pence. It was a little stone-built place, sound and solid because raised in the old days when work was soundly and solidly done, but it had never a stroke for repair given to it, and it was very small, and had only a narrow kitchen garden behind it, with one aged fig-tree past bearing, a few fruit espaliers, and some vegetables. Pippo

did not think anyone would give much for it, and the thought of raising a penny on it cut him to the quick. 'For the strozzini and the lawyers,' said he in his perplexity, 'if they do but smell at a peach, it is down their throats, stone and all, and never chokes them.'

        He had not any dealings with such folks himself, but so he had heard, and so he had seen in this intercourse with his neighbours. Had not Simone Zauli, the money-lender, who dwelt at the new white house with the gilded weathercock and the cast-iron gates, on the Pomodoro road, made all his riches thus out of his fellow-creatures, beginning as a ragged boy by stealing dogs and selling them alive, or their skins when dead, and then lending other boys trifling sums to lose at lotto or at marra, and so progressing upward in man's and fortune's favours?

        Nevertheless little old Pippo said to him-

self: 'Nanni gave in without a struggle, but I will go and ask them to do right by me. Human hearts are good in the main, and what for should those gentlemen want to hurt a poor soul like myself?'

        He thought these things were done because the gentlemen did not know of them; so he resolved to tell the gentlemen; and he brushed himself and put on his Sunday clothes, and betook himself on a round of visits. First, of course, he went to the Syndic's villa, but there he was told that the Count Durellazzo was still away at the Bagni; if it were anything of business, Messer Nellemane down in the village would attend to it.

        'Nay! nay! as well send me to Lucifero himself,' muttered Pippo, and turned back to descend the long four miles of stony, shadeless hills that he had painfully climbed.

        Bindo Terri, who was up there, flirting and drinking with the Syndic's pretty massaja, heard the muttered words and duly reported them.

        Bindo had got about his duties once more, and though he had made himself some bruises very cleverly with iodine and indigo, he could not affect to be ailing any longer, and had indeed got sick of lying in bed, despite the fry and Vin Santo, and so had come up cheerfully to the Syndic's farm to guarantee as 'healthy meat' a bullock just dead of pleuro-pneumonia.

CHAPTER XII.

alter the law; he was kind, however, and told his maestro di casa to send the old man into the kitchen to have a meal; the small gentry said much the same, a little more disagreeably; the lawyer said that they were determined to make their laws respected; and when the old man timidly asked why the law had been made, and suggested that they would be very much better un-made again, grew angry, and told Pippo he was impudent, which was indeed, the last thing that Pippo ever dreamed of being. The doctor said much the same thing as the lawyer, and as for going to Zauli, Pippo knew that would be no good; as soon will you get peaches off an ant-eaten tree as mercy out of the heart of a money-lender.

        In Pippo's eyes, and in those of most in Santa Rosalia, Simone Zauli was as a great swollen dragon, gorged on the bodies and

the souls of other men, and he was the only incarnation that they knew of usury.

        Jaded, footsore, very heart-sick, Pippo trotted through the ankle-deep dust, carrying his boots in his hands; he had thought it only respectful to enter the gentlemen's houses with his boots on, but that was no reason why he should wear them out on the common highway. He was very tired when he got home; for one way and another, up and down hill, and to and fro, he had walked five and twenty miles, if one. But he ate his bit of supper in silence, and went to bed. In bed another hope dawned on him; a faint one, but still something on which to act.

        He said nothing to his daughter, for he held the old-fashioned opinion that women had no head for anything, and had best be told naught, but next morning put on his

festa coat and waistcoat, took his straw hat and went through the clouds of dust in the shaky diligence to Pomodoro.

        'They do say he is a liberal one and has a heart for the poor,' thought Pippo, and boldly went and asked for Signore Luca Finti, who had taken a lodging in the town, for people were now saying that the new deputy, who was a bachelor, was thinking of nothing less than asking for the hand of Teresina Zauli, an ugly wench, indeed, brown, clumsy, with a bearded lip, and a chignon like a melon, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, but worth her weight in gold, and owning all they jewels, too, of a dead countess whose affairs her father had managed; the countess, being a poor-witted and sad-spirited lady. Teresina Zauli had given her heart to a brave young bailiff who was floridly handsome as a dahlia

flower, but that was not the match her father meant for her, and she had soon resigned herself to the idea of being a deputy's wife, and living in Rome, and going to the Quirinal when a state ball was given, as Luca Finti's wife would do unquestionably.

        The 'note' of the new deputy being all things to all men, and familiar good-nature to the entire population, the little old dusty figure of Pippo was shown into the chamber where the deputy was taking a light breakfast of stuffed onions and a risotto of liver and brains. Signore Finti, thinking the old man came to beg, buttoned up his pockets, but saluted him with a sweet smile and words so bland that Pippo thought at a bound: 'he will get me let off the fines.'

        He was benignity and kindness itself, for this Luca Finti was to everyone; but when he found what the errand was he grew a

little colder, a trifle less affable; for to the mind of the Deputy municipal law was sacred. The bureaucratic mind, all the world over, believes the squeak of the official penny whistle to be as the trump of archangels and the voice from Sinai.

        That all the people do not fall down prostrate at the squeak is, to this order of mind, the one unmentionable sin.

        With hope Pippo began his tale.

        He was a long time telling it, and he told a good deal of it three times over; and he muddled it all together, and at the close of it he damned the State in general, and Messer Gaspardo Nellemane in particular, very finely.

        Luca Finti listened patiently; but when Pippo, out of breath, paused in his cursing, he frowned, and drew himself up with the gesture he generally kept for the Tribune.

        'I fear you are contumacious.'

        'Eh? sir?,' said Pippo. 'That's what they say in the summons-papers. Con-tu-ma-cious. It's a mighty long word for poor folks that don't know what it means. What have I done? Nought! Nought! He came prying and poking where he'd no business: he didn't make the reeds in the water; God made them. He didn't set my brook running; God set it. As for the poor little beast, every child knows her and loves her. I have done nought. That I'll say if I die for it. I live peaceably, and I hurt none; and this Jack-in-office comes spying on me, and worrying me, and beggaring me, and then he calls it all con-tu-macy! What have I done?'

        The Deputy's face clouded and grew grave as he looked over the papers which Pippo had handed to him.

        'They seem all in order,' he murmured a little severely: if the penny whistle has shrieked, who shall dare to find fault with its blast?

        'Eh, sir?' said Pippo wistfully.

        'I see nothing out of order in these,' said Luca Finti. 'Really nothing. It may fall hard on you; but you should have observed the laws.'

        'Laws, sir?' said the old man hotly. 'I never broke the law--never. It never could be put against me. They are not laws, these tomfool's rubbish that those spies and blackguards lay their heads together to concoct, that they may wring our money out of us when they want a breakfast, or a supper, or a drink, or a trull!'

        'Hush--sh--sh!' said the Deputy, putting up his hand with quite a shiver. 'You must not say such things. You must never

say such things. The Law is unassailable, and its administrators and representatives must be respected. These papers are perfectly correct. They are founded on Imperial Law, and, were they not so, every municipality has a right to make and to enforce its own laws. The regulations of your commune are admirable ones; wise, preventative, full of an excellent forethought and caution. It is your duty, and it ought to be your pleasure, to obey them--'

        Messer Luca Finti might have gone on in this strain for an hour, since every Italian is eloquent, or, at any rate, long-winded and master of a million words, but old Pippo, whose slow and patient blood was beginning to boil under the bitterness of his disappointment, interrupted him.

        'Listen, your honor; that guard is a rogue that has been a vagabond before all

our eyes ever since he could run alone; and the clerk that makes the laws is a rogue too, only a smooth one, in cloth clothes; and wrong, to my knowledge, I have never done; and the brook has been put there by God in heaven, and the reeds any man of us cuts when he pleases, and no one is a penny the worse; and my little old dog is a pet of every baby about in the place, and why shouldn't it sit at the door; and if you only will think on the cruelty of all this, and the shame and the sin against me, an old man, and one who never did harm, and--'

        'My dear friend,' said the Deputy wearily, 'your head is a wooden head. You will not understand. You have broken the law. Libel against the officers of the law will not efface the fact, but only increase your criminality. I can do nothing. Nothing whatever.

        'What is the use of you being our Deputy, then, if you cannot see to having us righted?' said Pippo, whose spirit had risen as his heart was breaking.

        'You are not wronged,' said Luca Finti with a polite contempt. 'Were you wronged, be sure my protection should be all over you. You are not wronged at all, caro mio. You have transgressed certain just laws, and you must be made to pay a just penalty for your disobedience. It is no use to groan,' added the Deputy, as Pippo did groan at all the grand words that fell like ice on his ear.

        'You should not complain. You should confess yourself to blame. I do not see that the fines are in any way excessive. You must pay them, and you will be a wiser man for the future.'

        Pippo stood quite still; the veins swelling

on his wrinkled forehead and great angry tears gathering in his eyes.

        There is nothing on earth so hard to endure as this tone of easy superiority, of jaunty counsel: to the old man, with whom this matter was ruin itself, every one of the tranquil, insolent, chill words was like the stab of a knife.

        He gathered up the papers with a tremulous hand; it was all he could do to keep from bursting out crying like a child.

        'There's no right in them, and no justice,' he muttered. 'God forgive you gentlemen who ruin the poor.'

        And with that he put his hat on his old white head, and turned his back on Luca Finti, and went out of the door. The Deputy hesitated a moment, then rose and went after him: this was an old fool rightly served, he thought; but then--he

wanted to keep a good name in his newly-won Collegio.

        He touched Pippo on the shoulder.

        'Here,' he said a little hurriedly. 'You must try and make a collection and pay those amounts so; they are not at all excessive; quite just, quite just; but if you are so poor, take this to begin with; only you must not say I gave it.'

        Then he slid into the old man's hand a five-franc note.

        Pippo put it back again very quietly.

        'Thank you sir,' he said very quietly too. 'I came for justice not for favour, and I never was a beggar yet.'

        Then he went down the stairs and Messer Luca Finti for the first time in his life felt crest-fallen.

CHAPTER XIII.

        It was a sad sight to see that strong healthy, handsome youth, who should have been at work in the mill with the weighty sacks pulling at his arms, shut up in prison, lying on a wooden bench face downwards, doing nothing, grown spiritless, and yet sullen, broken in strength, and yet savage, as the dogs are that these wise laws chain.

        Pippo sat down before him; the old

man's brown face was pinched and pallid, but he was quiet still; he felt like one stunned and paralysed.

        'My boy, these devils claim two hundred and forty three francs of me,' he said with a little quiver in his voice. 'If I do not pay they will sell me up; I must get money on the house. You know well a thing borrowed on is as good as lost. I did think to give the girl the house in dower, when she married you. What do you say now? It will come to you mortgaged, and that is no better than a loaf that the mice have gnawed, with all the crumb eat off, but so it must be.'

        Carmelo nodded.

        Nothing mattered to him much.

        'Will not the new deputy do any good for us?' he asked wearily.

        'Curse him!' said Pippo. 'He is one of them; a scoundrel climbed up on poor fools'

backs, and making more poor fools a ladder to get up higher by, that's all. A scoundrel; a sheer scoundrel, a tongue of oil, a heart of brass! Don't think of him! You won't mind then, Carmelo, if the old house never comes to the girl?--'

        Carmelo laughed a little bitterly.

        'I am a felon,' said he. 'House or no house, Viola will be too good for me when I come out; I am disgraced.'

        'Not you,' said the old man. 'You did right; the prison can do you no shame: all the village says that, and Viola will be as proud to walk before the priest with you, as if you were the king. I thought I would tell you of the house, because you had a right to look for it, and when once there is a loan on it, it is gone for good.'

        'Never mind me, ' said Carmelo. 'I am so sorry all this loss falls on you. There

seems a curse on us. Tell Viola not to fret, to keep a brave heart; I shall be out in three weeks more, for certain I am that when they hear all they will set me free, and then --'

        'Then she shall marry you,' said Pippo. 'Not but what if things go on as they are now you will breed but beggars.'

        'We must take our chances of that,' said Carmelo. 'If you are sure she will not be ashamed of me --'

        'If she were, she would be turned out of my door, neck and crop,' said Pippo. 'But there is no fear of that. Viola is a good girl and a loyal. I am glad you do not care more for the house.'

        'I do not care at all except for you,' said Carmelo, to whom in his durance it seemed that no roof could ever be needed by anyone except the broad blue sky.

        Then Pippo left him and said to the gaoler at the prison door:

        'Can you tell me of a man who lends money?' and the gaoler answered that he knew no one who would lend it without making a profit on it, but if there were a profit to be had, then nobody he thought could be fairer than a certain Signore Nicolo Poccianti, who dwelt hard by the west gate, and was a notary and a lender too.

        To him went Pippo.

        'When you must be hanged, what matters the rope?' he said to himself, and by sunset on the morrow he had three hundred francs in his breeches pocket, and he left his papers that concerned the house with Messer Nicolo, and had put his cross before two witnesses against a long written thing that was read out to him without his

understanding any word or any sense of it, and had seen seals and signatures set at the public office to documents a metre in length.

        When he took his place in the lumbering diligence to be borne homeward, he felt that the dust of the road and the blue of the sky spun round him. Life was over for him, as much as though the coffin had been nailed down above his body.

        His little house had been very dear to him; it had made him feel proud and like a man; there had been always that little place to live and die in, a place all his own, as much as the palace is a monarch's: now that another had a claim on it, all that was over.

        'I have borrowed on the house,' he said to his daughter when he reached home, and

sank into a chair, pale to the lips, and with all his limbs and frame trembling.

        Then he stretched out his hands with a sudden strength of passion.

        'God's curse on them!' he cried fiercely; 'God's curse on them!'

CHAPTER XIV.

        Pippo was in bed with what is called a stroke of heat, and wandered in his speech and seemed stupid. Timid Cecco went and paid it all because the girl asked him to do so, he being very far from sure that he would not be incriminated in some way himself. But when they gave him the receipt for the money, the simple soul was overjoyed, and ran back as fast as ever he could, and tore up Pippo's

stairs, and went in triumph to Pippo's bedside.

        'Now you have got a bit of paper,' he cried, 'they never can hurt you any more. Keep it close. Never lose it. You've got your bit of paper now!'

        The old man lay with his face to the wall, and answered nothing.

        Viola, young, and so hopeful, caught Cecco's arm in both her hands.

        'Is that true? Is that really true? Will they never be able to torment us any more? Are you quite certain?'

        Simple Cecco, in the honesty of his own convictions, patted her hands kindly, and said:

        'Of course they can't, my dear, now you have got that bit of paper. You must keep it close, and always have it by to show; this bit of paper. Why, my dear,' continued

Cecco, with a touch of patriotic indignation, 'Do you think after taking nigh three hundred francs from your poor grandfather, they wouldn't respect his bit of paper? No, no; they're bad, but not so bad as that.'

        'And Raggi may be loose?'

        'Why, I should say so, my dear: for what else is the tax paid for her, and that bit of paper given?'

        The one-idea'd mind of Cecco the cooper could not embrace a state of things in which you pay heaps of fines and taxes and yet get nothing in return for them.

        'Poor grandfather!' said Viola with her onyx-like eyes suffused and tender. 'Pray God send him no more trouble.'

        Pippo, as she spoke, sat suddenly up in his bed.

        'Nay, nay; Dominiddio has nought to do with sending this sort of trouble,' he said, with a thickened voice and a sort of wild gesture. 'Never lay it on God, my child. This trouble and them who made it are spawned and hatched in hell.'

        The girl shuddered.

        She had never seen her kindly, placid, pious old grandfather thus.

        A lull occurred in the storm of summonses. Some eight or ten days drifted by in peace. Raggi ran about.

        At the end of the week Pippo got up and put on his clothes and went out to his daily work.

        'Never to cut the reeds! Never to cut the reeds!' he muttered: but he had been cowed and terrified; he did not dare take his reaping-hook and wade in amongst the little green blowing rushes. It is the per-

fection of these laws that they change brave men into soulless machines.

        He got his spade and went and dug, in his little bit of ground amongst the potatoes and tomatoes. Seeing him thus labouring the girl took heart, and began to hope all would go well. She did not know enough to realise all the mortgage on the little house implied, and she felt sure that Carmelo would soon be free.

        She called Raggi, and ran lightly up to Gigi Canterelli's shop to buy a little macaroni. She passed Messer Gaspardo Nellemane. She coloured hotly, remembering the gifts of Corpus Domini. He uncovered his head with a bland smile; his eye, glancing from her, fell on little yellow Raggi.

        That night he said to Bindo, 'There are still dogs loose despite the law. Enforce our regulations.'

        Bindo promised extra zeal, though it was by no means to his views to drill the populace into perfect obedience, but rather to leave a little troop of contraventions straying about like gipsies, on which he could pounce down for his fines at leisure, as a hawk picks one out a brood of young birds for breakfast, and takes another at noonday.

        The next day another summons, to 'make accord on a transgression,' was left at Filippio Mazetti's. Viola received it when her grandfather was in the kitchen garden, and after a moments hesitation thrust it in her pocket, and waited her opportunity to take counsel with Cecco the cooper.

        'It is a mistake,' said Cecco. 'Of course it's a mistake, when you have got the bit of paper! Lend me the bit of paper, and I will go and see to it. I have been once;--I can

just as well go again, and not worry your grandfather.'

        Cecco was a long, thin man, like a lath, and was very pale, and almost anything in the world set him all of a tremble, as he would say himself, and he shook in his shoes as he went up to the Municipal Palace on his unselfish errand. But he was a good neighbour and friend, and was fond of Viola; and he put a bold front over a quaking spirit as he asked to see Messer Nellemane. It was the hour when the potentate gave gracious audience.

        'I have ventured, sir,' he began, with great respect in his tone, for he knew that the Secretary liked and expected much obsequiousness. 'I have ventured, Pippo being ailing himself, as one may say, and not able in any way to come to you, to bring your most illustrious this summons they

have sent him by a mistake, sir. Quite a mistake, as you will see, sir, for you will remember only last week giving to me, who came for him then also, a bit of paper that set him free of all these things. This is a mistake, sir--'

        'We never make mistakes,' said Messer Nellemane frigidly, and glanced his eye over the summons. 'I cannot suppose for a moment it is a mistake. But it is not in my department. However, as you seem a well-meaning person, I will send for the usciere.'

        He touched a hand bell.

        The usciere was out, serving warrants; in his stead fat Maso, who was below cracking walnuts, as he had been eating figs when Carmelo's wedding-party had come, responded to the summons, even tried to look pompous and official, knowing that the master of all their destinies expected it.

        'This summons, Signore Tommaso,' said Messer Gaspardo to him, with dignity yet graciousness; 'Will you be as good as to say why it was issued? It is worded so as to call to account Mazzetti Filippo, for a transgression of the law on the 15th ult.; that was the day before yesterday. What is his offence?'

        'Dog loose, Signore,' said the fat Maso, who knew that his superior liked to do all the eloquence himself, and expected pithy and pregnant replies from his colleagues and inferiors.

        'Dog loose? Ah! The witness?' asked Messer Nellemane.

        Maso replied promptly, 'The municipal guard, Terri Bindo.'

        'All in order--all quite in order,' said Messer Gaspardo complacently, and turned to Cecco. 'You perceive, my friend, there

is no mistake. No mistake is ever made here. I should have thought that Mazzetti had had caution and lesson enough; he must be an extremely obstinate and perverse person. His dog was loose the day before yesterday. He must pay two francs, and if he continue his transgression the next penalty must be higher.'

        Cecco gasped: he remained standing with his mouth wide open, so amazed and so horror-stricken he was.

        'But your honour,' he said with a trembling and panting voice. 'Please, your honour, here is this bit of paper; you gave it yourself, and the taxgatherer gave such another; I paid all that mint of money for him only last week; if it don't set him free, what was the use of it? what was the money paid for--?'

        This most timid man grew audacious in

his grief and amazement. If a bit of paper was no protection, then to Cecco heaven and earth alike were falling.

        'What was the money paid for--what was the money paid for?' he stammered in his bewilderment. 'Sixty-five francs of it was every penny for Raggi!'

        'Everything is in order,' said Messer Nellemane, coldly eyeing the agitated creature with some scorn and more disgust. 'What this very stubborn friend of yours paid last week were arrears; long due arrears. That payment has nothing to do with this, nor with any future ones that his contumacy may cost him.'

        'Lord have mercy on his soul!' groaned Cecco.

        Messer Nellemane grew impatient.

        'If you are come to pay the fine, pay it.

If not, I must remind you that my time is valuable, and so also is that of the other officers of the commune.'

        'Lord have mercy on his soul,' ejaculated Cecco, looking all round the room with a scared expression. 'Why, if he were as rich as a wax candle maker he would be ruined at this rate in a month!'

        'Are you coming to pay the fine?' repeated Messer Nellemane, sharply hitting his desk with his ruler, as Léon Gambetta does when in a rage with Paul de Cassagnac.

        'Lord, have mercy!' moaned the cooper for the third time, and fumbled in his breeches pocket and pulled out some very dirty little half-franc notes and halfpence.

        'Is it two francs?' he asked faintly.

        'Three-fifty with spese,' * said Maso with great rapidity.

___________________

Costs.

        Cecco counted out the sum; he happened to have it in his pocket, for he had just been paid for some wine barrels.

        Maso made him out a receipt grudgingly, but Cecco put it back with a feeble gesture.

        'What is the use of it if you will come again directly?' said this very stupid man.

        'Imbecile!' thundered Messer Nellemane. 'Every charge is separate, and every charge is just. A word more, and I call the guard.'

        Poor Cecco went humbly out, fumbling in his pocket at the few pence that were left him, and sorely terrified at his own temerity. He went home, and passing Viola, who stood with anxious face and wistful eyes awaiting his return at her door, he tried to nod cheerfully.

        'It is all right, my dear. It was a mistake,' he said briskly. 'Only--only--keep

Raggi with a string beside you. She will be safest so.'

        Then he hurried on to his noonday meal, as he said, fearing she would question him.

        'We won't have meat for a few Sundays, Guiditta,' he said to his wife. 'I had a misfortune. I lost the money they paid me for mending the casks. Nay, never tear your hair. It is no such great calamity. How did I lose it?--oh, I don't know; I daresay I pulled it out unawares with my pipe.'

        A falsehood that certainly may go heavenward with Uncle Toby's oath.

        When his frugal dinner of beans was over Cecco went to his workshop with a heavy heart and a bewildered brain. 'Lord have mercy on us,' he said to himself as he hammered his staves. 'We'll all be ruined men!'

        Meanwhile fat Maso was spending the one franc fifty centimes, that he had had for spese, on a very comfortable meal of pork chops and fried artichokes in the back room of the shop of Gigi Canterelli, who, as he served him, thought to himself. 'By Bacchus, I should do little harm if I poisoned the whole damned lot of you in your pasta!'

        For these are the cheerful and loyal feelings in the populace that the present administrators of the Law promote.

CHAPTER XV.

        The days were very sad ones to Raggi and her mistress. The girl did all she could to console the little dog; nursed it, caressed it, and robbed herself of soup to make its meals, but nothing could atone to Raggi for that cruel enforced inaction; and when at night, the doors being closed, it was let loose it had lost the wish to play, being too

sad of heart. The children, too, pined for Raggi, and cried at not having the pretty little dancer with them in their sports: but even they were no more allowed to play about the piazza or on the roads, and their young lives were not much brighter than was Raggi's.

        Their fathers were poor, and dared not risk incurring the heavy fines which punished all infringement of Messer Nellemane's rules and regulations, and they kept their little sons and daughters in, with harsh threats and harsh measures. For the men themselves grew sullen and irritable. Their hearts were with Carmelo, and their impotent sense of never-ending, ever-increasing wrong wore them down with a leaden weight.

        There was another reason, too, for heavy hearts in the village. A new enterprise had

brought with it its usual complement of old ways and old interests ruined. It was no less a thing than a projected tramway from the City, sixteen miles away to the north, and Pomodoro, seven miles away to the south; and this tramway was to pass through Santa Rosalia. Nay, Santa Rosalia was even to pay five thousand francs a year for being thus honoured.

        The scheme was due to foreign speculators: foreign speculators are, to free Italy of to-day, what the devouring hordes of the Huns were to the Italy of a thousand and more years ago. The nation is like a young man come into a goodly heritage, with a swarm of money-lenders on him, devouring him at ninety-two per cent. Some of the latter are indigenous to the soil: the majority are English, Belgian, and American. Unfortunately they are made welcome.

        Tory governments have always been twitted with having a job: Italian municipalities, in this respect, are thoroughly Tory.

        This tramway was a job gigantic.

        The City never needed to go to Pomodoro, and Pomodoro scarcely ever went to the City. But what did it matter? Nothing at all, certainly, to the gentlemen who projected it.

        You can take Italians with a trap as you can take birds; for your call-bird put the boast that a thing is American or English, and they will tumble into your trap by thousands. It is a sentiment that one feels ashamed to see in the land of Dante and of Michaelangelo: but it is there.

        They are smitten with a very disease of imitation.

        A country tramway, whether viewed from the point of its cruelty when drawn

by horses, or its hideousness when drawn by steam, not to speak of its peril to children, and its disfigurements of nature, may be said to be the vilest abomination hitherto conceived by that procreator of monsters which is called Progress. But the municipal mind is enamoured with them, and likes to see them unrolling their unsightly irons over the birthplace of Virgil, the tomb of Ferruccio, the battle-fields of Scipio and of Hannibal.

        There had been much opposition to this one, in the meeting of the Thirty who formed what was called the Provincial Council; but the dissidents had been overruled in the matter: some had houses which the company would buy to demolish; others had angles of hedges that would also be bought at high prices; some sold the fuel that would be burned in the engine. Some-

how or other, with such delicate persuasions, everybody was reduced to reason, and the tramway had been decided on; Messer Nellemane being foremost in praise of its project, and his friend the engineer being appointed on its staff. Indeed, it was entirely due to the energy and exertions of Messer Nellemane, working in the name of the Cavaliere Durellazzo, that the abandonment of the tramway was averted.

        'The people are never awake to their own benefit,' he said, as he overheard the lamentations of the owners of the diligences and little carts that had hitherto sufficed to carry on the intercourse of Santa Rosalia with the greater world.

        He had been fully awake to his, however; and in the arrangement for the payment of the five thousand francs a year by Santa Rosalia had not forgotten his own

services, or allowed the Tramway Company to forget his.

        Every member of the Provincial Council, too, got, or expected to get, something; and so every one of them decided that tramways were a blessing of providence; and if the speculators were making a bad speculation that was their look out; and if the diligence owners and the carters were ruined--why--that was theirs.

        The municipalities were all of them pleased, and if the populace raged and groaned, who cared? The municipalities attend no more than a schoolmaster attends to a child's tears over Euclid and syntax. Euclid and syntax are for the child's ultimate good; so are taxes for the public's benefit.

        Now the iron rails were, of course, to run in as straight a line as possible; and

that they might do so the little boschetto of the mill was amongst the things that had to be destroyed.

        The engineers of the City end decided that it was not necessary, a little curve could spare the wood; but Pierino Zaffi argued quite the contrary; and, as he was a clever fellow who knew how to put a case, and how to carry it through, he got his way: the boschetto of the mill was expropriated, just for all the world as the gardens of the Farnesina were, if we may compare the death of a mouse with the fall of a lion.

        Pastorini, poor foolish man, who had been wont to fancy that what was yours was your own, and that neither King nor Pontiff could make away with another man's property, was stunned as by the fall of a mountain on his head when they notified to him, in the municipal peremptory fashion,

that his wood was wanted, and would be taken, and levelled to the ground.

        When Messer Nellemane, with Messer Pierino Zaffi, with other legislators and engineers, brought the great engineer of the City down into the boschetto, without so much as a by your leave, or for your leave, as Pastorini said afterwards, and began measuring with tapes and rods, the miller stood at his house door with his mouth wide open and his eyes staring vacantly: then, all of a sudden, he strode across his own land, and seized the first man he came upon by the collar.

        'It is my land. It is my land,' he said in a low thick voice. 'No man comes here but by my leave; no, not the King himself, nor the Holy Father.'

        'Holy Father!' Messer Nellemane shrugged his shoulders as he heard. What-

ever such a person might have been in the old dark ages, he, too, had had to bow to a municipality now.

        'Does the owner object?' said the chief surveyor.

        'Of course he objects,' said Messer Nellemane. 'These people always do, to raise the price; there is no cunning so furbo as country cunning.'

        'That is true,' said the engineer from the City.

        'Will you go?' said Demetrio Pastorini fiercely, shaking Pierino Zaffi, who was the man he by chance had seized. 'Will you go? The land is mine, as the church is the Lord's, and his palace the King's. You cannot touch it. You shall not tread on it. Do you hear what I bid you? Depart.'

        'Let us humour him, sir,' whispered Messer Nellemane to Cavalier Durellazzo,

and their business being already done, they went; Pierino Zaffi white and shaking, for the miller's grasp had not been light, and the aspect of the old man had been terrible.

        'I am rid of them,' muttered Pastorini to his eldest daughter, as he strode in from the wood; but his breath oppressed him as he said it, and his brow was crimson, and his tongue seemed to him to cleave his mouth.

        The next week it was certified to him by a public document that his wood would be felled in the ensuing November pro bono publico, and that he would receive a certain sum in proportion, valuing the poplars at ten francs each, which was the current price for light timber.

        Pastorini, through his dull spectacles, plodded painfully through the decree; then, with his white strong teeth grinding one on

another, he tore the sheet in two and put it on the charcoal fire, then burning brightly under the pot of soup.

        'We are not to be bought and sold like steers,' he muttered as the paper blazed, 'nillywilly--just at a clerk's will--as though we were dumb stones.'

        But there he mistook.

        With the excuse of a 'general interest' and a municipal licence, spoliation may be done in the people's name, while the people groan, and starve, and sorrow, and die: unconsenting, but impotent as the ox that is dragged to the slaughter.

        Demetrio Pastorini had driven the men off his land, and had burned the paper; he was simple enough, like Pippo, to think he had conquered, that his rights would be respected.

        When the diligence drivers and the small

carriers gathered about the mill-house in evening time, muttered savage oaths against the coming iron day, and condoled with him for the loss of his wood, he smoked his pipe stolidly and only said: 'No, no! they'll not touch my trees. Mine is mine, come King or Pope against me.'

        'But they will fell your wood, they have marked it out; the will be down on you, and cut it, come Ognissanti,' said the neighbours, trying to persuade and to prepare him.

        But he only shook his head, and replied to them.

        'They'll not touch my trees.'

        If this seems to you, gentlemen, exceedingly stupid, you must try and realise what people are like, in a country place, in the green heart of Italy. They are full of intelligence of their own kind, but they do not

understand the new ways of freedom; and they are primitive enough to fancy that a man can do as he will with his own.

        Under the Liberal governments of this latter half of the century this is an impression which is rapidly being improved away all over Europe: but it still lingers in old countries and old people as lichens cling about oaks marked for felling.

        'They'll not touch my trees,' said the miller, positively, and he passed whole hours at his mill-door, looking up at their columns of autumnal foilage, and listening to the rustling of the leaves as he had never done in any time of his life.

        He had always been fond of his boschetto and proud of it, and grateful to it; being wise enough to know how it helped to keep the stream deep, and save it from absorption of the sun's rays, save the sun from drinking

it up as he was wont to phrase it: and he had deemed this wood of such use and import that he had never followed the common foolish custom of lopping the branches to sell for fireing; a custom which is penny wise and pound foolish.

        He had always loved his wood, but now it was with an almost savage sense of possession, an almost painful tenderness of affection, that he looked up at the quivering leafy pillars, full in spring of song of birds, and in summer of the laughter of crickets.

        'It would be like stealing my daughter,' he said, with his face dark and sullen, as he leaned over the half-door of his house and watched the green river gleam through the still green boughs.

        'But they'll not touch them. No they'll not touch them, that I promise you,' he would say again and again to his children.

Sore as his heart was for Carmelo, he almost chafed more at the thought of the wood felled by strangers.

        No one did or said anything else about it to him. The due summons had been served upon him, and of course no more was needed. But he himself made sure that the thing was abandoned and forgotten.

        'Did I not tell you that they could not do it?' he said to his daughters and sons. 'Nay, nay, the State is not a robber.'

        Messer Nellemane going by with his cigar in his mouth for an evening's stroll, used to see him thus gazing up at his poplars, and on such occasions would smile.

        'The hot-headed old madman,' he thought. 'Well, there are straight waistcoats for all such.'

         Messer Nellemane had a mind at ease. He saw that the face of the maiden who had

rejected his honours had grown wasted and pale; he knew that the little Casa del Madonna was mortgaged, which is as good as gone; the lad Carmelo was in prison, and the wood was doomed. What could be better? Borgia had poison and the Tiber for those who thwarted him; the methods of Messer Nellemane were more refined, but I am not sure that they were kinder.

        As he stepped along one evening he had to step across the little brook that escaped from Pippo's house and ran across the roadway into the weir. It was now October, and rain had swollen the little stream, and it moistened the boots of this great man, who was a clerk at fifty pounds a year, and yet practically ruled over three thousand people.

        He stamped his feet angrily, shaking off the moisture, and seeing old Pippo, who was sitting at his threshold to keep the

poor little fettered dog company, and who was staring aimlessly at the river, and doing nothing, as he could not afford to buy osiers to make things that perhaps no one would take, he paused in his walk, and with wet boots approached the basketmaker.

        Showing his boot, as you show a dead rabbit to a poacher, as pièce de conviction of his crime, Messer Nellemane said sternly:

        'Signor Mazzetti, for some months past you have been admonished and fined for allowing this water to run across the road and annoy the public. How much longer do you intend to defer compliance?'

        Pippo got up, and took off his hat, from that respect for authority which is strong in the Italian; a good sentiment whose endurance is daily and hourly being strained and whittled away by the oppressor rusticorum.

        He did not reply at all.

        'How long do you intend to defer compliance with the municipal injunction?' said the great man.

        'Eh?' said Pippo; he looked sullen and sad, and his head never seemed to him now to be right: 'there's a swarm of bees always buzzing in it,' he said often to his daughter.

        'How long will you let this water obstruct the public way?' demanded Messer Nellemane, driven in his desperation to use simple language.

        Pippo shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.

        'How long?' repeated Messer Nellemane with imperious impatience.

        'I have nought to do with it,' said Pippo at last, doggedly. 'Dominiddio set it running; He can stop it if He wish.'

        'You are impious!' said Messer Nellemane.

        'No,' said Pippo, 'no, not I.'

        'Such trifling is merely insolence,' cried the other very angrily, and losing something of his dignity, and of his suavity all. 'Yours is a contravention of the most odious kind. You have been warned, mildly chastised, reasoned with in every way; you are obdurate, obstinate, and blasphemous. Do you, or do you not, intend to make the necessary works to remove this nuisance and obstruction?'

        Pippo looked at him with sunken, sullen desperate eyes.

        'I can do nought,' he said doggedly, and he covered his head as he spoke. 'With one thing and another of your accursed laws you have taken from me all I have. The roof over my head is wholly mine no more. You can torture me as you may; you can't get blood out of a post.

        Then he sat down, and put his pipe in his mouth, and he let loose little Raggi.

        'You have made slaves of men and beasts,' he said, 'but you have done your worst to me already; you can't get blood out of a post.'

        And he took the little dog on his knee and caressed it.

        The water rippled and bustled brightly in the sunset light, and toppled over into the river below, as though no presence of a great man were there to trouble it. Messer Nellemane struck his cane into it as though it were an obstinate child that he chastised; he was pale with passion.

        'The laws will force you to respect them, ' he said furiously. 'That you will find, and to your cost.'

        'You can't get blood out of a post,' said

Pippo. 'I have bartered my house to pay you, and I'll do no more. Get you gone.'

        As he spoke he threw a pebble down the road, and bade the little dog run after it; Raggi ran, nothing loath, and brought it joyfully.

        'The dog will ne'er be tied again for you,' said Pippo. 'We pay, and you hurt us just the same. For me, I can pay no more; and were it so that I could, I would not.'

        Messer Nellemane said nothing; he opened his note-book and wrote in it, and went away in silence.

        Raggi played with the pebbles, and the cooper's children ran out and played too, and shouted and spun tops on the river-side; and Pippo clapped his hands and encouraged them. An old man, a little dog, and five small boys and girls made up this scene of anarchy and revolt, and broke the com-

munal laws in a way that was terrible to behold.

        'Laugh, children, laugh while you may,' cried Pippo; 'soon you will starve, and then the Law will laugh at you.'

        The children did laugh, and romped on; not understanding.

        Excellencies and Ministers--you think Messer Nellemane does not matter; that he is only a clerk and his place is only a village; you think that these people are all poor clods, and know not their right hand from their left; in your high place, whether you were born there, or whether you climbed there, it is so far below you, that poor, little, dusty village, with its stone walls and its narrow rooms, where the people die like flies, and no one cares, and Sheriff's officers, on the Pale Horse, make their rounds together night and day, and no one

hears the death cries, for the voices are too feeble and the roofs are too low; you think it does not matter, and you turn away your eyes, and you manufacture your pretty phrases, and you take your armchair at the Congress table of the Nations, for all that does matter to your thinking is only la haute politique. But you mistake; ah yes, you mistake.

        Louis Quatorze made just such a mistake; and the scaffold was built for the children of his blood.

        But the Roi Soleil had many an excuse. He was born in the purple; he was reared in oblivion of the people; he honestly believed that God had made him of ivory and them of clay; but you--is it so long since you left your cabin in Sicily, your desk in Piedmont?--are you not sons of the wars of independence?--were you not lulled in your

cradle by the shouts of 'Morir per Libertà!' Would you not be nought, unless the people made you all? unless, with their blood and sweat, they had cemented the mortars of your houses, and with their bodies made the steps by which you have mounted thrones?

        Yet once in office you forget!

        Once in office, Lethe never gave more utter oblivion than this oblivion of yours. Your portfolios won, what else matters?

        Let these people toil, and groan, and die; let the tax-gatherers seize the last rag off their naked and starving bones, wring from them every poor bronze coin that they have gained by the labour of their limbs, and claim impost off the crust of black bread that their hungry babies gnaw; what matter? it is only the people--you, too, were of the people once, but you have forgotten that.

        You are in office; you speak with elo-

quence in the Chamber, and you have your place in the councils of Europe.

        Vive la Haute Politique!

        We must be a great Power--ay, though in every house lies a corpse, in every river rots another, in every poor man's mouth is a curse, and over all the land there spreads the plague of want, the putrefaction of despair.

        Vive la Haute Politique!

        What! though you see behind her a spectre, a scaffold, and a tomb?

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

Return to the Victorian Women Writers Project Library