appropriate their profits. To the priest he gave in token of gratitude for the assistance rendered him by the villagers, a considerable sum for the poor. On me he bestowed a small picture of Lord Byron, which he had always carried about with him. The portrait of Erminia he had rolled up in a tin cylinder, and that and his fire-arms were all that he took away with him. So we parted, and as I believed, never to meet again, and Maddalena, who insisted upon going with him, and clung like a wild cat to the carriage, had to be forcibly dragged off and locked into the house till it had rolled far away.

"However that very night, so soon as they left off watching her, she vanished, and for days ran up and down the streets of Rome like a maniac, looking in vain for her master. At last she returned, and hobbled about the villa alone, but she let everything go to waste; the grapes might rot on the vines, and the fruit on the trees, rather than she take the trouble of gathering them and carrying them to market. She had always been idle, indeed, as a toad--a creature she resembled in appearance too--and it was only when it concerned the captain that she could work and bestir herself like three people in one.

"Of him, however, we heard nothing more; of his mortal foe Barbarossa we heard far too much. Since that night he and his band had lingered about our neighbourhood, and he seemed to have conceived a hatred against his countrymen, because they had gathered to the assistance of the foreigner. But for the company of papal gendarmes who were sent us as a permanent support from Rome, I do believe he would have fallen upon his own native village and taken a bloody revenge.

"Accordingly no one who had been present on the occasion, ever ventured himself a rifle-shot from the last houses without taking his fire-arms with him, and such as had to go into the mountains always begged for two gendarmes as escort. Those were sad times, amico mio, and I even lost my pleasure in rhyming, for I knew that he had a special spite against me. Twice there were great expeditions undertaken against the bandits, but not much came of them, for they had their scouts posted everywhere; they knew every crag and cranny of the mountains as intimately as the devil does his own den, and they were merely driven for awhile a little further back into the Sabina.

"However when in the winter old Serone, Domenico's father, died from grief on his son's account, we had an interval of peace. Il Rosso, whom of course the fact reached, may perhaps have felt some remorse, for by nature, as I have said, he was not bad-hearted, only his unfortunate love had hardened and frenzied him. It really seemed as though he meant to keep quiet during his year of mourning, and until midsummer we heard no more of banditti. Whether they were at work further south, or how they kept themselves alive during this holiday, God knows. But when we took it for granted that our deliverance from them was final we reckoned without our host. Our neighbourhood began all of a sudden to be haunted again. My neighbour, Pizzicarlo, who had been one of us that night at the villa, was captured by these villains while riding his donkey to Nerni, dragged off into their haunts, and only released on payment of a considerable ransom. And so with others, whom they sadly maltreated. This could not go on. The gendarmes obtained reinforcements, the razzia into the mountains began anew, but not with much better success. At that time Barbarossa seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, terrible as a basilisk, and slippery as an eel, and far and wide mothers quieted their screaming children by saying: Zitto, Barbarossa is coming! But other stories were told too, more to his credit; how he behaved to the poor and defenceless like a knight in a legend, intent mainly on righting the defective justice of the world, though every now and then robbing the egregiously wealthy just to supply his own needs. As I have before said, he was to be pitied, and if he had not run up so heavy a score that the law could not possibly wink at it, perhaps an amnesty would yet have changed him back into a peaceable honest citizen.

"Under these circumstances we lived wretchedly enough, much like shipwrecked sailors on a plank, with a shoal of sharks around. Thirteen months had now passed since the captain's departure, and no one spoke of him, at least no one said any good of him, fearing to be overheard by somebody who might repeat it to Barbarossa. Imagine, therefore, my horror one afternoon. I had just opened a bottle of castor oil, and was thinking of nothing worse, when Signor Gustavo his own very self entered my room as though nothing had happened. 'Corpo della Madonna!' I cried, 'What wind has blown you here? Are you so weary of life that you determine to make your villa your mausoleum?' Then he told me that he had not been able to endure either the East or West. Nowhere had he found any flavour in the wine, everywhere the women were tedious, and since he had fired at men, the chase of lions and hyenas had become insipid. And always too he had been pursued by the feeling that he had, like a contemptible coward, left the field to his foe, instead of waiting to measure his strength against him. And a short time back, when staying at some German Spa, he read a newspaper account of the Sabine mountains being again ravaged by banditti, and of Papal carabinieri having for months pursued the vagabonds, who seemed as inexterminable as toadstools after rain: why then he had found the monotonous elegant world in which he was living, simply intolerable, and taking an extra post, he had travelled day and night without halting, crossed the Alps, and got here. And now here he was again settled in the vineyard. Maddalena had been actually wild with joy, and he himself felt more at home than he had done for a year and a day. 'And what then was he going to do here?' asked I in horror and amazement. 'Oh!' said he, 'I shall have no lack of occupation; I shall join the patrol of gendarmes that are constantly on the mountains, and so as a volunteer and dilettante face my man. When I come to consider it, it was I who hung this mill-stone about your necks, and so it is only fair that I should try to help you off with it. Good-day, Angelo, pay me a visit in my mausoleum.'

"And away he went: he had grown so strangely restless--quite unlike his former self--that he could not stay long in any one place. What I felt about the whole affair, I leave you to imagine. Meanwhile it had never been my wont to play the coward, and indeed here it behoved me to take the initiative, on account of my old acquaintance with Signor Gustavo. So I boldly visited him in the villa, and found everything just as though he had never left it. Maddalena hobbling about as before, and busy enough now, gathering the grapes with her long arms; the dog, who had grown old and blind of one eye; and in the salon the marks of the bullets still visible, but the holes in Erminia's portrait had been carefully repaired. When I went in, the captain was walking up and down, smoking and reading, but on seeing me he laid aside his book--as usual verses by his English poet--and heartily shook my hand. He had spent the whole night between the rocks and woods, lying out to stalk his game, and only slept a little in the morning. At midnight he was going out again with three stout fellows who did honour to the Pope's uniform. If I liked I might go with him.

"I declined with thanks on this occasion, and did not remain long, for his manner, half fierce and half reckless--as though he were playing a game of chance--gave me an uncomfortable feeling. On my way home, I laid a kind of wager as it were with myself--that if seven days passed without his coming to a bad end, I would print my sonnets to Erminia at my own expense; if otherwise I would leave them in manuscript. And an end did indeed come, but whether it could be called good or bad, God knows, and so to the