tudes, take the stony path which winds painfully up the side of
the mountain. You will come to a town of five or ten thousand souls,
which is little more than a dormitory for five or ten thousand
peasants. Viewed from a distance, this country town has an almost
grand appearance. The dome of a church, a range of monastic buildings,
the tower of a feudal castle, invest it with a certain air of
importance. A troop of women are coming down to the fountain with
copper vessels on their heads. You smile instinctively. Here is
movement and life. Enter! You are struck with a sensation of coldness,
dampness, and darkness. The streets are narrow flights of steps, which
every now and then plunge beneath low arches. The houses are closed,
and seem to have been deserted for a century. Not a human being at the
doors, or at the windows. The streets, silent and solitary.

You would imagine that the curse of heaven had fallen on the country,
but for the large placards on the house-fronts, which prove that
missionary fathers have passed through the place. "_Viva Gesu! Viva
Maria! Viva il sangue di Gesu! Viva il cor di Maria! Bestemmiatori,
tacetevi per l'amor di Maria!_"

These devotional sentences are like so many signboards of the public
simplicity.

A quarter of an hour's walk brings you to the principal square.
Half-a-dozen civil officials are seated in a circle before a cafe,
gaping at one another. You join them. They ask you for news of
something that happened a dozen years ago. You ask them in turn, what
epidemic has depopulated the country?

Presently some thirty market-men and women begin to display on the
pavement an assortment of fruit and vegetables. Where are the buyers
of these products of the earth? Here they come! Night is approaching.
The entire population begins to return at once from their labour in
the fields; a stalwart and sturdy population; the thew and sinew of
some fine regiments. Every one of these half-clad men, armed with
pickaxe and shovel, rose two hours before the sun this morning, and
went forth to weed a little field, or to dig round a few olive-trees.
Many of them have their little domains several miles off, and thither
they go daily, accompanied by a child and a pig. The pig is not very
fat, and the man and his child are very lean. Still they seem
light-hearted and merry. They have plucked some wild flowers by the
roadside. The boy is crowned with roses, like Lucullus at table. The
father buys a han