ll hour antecedent to the dawn.
'She is a traitress!' he exclaimed, and leaping from his bed, as with a
brain striking fire, screamed, 'Traitress! traitress!' Battista and his
wife had to fling themselves on him and gag him, guessing him as mad. He
spoke pompously and theatrically; called himself the Eye of Italy, and
said that he must be in Milan, or Milan would perish, because of the
traitress: all with a great sullen air of composure and an odd distension
of the eyelids. When they released him, he smiled and thanked them,
though they knew, that had he chosen, he could have thrown off a dozen of
them, such was his strength. The woman went down on her knees to him to
get his consent that she should dress and bandage his head afresh. The
sound of the regimental bugles drew him from the house, rather than any
immediate settled scheme to watch at the gates.

Artillery and infantry were in motion before sunrise, from various points
of the city, bearing toward the Palio and Zeno gates, and the people
turned out to see them, for it was a march that looked like the beginning
of things. The soldiers had green twigs in their hats, and kissed their
hands good-humouredly to the gazing crowd, shouting bits of verses:

'I'm off! I'm off! Farewell, Mariandl! if I come back a sergeant-major or
a Field-Marshal, don't turn up your nose at me: Swear you will be
faithful all the while; because, when a woman swears, it's a comfort,
somehow: Farewell! Squeeze the cow's udders: I shall be thirsty enough:
You pretty wriggler! don't you know, the first cup of wine and the last,
I shall float your name on it? Luck to the lads we leave behind!
Farewell, Mariandl!'

The kindly fellows waved their hands and would take no rebuff. The
soldiery of Austria are kindlier than most, until their blood is up. A
Tyrolese regiment passed, singing splendidly in chorus. Songs of
sentiment prevailed, but the traditions of a soldier's experience of the
sex have informed his ballads with strange touches of irony, that help
him to his (so to say) philosophy, which is recklessness. The Tyroler's
'Katchen' here, was a saturnine Giulia, who gave him no response, either
of eye or lip.

'Little mother, little sister, little sweetheart, 'ade! ade!' My little
sweetheart, your meadow is half-way up the mountain; it's such a green
spot on the eyeballs of a roving boy! and the chapel just above it, I
shall see it as I've seen it a thousand times; and the cloud hangs nea