fell back on the Five Days of Milan in
'48--the immortal days, when a populace drove out an army, and what
began almost in jest ended in a delirium, a stupefaction of victory. His
language was hot, broken, confused, like the street fighting it
chronicled. Afterwards--a further sharpening and blanching of the old
face--and he had carried them deep into the black years of Italy's
patience and Austria's revenge. Throwing out a thin arm, he pointed
towards town after town on the lake shores, now in the brilliance of
sunset, now in the shadow of the northern slope--Gravedona, Varenna,
Argegno--towns which had each of them given their sons to the Austrian
bullet and the Austrian lash for the ransom of Italy.

He ran through the sacred names--Stazzonelli, Riccini, Crescieri,
Ronchetti, Ceresa, Previtali--young men, almost all of them, shot for
the possession of a gun or a knife, for helping their comrades in the
Austrian army to desert, for "insulting conduct" towards an Austrian
soldier or officer.

Of one of these executions, which he had himself witnessed at
Varese--the shooting of a young fellow of six-and-twenty, his own friend
and kinsman--he gave an account which blanched the Duchess's cheeks and
brought the big tears into her eyes. Then, when he saw the effect he had
produced, the old man trembled.

"Ah, eccellenza," he cried, "but it had to be! The Italians had to show
they knew how to die; then God let them live. Ecco, eccellenza!"

And he drew from his breast-pocket, with shaking hands, an old envelope
tied round with string. When he had untied it, a piece of paper emerged,
brown with age and worn with much reading. It was a rudely printed
broadsheet containing an account of the last words and sufferings of the
martyrs of Mantua--those conspirators of 1852--from whose graves and
dungeons sprang, tenfold renewed, the regenerating and liberating forces
which, but a few years later, drove out the Austrian with the Bourbon,
together.

"See here, eccellenza," he said, as he tenderly spread out its tattered
folds and gave it into the Duchess's hand. "Have the goodness to look
where is that black mark. There you will find the last words of Don
Enrico Tazzoli, the half-brother of my father. He was a priest,
eccellenza. Ah, it was not then as it is now! The priests were then for
Italy. They hanged three of them at Mantua alone. As for Don Enrico,
first they stripped him of his priesthood, and then they hanged him. And