twards to high Laviano, looking towards
the pass by which the highway leads from Ciliento to Basilicata.

In Laviano, facing the wretched houses, stood the grand beginning of a
wretchedly unfinished building, one of those utter failures of great
hopes, which trace the track of invading liberty through the south. It
came, it saw, and it began many things--but it did not conquer and it
completed very little. In the first wild enthusiasm of the Garibaldian
revolution, even poor, hill-perched, filth-stricken, pig-breeding
Laviano was to be a city, and forthwith, in the general stye, the walls
of a great municipal building, from which lofty destinies were to be
guided and controlled in the path to greatness, began to rise, with
strength of stone masonry, and arches of well-hewn basalt, and divisions
within for halls and stairways, and many offices. But the beams of the
first story were never laid across the lower walls. There was no more
money, and what had been built was a palace for the pigs. Laviano had
spent its little all, and gone into debt, to be great, and had failed;
and though the people had earned some of their own money back as wages
in the building, more than half of it slipped into the pockets of
architects, who went away smiling, jeering, and happy, to prey upon the
next foolish village that would be great and could not. And above, from
a hill on the mountain's spur outside the village, still frowned intact
the heavy four-towered castle, complete and sound as when it had been
built, the lasting monument of those hard warriors of a sterner time,
who could not only take, but hold--and they held long and cruelly.

Veronica looked up backwards at the towers, as the horses stood a while
to breathe after the steep ascent, and she asked Don Teodoro to whom the
castle belonged.

"It is yours," he answered. "The castle is yours, the village is yours,
the hills are yours. Your steward lives in the castle. You have much
property here, more miles of good and bad land than I can tell."

"And is it all like this? Are the people all like these?"

"No. There are poorer people in the hills."

The happy laugh that had come when the wind had blown the olive blossoms
of Eboli upon her lap had long been silent now. Her face was grave and
sorrowful, and she drew in her lips as though something hurt her. Some
half-naked children stood shyly watching her from a little distance.
Pigs grunted and rubbed themselves against the whee