had passed; that I was a common tourist,
not even an artist (as my sketch-book showed), and that my cards gave
my exact address and description.

But the Sindaco, the French-speaking Sindaco, understood me not in the
least, and it seemed a wicked thing in me to expose him in his old
age, so I waited till he spoke. He spoke a word common to all
languages, and one he had just caught from my lips.

'Tourist-e?' he said.

I nodded. Then he told them to let me go. It was as simple as that;
and to this day, I suppose, he passes for a very bilingual Mayor. He
did me a service, and I am willing to believe that in his youth he
smacked his lips over the subtle flavour of Voltaire, but I fear
to-day he would have a poor time with Anatole France.

What a contrast was there between the hour when I had gone out of the
cafe a prisoner and that when I returned rejoicing with a crowd about
me, proclaiming my innocence, and shouting one to another that I was a
tourist and had seventy-three lira on my person! The landlady smiled
and bowed: she had before refused me a bed! The men at the tables made
me a god! Nor did I think them worse for this. Why should I? A man
unknown, unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks of travel
and mud, and in a suit that originally cost not ten shillings; having
slept in leaves and ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk
and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is a foreigner; he
carries a great club. Is it not much wiser to arrest such a man? Why
yes, evidently. And when you have arrested him, can you do more than
let him go without proof, on his own word? Hardly!

Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially for this strange
adventure they had given me; and next day, having slept in a human
room, I went at sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above their
town, and so climbed by a long cleft the _second_ spur of the
Apennines: the spur that separated me from the _third_ river, the
Parma. And my goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed it) was
a place marked in the map 'Tizzano'. To climb this second spur, to
reach and cross the Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left
Calestano on that fragrant morning; and having passed and drawn a
little hamlet called Frangi, standing on a crag, I went on up the
steep vale and soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips a
little and allows a path to cross over to the southern side.

It is the custom of many,