ry is which lies to the south-east of
the capital, and-which we generally call the Abruzzi. The district is
wholly mountainous, and though there are no very great elevations
there are very ragged gorges and steep precipices, and now and then an
inaccessible bit of forest far up among the rocks, which no man has
ever thought of cutting down. It would be quite impossible to remove
the timber. The people are mostly shepherds in the higher regions,
where there are no vines, and when opportunity offers they will waylay
the unwary traveller and rob him, and even murder him, without
thinking very much about it. In the old days the boundary between the
Papal States and the kingdom of Naples ran through these mountains,
and the contrabbandieri--the smugglers of all sorts of wares--used to
cross from one dominion to the other by circuitous paths and steep
ways of which only a few had knowledge. The better known of these
passes were defended by soldiers and police, but there have been
bloody fights fought, within a few years, between the law and its
breakers. Foreigners never penetrate into the recesses of these hills,
and even the English guide-books, which are said to contain an account
of everything that the Buon Dio ever made, compiled from notes taken
at the time of the creation, make no mention of places which surpass
in beauty all the rest of Italy put together.

No railroad or other modern innovation penetrates into those Arcadian
regions, where the goatherd plays upon his pipe all the day long,
the picture of peace and innocence, or prowls in the passes with a
murderous long gun, if there are foreigners in the air. The women toil
at carrying their scant supply of drinking-water from great distances
during a part of the day, and in the evening they spin industriously
by their firesides or upon their doorsteps, as the season will have
it. It is an old life, the same to-day as a thousand years ago, and
perhaps as it will be a thousand years hence. The men are great
travellers, and go to Rome in the winter to sell their cheese, or to
milk a flock of goats in the street at daybreak, selling the foaming
canful for a son. But their visits to the city do not civilise them;
the outing only broadens the horizon of their views in regard to
foreigners, and makes them more ambitious to secure one, and see what
he is like, and cut off his ears, and get his money. Do not suppose
that the shepherd of the Abruzzi lies all day on the rocks