at my old clothes and almost smiled.

But the weather was cold, though the roads were dusty; so I mounted my
ass and jogged along, meditating deeply.

CHAPTER XIV

Fillettino is a trifle cleaner than most towns of the same kind.
Perhaps it rains more often, and there are fewer people. Considering
that its vicinity has been the scene of robbery, murder, and all
manner of adventurous crime from time immemorial, I had expected to
find it a villainous place. It is nothing of the kind. There is a
decent appearance about it that is surprising; and though the houses
are old and brown and poor, I did not see pigs in many rooms, nor did
the little children beg of me, as they beg of everyone elsewhere. The
absence of the pigs struck me particularly, for in the Sabine towns
they live in common with the family, and go out only in the daytime to
pick up what they can get.

I went to the apothecary--there is always an apothecary in these
places--and inquired for a lodging. Before very long I had secured a
room, and it seemed that the people were accustomed to travellers, for
it was surprisingly clean. The bed was so high that I could touch the
ceiling when I sat on it, and the walls were covered with ornaments,
such as glazed earthenware saints, each with a little basin for holy
water, some old engravings of other saints, a few paper roses from the
last fair, and a weather-beaten game-pouch of leather. The window
looked out over a kind of square, where a great quantity of water ran
into a row of masonry tanks out of a number of iron pipes projecting
from an overhanging rock. Above the rock was the castle, the place I
had come to see, towering up against the darkening sky.

It is such a strange place that I ought to describe it to you, or you
will not understand the things that happened there. There is a great
rock, as I said, rising above the town, and upon this is built the
feudal stronghold, so that the walls of the building do not begin less
than forty feet from the street level. The height of the whole castle
consequently seems enormous. The walls, for the most part, follow the
lines of the gray rock, irregularly, as chance would have it, and the
result is a three-cornered pile, having a high square tower at one
angle, where also the building recedes some yards from the edge of
the cliff, leaving on that side a broad terrace guarded by a stone
parapet. On another side of the great isolated boulder a narrow
roadway h