ots have to endure?' Jacopo
muttered to himself, and aroused a rare laugh from Angelo, who seized
him under the arm, half-lifting him on. At the inn where they rested, he
bathed and bandaged the foot.

'I can't help feeling a kindness to you for it,' said Jacopo.

'I can't afford to leave you behind,' Angelo accounted for his
attention.

'Padrone, we've been understanding one another all along by our thumbs.
It's that old inn of mine--the taxes! we have to sell our souls to pay
the taxes. There's the tongue of the thing. I wouldn't betray you; I
wouldn't.'

'I'll try you,' said Angelo, and put him to proof next day, when the
soldiers stopped them as they were driving in a cart, and Jacopo swore
to them that Angelo was his intended son-in-law.

There was evidently an unusual activity among the gendarmerie of the
lower valley, the Val di Non; for Jacopo had to repeat his fable more
than once, and Angelo thought it prudent not to make inquiries about
travellers. In this valley they were again in summer heat. Summer
splendours robed the broken ground. The Val di Non lies toward the
sun, banked by the Val di Sole, like the southern lizard under a stone.
Chestnut forest and shoulder over shoulder of vineyard, and meadows of
marvellous emerald, with here and there central partly-wooded crags,
peaked with castle-ruins, and ancestral castles that are still warm
homes, and villages dropped among them, and a river bounding and rushing
eagerly through the rich enclosure, form the scene, beneath that Italian
sun which turns everything to gold. There is a fair breadth to the vale:
it enjoys a great oval of sky: the falls of shade are dispersed, dot the
hollow range, and are not at noontide a broad curtain passing over from
right to left. The sun reigns and also governs in the Val di Non.

'The grape has his full benefit here, padrone,' said Jacopo.

But the place was too populous, and too much subjected to the
general eye, to please Angelo. At Cles they were compelled to bear
an inspection, and a little comedy occurred. Jacopo, after exhibiting
Angelo as his son-in-law, seeing doubts on the soldiers' faces,
mentioned the name of the German suitor for his daughter's hand--the
carpenter, Johann Spellmann, to whose workshop he requested to be taken.
Johann, being one of the odd Germans in the valley, was well known: he
was carving wood astride a stool, and stopped his whistling to listen
to the soldiers, who took the first word