ast nine, Garibaldi, with thirteen of his staff,
started by special train for the capital.

It must be remembered that though the army of Salerno was recalled to
the Volturno, no troops had been withdrawn from Naples. The sentries
still paced before the palaces and public offices, the barracks held
their full complement, Castel Sant' Elmo had all its guns in position.
These troops quartered in the capital, where everything contributed to
stimulate their fidelity, were of different stuff from Ghio's or
Caldarelli's frightened sheep; a White Terror, a repetition of the
15th of May 1848, would have been much to their mind. There had been
no actual revolution; nothing officially proved that Naples had thrown
off the royal allegiance. Such were the strange circumstances under
which Garibaldi, without a single battalion, came to take possession
of a city of 300,000 inhabitants.

Courage of this sort either does not exist, or it is supremely
unconscious. It is likely, therefore, that the Dictator gave no
thought to the enormous risk he ran, but his passage from the station
to the palace of the Foresteria, where he descended, was a bad
quarter-of-an-hour to the friends who followed him, and to whom his
life seemed the point on which Italian regeneration yet hung. A chance
shot fired by some Royalist fanatic, and who could measure the result?
As he passed under the muzzle of the guns at the opening of the
Toledo, he gave the order: 'Drive slower, slower--more slowly still.'
And he rose and stood up for a moment in the carriage with his arms
crossed. The artillerymen, who had begun to make a kind of hostile
demonstration, changed their minds and saluted. The sullen looks of
the royal soldiers was the only jarring note in the display of
intoxicating joy with which the Neapolitans welcomed the bringer of
their freedom; freedom all too easily had, for if anything could have
purified the Neapolitans from the evil influences of servitude, it
would have been the necessity of paying dearly for their liberties.
The delirium in the streets lasted for several days and nights; what
the consequences would have been of such a state of madness under a
paler sky, it is not pleasant to reflect; here, at least, there were
no robberies, no drunken person was seen; if there were some murders,
a careful inquiry made by an Englishman showed that the number was the
same as the average number of street-murders through the year. At
night, when the wor