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like this; she goes from house to house, and out to all the villas in turn

An angry glisten of Messer Gaspardo's eyes told his faithful servitor that he had gone on the wrong tack: he hastened to make amends.

'A beggar, of course, she is,' he added. 'I think she has been one twenty years. I remember her as long as I remember anything, and she always lived by charity. A lady did get her awhile ago permission to get taken in at Montesacro; but the old cranky, crazy creature said she could not live shut up: if she could not walk her dozen miles a day she would die-so she said. Yes to be sure, illustrissimo, she is a beggar.'

'A vagrant!'

Messer Nellemane shrugged his shoulders

and sighed over the degeneracy of a public

which would still continue to find patrons to support and pamper mendicancy. He fell into deep meditation. In the 395 Regulations framed for the Polizia, Igiena, and Edilità of the commune there was one terrible void: there was nothing at all said about beggars.

'They can find means to maintain all these creatures, and yet they declare they cannot support the imperial and local taxes!' he said aloud to his subordinate; by his 'they' meaning the landowners of the district, men of long descent, patrician appearance, and courtly manner, whose rank was the bitter envy of Messer Nellemane, whilst their poverty was the object of his equally bitter scorn.

Bindo Terri sighed too, and put up his hands to express his own equal regret and horror. Himself, he knew very well that

most of the people who gave alms to Annunziata were people of the poorest sort;

peasants or homely folk, such as masons, carpenters, smiths, and the like; but he saw that it would not suit his chief's mood then to say so.

'There is nothing about beggars in it?' he said questioningly, turning over the leaves of his beloved and revered Regulations.

'Not as yet,' said Messer Nellemane. The good Cavaliere Durellazzo is, perhaps, too lenient to the vagrant classes.'

The good Cavaliere Durellazzo was just then sitting in a straw chair, with a wide straw hat on, smoking a cigar made, for the most part, of straw, on the sands of a summer resort on the Mediterranean, and no more troubled himself about his commune when away, than he did when at home in it.

CHAPTER IV.

HAT very night, as ill luck would have it, Messer Nellemane went

sauntering down the green banks of the Rosa, for the pleasure of surveying a grim piece of work he had done the year before. An old convent, once of an Olivetine Congregation, crowned a hill that rose up from the Rosa; it had been a beautiful hill, clothed for centuries with forest greenery, in which many a tall cypress, hundreds of years old, and of great height and girth, towered majestic, whilst the bronze-hued ilex oak, and the silver poplar, and the

chestnut, and the acacia, all grew in amity together, sheltering in spring time millions of primroses, and of many another wee wood-flower.

Santa Rosalia is in a lovely pastoral country; the country that seems to thrill with Theocritus' singing, as it throbs with the little tambourine of the cicala; a country running over with beautiful greenery, and with climbing creepers hanging everywhere, from the vine on the maples to the chinarose hedges, and with the deep blue shadows and the sun-flushed whiteness of the distant mountains lending to it in the golden distance that solemnity and etherial charm which, without mountains somewhere within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of freedom it is scarred and wounded; great sear patches stretch here and there where woods have been felled

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