Tasso. A village white as a seashore stone; lying along a river green as the Adige; with low mountains in sight across a green table-land of vine and chestnut, olive and corn; with some tall poplars by the water, and a church with a red brick bell-tower, and the bell swinging behind its wooden cage. Across the fields and along the side of the hills are scores of other villages; narrow roads run between them all in a network hidden under vine leaves; and some hundreds of house-roofs make up together what is called the Commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda. Of this commune the chief place, because the largest village, is Santa Rosalia. Santa Rosalia in Selva; so called because thus named in days when the woods had covered it up as closely as a blackbird's nest is covered with the long leaves that it builds in; Santa Rosalia in

Selva, a simple, honest, fresh, and most rural place, with sunburnt women plaiting straw upon its doorsteps, and little naked children tumbling about like Loves escaped from the panels of Correggio; with the daffodils and the odorous narcissus growing in spring-time everywhere among the grass and corn, and in the autumn the ox-carts going with the tubs of gathered grapes slowly down its single street: a street without a paving-stone, and without a shop except the butcher's stall and the grocer's, and one little old dim penthouse-like place where in the gloom an old woman sells cakes and toys and rosaries.

The bright green country lies close about Santa Rosalia, and indeed is one with it, and in summer so overlaps it, and roofs it in, with vine-foliage and clouds of silvery olive leaf that nothing is to be seen of it

except the bell-tower of its chief church, San Giuseppe, with a statue of the saint upon its roof pointing heavenward.

Things had always come and gone easily in Santa Rosalia in the old days, and even in the new. With revolutions and the like it had had nothing to do. It never talked politics. When men who had remembered wine ten centimes a flask found it rise to a hundred they scratched their heads and were puzzled; being told it was the cost of liberty, they took the explanation simply as a matter of fact, and thought liberty was a name for the vine disease.

When the church was whitewashed, and the trattoria was turned into the Caffè Vittorio Emanuele, and the conscription placards were pasted on the bridge, and the Imperial taxes established themselves in a brand-new stucco-plastered public office

next the butcher's, with a shield upon it, bearing a white cross on a red ground, Santa Rosalia did not take much notice: everything grew dear indeed, but some said it was the gas away in the city did it, and some said it was the railway, and some said it was the king, and some said it was all the fault of liquid manure; but still nobody troubled much about anything, and everybody continued to go to mass, and do his best to be happy, until the events took place that I propose to record.

The Commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda, whose centre is the village of Santa Rosalia, is, like all Italian communes, supposed to enjoy an independence that is practically a legislative autonomy. So long as it contributes its quota to the Imperial taxes, the Imperial Government is supposed to have nothing to do with it, and it is considered

to be as free as air to govern itself; so everybody will tell you; and so inviolate is its freedom that even the Prefect of its province dare not infringe upon it-or says so when he wants to get out of

any trouble. Anybody who pays five francs' worth of taxes has a communal vote in this free government, and helps to elect a body of thirty persons, who in turn elect a council of seven persons, who in turn elect a single person called a syndic, or, as you would call him in English, a mayor. This distilling and condensing process sounds quite admirable in theory. Whoever has the patience to read the pages of this book will see how this system works in practice.

Now in Vezzaja and Ghiralda the thirty persons do nothing but elect the seven persons, the seven do nothing but elect the one person, and the one person does nothing