me, and got a lift. They were on their
way to buy corn at Rionero. We breakfasted
on fried sardines at Eboli, and entered into a
vociferous, gesticulative, but finally infructuose
treaty for a cargo of water-melons as
we were quitting the moist levels, where they
grew, to slant up among the mountains whose
lofty crags, wreathed in blue films of distance,
look down upon the watery plains of
Pæstum.

An hour or two before sunset we were
well in among the mountains, and stopped
at a private house in Oliveto, to buy some
barley for use on the road. Though it was
but a small bag of barley, there were a good
many words about it. While the bargain
was pending, as the day had been very hot,
and I was thirsty, I asked if they had any
water tolerably fresh from the spring. It
seemed an innocent thing to ask; they gave
me a glass of water, but it was the immediate
cause of getting me into trouble.

I should inform the reader that the cholera
was in Naples— five hundred were dying
daily there— and all the subjects of Ferdinand
the Fat (who set an inordinate value on their
lazy inglorious lives, and are innocent of
predestinarian principles or any other incentives
of valour, whether Mahometan or Calvinistic)
were in the utmost degree of trepidation.
Still, why should I not drink my glass of
water? It is true I wore a peaked beard
which did not match very well with my
peasant's costume, and Bomba has declared
that men with beards are dangerous. My
beard, moreover, was of an ultra-republican
colour.

The barley bargain had been concluded,
the water drunk, and our waggon was
trundling down the steep street, while I sat
in my shirt sleeves smoking and admiring
the sunset among the purple peaks, when a
man came running after us, and cried:

"Stop! the brigadier wishes to see this
man," pointing to me.

"And who and where may the brigadier
be, by your favour," said I.

"The Corporal Salzalo, at the guard-house,"
said he.

"Ask the Corporal Brigadier Salzalo, with
my compliments, to step down here, where
he may inspect my passport and receive a
gratification of five grains (twopence) to drink
my health."

In my innocence I thought it was only a
case of bottiglia; I had no idea of the vials
of wrath which my draught of water had
uncorked in Oliveto.

Meanwhile, my companions the carretteri
were astonished and shocked at the loftiness
and indiscretion of my message to a
functionary in so high authority, and besought
me to answer his summons in person; so
that, bethinking myself that a humble deportment
might harmonise better with my
costume, I came down from my waggon and
accompanied the messenger.

All the inhabitants of the place seemed
crowded about the guard-house, and stared
at me with angry curiosity. The Corporal
Salzalo received me with grim austerity, and
was indeed a very gaunt, hard-featured, ill-
omened looking official. He seized me rudely
by the arm, and drew me into the guardhouse,
wherein a bewildered and scared little
man, vainly attempting to assume a magisterial
severity of aspect, sat on a rush-
bottomed curule chair. This was the Giudice
of Oliveto.

"Shew your papers! " thundered the
corporal.

"Behold them! " said I, unfolding a Foreign
Office passport, bound in maroon morocco,
signed with the flowing pen of Palmerston.

The brigadier, determined to do his
business thoroughly, began to peruse the
preambular recitation of his lordship's titles,
orders, and appointments.

"That is English," said I, "which you
cannot understand; what it touches you to
examine is the visa of his Sicilian majesty's
minister of foreign affairs, which is at the
other end of the book."

The brigadier signified by twitching the
passport away from my indications of Caraffa's
signature, and by sundry explosive growls,
that he did not wish to be instructed in his
business as a military diplomatist. Soon,
however, both he and the judge lost their
interest in the passport, which they could
neither of them make anything of, and had
only examined by way of form.

"We must now make a corporeal perquisition,"
said the brigadier, laying hold of me
again, and putting his hands into my pockets.

"I am an English gentleman," I began.

"We see you are," interrupted the corporal,
in a tone of triumphant condemnation, as if
he had forced me into a most full and
satisfactory confession of my guilt.

"I am an English gentleman," I continued,
"and I warn you that it will be a signal
infraction of international law to search my
person— my papers being regular— without
just cause of suspicion."

No notice was taken of my remonstrances,
and the search resulted in the discovery and
sequestration of a pistol, an illegally long-
nosed clasp-knife, and a powder-flask. My
remonstrances had been made with a view to
these forbidden pieces of hardware; and I
was surprised that their discovery did not
produce more sensation.

The pistol was pronounced to be loaded,
and laid aside with the knife; the powder-
flask fell in for much the largest share of
attention. The corporal inspected it narrowly,
poured a little powder into the palm of his
hand, bedrub it with his finger, smelt it, and,
on the evidence of his military nostril, with
much solemnity pronounced it to be
gunpowder, neither more nor less— he and the
bystanders seeming disappointed at not
finding it something infinitely more deadly.