CHAPTER XXV.

WHAT'S IN THE WIND.

Topography of the Olmo.-Company at the Lago.—Company at the Olmo.- Company at the Querciola.-An English carriage on the downs.

I HAVE said that we often drove through a romantic ravine and thick chestnut-woods that lay between our house and the valley of the Mugello. It is needful that I should now more particularly describe the locality and the line of roads amongst which we were settling ourselves. I have said that our house was about five hundred yards from the provincial or high road from Florence to Borgo S. Lorenzo and Faenza: and that, about double that distance below our lodge-gate on the way to Florence, was a neat osteria or public-house, nearly opposite to which was the cottage of the retired attorney Dr. Masini, and three or four farm-houses with the blacksmith's shop. Above our lodge and gate, the turnpike wound northwards, over grassy and cultivated hills, leaving, on the right, a parish road

which branched off to Masseto, the residence of the Marchese Guadagni. A smooth grassy meadow occupied the greater part of the triangle formed between this parish road and the turnpike. Beside this meadow and road, and distant about half-amile from our lodge, was a large solitary farm-house called the Croci. Here the turnpike began to descend amongst the hills; and after another half-mile, led to a large public-house called the Lago; placed near more farm-houses and near the entrance to the beautiful ravine through which the high road wound, as I have said, to Borgo S. Lorenzo :-a town of about six thousand inhabitants, distant six miles below. This Osteria del Lago was kept by a man named Pietro Parenti, a mason, who had worked for us almost constantly since we came into the country; and who was nephew to the landlord of the public-house of the Olmo.

About midday of the 28th of July of this year, 1864, three strangers went into this public-house and asked for something to eat: I call them strangers because, although this was a high road between Florence and a town of five or six thousand inhabitants, I am assured, by the innkeepers, that in the course of the year, not ten people pass along it who are not perfectly well-known as belonging

to the population of the country. Thus, on the evening before this day, when my keeper was drinking in the same house with an apparent stranger, everyone knew that his friend was the notorious "Pallandra," who had escaped from our plantation when his comrade had been arrested a fortnight before. However, the three who were now eating at the Lago were really strangers. They spoke Romagnole-or the dialect of the Romagna -well distinguished by all Tuscans-interlarded with unintelligible slang words as they conversed with one another: they had all very long knives or stilettos. The landlord, afterwards interrogated, said he had fancied they were cattle-drivers who had left their herd in the road hard by ; but his two daughters, who returned after dinner to their work on our neighbouring lands, saw no drove of cattle, but had observed the three strangers creep under the arch of a bridge where it spans the torrent of the Lago beneath the high road near their father's house, and there lie concealed for some hours.

About two hours after midday on that same day, the young wife of our gardener, who occupied one of the two tenements that formed our lodge, -the keeper living in the other--went down, with her baby in her arms, to the osteria of the Olmo.

She there found two strangers eating at a table. One of them wore a very large black beard, the other a pair of spectacles. The man with the beard was talking Romagnole to the inn-keeper, and saying that he was a hay and grass seed merchant, and asking whether he thought that I, the Signore of the neighbouring castle, would buy any seed. The landlord answered doggedly that he knew nothing about it:-that the woman was my gardener's wife, and that they should apply to her. They did so, and she advised them to come up to the house. They did not come; but began paying their reckoning. This led to a quarrel between them and their host for when they objected to his demand of four francs, he reminded them of their horse in the stable, which had eaten for three; and he long refused to take the zwanzigers—as the people still call German money which they offered; though he admitted it might pass in Romagna. These two also talked Romagnole to mine host; but between themselves, they spoke a language which Lena Margheri could not understand. She came away and left them squabbling.

About a mile and a-half under the Olmo, towards Florence, is a village called the Querciola. At a public-house here kept by Frangioni, a sort of

cattle-broker, four strangers stopped that day to eat, and then went on their way towards Borgo S. Lorenzo. On the hill of the Croci near this road, that same Frangioni and a contadino of a neighbouring farm, were returning from a cattle fair, when they were stopped by four strangers, who asked them many particulars about the neighbourhood.

But if, as I have said, it is needful that sheep and cattle should in Tuscany be locked up at night in stables well secured with iron bars to prevent them being carried away by robbers, it is no less necessary that they should be taken to the same shelter in the day time to protect them from the heat of the sun. Thus, then, having been led out to the fields at sun rise, they are driven back to the close stables at about ten o'clock; where they pant, in shade, during the hottest hours of the day. At about three o'clock in the afternoon of this eventful 28th July, Adrian Rossi, son of a tenant farmer at the Olmo, was driving his father's three cows from their stable to the grassy hills which lie on each side of the road that branches off, as I have said, from the turnpike towards Masseto. He had already got to the downs beyond the embranchment on this Masseto road, when he was stopped