to go into the mountains always begged for
two gendarmes as escort. Those were sad times, _amico mio_, and I even
lost my pleasure in rhyming, for I knew that he had a special spite
against me. Twice there were great expeditions undertaken against the
bandits, but not much came of them, for they had their scouts posted
everywhere; they knew every crag and cranny of the mountains as
intimately as the devil does his own den, and they were merely driven
for awhile a little further back into the Sabina.

"However when in the winter old Serone, Domenico's father, died from
grief on his son's account, we had an interval of peace. Il Rosso, whom
of course the fact reached, may perhaps have felt some remorse, for by
nature, as I have said, he was not bad-hearted, only his unfortunate
love had hardened and frenzied him. It really seemed as though he meant
to keep quiet during his year of mourning, and until midsummer we heard
no more of banditti. Whether they were at work further south, or how
they kept themselves alive during this holiday, God knows. But when we
took it for granted that our deliverance from them was final we
reckoned without our host. Our neighbourhood began all of a sudden to
be haunted again. My neighbour, Pizzicarlo, who had been one of us that
night at the villa, was captured by these villains while riding his
donkey to Nerni, dragged off into their haunts, and only released on
payment of a considerable ransom. And so with others, whom they sadly
maltreated. This could not go on. The gendarmes obtained
reinforcements, the razzia into the mountains began anew, but not with
much better success. At that time Barbarossa seemed to be everywhere
and nowhere, terrible as a basilisk, and slippery as an eel, and far
and wide mothers quieted their screaming children by saying: _Zitto_,
Barbarossa is coming! But other stories were told too, more to his
credit; how he behaved to the poor and defenceless like a knight in a
legend, intent mainly on righting the defective justice of the world,
though every now and then robbing the egregiously wealthy just to
supply his own needs. As I have before said, he was to be pitied, and
if he had not run up so heavy a score that the law could not possibly
wink at it, perhaps an amnesty would yet have changed him back into a
peaceable honest citizen.

"Under these circumstances we lived wretchedly enough, much like
shipwrecked sailors on a plank, with a shoal of sharks around. Thir