see about Italian towns in couples,
with red-braided swallowtail coats and cocked hats, those carabinieres
--namely, who are soldiers in war and policemen in times of peace. Any
spectator from a foreign land would have thought it the business of such
an officer of the law to press in and stop the fighting; but he did not
so interpret his duty. He gingerly touched the shoulders next him with
the tips of his fingers, and now and then lifted himself on the tips of
his toes to look if the fight had stopped of itself or not.

At last the fat, elderly man, whom his friends--and all the throng
except that one wicked youth seemed his friends--were caressing in
untimely embraces and coaxing in tones of tender entreaty, burst from
them, and, aiming at the head of his enemy, flung his club, to the
imminent peril of all the bystanders, and missed him. Then he frankly
put himself in the hands of his friends, who lifted him into a cab,
where one of them mounted with him and stayed him on the seat, while the
cabman drove rapidly away. The wicked youth had vanished in unknown
space; but the carabiniere, attended by a group of admirers, marched
boldly up the middle of the street, and the crowd, with whatever
reluctance, persuaded itself to disperse, though the cabmen, to the
number of ten or twenty, continued to drive around in concentric circles
and irregular ellipses. In five minutes not an eye-witness of the fray
remained, such being the fear of the law, not so much in those who break
it as in those who see it broken, and who dread incurring the vengeance
of the culprit, if he is acquitted, or of his family if he is convicted
on their testimony. The quarrel had gone on a full quarter of an hour,
but the concierge of the hotel in front of which it had raged professed
to have known nothing of it, having, he said, been in-doors all the
time. A cabman whom we eliminated from the hysterical company of his
fellows and persuaded to drive us away to see a church attempted to
ignore the whole affair when asked about it. With difficulty he could be
made to recollect it, and then he dismissed it as a trifle. "Oh," he
said, "chiacchiere di donnicciuole," which is something like "Clatter
of little old women," a thing not worth noticing. He had, if we could
believe him, not cared to know how it began or ended, and he would not
talk about it.

Later, still interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the
public security in his own pers