ced by the presence of the gay gallants of Venice who were
stationed there. It is not difficult to imagine the distaste with which
they left all the enervating delights of their resplendent island of
marble, with its mantling of sunlight and the tranquil beauty of its
dreamy days, for tedious exile among an inhospitable and untamed
population, the severe silence and sombre forests or the monotony of
barren rocks. "If you have read your Virgil or Homer," Gozzi tells us,
"you have seen Illyrians. These people are quite as pagan in their rites
of marriage and the burying of their dead as any people of pagan
antiquity. One of their favorite national games consists in lifting a
tremendous disk cut out of marble and hurling it to a great distance. Is
not this Diomedes and Turnus?

"Contempt weighs down upon every family who has not had several of its
men killed, or has not executed cruel vengeance on the right and on the
left, or has not been itself the object of outrageous retaliation. It
was not long before I had the opportunity to ascertain the truth of what
the old priest had told me as we walked together under the walls of the
city.

"A woman about fifty years old came one day and threw herself at the
feet of the governor. From her shoulder hung down a cumbrous gamebag,
and out of it she pulled a mass of hair clinging to a dried-up skull:
then, placing the hideous object before the governor, she struck her
head against the ground, crying, 'Justice! justice!' I inquired what
could possibly be the motive of so extraordinary an exhibition, and I
learnt that the skull was that of the woman's mother, who was
assassinated _thirty years before_--that the murderers had been
executed, but that the greed for vengeance not being yet appeased in
that wild daughter of Dalmatia, she had never failed to repeat the same
ceremony at the installation of each successive governor, always
exhibiting the same thirst for avenging herself upon the family of her
enemies, the same gamebag and the same skull!"

"It was impossible to have introduced into Dalmatia any such
agricultural reform or innovation as would have ameliorated the
cultivation of its fertile plains. The Dalmatian peasants were wedded to
the unintelligent routine of their forefathers, and in their ideas or
apprehension of things no landmark was ever removed. But, then, is the
mere industry which clears the soil of any good if courage and
intelligence do not second and direct m