re he comes again. Only look at the misery in the fellow's face! and
you see he has his orders evidently enough; and he dare not hurry me. I
think I'll have a bath before I start."

"It is scarcely fair, after all," said I. "I suppose he wants to get
back to his one o'clock dinner."

"I could no more feel for a gendarme than I could compassionate a
scorpion. Take the best-natured fellow in Europe--the most generous, the
most trustful, the most unsuspecting--make a brigadier of Gendarmerie of
him for three months, and he'll come out scarcely a shade brighter than
the veriest rascal he has handcuffed! Do you know what our friend yonder
is at now?"

"No. He appears to be trying to take a stain out of one of his yellow
gauntlets."

"No such thing. He is noting down your features--taking a written
portrait of you, as the man who sat at breakfast with me on a certain
morning of a certain month. Take my word for it, some day or other when
you purchase a hat too tall in the crown, or you are seen to wear your
whiskers a trifle too long or bushy, an intimation will reach you at
your hotel, that the Prefect would like to talk with you; the end of
which will be the question, 'Whether there is not a friend you are most
anxious to meet in Switzerland, or if you have not an uncle impatient to
see you at Trieste?' And yet," added he, after a pause, "the Piedmontese
are models of liberality and legality in comparison with the officials
in the south. In Sicily, for instance, the laws are more corruptly
administered than in Turkey. I'll tell you a case, which was, however,
more absurd than anything else. An English official, well known at
Messina, and on the most intimate terms with the Prefect, came back from
a short shooting-excursion he had made into the interior, half frantic
with the insolence of the servants at a certain inn. The proprietor
was absent, and the waiter and the cook--not caring, perhaps, to be
disturbed for a single traveller--had first refused flatly to admit him;
and afterwards, when he had obtained entrance, treated him to the worst
of food, intimating at the same time it was better than he was used
to, and plainly giving him to understand that on the very slightest
provocation they were prepared to give him a sound thrashing. Boiling
over with passion, he got back to Messina, and hastened to recount his
misfortunes to his friend in power.

"'Where did it happen?' asked the hard-worked Prefect, with folly enou