been talking, and they
were close to the Church of the Minerva, not far from the Altieri
palace. As it was quite clear that Tommaso wished to go on his errand
alone, Cucurullo turned into a narrow street when he left him, and
walked slowly, picking his way over the uneven pavement. It was an
unsavoury lane, that ran between tall houses, from the windows of which
everything that was objectionable indoors was thrown out; and as His
Eminence the Cardinal Vicar's sweepers were only supposed to pass that
way once a week, on Thursdays, and sometimes forgot about it, the
accumulations of dirt were pestiferous. Rome in those days was what all
Naples was twenty years ago, and still is, in parts; it was full of the
most astounding extremes of splendour and incredible poverty, of perfect
cleanliness and abominable filth, and the contrast between the
stringency of the law and the laxity of its execution was often not less
surprising. Under the statutes, a man could be punished with torture and
the galleys for owning a dark lantern, for carrying a pointed knife in
his pocket, or for wearing a sword without leave; but, as a matter of
fact, the detailed manuscript accounts of scores of crimes committed in
Rome in the seventeenth century, and later, show that almost every one
went armed, that any one who could dress like a gentleman wore a rapier
when he pleased, and that dark lanterns were commonly used in defiance
of the watch, the sbirri in plain clothes, the Bargello who commanded
both, and the Governor who was his only superior in matters relating to
public order.

I have digressed a little, both to explain the affair of the serenade
under the Altieri palace, and to prepare my readers for what followed,
and especially for the lawless doings of Trombin, Gambardella, and Don
Alberto, which came to a climax during the night of Saint John's Eve, in
spite of the many admirable regulations about lanterns and weapons which
should have made the city a paradise of safety for unprotected females.
But, after all, progress has not done much for us since then, for the
cities are always growing faster than the police possibly can, so that
it is in the very greatest capitals that the most daring crimes are
committed with apparent impunity in our own time.

Cucurullo picked his way through the dirty side street, and was just
emerging into a broader and cleaner one, when some one overtook him and
tapped him on his hump, though he had not noticed