are harvested by men from Lucca. The two poor devils
before me could not find a sou in their pockets; one stakes his
knife, the other a cheese wrapped in vine leaves, the two stakes
being placed beside them on the stone. A little cure is watching
them, smoking his cigar, and apparently taking the liveliest
interest in their game.

"And that is all--not a sound anywhere except the regular dropping
of the water on the stone, the exclamations of one of the gamblers,
who swears by the _sango del seminario_; and in the common-room of
the inn, under my chamber, our friend's earnest voice, mingled with
the buzzing of the illustrious Paganetti, who acts as interpreter
in his conversation with the no less illustrious Piedigriggio.

"M. Piedigriggio (Grayfoot) is a local celebrity. He is a tall old
man of seventy-five, still very erect in his short cloak over which
his long white beard falls, his brown woollen Catalan cap on his
hair, which is also white, a pair of scissors in his belt, which he
uses to cut the great leaves of green tobacco in the hollow of his
hand; a venerable old fellow in fact, and when he crossed the
square and shook hands with the cure, with a patronizing smile at
the two gamblers, I never would have believed that I had before me
the famous brigand Piedigriggio, who, from 1840 to 1860, _held the
thickets_ in Monte-Rotondo, tired out gendarmes and troops of the
line, and who to-day, his seven or eight murders with the rifle or
the knife being outlawed by lapse of time, goes his way in peace
throughout the region that saw his crimes, and is a man of
considerable importance. This is the explanation: Piedigriggio has
two sons, who, following nobly in his footsteps, have toyed with
the rifle and now hold the thickets in their turn. Impossible to
lay hands upon or to find, as their father was for twenty years,
informed by the shepherds of the movements of the gendarmerie, as
soon as the gendarmes leave a village, the brigands appear there.
The older of the two, Scipion, came last Sunday to Pozzonegro to
hear mass. To say that people are fond of them, and that the grasp
of the bloodstained hand of these villains is agreeable to all
those who receive it, would be to calumniate the pacific
inhabitants of this commune; but they fear them, and their will is
law.

"Now i