The novelty of my situation, the character of my companions, and my late happy interview with Bianca, kept floating before me, chasing away sleep, and compelling me for a time to lie awake. I lay watching a gigantic tarantella—a species of spider well known for the venomous nature of its bite—spinning its net of silvery gauze from the branches of the oak above me. But I soon found a more agreeable object for contemplation, in the classic form of Zilla; who lay near me, sleeping on her father’s mantle of undressed deer-skin, over which her unbound ringlets rolled in luxuriant profusion. At last I dropped into a half slumber, but was speedily aroused by something writhing within my cloak. I threw it open, and lo! a bloated viper of enormous size was coiled round my left arm. While I endeavoured in vain to shake it off, an exclamation of disgust escaped me, which awoke the young girl Zilla; who, on beholding my predicament, fearlessly grasped the throat of the venomous reptile, and tossed it with all her strength among the trees. This action recalled the lines in Virgil’s Third Georgic— "In fair Calabria’s woods a snake is bred, With curling crest and with advancing head; Waving he rolls, and makes a winding track: His belly spotted, burnished is his back." "Signor, do not be alarmed!" said Zilla; "I hope the horrid thing has not bitten you? Ah, were you to sleep for a single night where I have often slept, in the sedges by the Lake of Lugano, at the base of Mont Salvador, where the surface of the water and all the fields around it swarm with vipers, you would not be so frightened by one." "I was not frightened, my gentil Zingara, though certainly a little startled." "Pardon me, Excellenza—I meant not that; but—but only that I am so happy to have been of service." She paused with something like embarrassment. She was so beautiful that I was half ashamed to offer her money; and on my placing a Venetian sequin in her hand, strange to say, it was with the utmost reluctance, and after many a furtive glance at the snoring capo, that this half-clad gipsy girl accepted the gift. So I kissed each of her dimpled cheeks—a soldier-like mode of payment, which she evidently relished much more: the sequin seemed only the bestowal of a charity, but the kiss was a compliment. Her oriental eyes kindled with vivacity and light, equalled only by those of the young Zingaro, her admirer; whom I observed coiled up close by, like a snake in a bush, and watching us with a keen expression of anger and mistrust, that boded me little good-will. "And so, for this night, I am the rival of a Zingaro—a beggarly gipsy boy!" thought I, resigning myself once more to slumber; "what a dashing intrigue for an aide-de-camp! And yet the girl is pretty enough to turn the heads of our whole mess."