They come, singly and in batches, and soon make Olevano uninhabitable to men of the Potter and Browne type. They keep the taverns open all night, sing boisterous choruses, kiss each other in the street "as if they were in their bedrooms," organise picnics in the woods, sketch old women sitting in old doorways, start a Verschoenerungsverein and indulge in a number of other antics which, from the local point of view, are held to be either coarse or childish. The natives, after watching their doings with critical interest, presently pronounce a verdict--a verdict to which the brightest spirits of the place give their assent--a verdict which, by the way, I have myself heard uttered. "Those Englishmen"--thus it runs--"were at least assassins. These people are merely fools." POSTSCRIPT--One thing has occurred of late which would hardly have happened were the Germans still in occupation of Olevano. At the central piazza is a fountain where the cattle drink and where, formerly, you could rest and glance down upon the country lying below--upon a piece of green landscape peering in upon the street. This little view was like a window, it gave an aerial charm to the place. They have now blocked it up with an ugly house. The beauty of the site is gone. It is surprising that local municipalities; however stupid, however corrupt, should not be aware of the damage done to their own interests when they permit such outrages. The Germans--were any of them still here--would doubtless have interfered en masse and stopped the building. Something should be done about these reviewers. There has followed me hither a bundle of press notices of a recent book of mine. They are favourable. I ought to be delighted. I happen to be annoyed. What takes place in this absurd book? The three unities are preserved. A respectable but rather drab individual, a bishop, whose tastes and moods are fashioned to reflect those of the average drab reader, arrives at a new place and is described as being, among other things, peculiarly sensitive on the subject of women. He cannot bear flippant allusions to the sex. He has preserved a childlike faith in their purity, their sacred mission on earth, their refining influence upon the race. His friends call him old-fashioned and quixotic on this point. A true woman, he declares, can do no wrong. And this same man, towards the end of the book, watches how the truest woman in the place, the one whom he admires more than all the rest, his own cousin and a mother, calmly throws her legitimate husband over a cliff. He realises that he is "face to face with an atrocious and carefully planned murder." Such, however, has been the transformation of his mind during a twelve days' sojourn that he understands the crime, he pardons it, he approves it.