On the plain to the west and north of the city 20,000 soldiers of the king were in camp; 4,000 more had for some days been pushing back the insurgents in the hills. Their general imagined it was Garibaldi who was retreating before them. No military man could understand how a thousand foot-soldiers, aided only by a few thousand ill-armed and untrained recruits, could give the slip to the pursuing columns of regular troops, and surprise the entrance to a city guarded at every point by battalions of trained men and commanded by the artillery of the forts and the warships in the bay. Even now the descent of the Thousand into Palermo does not become plain until we go over carefully the condition of the city on that fateful night, the situation of the various bodies of troops that were guarding it, and the movements down the mountain side of Garibaldi and his men. I.--IN PALERMO. The Bourbons had now ruled over Naples, with the whole southern part of Italy and the island of Sicily, for 125 years. Ferdinand II., who was dead but a single year, had been peculiarly unfortunate through the whole of his long reign. During its first years, after 1830, the secret societies of _carbonari_ conspiring against him multiplied everywhere in Sicily. The cholera year of 1837 reduced the pride of Palermo; but in 1848, when France again gave the signal of revolution, the city rebelled and held out for a year and four months. For four weeks King Ferdinand had the city bombarded from his fort in the harbour. This did not help to make the citizens love him the more when he finally conquered, and his name was handed down as “King Bomba.” In 1859, his young and inexperienced son, Francis, found things in the worst possible condition. In the north, Italians had united under the King of Sardinia against the Austrians and the petty princes who had so long divided up their country. With the help of France, the war was soon over. The Austrians were driven out of Lombardy; the Duchies of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany expelled their reigning houses; and a good part of the States of the Church was taken from the Pope. All these, with Sardinia, now made up the one kingdom of Italy, with Victor Emanuel as constitutional monarch. It was a long step forward toward the realisation of what had hitherto been but a dream--a united Italy. And Garibaldi had been the one hero of its making.