The _breva_, or fair-weather wind, from the north was blowing freshly yet softly down the lake. The afternoon sun was burning on Bellaggio, on the long terrace of the Melzi villa, on the white mist of fruit-blossom that lay lightly on the green slopes above San Giovanni. Suddenly the Duchess and the boatman left the common topics of every day by which the Duchess was trying to improve her Italian--such as the proposed enlargement of the Bellevue Hotel, the new villas that were springing up, the gardens of the Villa Carlotta, and so forth. Evelyn had carelessly asked the old man whether he had been in any of the fighting of '59, and in an instant, under her eyes, he became another being. Out rolled a torrent of speech; the oars lay idly on the water; and through the man's gnarled and wrinkled face there blazed a high and illumining passion. Novara and its beaten king, in '49; the ten years of waiting, when a whole people bode its time, in a gay, grim silence; the grudging victory of Magenta; the fivefold struggle that wrenched the hills of San Martino from the Austrians; the humiliations and the rage of Villafranca--of all these had this wasted graybeard made a part. And he talked of them with the Latin eloquence and facility, as no veteran of the north could have talked; he was in a moment the equal of these great affairs in which he had mingled; so that one felt in him the son of a race which had been rolled and polished--a pebble, as it were, from rocks which had made the primeval frame-work of the world--in the main course and stream of history. Then from the campaign of '59 he fell back on the Five Days of Milan in '48--the immortal days, when a populace drove out an army, and what began almost in jest ended in a delirium, a stupefaction of victory. His language was hot, broken, confused, like the street fighting it chronicled. Afterwards--a further sharpening and blanching of the old face--and he had carried them deep into the black years of Italy's patience and Austria's revenge. Throwing out a thin arm, he pointed towards town after town on the lake shores, now in the brilliance of sunset, now in the shadow of the northern slope--Gravedona, Varenna, Argegno--towns which had each of them given their sons to the Austrian bullet and the Austrian lash for the ransom of Italy. He ran through the sacred names--Stazzonelli, Riccini, Crescieri, Ronchetti, Ceresa, Previtali--young men, almost all of them, shot for the possession of a gun or a knife, for helping their comrades in the Austrian army to desert, for "insulting conduct" towards an Austrian soldier or officer. Of one of these executions, which he had himself witnessed at Varese--the shooting of a young fellow of six-and-twenty, his own friend and kinsman--he gave an account which blanched the Duchess's cheeks and brought the big tears into her eyes. Then, when he saw the effect he had produced, the old man trembled.