"Ah, eccellenza," he cried, "but it had to be! The Italians had to show they knew how to die; then God let them live. Ecco, eccellenza!" And he drew from his breast-pocket, with shaking hands, an old envelope tied round with string. When he had untied it, a piece of paper emerged, brown with age and worn with much reading. It was a rudely printed broadsheet containing an account of the last words and sufferings of the martyrs of Mantua--those conspirators of 1852--from whose graves and dungeons sprang, tenfold renewed, the regenerating and liberating forces which, but a few years later, drove out the Austrian with the Bourbon, together. "See here, eccellenza," he said, as he tenderly spread out its tattered folds and gave it into the Duchess's hand. "Have the goodness to look where is that black mark. There you will find the last words of Don Enrico Tazzoli, the half-brother of my father. He was a priest, eccellenza. Ah, it was not then as it is now! The priests were then for Italy. They hanged three of them at Mantua alone. As for Don Enrico, first they stripped him of his priesthood, and then they hanged him. And those were his last words, and the last words of Scarsellini also, who suffered with him. _Veda eccellenza_! As for me, I know them from a boy." And while the Duchess read, the old man repeated tags and fragments under his breath, as he once more resumed the oars and drove the boat gently towards Menaggio. "_The multitude of victims has not robbed us of courage in the past, nor will it so rob us in the future--till victory dawns. The cause of the people is like the cause of religion--it triumphs only through its martyrs.... You--who survive--will conquer, and in your victory we, the dead, shall live_.... "_Take no thought for us; the blood of the forerunners is like the seed which the wise husbandman scatters on the fertile ground_.... _Teach our young men how to adore and how to suffer for a great idea. Work incessantly at that; so shall our country come to birth; and grieve not for us!... Yes, Italy shall be one! To that all things point._ WORK! _There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome, no opposition that cannot be destroyed. The_ HOW _and the_ WHEN _only remain to be solved. You, more fortunate than we, will find the clew to the riddle, when all things are accomplished, and the times are ripe.... Hope!--my parents, and my brothers--hope always!--waste no time in weeping_." The Duchess read aloud the Italian, and Julie stooped over her shoulder to follow the words. "Marvellous!" said Julie, in a low voice, as she sank back into her place. "A youth of twenty-seven, with the rope round his neck, and he comforts himself with 'Italy.' What's 'Italy' to him, or he to 'Italy'?" Not even an immediate paradise. "Is there anybody capable of it now?"