At the time of his residence there that little, out-of-the-way corner of Europe had not yet been awakened from the stupor of its feudal sleep, nor had the faintest breath of modern ideas so much as rippled over the sullen surface of hereditary slavery to traditional customs. From time immemorial the habits of the people were the same, and singularly uninfluenced by the presence of the gay gallants of Venice who were stationed there. It is not difficult to imagine the distaste with which they left all the enervating delights of their resplendent island of marble, with its mantling of sunlight and the tranquil beauty of its dreamy days, for tedious exile among an inhospitable and untamed population, the severe silence and sombre forests or the monotony of barren rocks. "If you have read your Virgil or Homer," Gozzi tells us, "you have seen Illyrians. These people are quite as pagan in their rites of marriage and the burying of their dead as any people of pagan antiquity. One of their favorite national games consists in lifting a tremendous disk cut out of marble and hurling it to a great distance. Is not this Diomedes and Turnus? "Contempt weighs down upon every family who has not had several of its men killed, or has not executed cruel vengeance on the right and on the left, or has not been itself the object of outrageous retaliation. It was not long before I had the opportunity to ascertain the truth of what the old priest had told me as we walked together under the walls of the city. "A woman about fifty years old came one day and threw herself at the feet of the governor. From her shoulder hung down a cumbrous gamebag, and out of it she pulled a mass of hair clinging to a dried-up skull: then, placing the hideous object before the governor, she struck her head against the ground, crying, 'Justice! justice!' I inquired what could possibly be the motive of so extraordinary an exhibition, and I learnt that the skull was that of the woman's mother, who was assassinated _thirty years before_--that the murderers had been executed, but that the greed for vengeance not being yet appeased in that wild daughter of Dalmatia, she had never failed to repeat the same ceremony at the installation of each successive governor, always exhibiting the same thirst for avenging herself upon the family of her enemies, the same gamebag and the same skull!"