"I may mention that though, like the Italians, the Croats generally profess the Catholic religion, in the military portion of that semi-barbarous race there is a strong element of the Greek schism, and of this last was the Regiment de Radetzki composed. Its soldiers had all the worst qualities of the Croat; they were revengeful, deceitful, intemperate, prone to robbery, and officered by Germans, who, when in Tuscany, cared little to restrain their licentiousness. "Their colonel, notwithstanding his title of count, was a man without family or friends, save such as position gave him, without kindly sympathy or common human feeling. His mother had been found speechless and dying near the new Scottish gate of Vienna, and she expired soon after in the Allgemeine Krankenhaus, or great infirmary of the city, leaving her child to the foundling hospital, by the name of Rudolf. "Ten years after a person of rank, a prince of the Russian Empire, on searching the books of the said hospital, discovered in this foundling his own son, the mother being a hapless Polish woman, whom, he had deluded and abandoned; so the little Rudolf, on the payment of so many thousand ducats, became a count, and in time rose to the rank of colonel of Croats; and, as such, exercised the stern military laws of Austria with unexampled severity. "On bringing my brother before him, the Croats charged Attilio with attempting to induce them to desert in the name of Kossuth; and then with defiling the flag of the Empire by spitting thereon. "'Did he attempt to seduce you by money?' asked the colonel, with a frown on his face. "'Yes, Herr Colonel,' replied a corporal named Schwartz, and he produced eighteen _quattrini_, which he had found in the pocket of my jacket, and which were in value about twopence British. "On this the colonel, undeterred by the manly aspect of the beautiful little boy--for my brother Attilio was beautiful--struck him with his gloved hand, and with his sheathed sword, repeatedly. "He then ordered him to be put into one of the dark, damp, and horrid dungeons of the old castle of Pistoja, where, among the rats, the toads, the gloom, and the cobwebs, the poor boy wept for his parents, and for me; wept in cold and forlorn misery, on some wet straw, near which a clay pitcher of water was placed. "He had a stone whereon to rest his head if weary, and his right wrist was fettered by a chain to his left ankle. "'Sono desolato! Sono perduto!' ('I am ruined! I am lost!') he kept repeating from time to time. "Our father was crushed with grief, our mother was filled with wild despair, and I was stupefied!" "And they dared to seize him thus?" exclaimed Mr. Basset, flushing with indignation like an honest John Bull, while vigorously polishing his forehead with his silk handkerchief; "a frightful outrage on the rights of the subject! Where were the police? Where was that great bulwark of liberty, the writ of _habeas corpus_?"