The police system of Italy has always been so ineffective that many of the great Roman families have preferred to pay tribute to the brigands in return for protection for their farms and estate to claiming assistance against them from the government. One of the best known Roman princes paid this tribute regularly to the archbrigand Tiburzi. In old days the brigands came down into the villages on the great festivals in velvet jerkin and feathered cap bearing candles and gifts for the Madonna and the presbytery. Hardly less picturesque than the brigands are the chief herdsmen called _butteri_, in blue jacket and brass buttons with a feather in the soft-felt Italian hat. Their skill as rough-riders is celebrated and the palm remained with them when Buffalo Bill's cowboys challenged them to a trial of skill. A primitive and classical feature of campagna labour is the singing with which it is enlivened. Hour after hour while sowing a field a monotonous folk-song will be kept up, verse succeeding verse at regular intervals, a woman singing and a man whistling the accompaniment--the phrase ending always with that long-drawn dying cadence peculiar to primitive song, like the chant sung to-day by the Neapolitan girls in the caves at Baiae, though it is the dirge which their predecessors made for Adonis. One of the most familiar sights which pass these workers in the fields are the wine-carts bound for Rome; a folding linen or leather hood, generally purple in colour, protects the driver, and a little dog of the common and wrathful species known as the _lupetto romano_--the Roman wolfling--balances himself on the cargo and constitutes himself the protector and companion of his master. At the back of the cart there is always a tiny barrel fixed transversely; this is the perquisite of the driver and his friends when his errand is accomplished. Occasionally a garlanded cross marks the spot where some carter was killed under the wheels of his cart, just as a stone wreathed with flowers showed where a wayfarer had died struck by lightning in the pagan campagna. These cart accidents are not infrequent: in the long silent journeys across the sunburnt plain of the _agro_ the men drop asleep, and it is then easy to fall heavily and be crushed beneath the cart, while the horse or mule pursues the accustomed route to Rome. Little wayside sanctuaries like those which stud the campagna, and which the wayfarer salutes as he passes, still exist in some of the untouched parts of Rome down by the Tiber in the region of Piazza Montanara and in the Borgo of S. Peter's. The goatherds, like the _butteri_ and the wine-carts, may also be seen by those who never leave the walls of Rome. Perhaps when we see them standing by the little herd of goats on the shady side of piazzas in May, clad in such goatskin breeches as were worn by their pagan ancestors, it is not the "Roman country" but the beginnings of the "eternal city" of which we are chiefly