"Not a very inviting person;--a loafer, a lazzaroni, a dead-beat of a dago, really--and yet my heart warmed to him all the same when he answered me with enough French sandwiched between his 'o's' and 'i's' to help out my bad Italian. What finally trickled from his wrinkled lips was the disappointing announcement that no hostelry at all worthy of the Distinguished Signore existed in the village, nor was there money enough in the place for any one of the inhabitants to have a surplus of anything--rooms especially--but there was--here the oily smile overran the soap-suddy face--a most excellent casino kept by an equally excellent citizen where travellers were wont to stay overnight; that it was up a back street--they were all 'back' so far as I had seen--and that, if the Distinguished Signore would permit, he would curtail the sale of his religious relics long enough to conduct his D. S. to the very door. "So we started, the vendor of 'helps to piety' ahead and I following behind, my knapsack over my shoulder. I soon discovered that if the casino was up a back street he was going a long way round to reach it. First he dived into an alley behind the mouldy, plaster-pock-marked church--the candle-stick of the campanile--ducked under an archway--'_sotto portico_,' he called it--opened out into a field, struck across a little bridge into another street--hardly a soul about, nothing alive--nothing except dogs and children--all of which he explained was a short cut. For some time his dodging made no impression on me; then the way he rounded the corners and hugged the shadowed side of the street, away from the few dim lamps, set me to wondering as to his intentions. What the devil did he mean by picking out these blind alleys? He must have seen that I was no tenderfoot or tourist who had lost his way. "With this I began to fix certain landmarks in my memory in case I had to make my way back alone. There was no question now in my mind as to the town's character. Half the murders and hold-ups in the large cities are concocted in these villages, and this had rascality stamped all over it. Every corner I turned looked more forbidding than the last--every street seemed to end in a trap--the kind of street a scene-painter tries to produce when he has a murder up a back alley to provide for the third act. And crooked!--well, the tracks of a bunch of fishworms crawling out from under a brick were straight compared to it. When I at last protested--for I was getting ravenous and I must say a trifle uneasy--the beggar bowed low enough for me to see the tail of his jacket over his sombrero, and gave as a reason that any other route would have greatly fatigued the signore, all of which he must have known was a lie. The fact was that if I had known how to get out of the tangle, I would have lifted him by the scruff of his neck and the slack of his trousers and dropped him into the first convenient hole.