Supervision over the inns was far stricter than at present, especially in Italy. At Lucca and Florence all the inns were in a single street; and in many towns the new arrival was taken before the authorities by the guard at the gates previous to choosing his inn, to which he would be conducted by a soldier. At Lucca, too, was a department of the judiciary, called "della loggia," which was specially concerned with strangers, and to this the innkeepers had to send a daily report on each guest. Yet to judge by the tourists' accounts, the supervision might well have been carried further and reports on the innkeepers required from the tourists. Such a system of double reports would have been a check on the murdering innkeeper, to whom there are occasional references; one had been detected at Poictiers shortly before Lauder's arrival, and at Stralesund, another's tale runs, eight hundred (!) persons had disappeared at one inn. They had reappeared, it is true—pickled. Another kind of innkeeper who ran less risk but was equally dangerous was he who was in league with robbers; it was common enough, if travellers may be believed, for robbers to have spies in the inns. At Acciaruolo, near Naples, another device was practised by the keeper of an atrocious inn. He had an understanding with the captains of coasting-vessels, the result of which was that the latter found it impossible to get any further that night or to let the passengers sleep in the boat. It must have occurred to the reader that this is a most one-sided chapter: the tourist has been having his say so uninterruptedly that even a clergyman in the pulpit might envy him. What of the innkeepers' side of the question? Fortunately that can be presented, too, with the help of a manuscript so unique that it must be described now instead of being buried in the bibliography. It is nothing less than an account of an Innkeepers' Congress in 1610, written by a delegate. At least, an expert palæographer (whose name I am not permitted to give for fear of another expert palæographer) affirms it to be in a fairly recent commercial script; and it certainly is in English. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. There is no inn, for example, of the three hundred and fifty-eight referred to above which is not mentioned in it; neither is there any inn that is so mentioned that is not to be found among the said three hundred and fifty-eight. Subjective tests, moreover, however dangerous, have their value, and it will appear that the wealth, and, so far as it can be checked, the accuracy of detail, the turns of phrase and of mind, equally characteristic of the innkeeper and the sixteenth century, leave no more room for doubt here than, to take a report of a meeting, in the case of the account of the sayings and doings of the agriculturists in session of which Flaubert made such instructive use in his biography of the late Madame Bovary. [Illustration: THE RED GATE, ANTWERP]