countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who
think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in
Italy, could have heard our honest man's talk. The truth is, these
ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as
keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded
that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller
of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion,
that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse
often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their
porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same
impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the
diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the
Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the
Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant
an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those
brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man
lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the
strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is
more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser
has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua,
twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles
south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in
another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people
who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence
to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his
hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give
five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to
the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with
Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the
rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took