The best quarters at Tavazzano are at a little inn, the first
house reached by travellers passing through the place from Milan
to Lodi. It stands in a vineyard; and its principal room, a
pleasant refuge from the summer heat, is open so widely at the
back to this vineyard that it is almost a large veranda. The
bolder children, much excited by the alarums and excursions of
the past few days, and by an irruption of French troops at six
o'clock, know that the French commander has quartered himself in
this room, and are divided between a craving to peep in at the
front windows and a mortal terror of the sentinel, a young
gentleman-soldier, who, having no natural moustache, has had a
most ferocious one painted on his face with boot blacking by his
sergeant. As his heavy uniform, like all the uniforms of that
day, is designed for parade without the least reference to his
health or comfort, he perspires profusely in the sun; and his
painted moustache has run in little streaks down his chin and
round his neck except where it has dried in stiff japanned
flakes, and had its sweeping outline chipped off in grotesque
little bays and headlands, making him unspeakably ridiculous in
the eye of History a hundred years later, but monstrous and
horrible to the contemporary north Italian infant, to whom
nothing would seem more natural than that he should relieve the
monotony of his guard by pitchforking a stray child up on his
bayonet, and eating it uncooked. Nevertheless one girl of bad
character, in whom an instinct of privilege with soldiers is
already dawning, does peep in at the safest window for a moment,
before a glance and a clink from the sentinel sends her flying.
Most of what she sees she has seen before: the vineyard at the
back, with the old winepress and a cart among the vines; the door
close down on her right leading to the inn entry; the landlord's