It is sometimes the traveller’s good fortune in some remote place to meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the genius loci as he has conceived it.  Though his own subjectivity will assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure in a composition which derives from him its vividness.  Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no knowledge.  On one of these nights I had been threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights kept changing.  My mind instinctively went back to scenes of treachery and bloodshed in the olden time, when Gorrado Trinci paraded the mangled remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on mule-back, through Foligno, for a warning to the citizens.  As the procession moved along the ramparts, I found myself in contest with a young man, who readily fell into conversation.  He was very tall, with enormous breadth of shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo’s favourite models.  His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair.  Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely bright fierce eyes.  The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a statue of Hadrian’s age.  The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate above a firm round chin.  He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a peasant’s slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed panther.  He told me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment; and I could well imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait, how grandly he would go.  This young man, of whom I heard nothing more after our half-hour’s conversation among the crackling fireworks and roaring cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of dangerousness—­of ’something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst forth.’  Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century.  Gattamelata, who began life as a baker’s boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed.  Like this were the Trinci and their bands of murderers.  Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice.  Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being ‘perfettamente tristo.’  Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and