We were the first visitors, it seemed, barring Austrians and a few Italian officers, who had visited his inn in nearly five years.  Both of his sons had been killed in the war, he told us, fighting bravely with their Jaeger battalion.  The widow of one of his sons—­I saw her; a sweet-faced Austrian girl—­with her child, had come to live with him, he said.  Yes, he was an old man, both of his boys were dead, his little business had been wrecked, the old Emperor Franz-Joseph—­yes, we could see his picture over the fireplace within—­had gone and the new Emperor Karl was in exile, in Switzerland, life had heard; even the Empire in which he had lived, boy and man, for seventy-odd years, had disappeared; the whole world was, indeed, turned upside down—­but, Heaven be praised, he had a little grandson who would grow up to carry the business on.

[Illustration:  A LITTLE MOTHER OF THE TYROL

We gave her some candy:  it was the first taste of sugar that she had had in four years]

[Illustration:  THE END OF THE DAY

A Tyrolean peasant woman returning from the fields]

“How do you feel,” I asked the old man, “about Italian rule?”

“They are not our own people,” he answered slowly.  “Their language is not our language and their ways are not our ways.  But they are not an unkind nor an unjust people and I think that they mean to treat us fairly and well.  Austria is very poor, I hear, and could do nothing for us if she would.  But Italy is young and strong and rich and the officers who have stopped here tell me that she is prepared to do much to help us.  Who knows?  Perhaps it is all for the best.”

Immediately beyond Madonna di Campiglio the highway begins its descent from the pass in a series of appallingly sharp turns.  Hardly had we settled ourselves in the tonneau before the Sicilian, impatient to be gone, stepped on the accelerator and the big Lancia, flinging itself over the brow of the hill, plunged headlong for the first of these hairpin turns.  “Slow up!” I shouted.  “Slow up or you’ll have us over the edge!” As the driver’s only response to my command was to grin at us reassuringly over his shoulder, I looked about for a soft place to land.  But there was only rock-plated highway whizzing past and on the outside the road dropped sheer away into nothingness.  We took the first turn with the near-side wheels in the gutter, the off-side wheels on the bank, and the car tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees.  The second bend we navigated at an angle of sixty degrees, the off-side wheels on the bank, the near-side wheels pawing thin air.  Had there been another bend immediately following we should have accomplished it upside down.  Fortunately there were no more for the moment, but there remained the village street of Cles.  We pounced upon it like a tiger on its prey.  Shrilling, roaring and honking, we swooped through the ancient town, zigzagging from curb to curb.  The great-great-grandam of the village was tottering across the street when the blast of the Lancia’s siren pierced the deafness of a century and she sprang for the sidewalk with the agility of a young gazelle.  We missed her by half an inch, but at the next corner we had better luck and killed a chicken.