his efforts to convict this woman telling him she deserved some punishment; and his suspicions being unsatisfied, he resolved to keep them hungry upon her, and return to Milan at once.  As to the letter itself, he purposed, since the harm in it was accomplished, to send it back honourably to the lieutenant, till finding it blood-stained, he declined to furnish the gratification of such a sight to any Austrian sword.  For that reason, he copied it, while Battista’s wife held double bandages tight round his head:  believing that the letter stood transcribed in a precisely similar hand, he forwarded it to Lieutenant Pierson, and then sank and swooned.  Two days he lay incapable and let his thoughts dance as they would.  Information was brought to him that the gates were strictly watched, and that troops were starting for Milan.  This was in the dull hour antecedent to the dawn.  ‘She is a traitress!’ he exclaimed, and leaping from his bed, as with a brain striking fire, screamed, ‘Traitress! traitress!’ Battista and his wife had to fling themselves on him and gag him, guessing him as mad.  He spoke pompously and theatrically; called himself the Eye of Italy, and said that he must be in Milan, or Milan would perish, because of the traitress:  all with a great sullen air of composure and an odd distension of the eyelids.  When they released him, he smiled and thanked them, though they knew, that had he chosen, he could have thrown off a dozen of them, such was his strength.  The woman went down on her knees to him to get his consent that she should dress and bandage his head afresh.  The sound of the regimental bugles drew him from the house, rather than any immediate settled scheme to watch at the gates.

Artillery and infantry were in motion before sunrise, from various points of the city, bearing toward the Palio and Zeno gates, and the people turned out to see them, for it was a march that looked like the beginning of things.  The soldiers had green twigs in their hats, and kissed their hands good-humouredly to the gazing crowd, shouting bits of verses: 

’I’m off!  I’m off!  Farewell, Mariandl! if I come back a sergeant-major or a Field-Marshal, don’t turn up your nose at me:  Swear you will be faithful all the while; because, when a woman swears, it’s a comfort, somehow:  Farewell!  Squeeze the cow’s udders:  I shall be thirsty enough:  You pretty wriggler! don’t you know, the first cup of wine and the last, I shall float your name on it?  Luck to the lads we leave behind!  Farewell, Mariandl!’

The kindly fellows waved their hands and would take no rebuff.  The soldiery of Austria are kindlier than most, until their blood is up.  A Tyrolese regiment passed, singing splendidly in chorus.  Songs of sentiment prevailed, but the traditions of a soldier’s experience of the sex have informed his ballads with strange touches of irony, that help him to his (so to say) philosophy, which is recklessness.  The Tyroler’s ‘Katchen’ here, was a saturnine Giulia, who gave him no response, either of eye or lip.