about those courts and corridors and staircases; a dull murmur of voices, broken by loud shouts and sonorous laughter, reverberates through the most distant recesses of the huge edifice.  What animation!  What life!  What varieties of type, of speech and gesture!  Youths of athletic build, with great moustaches and stentorian voices; youths as slim and sweet as girls; the dusky skin and coal-black eyes of Sicily; the fair-haired, blue-eyed faces of the north; the excited gesticulation of Naples, the silvery Tuscan intonation, the rattling Venetian chatter, a hundred groups, a hundred dialects; on this side, songs and noisy talk, on that side running, jumping, and hand-clapping; men of every class, sons of dukes, senators, generals, shopkeepers, government employees; a strange assemblage, suggesting the university, the monastery, and the barracks:  with talk of women, war, novels, the orders of the day; a life teeming with feminine meannesses and virile ambitions; a life of mortal ennui and frantic gayety, a medley of sentiments, actions, and incidents, absurd, tragic, or delightful, from which the pen of a great humorist could extract the materials for a masterpiece.

Such was the military college of Modena in the year 1865.

III.

I cannot recall the two years that I spent there without being beset by a throng of memories from which I can free myself only by passing them all in review, one after another, like pictures in a magic-lantern; now laughing, now sighing, now shaking my head, but feeling all the while that each episode is dear to me and will never be forgotten while I live.

How well I remember the first grief of my military life, a blow that befell me a few days after I had entered college all aglow with the poetry of war.  It was the morning on which caps were distributed.  Each new recruit of the company found one that fitted him, but all were too small for me, and the captain turned upon me furiously.

“Are you aware that the commissary stores will have to be reopened just for you?” And I heard him mutter after a pause, “What are you going to do with a head like that?”

Great God, what I underwent at that moment!  What—­be a soldier?  I thought.  Never!  Better beg my bread in the streets—­better die and have done with it!

Then I remember an officer, an old soldier, gruff but kindly, who had a way of smiling whenever he looked at me.  How that smile used to exasperate me!  I had made up my mind to demand an explanation, to let him know that I didn’t propose to be any man’s butt, when one evening he called me to him, and having given me to understand that he had heard something about me and that he wanted to know if it were really true (I was to speak frankly, for it would do me no harm), he finally, with many coughs and smiles and furtive glances, whispered in my ear:  “Is it true that you write poetry?”