“I’ll do it for you,” said the priest, for he was a brave man; and with that the horse and man went away. But when they got among the chestnut trees there was a great noise, and flames of fire; and so the horse and rider vanished. Well, the next day the parroco tried to get someone to serve the mass, but he had great difficulty, as everyone was afraid of making a mistake and getting carried off to hell; but at last he persuaded a priest to help him, and towards midnight the two went to the church. The horse and rider stood in the entrance of the west door, and the two priests read mass, with their backs to the altar. They got through without mistake and the devil and the condemned soul disappeared and were never seen again; but the priest who had served the mass was taken up stiff and dumb with terror, and it was many weeks before he could speak again. The parroco was less affected; but there was a strange glitter in his eyes for some days; and it was long before he could trust himself to talk of that night.
These stories of demon-steeds are not uncommon in the South. A notable one is that of the terrible “Belludo” of The Alhambra, which Washington Irving uses with such grim effect in his book on the old Moorish pile.
TUSCAN SKETCHES
A TUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND THE FESTA AT IL MELO
I had left Clementina and the little ones behind me, and had moved further up among the Apennines to a village which, perched on a low hill, overlooks the river and the winding valley. The summits of the mountains all around rise bare and scarped from dark pine and ash woods, while their bases are clothed with chestnuts. Many a long line of soldiers have the villagers seen marching up the valley on the other side of the river which flows at their feet: for the pass is an important one, being the high road from Tuscany into the Modenese. Napoleon III. and Victor Emmanuel rode through it side by side, and old men still relate how the village turned out to salute Emperor and King as they went by. The great Napoleon lives too, in the recollection of the country people, for he drew many soldiers from all the districts round for his “Summer Excursion to Moscow.” One cannot vouch, however, for the historical exactitude of some of the stories concerning him. One old woman, for instance, whose husband had saved himself on the ill-fated expedition by cutting open a horse and getting inside it, firmly believed that le petit Caporal had perished miserably at Moscow, pickled in a barrel of salt!
Nor are more ancient historical associations wanting. At a very little distance lies the village of Gavinana where the lion-hearted Francesco Ferruccio, trying to burst through the mountains from Pisa to the relief of Florence, was betrayed in 1530 to the Prince of Orange. Captured in the battle which ensued, and carried, covered with wounds which must have been fatal, into the market-place before the Imperialist leader, he was there stabbed to death in cold blood, and expired with the exclamation:—“It is a noble thing to kill a dead man!”