The familiar odours breathed upon me with pungent freshness, wafted hither and thither on a mountain breeze.

A glance upwards at the narrow strip of sky showed a grey-coloured dawn, prelude, I feared, of a dull day.
Evidently I was not the only traveller departing; on the truck just laden I saw somebody else's luggage, and at the same moment there came forth a man heavily muffled against the air, who, like myself, began to look about for the porter.

We exchanged greetings, and on our walk to the station I learned that my companion, also bound for Taranto, had been detained by illness for several days at the _Lionetti_, where, he bitterly complained, the people showed him no sort of attention.

He was a commercial traveller, representing a firm of drug merchants in North Italy, and for his sins (as he put it) had to make the southern journey every year; he invariably suffered from fever, and at certain places--of course, the least civilized--had attacks which delayed him from three days to a week.

He loathed the South, finding no compensation whatever for the miseries of travel below Naples; the inhabitants he reviled with exceeding animosity.