Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1867. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... the last austrian who left venice. N the spring and early summer of the year last past, --the year 1866, --the hatred felt by Venetians towards the Austrian soldiers who held their city in thraldom, had reached its culminating point. For years this hatred had been very strong; how strong can hardly be understood by those who never recognise the fact that there had been, so to say, no mingling of the conquered and the conquerors, no process of assimilation between the Italian vassals and their German masters. Venice as a city was as purely Italian as though its barracks were filled with no Hungarian long-legged soldiers, and its cafes crowded with no white-coated Austrian officers. And the regiments which held the town, lived as completely after their own fashion as though they were quartered in Pesth, or Prague, or Vienna, --with-this exception, that in Venice they were enabled, and, T indeed, from circumstances were compelled, --to exercise a palpable ascendancy which belonged to them nowhere else. They were masters, daily visible as such to the eye of every one who merely walked the narrow ways of the city or strolled through the open squares; and, as masters, they were as separate as the gaoler is separate from the prisoner. The Austrian officers sat together in the chief theatre, --having the best part of it to themselves. Few among them spoke Italian. None of the common soldiers did so. The Venetians seldom spoke German; and could hold no intercourse whatever with the Croats, Hungarians, and Bohemians, of whom the garrison was chiefly composed. It could not be otherwise than that there should be intense hatred in a city so ruled. But the hatred which had been intense for years had reached its boiling point in the May preceding the outbreak of the war. Whatever