At last Gerard was seen at some distance with a female in his hand.
“She is long enough,” said one of her sex, criticising her from afar.
“Gemini! what steps she takes,” said another. “Oh! it is wise to hurry into good company,” was Pietro's excuse.
But when the pair came up, satire was choked.
Gerard's companion was a peerless beauty; she extinguished the boat-load, as stars the rising sun. Tall, but not too tall; and straight as a dart, yet supple as a young panther. Her face a perfect oval, her forehead white, her cheeks a rich olive with the eloquent blood mantling below and her glorious eyes fringed with long thick silken eyelashes, that seemed made to sweep up sensitive hearts by the half dozen. Saucy red lips, and teeth of the whitest ivory.
The women were visibly depressed by this wretched sight; the men in ecstasies; they received her with loud shouts and waving of caps, and one enthusiast even went down on his knees upon the boat's gunwale, and hailed her of origin divine. But his chere amie pulling his hair for it—and the goddess giving him a little kick—cotemporaneously, he lay supine; and the peerless creature frisked over his body without deigning him a look, and took her seat at the prow. Pietro Vanucci sat in a sort of collapse, glaring at her, and gaping with his mouth open like a dying cod-fish.
The drover spoke to the buffaloes, the ropes tightened, and they moved up stream.
“What think ye of this new beef, mesdames?”
“We ne'er saw monsters so viley ill-favoured; with their nasty horns that make one afeard, and, their foul nostrils cast up into the air. Holes be they; not nostrils.”
“Signorina, the beeves are a present from Florence the beautiful Would ye look a gift beef i' the nose?”