Don Alfonso, who had been kept in cotton by his parents, envied his friend Jeli the canvas bag in which he stored his effects,—his bread, his onions, his bottle of wine, his neckerchief for cold weather, his little hoard of rags and thread and needles, his little tin food-box and his flint; he envied him especially that superb spotted mare, that animal with rough forelock and wicked eyes, swelling her indignant nostrils like a fierce mastiff when anyone tried to mount her. Sometimes she would allow Jeli to get on her back and scratch her ears; she was jealous of him, and would come smelling round to find out what he was saying.
"Let the vajata be," Jeli would say, "She isn't ugly, but she doesn't know you."
After Scordu from Bucchiere took away the Calabrian which he had bought at San Giovanni's Fair, under agreement to keep her in the drove until vintage time, Zaino, the bay colt, orphaned, refused to be comforted and galloped over the mountain precipices with long, lamenting neighings, and its nose in the wind. Jeli ran behind it, calling to it with loud shouts, and the colt paused to listen with its head in the air, and its ears pricking back and forth, and switching its flanks with its tail.
"It's because they have carried off his mother, and he doesn't know what to make of it," observed the herdsman. "Now we must keep him in sight, for he would be capable of jumping over the precipice. That was the way I felt when my mamma died; I couldn't see with my eyes."
Then, after the colt began to try the clover and to make believe bite:—
"See! he is gradually beginning to forget.... But this one will be sold, too. Horses are made to be sold, just as lambs are born to go to the butcher, and the clouds to bring the rain. Only the birds have nothing else to do but sing and fly all day."
These ideas did not come to him clear cut and in sequence one after the other, for it was rarely that he had anyone to talk with, and, therefore, he had no cause for haste in starting them up and disentangling them in the depths of his brain, where he was accustomed to let them sprout and grow gradually, as the twigs burgeon under the sun.
"Even the birds," he added, "have to hunt for food, and when the snow covers the ground they perish."
Then he pondered for a moment,—"You are like the birds; but when winter comes you can sit by the fire and do nothing."
But Don Alfonso replied that he too went to school and had to study. Jeli opened his eyes wide and was all ears, while the signorino began to read, and he looked at the book and at the young master himself with a suspicious air, listening with that slight winking of the eyelids which indicates intensity of attention in beasts little accustomed to mankind.