And compare Neli, as he got behind the ass to drive it off, said,—
"As God exists I robbed him of the colt! The color makes no difference. See what solid legs, compare! That beast is worth forty lire with one's eyes shut."
"If it had not been for me," returned the friend, "you would not have struck the bargain. Here are still two lire and a half of your money. And if you don't object we will go and have a drink to the health of the ass!"
Now the colt needed to have its health in order to repay the thirty-two and a half lire which had been paid for it, and the straw which it ate. Meanwhile it was contented to frisk behind compare Neli, trying to bite his new padrone's coat tails, and making no ado because it was leaving forever the stall where it had been sheltered by its mother's side, free to rub its nose on the edge of the manger, or to gambol and cut up capers, butting with the ram or going to rub the pig's back in its pen.
And the padrone, who was still again counting over the money in her handkerchief before the apothecary's counter, had on her side no regrets, although she had assisted at the birth of the foal with its black and white skin, as shiny as silk, and which could not at first stand up on its legs, but lay in the warm sun in the court-yard while all the grass which had made it grow so big and strong had passed through her hands!
The only person who missed the foal was its mother, who stretched out her neck toward the entrance of the stall and brayed. But when her udder was no longer painfully distended with the milk, she also forgot about the foal.
"Now you will see," said compare Neli, "that this ass will carry four bushels of corn better than a mule, for me."
And at harvest time he was set to threshing.
At the threshing, the colt, fastened by the neck, in a row with other animals—worn out mules, decrepit horses, paced over the sheaves, from morning till night, so that when it was brought back to the stable, he was so tired that he had no desire to bite at the heap of straw where they put him up in the shade when the wind blew, while the peasants did their winnowing with shouts of "Viva Maria!"
Then he let his nose hang down and drooped his pendent ears, like a full-fledged ass with eyes dulled, as if he were weary of gazing across over that vast plain, smoking here and there with the dust of the threshing-floors, and he seemed made for nothing else than to die of thirst and enforced treading on sheaves.