"Where do the working people live who cultivate these great farms?" asked Ellen, and the man answered by pointing to a large house in the distance. "Sometimes twenty or thirty people live in one of the houses of the contadino, or farmer. Their real home is in some town, but they stay with the farmer while he needs them."
Even with the best of company a long ride on a warm afternoon becomes tiresome. After a time Irma found herself counting the milestones, or kilometre stones, and she saw that instead of being perfectly plain blocks, most of them had some little carved ornament. On one hill they saw a wall that enclosed an old town, and the coachman could hardly find words to express the rapidity with which the population was diminishing.
"Why in the world should any one wish to live on the top of a hill?" asked Uncle Jim. "It was all very well when war was their occupation, but in these piping days of peace it would be too much like work to have to mount that hill daily for the protection of that old castle wall."
After a while the party came to a place where they could draw up by the side of the road and examine their lunch baskets.
"The first hotel luncheon I ever saw," exclaimed Uncle Jim, "without chicken legs and butterless rolls."
"You never before had me to order for you," said Richard. "I know their tricks and their manners, and so I did a little shopping on my own account. At this time of day I knew we would need nothing very substantial, and now you may praise the Sienese fruit and pastry to your heart's content, for that luncheon came chiefly from the little shops, and not from the landlady's larder."
"We can show appreciation without mere words." And soon the luncheon was finished to the last crumb, with due appreciation.
The air was cooler, and shortly they were passing through a factory town at the foot of a hill. As working hours were just over, people were sitting at their open doors, or going in and out of the little shops, much as they would in a New England village. Indeed, Uncle Jim said it made him think of a certain New Hampshire town that he knew well, until, as the horses clattered up the hilly street, suddenly at one side were the high substantial walls of a mediæval town.