“This last horse is quite safe,” said the man, “and there’s nothing that can hurt in the sack.”
It certainly did not look inviting, but I determined to try, nevertheless. So the horse was made to stand by a stone wall, and up I got; on the wrong side, of course—there was no help for that.
The road was like all hillside roads; now up, now down, now of large slippery stones, now of loose rolling small ones; and when the horse took to making glissades down the former and catching his feet in the latter, I did not find a knobbly charcoal sack, without pommel, stirrup, or bridle, the most pleasant of pleasant seats. However I held on bravely by the wooden front of the pack-saddle, and saved my legs if I exercised my arms and back. A curious procession we must have made, winding through the woods to the music of a concertina with which one of the men intended to provide for the dancing.
When we reached the Melo we found that we were among the first arrivals. In the one street there were two stalls covered with brightly-coloured cakes and sweets; a basket of villainous-looking pears sold by a villainous-looking man; a couple of baskets of figs; and a couple of men with steel-yards selling peculiar wafer-like cakes known as cialde. Visitors had not arrived yet, however, and to pass the time we sauntered into the church where mass was going on. Towards the end, a man brought round the collection-box and a plate of bits of round baked dough. My companion took two or three of these, putting his penny into the bag at the same time, and handed me a couple.
“What are they?” I asked.
“St. Nicholas’ bread. They have been blessed by the priest. Put one of them outside the window when it rains, and no hail will come. Keep them in your bedroom and you’ll never be ill.”
The village was beginning to look more lively now, for it was getting near eleven, the time for high mass. The peasant women were resplendent in new dresses made for the occasion; some of them even indulged in velvet trimming and dress-improvers, to the undisguised admiration of the swains, and the envy of their less fortunate sisters. They all wore their gayest kerchiefs, generally of fine silk, tied tightly over their well-pomaded hair. Many of the younger women, too, had huge bows of common ribbon, tinsel flowers, and paper lace, boldly displayed in the very middle of the chest. It would have been impossible to wear them at the neck, of course, for they would have been partly hidden by the chin and the kerchief ends. The young men evidently considered grey the correct thing to wear; but they enlivened it by sticking jauntily into their hat-bands flowers and sprays of tinsel of the most amazing forms and colours. Of course everybody talked to everybody, and I was closely questioned by one old woman after another, as to my nationality, family, occupation, etc., etc.
High mass over, the crowd was speedily sucked in by the various houses, and the most important part of the day’s business, the feasting, began. My landlord took us to the house of one of his friends, a keen sportsman who had just returned from the low-lands of the Maremma to settle again in his native place. The phrase “Nature’s gentleman,” has grown too commonplace for use nowadays; but it is the only expression which gives an exact description of our host. He was a tall, finely-built man, small-flanked, broad-chested, with grey, bushy hair, thinnish brown face, aquiline nose, bright intelligent brown eyes, and a peculiar grace in every movement. One of his two daughters (hard-working girls, both of them) had all his classical ease of motion, and a winning suavity and urbanity of voice and manner, that made one envy the clowns she was addressing. The blood of some superior race seemed to reveal itself also in the fine figure, clean-cut features, and wide intelligent grey eyes shaded by thick black hair, of the youngest son.
Our host told us stories of the Maremma. He had once been a thriving farmer there, so he said, but American competition was proving too much for Italian agriculture, burdened as this last is with heavy taxes; and in the last years of his stay there it had not paid him even to reap the crops: he had let them lie rotting on the ground. He told us, too, of the terrible fever, and the terrible remedies by which it used to be combated. He had had as many as fifty leeches on the pit of his stomach at once, in one bad attack. Then he and my landlord began to relate tales of the experiences of their common shooting expeditions in past times, and our host fell on an incident of quite mediæval colouring. He was travelling once with a friend and his wife, he said, in the days before railroads. His friend was taken ill on the road, and on their arrival at the inn where they intended to pass the night, asked for some broth.