There, you see that it is quite unlike anything you ever saw before. Look at those figures in the foreground, how picturesque and yet how simple their costume is! Well, but to proceed: the village where I was staying, when the fact that I am about to relate occurred, was one of the sort you see here. Ah! here is a sketch of the very place, and there is the name of it written underneath. I remember that it had a certain celebrity in the country round about it, as the cathedral (!) in the chief piazza or square boasted of a miraculous picture of the Madonna, that had the reputation of turning up its eyes, and in this manner contrived to heal great numbers among the faithful who were blind, deaf and dumb, maimed, halt, or lame.
I cannot say that I ever witnessed one of these miracles, but that may have been from my want of faith; yet the tales that I heard of miraculous cures from persons of some repute, the arch-priest of the parish amongst the number, were most startling.
I had taken up my quarters in a comfortable rustic inn, not in the town itself, but on a separate hill in an isolated spot, being built in its own grounds, fertile with olive trees, which grew up the sides of the hill nearly to the door of the house.
The inn was frequented almost entirely by artists. Sometimes we were a large company, composed of all nations, when we would dine together "al fresco" under the shade of the vine which formed a verandah on one side of the house. At other times I would be left alone in the inn. The hill on which I lived commanded an extensive view of the surrounding mountains, including the township with its old ivy-grown tower overlooking all, and which appeared as if it were sliding down the mountain side.
I experienced an indescribable feeling of delight in rambling alone through this romantic scenery on a hot summer's day, beneath a perfectly cloudless sky, without a breath of wind to rustle the leaves of the shady trees, amidst a solitude like that of the desert, and a silence unbroken save by the chirping of the birds and the chattering of the cicala, or at intervals, perchance, the distant shepherd's pipe, or the wild barbaric chant of the mountaineer. With what rapture, I remember, would I step from crag to crag, trampling the bush and bramble under my feet, and startling away the green lizards in my path! Quaffing the beauties of nature at every step, the dreamy influence of the balmy atmosphere intensifying my feelings for the beautiful to an abnormal degree.
It was on one of these sultry days during my rambles that I was taking shelter from the burning sun under the shade of a wide-spreading oak, reclining lazily on the soft moss, and listening to the chirping of the grass-hoppers, when my ear was attracted by the sound of the bleating of goats, and shortly afterwards I heard the voices of two peasants which seemed familiar to me. They were discoursing together in the dialect of their own village, a very different lingo from the pure Tuscan, and perfectly unintelligible to one lately coming from Rome, yet a prolonged stay in these parts rendered it familiar to me. I recognised the voices as belonging, one of them to a goatherd who supplied me with milk in the morning, the other to a peasant who possessed a vineyard, a small barrel of whose wine I had bought the day before.
"Ohè! Antonio," cried Guiseppe, the goatherd, to his friend, "so I hear you have sold a quarteruolo of wine to the Signor Inglese (the English gentleman) who lives on the hill."
"Well, Compar,"[8] said his friend, "and what of that?"
"I suppose you made him pay well for it, eh?" demanded the goatherd.