From some of these green hills the sea is visible, and when the sun sets where the sea is and the red evening glows behind the distant peaks, it is lovely as a poet's dream.
On the side of this lonely hill, known as Genistrello, there dwelt a man of the name of Castruccio Lascarisi. He was called 'Caris' by the whole countryside; indeed, scarcely any knew that he had another patronymic, so entirely amongst these people does the nickname extinguish, by its perpetual use, the longer appellative.
His family name was of Greek extraction undoubtedly; learned Greeks made it familiar in the Italian Renaissance, at the courts of Lorenzo and of Ludovico; but how it had travelled to the Pistoiese hills to be borne by unlearned hinds none knew, any more than any know who first made the red tulip blossom as a wild flower amidst the wheat, or who first sowed the bulb of the narcissus amongst the wayside grass.
He lived miles away from the chapel and the hamlet. He had a little cabin in the heart of the chestnut woods, which his forefathers had lived in before him; they had no title which they could have shown for it except usage, but that had been title enough for them, and was enough for Caris.
It had been always so. It would be always so. His ideas went no further. The autumnal migration was as natural and inevitable to him as to the storks and herons and wild duck which used to sail over his head, going southward like himself as he walked through the Tuscan to the Roman Maremma. But his dislike to the Maremma winters was great, and had never changed in him since he had trotted by his father's side, a curly-pated baby in a little goatskin shirt looking like a Correggio's St. John.
What he longed for, and what he loved, were the cool heights of Genistrello and the stone hut with the little rivulet of water gushing at its threshold. No one had ever disturbed his people there. It was a square little place built of big unmortared stones in old Etruscan fashion; the smoke from the hearth went out by a hole in the roof, and a shutter and door of unplaned wood closed its only apertures.
The lichen and weeds and mosses had welded the stones together, and climbed up over its conical rush roof. No better home could be needed in summer-time; and when the cold weather came, he locked the door and went down with his pack on his back and a goatshair belt round his loins to take the familiar way to the Roman Maremma.
Caris was six-and-twenty years old; he worked amongst the chestnut woods in summer and went to the Maremma for field labour in the winter, as so many of these husbandmen do; walking the many leagues which separate the provinces, and living hardly in both seasons. The songs they sing are full of allusions to this semi-nomadic life, and the annual migration has been a custom ever since the world was young—when the great Roman fleets anchored where now are sand and marsh, and stately classic villas lifted their marble to the sun where now the only habitation seen is the charcoal-burner's rush-roofed, moss-lined hut.
Caris was a well-built, lithe, slender son of the soil, brown from sun and wind, with the straight features and the broad low brows of the classic type, and great brown eyes like those of the oxen which he drove over the vast plains down in the Maremma solitudes. He knew nothing except his work.
He was not very wise, and he was wholly unlearned, but he had a love of nature in his breast, and he would sit at the door of his hut at evening time, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees, and often forget to eat in his absorbed delight as the roseate glow from the vanished sunrays overspread all the slopes of the Pistoiese Apennines and the snow-crowned crests of the Carara mountains.