And I watched the ants that were busy near my feet, and listened to them as they talked about me and discussed whether man has instinct.
“What is he doing here?” they said; “he wasn’t here yesterday. Certainly they have no instinct. They may have a low kind of reason, but nothing approaching to instinct. Some of the London houses show signs of instinct—Gower Street, for example, does really seem to suggest instinct; but it is all delusive. It is curious that these cities of theirs should always exist in places where there are no ants. They certainly anthropomorphise too freely. Or is it perhaps that we formicomorphise more than we should?”
And Silvio came by on his way to church. It was he who taught all the boys in Soglio to make a noise. Before he came up there was no sound to be heard in the streets, except the fountains and the bells. I asked him whether the curate was good to him.
“Si,” he replied, “è abbastanza buono.”
I should think Auld Robin Gray was “abbastanza buono” to Mrs. Gray.
One of the little girls told me that Silvio had so many centesimi and she had none. I said at once:
“You don’t want any centesimi.”
As soon as these words fell from my lips, I knew I must be getting old.
And presently the Devil came up to me. He was a nice, clean old man, but he dropped his h’s, and that was where he spoiled himself—or perhaps it was just this that threw me off my guard, for I had always heard that the Prince of Darkness was a perfect gentleman. He whispered to me that in the winter the monks of St. Bernard sometimes say matins overnight.
The blue of the mountains looks bluer through the chestnuts than through the pines. The river is snowy against the “Verdi prati e selve amene.” The great fat tobacco plant agrees with itself if not with us; I never saw any plant look in better health. The briar knows perfectly well what it wants to do and that it does not want to be disturbed; it knows, in fact, all that it cares to know. The question is how and why it got to care to know just these things and no others. Two cheeky goats came tumbling down upon me and demanded salt, and the man came from the saw-mill and, with his great brown hands, scooped the mud from the dams of the rills that watered his meadow, for the hour had come when it was his turn to use the stream.