“We are poor, but we could give you milk and cheese. You would be welcome.”
“I know it. Like you, I love the forest and the mountain, the shade and the sunshine; but yours must be a rough life.”
“It is our lot, and we are content. We toil not, and we love our freedom.”
“It is well.”
“I should like some memorial of having met you, anything to show that I have talked with an Englishman.”
My friend rapidly dashed off a slight sketch, a rough portrait, I think, of his gaunt visitor—no bad subject for the pencil.
“I would rather it had been your own portrait; but I shall keep it in remembrance of you.”
And so they parted; the civilised man to tell his little story of human feeling and native intelligence, “spending their sweetness in the desert air,”—the shepherd to relate his adventure over the watchfire, and perhaps draw forth from some sexagenarian herdsman his boyish recollections of the fall of San Fiorenzo and Bastia, and the march of the English red-coats over the mountains.