The environs of Florence afforded him superior advantages in developing his genius. The Apennines, with their dark gorges, their picturesque landscapes, and their snow-clad peaks, pleased his wild imagination. In their vast recesses he found his best inspirations and his most original subjects. Often he wandered for days over the abrupt mountains, infested with bandits, to find work for his ambitious pencil.
One day he had advanced farther than usual into the profound and dangerous solitudes. He sat down near a torrent, and began to sketch a wild landscape before him. All of a sudden he saw, at the summit of a rock near at hand, a man leaning upon his carbine, and apparently watching him with great curiosity. A large hat, with stained and torn brim, covered his sun-burnt visage; a leather belt bound his dark sack to his body, and gave support to a pistol and hunting-knife, invariably carried by the brigands of the mountains. His black beard, thick and untidy, concealed a portion of his face; but there could be no doubt that his dark glance was fixed upon the stranger who came to invade his domain.
For almost any other but our hero, the sudden apparition of that wild and menacing figure would have been good cause of terror. But Salvator was a painter, and a painter in love with his art; and he had in that strange costume, that forbidding look, something so much in harmony with the aspect of nature about him, that he at once made the man a subject of study.
“I mustn’t lose him,” he said; “he’s an inhabitant of the country. He comes just in the nick of time to complete my landscape; and his position is quite fine.”
And, drawing tranquilly his pencil, he began to transfer the outlines of the brigand to his album, when the stranger, coming a few paces nearer to him, said, in a rough voice,—
“Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“Well, my good fellow, I come to take your portrait, if you’ll hold still a bit,” responded the painter.
“Ah, you jest with me! Have a care,” said the other, coming still nearer.
“No,” replied Salvator, seriously; “I am a painter; and I wander over these mountains with no other purpose but to admire these beautiful landscapes, and to sketch the most picturesque objects.”
“To sketch!” cried the brigand, with evident anger, hardly knowing what the word meant. “Do you not know that these mountains belong to us? Why do you come here to spy us out?”