Part Two

_In the Apennines_

The Mountains.

Where the winding chain of the Apennines stretches upward from the sea, crossing and recrossing the land with so many and such strange devices that from off the height of one of the mountains themselves there seems scarce room for a space of level plain, wedged in between ridges or sunk in clefts of hills, are the fair valleys of North Italy. Away from the blue sea and its blinding beauty, and from the leaden heat of the shores, they hold a fresh and free life of their own. Heavy night dews there feed the wild flowers that sicken in the nerveless pallor of the summer sea-air, and fresh water runs swiftly from mountain springs. Sometimes they are narrow and hidden valleys, in whose depth even villages could scarce find a home, did they not climb the hill-sides on either hand, and camp out, as it were, upon the meadows or among the vineyards. Or, again, they are wider, so that little towns have been built within them—quaint towns with tall houses and taller _campanile_, at whose side there flows, perhaps, a shallow river, brown upon its shingly bed.

Where, north of Genoa and the sea some twenty miles, the low back of the Giove mountain lies across the country, there is one of these more open valleys that creeps upward toward the higher peak of Antola, and along its way many a picturesque little village has grown for years, wearing out the thatched roofs of its chimneyless houses beneath hot suns and sharp mountain winds, cheerily holding its own against storms and inundations from the river hard by, that is so cruel a foe when the great rains have been at work. Little hamlets cling to the mountain sides, with scarce a common thoroughfare beside them; while other hamlets that stand upon the roadside can often boast a finer house in their midst, for the _forestieri_ come in summer, and people whose houses lie conveniently can let rooms. By these villages a stone bridge is even built over the stream, so that the torrent may be safely crossed when it is swollen by the rains.

It was early on a summer evening that I first saw this broader and loveliest of North Apennine valleys which is between Giove’s mountain and the more cloven peaks of Antola hills. In the towns it had been so hot of late that not all the delights of sea-bathing in soft, Mediterranean waters, from the marble steps of olive-planted gardens, nor even the seductiveness of the _dolce far niente_ beside spouting fountains, beneath colonnades and on balconies, could banish the longing for the freedom of a fresher air, could atone for the remorseless Scirocco, for the sapping heat of those white August days and terrible nights. I sought release from them all and from the mosquitoes, where green trees might perchance fan a breeze towards me, where turf would at least be cool to lie on, and I sought it in the valleys—so little known even by those who live within their reach—of the Piedmontese Apennines.

I had seen a little station, just at the mouth of the Giove tunnel on the way to Alessandria, around which the country seemed to me crisply and luxuriantly beautiful. It was called Busalla. No one knew of it as a recommendable _villeggiatura_; Pontedecimo, Serravalle, Voltaggio were suggested to me instead, but I preferred my own choice. The little town is dirty, noisy, dusty as little Italian towns mostly are; but in the country round about I was not disappointed. Dense, bountiful chestnut woods, whose tender-coloured, fan-like leaves sway soothingly in the whispering breeze, would alone have been enough to freshen me, wearied by grand buildings and splendid colonnades. And besides the desired trees there was the gurgling of water all about—sometimes I could scarcely find from whence. I would glance around to see the stream that was babbling so audibly, and lay my head down again on the turf, fancying I was mistaken, only to hear the mocking laughter of the water again when I had ceased to look for it.

When I arrived at Busalla, I was rather at a loss at first about a shelter for the night. The cleanest even of the two inns looked scarcely such as I cared to enter. I questioned a comely female in the piazza, who had figs and peaches in a basket on her head, and who was freely gesticulating and shouting at a handsome _negoziante_ from Genoa. Having secured her attention by means of a larger remuneration than the nominal price she asked for the fruit, I learnt that there was a _magnifico stabilimento_ at Savignone, a village some three miles off: I could have a conveyance, or she herself would show me the way, as she was going to the village. I accepted her offer—the _vettura_ I had seen standing out, and I should have feared for my safety at its mercy.

We came first through the little town, with its butcher, fruiterer, and inevitable barber, past the old whitewashed _campanile_ with the sun-dial on its façade, and struck out upon a roughish way to the left. There was a torrent to cross on stepping-stones. I recollect that my guide laughed loudly at my care to keep on the stones. She trudged through the water on her bare feet. For a good half-hour the road runs alongside of just such a drowsy river as I have remembered before, creeping away furtively in the midst of an arid bed, too weary in the drought even to lift its voice; yet this river can swell beneath the sharp lash of an angry thunderstorm, to roll onward in muddy, turbulent volumes, regardless of walls, bridges, or any other obstacle. Now to the left is a weir: the road mounts some hundred feet above the level of the water, and is none of the safest to drive over, being narrow, ill-made, and unparapetted. I was glad I had not chosen the _vettura_.

Glad too, because a more lovely walk could scarcely be conceived. The valley lay before me in all its sweet, mellow beauty: fresh, crisp, luxuriant, and yet burnished all over and saturated with the dim, gently sorrowful shadow of coming autumn. The vintage was near, and the terraced hill-sides were hung with the rich festoons of unpruned vines, that seemed fondly to try and cover the bare ground whence the golden wheat had been shorn. Waving, sweeping chestnut woods drape those hills around, leaving bare only the summits, whose frail outlines lie clear against the pale sky. Unlike bolder types of mountains, these Apennines are fretted all over with a delicate tracery of faint furrows that wander waywardly, and of watercourses that rise slenderly above to grow into large ravines and gashes below. Nature is warm and gracious here, but not wanton with luxuriance, as in the more tropical beauty which I had just left; the country is not a wild country because the hand of man has rested on it all to put cultivation within its valleys, and even upon its hill-sides; but cultivation has not wiped away the mark of nature’s own wayward grace, that is fit to that other grace, free, winning, and wayward, too, even to quaintness, which belongs to its people.

We crossed the bridge—the only stone bridge on the river, that gives its name to a village hard by—and followed the way that steeply climbs the hill for a while until another Campanile is in sight. Ten minutes more of climbing brought us out on to the piazza of Savignone.

I dismissed my friendly peasant guide, who promised me her warmest prayers in exchange for my silver coin, and watching her as she reaped neighbourly greetings from knots of country folk gathered on the _piazza_ for their evening relaxation, I looked around upon the village that was, for a while, to be my home. I stood in a large open square paved with round pebbles; a church was on my right—on either side of which, and forming a quadrangle round about, lay a long, low building, yellow-painted and large-windowed, formerly a hospital, but now the _magnifico stabilimento_ of which I had been told. Here were evidently the remains of an old feudal borough, belonging probably in long-lost times to one of those lords of the marshes so famous in the days of the terrible _condottieri_. Even through the embellishments of modern stucco one could trace the skeleton of a palace which had seen better usage, in the days when architecture was something more than a name; and besides the palace, hospital, or _stabilimento_, there were ruins of a castle on a little hill close above, a hill that in the twilight seemed to dwell beneath the shadow of another and rockier mountain.

All around me rose graceful and methodless mountains, with forms that were broken into a wealth of harmonies, and sky-line lying clear-cut and undulating upon the darkening blue. A soft dew fell from out the hot day upon all drooping things, and, as I rested, the sound of rippling water smote on my hearing—of water that, said I, would ripple and murmur just the same to-morrow, when the sun should be burning overhead. ‘Ah, yes, we have many streams here; that is why the doctors have built a _Stabilimento Idroterapico_,’ was the old _contadino’s_ explanation, to whom I turned now for advice. ‘Your honour will be well there in the Stabilimento; there is true luxury! We have a fair spot at Savignone for anyone to pass the time in, and one does not feel the heat too much—no! And over the gorge of the river is _la Valle Calda_.’ So I stayed at Savignone; and when the sun’s power had flagged the next day, and dews crept down once more, I went back upon my steps of the first evening—back almost as far as Busalla, that I might learn to know that other gorge, which the old peasant had called _la Valle Calda_.

Leaving the town of Busalla, my road struck off from the main highway across the Giove, from that highway which was in olden times the traveller’s only route from Turin to Genoa. It is still studded along with many a little wayside inn, now forlorn and impoverished, where carriage-loads of foreigners used to stop in days gone by, while their horses were baiting. These little inns have sunk nowadays to the lower rank of ‘_bettole_’ or taverns; since the making of the railway they lack the custom which raised them into ‘_alberghi_,’ and no longer profess to find beds, but only to supply the wayfarer or the waggoner with food and drink. Nevertheless the ‘_bettole_’ are still distinctive features, and picturesque with a purely Italian picturesqueness.

The branch road up the valley of the Scrivia is not at first sight inviting. Poor and dirty buildings of the town’s outskirts flank its ill-paven and narrow streets, but squalid houses are soon left behind, and the country opens out before and around you. As I have said before, it is a free landscape, even though the hills stand about on every side closing in the valley, and though, looking up toward the farther end of it, you can see that the land grows more mountainous, and that the cones and shoulders of hills seem to lie up more cumbrously against the horizon. But they are not mountains whose peaks tower into the sky, neither are their sides made up of cliffs and dark ravines. They are scarcely perhaps high enough and important enough even to deserve the name of mountains—these slimly moulded and graceful hills, daintily muffled in luxuriant vegetation—excepting that they are so amply cultivated where the chestnut woods are not, that something of their height is lost, perhaps, because their nature is so like the nature of the plains; the plains, that are no more than narrow little strips of level land from which cultivation creeps up the steep slopes; for patches of corn-field, of maize and potato crops, intersected with vineyards and trellises, find room on many a tiny ledge or terrace of earth till the whole land wears a look of careful plenty.

Even the timber vegetation of the country has a sort of prodigality in its beauty, which seems to tell how the broad-leaved chestnut trees are not only fair to behold but also bountiful in service. They wear a promise of warmer tones now over their brilliant summer colouring, for the autumn has just begun to shed a new influence abroad, and faintly golden tints speak of the fruit-time of the year, after the sunnier time of flowers and scents is over. The whole land has a flush of this new promise. Harvest is over, and the corn-fields are laid bare, yet there is a golden burnished hue upon the ground where the yellow stubble is left upon the yellow clay soil. The vintage is not yet gathered in, so that the vines have lost none of their beauty, but that rather the cool purple-red of their luscious fruit-clusters, near to that other warmer red which is faint as yet upon the gracefully-turning tendrils and broad leaves of their foliage, serves to help the warm painting of the whole. As far as the eye can see, gold and green mingle in subtle harmony. A faintest fancy of coming gold in the chestnut woods, the steadier gold and yet pale of the cropped fields, the gold that almost deepens into brown where patches of ploughed land lie here and there upon the hillsides and in the valley, and through the whole the golden-winding thread of the river.

This is the valley of the Scrivia, from whose main course that side gorge creeps up, among the mountains, to the village of Savignone and the feudal castle. At its foot a mountain stands sentinel to all the little quiet and cosy villages within the precinct below—a tall mountain, uprising many hundreds of feet in one solid mass, but indented with many clefts and water-courses, and cut at its summit into many sharp peaks, each different in shape and in size, and all lying clear and fine against the sky. Here the river winds in closer coils, and its rough bed spreads across the valley; for soon the water gathers itself together, since it is somewhere in the fissures of Monte Baneo or her range that the Scrivia has its birth. At the foot of the sentinel mountain you may see a little white town lodged—and this is the town, more properly called the village, of Casella.

All this you will have seen on before you and beside you as you walked up along the stony road from Busalla. The stream has been flowing at your left, and on your right were chestnut woods growing up into the hills, and turf and moss that spread beneath them, and little hamlets dotting the wayside, and blackberry hedges by the road. Many little torrents bubble across the footpath—streams that must be crossed on the roughest of stepping-stones, for only the village called ‘_Ponte di Savignone_’ boasts a stone bridge across the river for those who are bound for the Baths, and here are houses gathered on either side of the bridge, finer looking than the smoke-coloured and thatched cottages. From this point the main road of the Scrivia valley runs on the farther side of the water.

But I, in my evening ramble, was not bound for the high road nor for the town of Casella, that lies at the valley’s foot. The old _contadino_ had spoken of the mountain’s eastern side, when he had pointed across the gorge to the slopes lying opposite, and he had spoken of it as _la Valle Calda_. I did not therefore cross the stone bridge again, but holding to the right, went in search of this new valley. No carriage—not even the brave one offered to my notice the evening before at Busalla—could have held its way upon this road, for the stones lay looser and larger than ever upon it, and, as it went farther into the hills, it narrowed, and grew more and more uneven. Monte Baneo still stood up before me with the valley and the river at its feet, and to westward the slopes of Antola. Little cottages began to appear in clusters upon meadows and peeping from among woods; blue smoke curled into the air from dells and copses, showing where other human habitations lay hid; then the _Campanile_ came to sight. It stood close against the hill, and as I came nearer the bells began gently to chime with gladsome rhythm for the morrow’s feast of Saint or Virgin.

This was _La Valle Calda_; and as I stood gazing on the soft and quiet scene there came an old woman along the road who went across the mountains weekly with new-laid eggs to sell, and she, greeting me friendly, as all these peasants do, told me many things of the country and of the neighbours, and commending me heartily for my genuine admiration of this valley of her home, she bade me turn my walk once more to the right till I should reach a village called, she said, _La Madonna della Vittoria_, for there should I behold a view worth the seeing indeed!

So towards the east I turned again, and climbed my way into the chestnut woods. I left the river behind that had been flowing on my left through green meadows as I walked from Ponte towards the chief village of _La Valle Calda_. I left even this semblance of a high road, running parallel with the real high road on the stream’s opposite shore which had seemed so close in the summer air that I had heard the laughter of the _vetturino_ as he drove his infirm vehicle, and chattered with his passengers, or urged his horse by loud vociferations.

My new way was nothing but a mountain path, and a steep one—for _La Madonna della Vittoria_ stands on a hill. The foot-track winds up between chestnut groves, rising higher and higher above the banks of a mountain torrent that in autumn and winter time is turbulent in its downward rush to the river. Now and again little hamlets appear, whose houses are ranged and huddled on both sides of the path; the road grows steeper, and the sides of the ravine, in whose deep the torrent gurgles, are rough and jagged as you look down upon them. In this side valley the country is wilder and more bleak, for there is less room for cultivation. The path creeps round an angle of the hill, and the long ridge is in sight, where _La Madonna della Vittoria_ stands between two heads of the mountain. The place takes its name from a little oratory, sacred to the Virgin of that title. People come hither in pilgrimage from the parish church; and in times of blight or of pestilence, of rains or of long drought, processions are frequent. The chapel is beyond the village, a little farther up on the hill. If you mount the street and the flight of stone steps that is at the end of the village, you will come upon the little mound on which stands the oratory. The piazza is a paved enclosure with a low stone wall and a stone bench that runs round hemming it in. There are acacia trees and cypresses against the church, and upon its front a worn and faded image of the Madonna, with sceptre and crown and glory, stands where it has stood for many a year within shallow niche to receive the winds and the rain and the people’s obeisance.

A sharp air blows of an evening around this little piazza upon the hill, a breeze that is keen to refresh and yet soft enough to soothe. Sitting upon the little low wall, it blows around, while your looks stray over the goodly country spread out beneath and about you. Ranges upon ranges of hills set a girdle on every side. But they are not hills that tell of a mountainous land far ahead, as do the hills of Savignone. There is a vague sense of space and freedom here, for we have turned our faces back again towards the sea. The distance that your eye can scan seems measureless: hills as far as you can see—tier rising behind tier, the higher peaks standing forward and the lower ones peering forth, as it were, from betwixt their shoulders; hills on every side, but hills whose outlines sink and grow dim in the filmier light as they near the sea far away. At first the mountains seem so thickly wedged upon the soil that no room can remain for places of human habitation; but as you gaze, you see how the rivers flow down from them, growing wider in their course, and with space for towns upon the banks. Far out ahead, where the blue air grows paler, the dim sky sinks down into a silvery line, that is the Mediterranean. And, perhaps, if the sunset has been clear, and if the vapours have not arisen to muffle it, you may see in the vague distance other things that are dim, yet more solid in their dimness, and these are the islands of the sea; and further up, beyond the sky-line, forms of dazzling whiteness, and these are peaks of the Maritime Alps; while below, in the nearest valley, the town of Ponte Decimo gleams out in the last of the sunlight, and _La Madonna della Vittoria_ looks down upon it all.

The old _pedona_ had been right when she told me it was worth while to climb the hill for the sake of the view at its top. I sat a while on the wall of the little _piazza_ watching the evening vapours creep down from the mountains, and feeling their breath on my cheek. Women with children clinging to their skirts, and small, swaddled babies in their arms, came to make their evening prayer in the sanctuary—to have their evening gossip in its porch. They greeted me with courteous grace, and one of them talked long with me, telling me of the neighbourhood and of its people—rambling on with stories of her own and of many other villages. They have the true grace of perfect unconsciousness, the dwellers in these little Apennine homes, and have no conventionalities, since each acts upon the moment’s impulse that he may enjoy life to the full. I call them all to mind, those simple friends of a time long past, and, as I think of them, I think of summer days when breezes moved silently amid leaves, and the air was white with heat as it lay clear above the tender green of chestnut trees.

I think of little rough and quaint villages that are the homes of these my friends, and, best of all, I remember one village that stands beneath the crest of a hill, with shady woods and orchards to girdle it about. Another hill lies over against it, whose graceful form I seem to see as I write—soft shapes, yet varied that rest upon the sky, subtle waves and indentations of earth, with which play the lights and shades of the daylight. It is that village of _La Valle Calda_, towards which I turned my steps again after I had looked on the fair scene from _La Vittoria’s_ hill. A church stands for centre to the parish—that church with tall _campanile_ and blue-painted belfry—and, beside the church, an oratory, where the memory of some special saint is sacred; but the parish itself is scattered far and wide through copse and over meadow, in hamlets that stand beside streams or on hill-tops.

The steeple is nevertheless, here as elsewhere, the beacon that can gather all neighbours together, and beneath it is a piazza with stone benches around, where at Ave Maria my memory confidently returns to recall each one of those faces seen long ago. I know I shall find them there, for I know they must have a goodly portion of gossip and loitering, and am fain indeed to confess that if foreign sayings about Italian impetuosity, and easily moved Italian feelings, have been often exaggerated, these Apennine country people are, on the other hand, no taciturn race. They are cunning to mould to their use the lithe tongue of their land, to adorn it with expletives, and to point it with gesticulation; and it is even this habit of noisy vociferation which has perhaps won them abroad the character—so little deserved—for curbless passions and vindictively cruel propensities. For they are a kindly people in their mutual relations, and formed by their very nature for warm, social life, since they need a free neighbourly intercourse, such as quiet and colder temperaments can scarcely understand.

Hence it is that the life of an Italian community, unlike the comparatively secretive life of northern lands, is to be learned in its open thoroughfares rather than its individual homes, and that we must seek on cottage door-steps, in market-places and piazzas, where men and women mix freely together, the true colour of the Italian people.

At the Chestnut Harvest.

As October days draw nigh to their end there is festival in the cottages of North Italy. Walking at evening among her mountains and passing through her homely villages, a red light of wood fire comes streaming upon you from open cabin doors and from between the chinks of clumsy window-shutters, and noisy sounds of revelry fall around. For this is the season when the chestnuts are ripe, and the peasants are making merry by dark, for the work they have had during the hours of day, and they are glad for that harvest which is to them the most bounteous of the year.

In autumn, thunder-storms lower in the Apennine valleys. Torrents grow turbulent, hurling themselves in foam from the hills around, and rivers that, in the long drought, have grown meagre, swell rapidly to great size, fed by rains amid the mountains and by the hundred little streamlets and torrents that cast themselves noisily down ravines. The river-beds are wide—so wide that in summer their barren expanse of shingle looks ill amid the green land—yet now there is often no room within them for the mass of moving water. It overflows the banks and swamps the near-lying cultivation, till the maize plantations lie dashed and the meadows are soft, like bogs. It carries away the little temporary bridges which, spring after spring, are newly set across the streams; scarcely can it flow, sometimes, beneath the arches of more stable bridges that, here and there, are built for greater security; it damages the weirs, and brooks no obstacle in its way, flowing swiftly—a great muddy, turbid stream, that bears upon its breast the trunks or the branches of trees and many other spoils from off the banks. And year after year the people know that this may all happen, yet year after year they take no precautions to shield themselves from evil; they build up no embankments, turn aside the course of no injurious waters, only, laughing they say, or sighing, ‘It is time that the great waters descend.’

And during the present month they are almost sure to descend, once, at least, with all their power of devastation, for the best of the sunshine has taken its leave of the land by the end of October. Down in the more level parts of the valleys, where the meadows lie, little cottages look out ruefully from amid the dripping walnuts, their thatched roofs damp and glistening in the wet; and higher up, among the chestnut woods, sad leaves lie damp upon the ground, where the mossy turf is so moist, that mushrooms are spoiled ere they be grown. The country looks tenderly forlorn, that was so gay with its vintage in September. Trees shed their foliage early in chestnut-wooded districts, and already tints have little left that is freshly green, but leaves are yellow upon boughs, and scattered day by day more thickly to earth. There is no hot sunshine, no blue light that is misty with heat; yet the valleys can still smile in their soberer mood when chance and glorious sunbeams strike across the land, or when the rain ceases and bright days come back, here and there, with warmer breezes. Swollen rivers abate if the deluge cease only for a day, and as you walk upon their banks the waters are limpid again, yet green from their depth with an intenser colour.

And wandering beneath the chestnuts, no sense of damp or dreariness oppresses now that sunshine is abroad once more, for yellow-tinted leaves wave brightly overhead, and yellower leaves, that are scattered, rustle pleasantly beneath your feet, while now and again a quick sound breaks the stillness, and that is the fall of the fruit. Since the middle of October you might have heard it when you were in the woods, for the chestnuts began to ripen at that time and the brown-burnished fruit to peep from out its prickly shell. But scarcely before the end of the month does the chestnut harvest begin in earnest in the Apennines. There are divers kinds of chestnuts, and the gathering of each dates properly from a different day: the so-called ‘timely chestnuts,’ that ripen before the commoner sorts—but this variety is rarer and the fruit finer than that of others—the late chestnuts, such as, of their own accord, do not fall sometimes till November—though these trees are often thrashed during the general harvest for the greater convenience of the gatherers.

Companies of women and girls greet you now upon your walks. They have little bags of sackcloth slung around their waists, and rough wooden tweezers in their hands, with which they open the spiked husks, where the fruit lies yet in its green case. They are merry; they laugh and talk, their shrill Italian voices sounding shriller to English ears in the harsh Genoese dialect. It is a season of festivity. The festa of the ‘_Santi_’ has but lately passed, and there is much interchange of colloquial news and much surmising on parish matters, with a little gossip and neighbourly scandal mixed therewith.

The ‘_Santi_’ is the last great feast of the year until Christmas be come, and it is treated with much solemnity throughout the whole of Italy. The ‘_Giorno dei Morti_’ is likewise a great day among the people, but then the pageant is one of mourning and of woe. Black garments are donned by those who have lost friends during the year, and little charms and candles are sold throughout the streets of the towns, with black and yellow garlands of everlastings, with which people are wont to adorn the graves. Yet there always seems to be as much excitement around this day as any other. Southern feelings love so dearly to be moved, that apparently it matters little whether it be to joy or to grief.

However, this great homage to the day of the dead seems to be confined more to the cities, and beneath the chestnuts, where our people are gathering up the harvest, there is little talk of sadness. Here a man has come to the aid of the girls, and has climbed to the top of a huge tree, that he may the better thrash down the fruit. It falls in prickly showers upon the crackling dead leaves below, but the women seem little to fear any hurt from thorns, for they tread boldly amid the heap, often with bare feet, and take the harsh shells within their hands to open them. All day the people are at work. They are almost all women at this task, for the men are labouring in the fields. Some few of them return home at midday to cook and to carry the dinner for brothers and husbands without, but most of them remain in the woods till dusk, and eat their cold ‘_polenta_’ at midday, resting upon the banks. Towards dark the great baskets are piled up that have been filled all day from each woman’s sack, and then the girls lift them upon their heads or their shoulders, and pick their way deftly along the stony paths with the burthens. Sometimes the loads are too heavy and must be left for the men, but this does not often happen, for these peasant women are strong, with a beautiful ease of strength, and proud of their power.

So, whether the day has been dark and cheerless, or whether the kind autumn sunshine has been there to brighten up all anew into a beauty more beautiful than summer-time, the women have been at work in the woods, and now the recreation hour has come. Within cottages great fires are lit upon hearths that are in the chamber’s midst, and the pot is put on to boil; rough wooden benches are drawn around, and men and women meet after their labour to commemorate, with fun and jollity, the first of the chestnuts. Upon each successive evening they meet in different cottages according to the help they have lent to one another during the day; land is not rented in the Apennines, neither do the people labour for pay, but each has his small homestead according to his wealth, and cultivates the ground himself, men and women helping their neighbours during every pressing season, as they themselves expect to be helped in turn.

When the ‘_minestra_’ has been eaten, or the ‘_polenta_’ then the pot is taken off, with the great chain from whence it hung, and the ‘_padella_’ is brought forth, upon which chestnuts are to be roasted. The red wood fire flares and flickers upon the hearth amid its heap of embers, throwing fitful dashes of light upon faces around—copper vessels and platters make sudden gleam upon dingy walls. Again the bold flames die away, and there is only a lurid mass of cinders, and then the women toss chestnuts in the pan and the men slit the brown hide of other chestnuts that are yet unroasted, and they all chatter and gesticulate the while in a fashion so quick and eager and with voices so high and thrilling, that foreign ears, to whom the shrill dialect is unknown, might fairly hear therein the words of an angry quarrel.

And sometimes there are quarrels even at these scenes of merriment. Italian natures are hot, and Italian women are jealous, besides being coquettes too, in their way, with often prudent or mercenary considerations, so that wrangles come and altercations; but they make it up again most times, and do not seem to break their hearts.

The women are not, as a rule, beautiful hereabouts. They are superbly built and powerful, with graceful movements, but their faces belong to a heavy-featured type that lacks much in delicacy of form, even though the ruddy pallor of colouring might atone for many deficiencies. The splendour of dark eyes can sometimes scarcely kindle them into real brilliancy, nevertheless these women have their lives to live and their wars to wage, and they bear the tokens, in themselves beautiful, of toil and the labour of living.

The chestnut harvest lasts some three weeks or more, and, when the fruit is all gathered in, it is spread above the open rafters that form the roof of every kitchen in these Italian cottages—there to be dried during winter by the fire’s heat from below. And when the chestnuts are dried, and the outer skin has been cracked off by the heat, then they are ground in a mill, so that the flour goes to make bread and cakes and porridge during the barren season, when there is little fresh food to be got by the poor. The dried chestnuts are boiled whole likewise, and in one form or another the common production of the woods provides nourishment, during this time, for all the peasants throughout the land.

Under the Cherry Trees.

The Bridal.

Summer sunshine lies gladly upon the green hill-sides of _la Valle Calda_. It moves in broken light over the warm green of broad-leaved chestnut trees that daintily sweep the turf with their branches, it quivers across the stream’s passing wave, or rests in a sheet of silver upon the still pools of the slowly flowing river. Flowers bloom gayer and breathe forth a stronger scent for its goodly radiance, summer fruits ripen the sooner. For these are June days, that I call to mind, as I think of _la Valle Calda_, that fairest of North Apennine valleys, and the wild cherries are ripe upon the land, the lads and the maidens are merry, for to-morrow is the Feast of St. John and the bridal day of Caterina Ponte.

In the hamlets around, excitement has waxed high these many days past. St. John is the patron saint of this little church that stands so simply beside the green background of the richly-wooded mountain, with belfry tower whose top seems almost to lie against the far horizon clouds. St. John is the saint to whom most honour is due from the dwellers in this particular parish. There will be a procession to-morrow, and that would be grave enough matter, even without the wedding of the prettiest girl in our village.

Down by the river’s brink, where the tall cherry trees grow whose large black fruit will not be ripe yet awhile, the morrow’s bride has had her home these twenty years long. Her cottage roof is thatched and moss-grown, as the roofs of all the other cottages that are here gathered together into a hamlet—one of the many hamlets that go to make up the parish.

The father’s homestead, where Caterina has lived away her life till to-day, is nothing but a low, one-storeyed house, that has no chimney to its roof and no glass to its windows, blackened around where the smoke has made its way; there are rough wooden shutters to keep out the night air and the coldest of winter blasts, but, in these happy dog-days, is no need to fear the fresh breath of the outside breezes, and, upon the sills, carnations bloom in pots, with marjoram and rosemary for the soup-flavouring, and marsh-mallow for the healing of hurts. The stone steps are uneven that lead to the threshold; the kitchen is dark, above the loose rafters of which chestnuts lie all winter time to dry with the heat of the fire below; a great black pot is hanging now over the red embers on the square centre-hearth, and Caterina knows every dint in those bright copper vessels that gladden the gloomy walls—every sunken brick in the floor. No wonder she sorrows a little to leave the hard bench where she has sat so often to fan the flame or—one among many—to roast chestnuts of an autumn evening; no wonder she drops a passing regret to the broken stone balcony without the door, where ofttimes she has stood gossiping with neighbours beneath the trellised vine or has listened to the ready vows of village swains! Though she be going to a better cottage, where there are windows and even a chimney, Caterina can still be sorry to leave the yellow gourd flowers that trail across the ground in the garden of her girlhood, will still perchance miss awhile the Michaelmas daisies, the sunflowers, the tomatoes, and even her own pet fruit-orchard stretching across green grass towards the river. But though she sigh a furtive sigh for all this, the vows of the one particular swain have been heard and registered now, so there must be a good-bye for ever to anything the others might have had to say, and this must be the last day even for the gossip of a maiden.

Where the land leaves the river-side and swells up into hills, wild cherries grow better than in low-lying orchards, and it is the wild cherries that are ripe for the feast of St. John; so that now, while it is yet daytime, girls of the village are still plucking the fruit, up among those further plantations, nor will be down till dark for the last chat beneath the vine of Caterina’s maiden home.

The trees are small and slender trees whereon grow the _amarene_, bitter wild cherries of our country, and it needs but the deftness of a light-footed mountain girl quickly to climb them, while the strength of some other tall Apennine maiden can boldly reach down branches with long arm and lithe figure, cruelly to strip them of the glistening, ruddy fruit.

Margaret and Virginia, Paula and Bianca are there at work, and they are favourite friends of the bride, and will hold a good place in the morrow’s ceremonies. ‘Yes, yes, he is rich, I tell you; she will be married in no dress of homespun! The stuff is to be of real wool! You will see!’ says one. ‘What luck, and she the poorest of us all,’ sighs another damsel for reply, and breaks the full-laden bough of a low little tree as she speaks. ‘But I grudge her no good fortune. Our turn will come, girls, and meanwhile who can put the garlic so justly into the pot, who can knead the maize so smoothly or the dough for household bread, who can mend a man’s suit or iron his shirt better than Caterina of the Walnut Cottage?’ The bride’s old home is thus named in the parish because of the fine nut trees that grow beside and around it. ‘See the fine cherry bough,’ pursues this last speaker; ‘she shall have it for gift in sign of prosperity.’ The luscious, bright fruit hangs in richest clusters from this slender stem; such tender stalks seem scarce able to uphold the heavy knots. Beside the crimson berries grow tufts of pale leaves, the same leaves that a moment before have had the soft blue sky behind their young green for background and the summer sunlight shining through them. ‘Truly it is pretty!’ say the girls in chorus, and then they all agree that Caterina has deserved so fortunate a fate as that which will be hers to-morrow ere noon, and they slake their thirst with the tart cherry-juice, the while they pile baskets with the spoil, and weary their lungs with talk and laughter, if not their limbs with toil.

So do evening shadows begin to creep over the soft slopes of those tender-carven hills, begin to lie darkly in their ravines; and when the ebbing sunlight is near to leaving the frail outlines alone upon the sky, then the bells of St. John’s strike their gladsome chime, for to-morrow is the day of the patron saint. It is the girls’ token that the day is done, and each lifts a basket to the head of a comrade ere, with firm step—the step that comes easy to women of such strong and graceful figure—they descend the mountain path towards home and a gossip with the bride. And all the while the bells are ringing so noisily, so wildly hurrying in merriest triplets, so loudly pealing with deep bass voice now and then, that even Virginia’s clear tones, and the chatter of other three good lungs besides, can scarce make themselves heard above the din.

If yesterday was a happy day when things were bright and hearts were glad, to-day is better a thousand times, with sun that is hotter and land that lies fairer before the eyes: so thinks the bride, and so think those four girls who are the bride’s friends. Many a little half-hour went by last night while these five told old tales and fancied new wonders, as they sat on the old wall beneath the vine, in the growing summer darkness. The wedding gown was handled and criticised, so were the wedding garments and the bride’s little dowry of household linen, that she and her mother and her mother’s sister had been spinning and weaving on the rough handloom these many months past. So was that fine young man criticised—the betrothed—who had been able to furnish his house so suitably, and had given the bridal gold of such massive weight and fine workmanship!

But past discussions, past surmises are all over now: the wedding morning is here. Upon the hedgerows that hem the path all the way from this river-side hamlet to the church, there has glossy homespun linen been hung in long lengths for adornment, with red and yellow church properties between, that have belonged to the vestry for processions these twenty years. This is all for St. John’s Day, and so are the flower-heads of gorse and poppy that strew the ground, the fresh-plucked posies in the little shrine on the bridge. But Caterina gets the benefit of it all notwithstanding.

The marriage is to be at eleven. It will not be in the church, but when the ring has wedded bride and bridegroom, and the sacred words that bind them have been spoken by the priest in the priest’s own house, then Caterina and her husband will come before the great altar for benediction, and that is the only part of a wedding which the congregation may see in Italy. The villagers are nevertheless assembled on the _piazza_ just in front of the church, that they may see the bridal pass, because the priest’s house is just behind the church, and even Caterina, in all her glory, must pass under the arch of the belfry, and up between the two trimmed box-hedges to-day, just as she has passed up many a time before with the tithes in kind or the priest’s best linen from the wash.

All the village children cry aloud, for the bride is in sight. ‘See! the dress is really of woollen stuff,’ whisper the women, and the men make comment on her comely person, for truly Caterina is a pretty girl. Her white stockings and clean bright shoes are neat (small are the dainty feet they clothe, say the village swains); her dress is costly for a peasant bride, the gold about her neck—gold that is no vanity here, because it is the bride’s invariable marriage portion—the gold in her ears and hair is of good quality, the muslin veil is fresh and fine, that drapes head and figure, after her country’s costume; but best of all is Caterina’s proud and merry face, best are her deep, brown eyes, her strong, lithe frame, and the healthy blood that flows beneath her olive skin. Caterina is a handsome girl, but, more precious in the sight of her bridegroom, she is a sound woman, fit to be a peasant’s wife.

Laughing—half with shyness, half with pleasure—the bride and the bride’s mother pass first through the little archway: the wedding party follows after. In the kitchen of the priest’s house—which is the entrance to his oratory and to all the rest of his abode—more admiration, more talk and wonderment from the old housekeeper, delay the couple awhile on their road. Caterina must be examined from top to toe while the men stand impatient at such female frivolity, and the guests are gathered, waiting, beneath the wide-spreading vine-trellis of the priest’s garden, or beside the trickling fountain in its midst. Everybody is glad when the ring has been put on—(Caterina has already twenty-three gold rings on different fingers, all part of her only dowry)—everybody sighs a little sigh of relief when the last Latin words have been spoken, of that ceremony which is about the same in all lands and in all religions. Nothing of importance occurs—only once a candle on the altar goes out unaccountably, and Caterina is frightened at the evil omen—a woman and an Italian peasant, she must needs be superstitious! But all the same, it serves for conversation at the wedding feast. The priest has had his comfit-box with the gold coins hidden within it; the old housekeeper has not been forgotten, since this bridegroom is not of the poorest; the wedding party descend into the church.

And, when the exhortations are said and the benediction has been given, Caterina is quite a married woman. The neighbours may have their fill of comment and admiration now, and the children their portion of comfits which Caterina scatters among them. Good words and bad words—ejaculations and laughter—fly to and fro, and resound under the trees of the cherry orchard, where they eat the marriage feast. Everybody is contented. Even the girls who have no husbands, and the fathers who have more mouths to feed than money withal to feed them, are glad to-day; for the sun shines and the harvests are all yet to come, and the winter is a long way off, and the bells ring merrily, for it is the Feast of St. John. And when they have done ringing for morning ceremonies and the marriage, they begin again for afternoon ceremonies and the procession. There, Caterina walks with her husband, and sees Bianca in her own old place, carrying the great cross in front. The pop-guns are fired, the procession has been round the meadows by the well, and is near home again. And the bells’ ringing dies away slowly, as banners and crosses are lowered beneath the porch. The lads and lasses have their simple dance on the green by the river, and the day of St. John sinks away into night.

Cherry trees still bloom and bear fruit in that North Apennine valley. Walking in and out amid the little frail trees, brushing the quaker’s grass and ragged robin, and treading down the buttercups and daisies, you might look up to see the ripe and ruddy fruit overhead, and listening, hear just such joyous voices as I have written of—voices of laughing maidens stripping the orchards’ cherry-trees. But Caterina would not be there, nor Virginia nor Bianca, nor any of the girls that I know, even though upon the stillness of the waning day there might come to you a sound of bells—joyful pealing bells—such as those that ring in the Feast of St. John.

The Parish Priest.

It is the day of the Corpus Domini. As though to herald in the sun, bells began to ring this morning from every church throughout the valley. For this is a great feast. It does not belong more to San Matteo than to San Luca, nor can even _la Madonna_ claim it for a special honour: it is the property of every village, of every saint, and of every parish. That little church niched in among the chestnuts has, therefore, just as good a right to sound her peal in the grey hours of the morning as has any other _campanile_ throughout this valley of the Northern Apennines. We are among the mountains of the Polcevera—in one of the numerous indentures of the land, scarcely large enough to deserve a more important name, which serve to vary and make more beautiful this already richly gifted portion of the country.

Twenty miles away from us is the Mediterranean, and on the other side of us lie the plains of Lombardy, white with the sun’s heat as it rests on the rice plantations. But here there is not even a remembrance either of plains or of sea. We are in the depth of the country, where the view has no monotony as of the flat, or even as of the sea, when it is unruffled by wind, and dazzling beneath the sun’s power of this summer time. The horizon’s margin is broken by the outline—now gently undulating, now jagged—of hills against a limpid sky; the foreground is varied—hill and dale, rugged wildness and careful cultivation, subtly balancing each other as separate effects in the landscape’s picture.

The scenery is characteristic of the Northern Apennines: a river gently flowing, and many a little quiet spring, thickly-growing chestnut woods—where the trees are not always tall and spreading, but somehow always shady—mossy banks that are green for Italy, and the land divided into plots and terraces, where each man grows his own corn and beans and potato-crops, gathers his own maize, and trains his own vines. The strawberries are nearly over—little rough, red fruit, that grows wild and luscious among the grass and the turf in the spring-time: but the glory of the fruit season is all to come. Large yellow plums and little blue plums, peaches and apricots, medlars, figs, grapes, melons, blackberries that are as large as mulberries, all these will follow one another in time, and great handsome golden gourds, with every kind of vegetable: now it is the season of the cherries. There are tall trees whereon the fruit grows small and jet black, and others whose berries are large, and sweet according to the usual shape and savour of their kind; but the type of the Apennines at this season is the _amarena_. The little trees are small and graceful, growing over the hill-side, often so low that the fruit can be plucked by the mere outstretching of a strong arm from the strong and graceful figure of an Apennine damsel. The _amarene_ are ripe for the Corpus Domini, and the bright red fruit, with the merriment of its ingathering, makes the brightest of all the bright colours in memory’s picture of these festivals of summer’s prime.

The long grass is not all yet mown, and among it the ragged robin, the buttercup, scabius, and ox-eyed daisy have woven a medley of merry colour; while, upon the river’s banks, meadow-sweet blooms, and higher up among the budding heather a golden field of yellow gorse. This forms the floral feature of the festivities. Yesternight, in the long June evening, after work was done, girls and boys wandered up the hill-sides, and, in their aprons, the maidens stored the golden bloomlike chaff. Then, when the bells awoke this morning at daybreak, the women rose to spread, along the highway before their dwellings, yards and yards of newly-bleached linen, spun with their own hands, and woven on the homely looms—a snow-white carpet on which to strew the gay blossoms. Upon the hedges, and hanging from the windows of the little cottages, bright crimson draperies and curious heirlooms are not wanting to honour the way where the sacred procession is to pass. Merrily the bells jangle—trills and triplets up and down—with the deep-toned first bell tumbling in now and then as bass, to add the necessary touch of solemnity. The ringers have been at work for hours. The first mass has been sung, and the second will soon be coming on, but the procession will not be till after vespers. The _parroco_ (or parish priest) stands on the piazza in black gown and biretta. He has said his say in church, and has no further work till afternoon: he is a peasant again, among his peasant flock, as he is on week-days, with only the faint halo of skirts and head-gear to keep him from his pipe and the broadest of his jests.

‘His reverence will walk himself in procession this afternoon?’ asks a lean peasant.

‘Surely, yes,’ replies the priest. ‘I would not if I could help myself, but the parish is not content unless I go through the farce myself for them. The Virgin grant a breeze, or we shall die of heat under the panoply, with the chin buried in devotion!’

‘Truly!’ laughs another peasant, a pipe in his mouth. ‘It’s poor work being a priest. And a fine sermon it was you preached, though! I wasn’t in church myself, not longer than for my duty at the right minute, but my wife told me! A woman’s not to steal excepting her husband’s drunk, and then it’s her duty to take the gains from his pocket for the household’s benefit. Sound religion! But the women aren’t always to be trusted!’

‘No, no; we preach these things, but you do as best you can. There’s no telling how things’ll turn out. Now, there’s myself even. Preach toleration in church, but, _Corpo di Bacco_, wouldn’t I have boxed Luigina’s ears, as soon as I was out, if she’d have let me!’ Luigina is the priest’s cousin—a lady of portly frame and of years that waver ’twixt forty-five and fifty. She lives in two brick-floored rooms on the top storey of the parsonage, lives and dresses like a peasant woman, and would fain have more to do with the priest’s household than his old servant permits.

‘Signora Luigina’s no fool,’ laughs the first man; ‘and she’s been a companion to you, your reverence.’

‘Yes—by the Virgin—thirteen years, more is the pity! I’d bury her for nothing, poor soul, and shed a good tear afterwards; but she spoilt those mushrooms all the same, that she cooked me to-day as a favour! Let the oil get outside them, would you believe!’

‘San Pietro—that was enough to drive a saint to swear, much sooner a priest; and they say she leads you a life as bad as Caterina does. But what can a man expect when he keeps women in his house that are not tied by the hand of the law?’

‘What can I do?’ objects the priest, laughing, and nothing depressed! ‘One had to choose a profession. Caterina’s a good servant, and Luigina is as good as most women when she doesn’t force me to a clean shirt. There she is. You there! Have you picked me out those two clean girls to scatter the flowers before the priest’s face in the procession?’

‘I know none so good as myself in the village,’ answers the woman, laughing. ‘Though it’s odd I should scatter flowers before _your_ face—only you’re not the same man, and that’s of course, when once you’re under the banner of the Lord!’

‘What, and do you think He’d put up with an ugly old scarecrow like you! Go to. I’ll find out the girls for myself.’

‘_Santa Madonna!_ And you’re right,’ says the woman, looking round and laughing. ‘So much the better for me! I must see to my own _minestra_. _I’m_ not going to eat beans half-cooked, that Nicoletta has put to boil in cold water, so that the Lord’s own mercy wouldn’t soften them—nor cabbage either, that’s not had a scrap of the vice cut out of it! _Andiamo_, let me be quiet! _Vossignoria_ might be ashamed to be so light-minded at his age!’ A laugh greets the two from around, for the Vicar, forgetful of dignity, has thought fit to inflict summary punishment on the portly shoulders of Luigina, to whom the diminutive scarcely applies! But the joke is hurriedly thrust aside as the little bell sounds from within the church, which quickly brings the people, priest and peasants alike, to their knees.

The act of devotion is no long penance—it is over almost as soon as begun, and, from the building, the congregation now pours out upon the piazza, mixing with the set of earlier worshippers, and entering busily with them into the pleasures of the present, and the business of before and after as well.

The Corpus Domini is over. The Virgin’s statue has been carried in state—hideously painted effigy with her gorgeous and silver trappings—the priest has muttered his say beneath the panoply, walking in the slow pace of the procession, and swearing fitly afterwards at the cruel infliction; the girls and the young men have vied with one another for who should carry crosses, and banners, and candles; the children have shouted, the bells have jangled, and the pop-guns been fired. Now the gorse blossoms are trampled and withered, and the linen has been gathered up. Girls are weaving new linen at the loom, and women bleaching it on the river’s shingle. The Signor Prevosto is himself again and has ceased to lament the fearful consumption of beans and pumpkins—no lavish hospitality will be dealt out from the parsonage yet awhile!

Good-bye vain and yet so dearly-prized rejoicings! Good-bye, till next week! The priest works in his garden. His spare form needs no longer be hampered with black gown; his movements have their freedom in the most threadbare of frock-coats, and his eyes may be comfortably shaded by the useful brim of an old straw hat. And the priest’s housekeeper shreds peas on the porch step, and scolds neighbours who are remiss in the payment of tithes in kind, or who would presume too far on the generosity of the _Parroco’s_ garden. He is happy tilling his ground, watering the choicer of his vegetables, pruning his fruit trees, training his vines, and blowing upon them through bellows the sulphur which is to save them from the fell disease.

Now a girl comes to ask his advice on the acceptance of a suitor.

‘Marry him, and he has been fitly presented to you by a third party, my child. A damsel must let no man seek her himself,’ says the old man, as he hammers at the rotten wood of his pergola, or digs trenches about his maize.

A neighbouring contadino turns up next, to bargain for the sale of a calf. Here the Prevosto is all alert. His thoughts would be distracted by gardening. The affair must be concluded over a bottle of sour Monferrato.

‘Two _marenghi_—why, you take me for a fool! I will give you one, and pay you for ten francs with a portion of the hay from the field of the marshes!’

‘_Per Bacco!_ But I also am no sucking child! The hay is all rotten. No—a _marengo_ and fifteen francs on this table, as the Madonna hears me swear it.’

The bargain is made, the old Parroco has none the worst of it, and the maid, or rather the mistress, Caterina, announces, ‘Here is the wife of squinting Giacomo, who bids you quickly to the cottage of Maddalena of the cherry orchard!’

‘I come—I come quickly; but why the woman should have owed me such a grudge as to die when the polenta is cooked and I faint from hunger! These peasants are uneducated!’ And he hurries to shrive the departing soul—none the less tender-hearted, none the less moved for his rough words of five minutes before; none the less ready, either, to advise the girl whom he meets on his downward path as to the superior usefulness of wool over cotton for a dress, be it for wedding or _prima communione_.

The men chatter to him of crops, the women of sick children, of inconsiderate husbands, of the expense of linen fabric, of the scarcity in eggs, and all the while he rapidly recites to himself the obligatory office, answering merrily to questions at every breathing space.

Then home to boiled beans and oil, to the perusing of a newspaper, or perhaps, even of a book and certainly to a sharp word-tussle with Luigina, his cousin of upstairs, or with Caterina, the rough and faithful companion of his long years of contented loneliness and poverty. Such is the parish priest.

The Priest’s Serving Maid.

The little footpath that, amid pear and cherry trees, and vine-trelissed ‘_pergola_,’ runs up alongside of the church, leads to the threshold of the _prevosto’s_ house. The establishment does not boast many rooms, and these are rough and poorly built, with great bare rafters, whitewashed walls and deep embrasured windows. The walls are ill-plastered, so that, when the weather has been hot and the rains heavy, spiders and scorpions can creep from out the cracks; the doors are cumbrous and unsightly, with great chinks at the hinges, but the rooms are large and lofty as far as may be, and in summer the _curato_ is cosy enough.

It is the kitchen that you must enter first, and through it alone can you pass into the rest of the house. Caterina, the maid-of-all-work, stands before the dresser, rolling out the paste for _minestra_. Beans and potatoes, sliced gourd and mushrooms, tomatoes, sweet herbs, and the unfailing garlic are already cooking, so that the kitchen is filled with a fragrant odour. Caterina rolls out the paste, throwing it gracefully over the rolling-pin, wielding and handling it artfully. She is a gaunt, threadbare-looking woman, of some five-and-thirty years—but the _prevosto_ is gaunt too, and sallow; the two match well together.

‘The neighbour, Maddalena, has come to eat two _lasagne_ with us,’ says the priest, now entering timidly—for Caterina is a bit of a tyrant. She does not answer now, and he makes a sign to the woman to seat herself upon the stone step at the threshold. There are platters and dishes ranged upon the shelf, and the peasant woman eyes them with interest. There is bread baking, too, in the oven, and Maddalena fancies perhaps that the poor little place wears even an air of opulence.

She sits on the doorstep chattering away fluently in a shrill soprano, that her voice may be heard above the noise of rushing water from without—for there is a fountain beneath the vine _pergola_ in the courtyard—a rough little fountain, into which water pours incessantly from a spring above, and from which troughs are laid sometimes to water the flowers and vegetables in the _prevosto’s_ little garden. This fountain is well known to the people of the village; there is a back-way to it which does not pass before the priest’s door, and many a time have I seen the villagers, when other springs have run low, filling their pitchers at this spout.

The peasant woman holds the talk herself, for Caterina makes no answer. She is in a bad humour. Both the women are plain and ill-favoured specimens of their class, only that Caterina is a little less unkempt and disorderly than her neighbour. Her hair is smooth though scant, and her faded print dress is neat; but Maddalena has many different patterns and patches upon her skirt—the bright yellow kerchief around her shoulders is soiled, and the fine and cunning plaits of her grey hair are not as well ordered as the women’s are wont to be on mass days.

Presently Caterina bustles into the darkened parlour, where, sits the _prevosto_ lazily smoking his pipe and reading the country newspaper. He has put aside even the least of his clerical garments now, and lounges at ease in an old coat and slippers, his tonsured head covered by a battered straw hat.

‘Listen to me, _Prevosto_,’ breaks forth the faithful woman, and she is not careful to modulate her voice even to a semblance of secrecy; ‘you don’t bring another mouth for me to feed here when it is baking-day again! _Per Bacco!_ no, indeed! The mean, grasping creature! She has as much food in her own house as we have in ours any day, and she must come here, forsooth, to delay me in my work, and to pry into my affairs, that she may report them in the village! It’s all her laziness. Who’s to get the _merenda_ for her husband and her children, I wonder, if she’s to find her’s ready for her here, whenever she chooses to ask for it! I’m sick of her slanderous tongue. But it shan’t happen again, do you hear? And I have the holy wafers to bake to-day, besides. For shame of you! Come now to your dinner in the kitchen. I’m not going to bring it in here. You’d best look sharp, for I know there’s that dying woman up at San Fedele, you ought to go after. I don’t know what you took off your canonicals for!’ And Caterina, the better for this free expression, hastens to dish up the _minestra_.

‘Poor old priest! What a shrew has he got in his house!’ says some pitying reader. Yet he would not part with her for worlds! She is his solace and his right hand, and loves him, besides, none the less because of her sharp and uncurbed speech.

Words in Caterina’s mouth are only the natural vent of her quick and eager nature, when the words are spoken to the old priest. For the most part, they are forgotten as soon as uttered, both by master and servant. The lonely man cannot afford to quarrel with mere froth of words in the woman who devotes her life to his comfort. Who would care for him as cares this poor hard-working servant? Who else would lay aside her ease, and forget her people, that she might carry his interests the steadier at heart, the better fight his battles and guard his homestead, and order his goods to advantage?

Yet Caterina is no miracle of a servant. In many a lone and cheerless home of Italian priest can I call to mind such a woman as this—such a fond and faithful drudge, with harsh ways and soft heart! And where the priest is old, having plodded out his life in some little secluded parish, amid a people more uneducated than himself—there the servant is old also, and the one has almost drifted into a shape and mould of the other’s nature and mind. For, as far as home-companionship goes, are these not all-in-all to each other? There is no wife for a comrade, there are no children to keep the old life burning to the end, in these homes of the Roman priesthood. And yet, who shall pretend that they are always sad? If you have been to see them now with me, surely, for all their quarrels, for all her loud voice and his cunningly judged and well-feigned meekness, you will scarcely say this is an unhappy house!

So the _lasagne_ are cooked and eaten with a good relish, and Maddalena has her portion upon the door-step, spite of Caterina’s vehement remonstrances beforehand. Neither is a little plateful denied to the pretty _contadinella_ who comes presently to the door with a summons for the _prevosto_. ‘Did I not tell you that you had best hasten up the hill without further delay?’ says Caterina, sending forth her parting shaft. And the priest sallies out on his mission while the girl gets detained awhile for a gossip. For this one is a favourite; she is young and merry, and comes not too often nor a begging. Caterina loves her well enough.

Il Signor Cappellano.

The Signor Prevosto is parish priest, and yet he is little more than a peasant. The _Signor Cappellano_ is under-priest, and he is just nothing more than a peasant. ‘_Abbiate pazienza_,’ his own parishioners would say if they were excusing his deficiencies to you! What would you have? San Matteo is not a large parish; though its hamlets lie far from one another, and it takes a long while on a weary way to bear the Sacrament to the sick, or even to offer homely advice to marriageable girl or ill-used wife, still the parish does not require three priests. And since they are kept merely to say a mass each on Sundays and holy days, why, they must manage with what pay they can get, for the best of the tithes must go to the rectory.

So the _Cappellano_ has little to do and little to earn for doing it. The Church gives him a cottage and a slip of barren land that lies mostly alongside of the stream’s bed; the cottage is weathertight and sufficient for himself and his old servant, and, with the aid of heaven’s mighty sun and man’s patient care, the land brings forth produce enough to keep two souls and two bodies—what more could an under-priest expect? Michaelmas daisies stand with goodly sunflowers in a row before his porch, brilliant _pomi d’oro_ ripen their fruit against the southern wall, while the gourds trail large leaves and golden flowers along the ground, among wheat and beans and potatoes. Neither he nor old Ninetta taste meat more than once a week, but what of that? The _minestra_ is as wholesome without, and of _polenta_ one never wearies, only the _Signor Cappellano_ himself must till the ground and sow and reap and manure again, or even the pumpkins would not grow large nor the maize fill its cones, so how can you expect him to be other than a peasant? ‘_Abbiate pazienza di lui!_’

‘_Frà Giuseppe_’ has the care of the parish school. Perhaps he gets paid a trifle more for it—a trifle that goes towards the meat on _festa_ days; be that as it may, if you come down the hill from the ‘Square Village’ towards the church, early upon any morning but a Sunday or a Thursday, you may hear certain monotonous sounds that leave no doubt as to the employment pursued beneath the thatched roof of the _Cappellano’s_ outhouse. The sound is the sound of lessons repeated, of moral tales read aloud, often of the switching of boys’ calves, oftener of the poor pedagogue’s swearing. He knows little enough himself, but the boys know less, and will never know more, because both teacher and pupil are sure that knowledge is quite useless, having got along, and seen others get along, very well without it thus far.

The school hours last till ten o’clock only—if he does not receive much, at least _Frà Giuseppe_ gives but little—the best of the day is all in front, and the _Cappellano_ makes good use of it. Besides digging trenches amidst maize and rice, training the vine, pruning the fig and the cherry tree, besides kicking the shins of refractory urchins, and having altogether a good deal to do with the boys, he has something to do with the girls too—he is the writer of village love-letters. The post is one of some importance: _Frà Giuseppe_ turns another honest penny by it.

But this is scarcely a matter we speak of. The love-letters—and even other letters, would-be business letters, which _Frà Giuseppe_ writes for the parish—cannot always be free from little white lies and intrigues of an innocent nature if they are to satisfy their purchasers, and in this, as in other trades, one must go heart and soul into one’s affair, and always work for the most lucrative market. So it is not as _Cappellano_ that _Frà Giuseppe_ writes his customers’ letters, but only as village _Scrivano_, and that is quite a different thing, and not a thing to be mentioned in the same breath with his priestly title. One is not forced to be consistent, and though, for the half-hour when he is in canonicals, the under-priest thinks fit—as under-priests do everywhere—to differ from his superior in matters of religious theory, though as in this case, he belongs to the Ultramontane party when he wears robe and biretta, and would fain make a stir in the parish about the _Prevosto’s_ laxity and so forth—in fact, though the _Signor Cappellano_ be a bit of a bigot in intention, both time and policy forbid him any indulgence of his opinion in practice.

‘Life is short and argument is long,’ says he. Were he possessed of ever so much more influence than he has in the parish he would still be a poor man, whose gourds and vines must always be a great deal more important to him than the souls of human creatures.

So, in other things beside the writing of letters, does the _Cappellano_ wear two faces, and having salved conscience by the preaching of fiery doctrines within the church’s walls of a Sunday and feast-day at Second Mass—he has the worldly wisdom to be nothing more outside the pulpit than that which he really is: a peasant amongst peasant neighbours. Who can afford to be a priest all day long for so poor a salary? One must needs have a little fun to one’s victuals when poverty forbids better sauce, or even a priest’s digestion would suffer, and the _Signor Cappellano_ knows well enough fun is not to be got by a strict face outside the church doors.

It is Sunday morning, and _Frà Giuseppe_ has just sung mass and delivered a scathing discourse in broad Genoese dialect to the somewhat empty benches of a nine o’clock congregation. He comes out of the sacristy now, having doffed his _soutane_, to keep only the knee-breeches and stockings with steel-buckled shoes for a finish, the long black coat and three-cornered hat of etiquette. He crosses the _piazza_, which is crowded with peasants, male and female, not all of whom have been in church, except for a moment at the Elevation. A group of lads and maidens turn towards him; none of them are very respectful in manner, but _Frà Giuseppe_ takes no offence. Though his person were held in ever such veneration—even as the _Prevosto’s_ own—though his voice be listened to with some amount of awe, as it is at the confessional, though, on holy ground, his counsels and upbraidings be sometimes regarded, none knows better than the _Cappellano_ himself what a mere name is any priest’s power outside of his office.

A plump, hardy-looking girl of some twenty-five years accosts him now with rough raillery. She has made a bet with some of the village swains on a matter regarding the under-priest, and at his answer the group around burst into loudest laughter. But even this is not enough to discomfit _Frà Giuseppe_; he has seen the joke and retaliates smartly, neither fear nor prudery hindering.

Another damsel appeals to him for succour against the too forward advances of a stalwart old farmer, and something of a romp ensues. Broad jests and plain words are spoken, but though a spade be called a spade with little ado, _Frà Giuseppe_ offers no reproof. His own education has not aimed at making him peculiarly sensitive to outward grossness of speech, and that is generally the worst feature about this frank and merry people. Who that is Italian, by birth and by nature, could have grown to be thus susceptible? A country priest, at all events, is not, and, as a rule, he gets on best by descending—if such a word be the fit one—to the work and the interests of the peasants about him, happy enough in his own way, and careless of any great show of respect.

Now he joins another party, and this time the group is one of old and seasoned men, whose interests are wrapped up in the crops and the coming fair. Hear him, as with avidity he discusses the country’s prospects, or reconnoitres cautiously, that he may know the better how to buy and to sell with advantage on Monday next!

Here is no moonstruck priest, but a man of the world—poor, parsimonious, and prudent. Poor, but not always stingy, not always grasping, because he, too—though pinched and careworn far more than the greater number of his people, who have their own lands and crops—he too has the proverbial _buon cuore_ of the Italians.

‘Eh, Teresa,’ he calls now to an old woman whom, as he turns his steps back to the little cottage, he meets coming down the path, a basket of eggs and vegetables on her head. ‘Hast brought my portion at last? And thou hast made me wait for it!’ ‘It is too true, _Signor Cappellano_,’ replies the poor soul. ‘Your excellence must excuse. It has been a bad time, and I have not had the things to bring, though, the Virgin knows, the will to bring them!’ ‘Well, well, it signifies not. Come now to the kitchen, and you shall eat a good mouthful of _minestra_ with Ninetta and myself.’

The little footpath leads down the meadow to the house with the thatched roof, where Michaelmas daisies grow to the front. There are no glass windows, there is only one chimney, the hearth is in the middle of the floor: it is just like a peasant’s hut. Ninetta has the _minestra_ ready; its savoury perfume pervades the kitchen, and she stands with the great pot tipped up to pour it out, blowing away the steam from her face meanwhile. She is a merry-eyed, wrinkled old lady of considerable years, and she is not conspicuous for a superabundance of mother-wit; in this she differs from Caterina, who is the Prevosto’s housekeeper. The poor peasant wife eats the good soup silently, while Ninetta chatters and the _Cappellano_ scolds.

‘Well, well, I shall get a better mess than this to-morrow, _Ninetta mia_,’ says he; ‘truly no man could keep his heart alive many days on nonsense of this sort. But with the morning’s sun I go to the threshing at neighbour _Pasquale’s_, and thank Heaven there will be a _minestra_ there that is fit to be called one, when it will be his daughter _Marrina_ who has made it!’

‘Oh, yes, you—you are always for praising what the pretty girls can do! An old woman like me can never please you. I’m ashamed of you, priest as you are!’

_Frà Giuseppe_ laughs contentedly. Such talk is his pleasure, spite of Ultramontane convictions. So is it also his pleasure to go to the common threshing-floor next day, where he handles his flail with the best of them, and bandies compliments with the pretty hostess as well, to quarrel afterwards—a pipe in his mouth—over bowls and _moro_ with village swains.

But none the less tenderly does he doctor the hurts of the very men with whom he has quarrelled—for the _Signor Cappellano_ is village physician too—none the less patiently would he sit beside a sick bed that night, for the sun goes down on nobody’s wrath—the sun that sinks behind the stately cone of Monte Baneo’s hill, to leave the rich little valley lying quiet beneath a clear summer night. And walnut trees stand still upon the darkened sky, to shadow the cottage over, where _Frà Giuseppe_ sleeps the placid sleep of the field-labourer.

Sweeping the Church.

Bells ring in the great Festa of San Giovanni Battista, and chosen girls of the village are busy with their preparations within the church, preparations both for the _funzione_ and for the procession. San Giovanni Battista is the patron saint, and hence it is that his day is held in higher honour here than even in the other villages around.

It is evening, and the vigil of the feast. All the afternoon, wearisome chimes have been sounding overhead, rippling along in a joyous, careless fashion, with here and there a great echoing stroke to give them emphasis. Upon the church piazza, or even within the building itself, the noise is almost maddening, but from woods and valleys around, or, better still, from the far side of the torrent, the bell’s voices have a sweet and plaintive ring that might almost lull to rest in these summer days.

Within the church four or five girls are at work. Some sweep the tesselated, marble floor of the nave, some dust the queer gaudy figures of saints and Virgins or the vessels of the sanctuary. Others, again, are busy hanging heavy crimson damask from windows and cornice, and in this work a man must needs be found to help with ha’mmer and steps. Two—and these are the greater and more privileged spirits—stand upon the daïs of the high altar to adorn it with flaring artificial flowers; fresh blossoms are rarely seen in a Romish church. The maidens ply their tasks merrily, not overanxious that the work be quickly ended, for it is pleasanter than toil in the fields or at home in cottages, and they chatter noisily the while. There is none of the reverential awe in their behaviour for which Roman Catholics are usually credited.

Presently the _Signor Cappellano_ comes in. He is supposed to be superintending the business, but there is field labour to attend to, the potato harvest is at hand, which the _Cappellano_ can ill afford to leave in other care than his own.

‘_Orsù_,’ begins the little man sharply. ‘Haste with your business, girls, for I have much to do and little time to waste.’

‘And it is perhaps necessary that your honour remain here to spy upon us,’ retorts the foremost of the maidens, pertly? ‘We are fairly capable of setting in order the church, and you may return to the fields.’

The little priest laughs. He knows that he is not much beloved among the neighbours, but the speaker is a pretty girl among her set, and the _Cappellano_ would fain be a favourite. He walks around, making a few haphazard remarks, that are received with about as much scorn as the feeble suggestions of an English curate who comes in among the squire’s daughters in the midst of decorations. He is soon out again in the hot daylight.

‘The good-for-nothing meddler!’ ejaculates she fervently who has spoken before. ‘It seems impossible he should not have understood by this time that I will have none of his impertinence!’ and she laughs a loud laugh, in which the others join also, furtively glancing at one another and then giggling afresh.

‘Say on, Bianca, and tell us a little news,’ they plead. And the request is readily complied with, for Bianca is the bold and adventurous spirit of the village, and has always some tale on hand which she loves to pass on amongst the quieter of her companions. The damsel is a proud and powerful woman; she has taken her stand long since in their midst, and, before her face at all events, the rest of the flock is tacitly content to submit to her sway.

She stands now upon the altar steps as she begins her story—a fine and goodly figure. Through the soft texture of her blue homespun, likely enough her only garment, one can clearly see the curves of her large and shapely form. Her bare feet rest freely upon the cool marble; one of her bare arms, from whence sleeves are tucked away, is stretched on high to fix a garland around the reredos, the other—curved and rounded beautifully—selects flowers from the basket at her side. Firm and graceful are the poses into which her figure is thrown as she moves and stands and stoops in the various requirements of her task. Bianca is no wondrous beauty; she has the heavy features and the sallow complexion of her race—she is but a fair sample of our Apennine _contadina_, only a woman with dark and fervid eyes, with masses of coarse and glossy hair; yet she has a fairness of form and a perfection of graceful strength, that we may not look to find elsewhere, as we find it at every turn amongst the North Italian peasants.

‘Well, girls,’ says she, and her voice sounds clear above the noise of the bells, ‘you must know that I’ve had an adventure—a fine and a merry one, too, and, what’s more, it’s the son of the _sindaco_ that I have to thank for it.’

‘Oh!’ comes an ejaculation in many tones from all the maidens.

‘It was down at the fair of Presoli. I went to sell and to buy for the mother, and as I was bargaining over a handkerchief—and I must have been red with excitement, too—he comes up behind me, and I hear him laughing with right good-will at my tussle with the old _pedona_. “Ha, ha! my pretty girl,” says he, “and I will give you the handkerchief.” “A thousand thanks, Signor Beppo,” I answer, and then we discourse a little, and when I have sold the little white heifer and bought the sieves and the rolling-pin for the mother, “It is nearly evening,” says he, “and at dusk the dance is to begin. Thou wilt surely come and step one measure with me.” I stay for the dance, I give no thought to the scolding which the mother will, perhaps, give me—for she expected me home for the supper, you must know—but I just enjoy myself to the full. Then the Signor Beppo gives me to eat and to drink, good wine of Monferrato, and he conducts me home in the later evening—it must have been upon ten o’clock.’

‘Oh, what fun!’ exclaim all the girls. ‘But didst thou not fear the mother?’

‘_Che!_’ the girl ejaculates, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I invented a little white lie for her. I told her there had come a rich _signore_, and wanted to buy the heifer for a good price, but then, that he went away, having said he would come back for her; that I waited, though tired and weary I was, until dusk of evening, and when he never came, that I sold to another man. Oh, the mother praised me for a thrifty girl! You think I am so stupid that I can’t even find a lie when I want it!’

The girls laugh. ‘Oh, no,’ says one, ‘and the white lies which one needs not to tell in confession are so fair and convenient.’

‘But say on, Bianca,’ calls out another. ‘The handkerchief that he gave thee—thou hast it?’

‘Surely. It is a ravishing handkerchief. He would have given me a brooch of gold, but that I would not.’

‘Oh, pity!’ says a sympathetic maid.

‘Pity!’ retorts Bianca. ‘Thou little fool! And what excuse should I have given for the trinket? The kerchief the mother knew well I meant to buy for myself, but gold gives no man to a girl but he who will marry her, and where was then my suitor to show? No, Bianca has got no gourd’s head on her shoulders! She knows her business! Also did he get his box on the ear before I had done with him, the fine young man,’ laughs she!

‘How was that? tell us,’ come the voices in chorus. But Bianca has said as much as she means to say, and no entreaties can extract more news from her.

‘I’ve told you the story for fun,’ says she, ‘and as to how I played my cards and why I spoke my mind as I did, that’s no concern of yours. And what’s more, girls, when your day comes, I don’t doubt you’ll know how to manage your game just as well as I did without any advice of mine,’ puts in this wary daughter of Eve. ‘All I say is, have your fun, and mind you don’t pay the bill.’

And Bianca is right, for again she is but a fair specimen of her class. The girls of North Italy are by no means so weak and impressionable as their free and fiery natures have led it to be surmised. Fun and frolic they love well enough, it is true; neither do they fear to run a risk of misunderstanding, sometimes, for the sake of a little glory and a brave adventure. But the girl who has not been dexterous with her weapons and bold in her dignity is for ever scorned amongst her neighbours and her comrades.

Therefore it is that our girls can freely go their way.

The Village Sempstress.

When the road leaves the church to steer for the valley’s narrower end and to follow the river’s course, it leads, before half a mile is gone, into the midst of a little hamlet that is one of San Matteo’s prettiest parasites. And there stands a cottage that has always been a marked feature in the neighbourhood. It is the house of Marrina, the village sempstress.

When the day’s heat has abated, and the shadows begin to deepen, and the breezes to blow more freshly, let us, with the villagers, gather round one of the village’s greatest characters.

She is an old maid. An old maid with plenty of ditties, like most of her kind, ditties about the youthful days when Paolo proposed, and nothing but prudence induced her to send poor Giovanni about his business—he who was such a handsome young fellow, too, and had such a flourishing _pasta_ business! But in spite of them all, Marrina is still single, though she is past fifty, and is of so portly a figure as to excuse any man for thinking twice about the necessary allowance of _polenta_ and beans. If you ask her, she will praise the Virgin to your face, who has kept her a virgin in peace and contentment until this age, and will assure you that, though Giovanni and Paolo were dying of love, nothing should persuade her to change her determination. Has she not nephews and nieces of all sizes, sexes, natures, and ages to cheer her loneliness? Does she not nourish towards all the men whose coats she fashions, and whose breeches she mends, a love far greater and more philanthropic than any she could have borne to one poor single husband?

It must surely be under no protest that Marrina is happy. Watch her broad, beaming face as she turns it round on the bystanders; listen to her good-humoured jests! She is no soured woman, though she has been lame from childhood, and has probably never been wooed as she pretends. She is proud of her position—the position which gowns and petticoats, corduroys and jackets, have won for her. With heavy figure, scantily clad in red and purple _bordato_—the homespun linen of the district—a bright yellow kerchief folded across her ample bosom, and her few grey locks neatly braided and packed into a lump behind her head, she sits on the stone bench beneath her cottage porch, two stockingless feet propped on an opposite stool, while she clips rashly with great scissors, sewing, settling, and jabbering jocosely the while.

A knot of peasants has gathered round; Marrina’s porch is almost as common a meeting-ground as the church piazza on _festas_ or the well at sunset. If there is any news rife anywhere, it is to be heard from the sempstress sooner than from anyone else; if there is any advice wanted, she is the one whose advice is asked at least, if rarely taken. A more sympathetic person could not be with whom to gossip over all matters of personal interest, with whom to weigh the pros and cons in all affairs of female indecision, and perhaps the taking of advice rarely includes much that is more definite. Besides the family circle—that children of brothers and of sisters, boys and girls of all ages, have swelled to goodly proportions around her—many inhabitants, not only of this hamlet, but of others in the parish, have met together to-night. Some have brought their own supper from home to eat, standing or lounging on steps and wall, others content themselves only with taking their evening rest. Amongst the men, many do not even talk; Marrina and her crew do it for them.

‘I never knew a man like you, Gian-Battista, for wearing out the knees of your breeches! I’ve patched this pair for you three or four times!’ (And this may clearly be discerned, for stuffs of more than one colour and texture have been used to help out the poor brown fustian.) ‘If you had a wife, and were not a blessed unencumbered mortal as I am, she would have told you long ago it wasn’t worth paying two _soldi_ every fortnight to get these things seen to! But I must earn my money, though I shan’t have the face to ask you for the coppers this time! Look there, here’s Bianca! She’s been to Ponte Decimo and some new stuff she’ll have brought to show me! I’m sick of these girls’ vanity! When I was a girl we took what our aunts and mothers gave us, without being so bold as to choose for ourselves. Eh, well, come on, child! What if I do talk? We’ve all been young once. Hand over the things.’

And the old face is as eager as any of the young ones over the merits of pure wool _versus_ cheaper mixed wares. ‘Give over thy silk apron, for the love of the Holy Mother, girl, and just buy a good thing while you’re about it! Who cares whether you’ve a silk apron or a decent stuff one? New-fangled notions from the towns! I’ve no patience with you all! As long as you’ve a good dress, a clean veil, and a little gold on, not the Lord himself but must needs be content with your looks!’

‘Don’t you think it’s too bright?’ objects the anxious and undecided purchaser. ‘They do say that in Genoa one wears nothing but dark colours.’

‘You go away with you!’ retorts the old woman angrily. ‘Why, when you can’t _get_ a colour now if you want it! When I was young that pedlar that you’ve heard me speak of—who used to look two ways out of his eyes, you know—why, I’ve known him bring round stuffs with colours in them that shamed the very Creator of the world! Now, hasn’t the Virgin that they carry round in procession got fine colours on? You don’t suppose the holy _Madonna_ doesn’t know what’s to be worn! Go to!’

And Marrina flings her big shears recklessly into some yards of calico, out of which there issues speedily the roughest pattern of a man’s shirt.

‘You’ve woven good linen this year, mother Teresa. I’ll buy twenty _palmi_ of it to make my Virginia some sheets against her marriage. The girl must have them, and, if her mother won’t give them her, I suppose her aunt must! And you,’ turning to the former girl, ‘not content with a stuff like that for a mere _festa_ dress, when my poor Tonietta has got nothing but a calico frock to have her First Communion! Why, I’d almost believe the wool was English, and they make no bad goods there, for they’re so rich they don’t need to.’

And Marrina takes the coveted stuff in her hands, crushing it to test its genuineness, and regarding it with the eye of a true connoisseur. Then, carefully refolding it, she gives back the packet without another word, and returns to her work.

The sky has become overcast. Banks and boulders of heavy cloud rest on the hills of Savignone down the valley. The mountains have caught the gloom, and look so dark that the ruined castle upon Monte Pilato’s side scarcely shows from off its background. A storm has been prophesied all day, because the air was so sultry; and now the walnuts overhead rustle ominously, and even the chestnuts far away seem to sway as though before a coming strength. Large drops of rain begin to fall.

‘Holy Madonna, and the tempest must come now when we want to keep the wheat upright!’

Marrina takes her huge person hastily away, limping over the stones, and calling with shrill voice to one niece to see to the linen, to the other to drive in the cows.

‘Ah, it’s become a strange parish since the days when I was a girl,’ she mutters. ‘Not a bell ringing yet for the Lord’s mercy against the storm, and it’s upon us, with the corn standing half a yard high, and the maize too!’

Most of the neighbours have disappeared to see after their property, but to the remaining Marrina addresses her complaint.

‘Why, when I was fifteen there wasn’t a stranger in the village—not even other country folk, let alone town folk! And now, because our valleys grow things better than theirs do, they must come and spoil our luck! It’s the strangers do it all. Not but that I admire the fine pink house over the river that Signor Mendicano built, as well as the blue front to the miller’s new cottage, but I say it’s the strangers spoil everything!’

‘You can’t have it both ways, dear heart,’ remarks a young man from beneath.

‘That’s all very well for you, Giannino. The strangers do you a great deal of good, I suppose, when they persuade you to play bowls all day and waste your time! When your land has gone to rack and ruin, and the disease has killed all your vines from want of a little care, they can set it all to-rights, I suppose, by just talking you over to go to America! It’s no fortune you’ll make there, but the fortune of pride and conceit, though you’ll have left your native land for it, and the girl who loves you well! But the young are all alike nowadays—no fear in them, and no fitting shame of things they know nothing about! And, to be sure, it’s not much there is in the girls of to-day that would keep a man to them! Yes, they’ll be all off to get their fortunes too, as if the poverty that did for their parents couldn’t do for them!

‘Ah, the bells _have_ begun to ring at last,’ she puts in as the clashing chime breaks in on her speech.

‘It’s all the foreigners from the towns!’ she goes on again glibly. ‘Now, I remember when I first used to go and mend canonicals in the sacristy for the _Prevosto_! It was as fearful he was of these _Signori_ as I am. They’ll ruin the village, Marrina, he said. And now doesn’t he go and eat their very _minestra_—I should even dare to say broth that’s made with meat on a Saturday, if it weren’t I’d be afraid for my soul at saying such a thing of the Lord’s priest! And no more delight does he take in walking under the canopy at procession than—_Dio!_ And there he is with the lady of the Signor Perrino! And a real woollen dress she has on, with this rain down on us! Why it’s a sin!’

Marrina quickly swings herself down the broken steps of her abode, and hastens towards the advancing couple.

‘Fetch a chair for her under the _pergola_; why it’s no education you young men have nowadays,’ she whispered angrily to Giannino.

The rain has come up the valley in a great mist; it has broken over the fields and the woods in a torrent that quickly saturates the ground; it drops again from the broad-leaved chestnuts. It is scarcely a wholesome rain, though the land was parched, for the hail descends and a violent storm might heavily damage the growing things of the country.

The _Prevosto_ seeks Marrina’s sympathy in this evil chance, but all her complaints have quickly given place to pleasure in the very presence of the townwoman with the real woollen dress on of a working-day. She is only a tradesman’s wife, but she has bits of news from the city and a figured silk jacket to display, and Marrina warms so that she is really mortified at the refusal of beans and _polenta_, which refreshment was offered at once with the gracious hospitality that comes as naturally to these courteous peasants as the passing benediction or chance greeting by the roadside.

But at last the storm is over, the air is fresh, the soil is fragrant after the rain. The _Prevosto_ goes on his way towards the sick person, whom he has to visit. The tradesman’s wife, after an exciting gossip, returns to the pink house in the meadows. Marrina lays aside her needle, for the night has darkened, and work cannot be done by firelight. ‘She’s a good soul, and it was a beautiful stuff,’ she murmurs sitting by the hearth. ‘But I say let everyone keep to what he’s been brought up in. And as for the strange folk and the going to America, I say, God forbid!’

The Village Damsel.

For a time holidays are over. Until the festival of the Madonna is due, after the dog days, there is no rigorous necessity for laziness. San Giovanni is past, and the most particular feasts of the early summer. Work is again the order of the day, with only the less important interval of Sunday to make a little breathing space—breathing space that will scarcely seem necessary from such pleasurable labour, perhaps, for all the peasants of the Northern Apennines think it indispensable even though they cannot be so fitly accused as the Southern Italians of that love of the _dolce far niente_ which has come to be considered, sometimes most unjustly, such a good description of their existence.

To-day is a _giorno feriale_, a working-day proper: let us judge for ourselves of the aptness of the proverbial reproof.

Standing on the church steps, as we stood on the day of the Corpus Domini, with the peasants—men and women—gathered in knots on the piazza, and the priest in their midst, you might see straight before you a road running right away amongst the meadows to the river’s bank, while to left of you another way winds itself above the water; and behind, a third, more rugged than ever, climbs the mountain’s side to a hamlet on the mountain’s brow. Take either of those three paths, and you cannot miss coming shortly into the midst of some steady labour.

Down towards the river’s shingle girls are driving cows to their evening drink, women are spreading yellow linen to bleach in the sunshine and moistening it with water that they dash up from the stream with their wooden scoops, or perhaps rolling it into bales before carrying it home. Below them the torrent’s bed widens out in the broader expanse of the valley, with plantations of willow trees guarding its way on the stones, and coronella shrubs bending over from the rocks; above them the water’s line dwindles away to a mere thread as it nears the mountains where it has had its birth. With the heavy homespun in coils on their heads and shoulders, or neatly folded away in baskets which they swing between them, the _contadine_ climb up to the meadow’s level, and so home to thatched cottages where walnuts grow in the fields, to lonelier cottages that stand in strong breezes on the ridge of the hill-side: home to fractious children, famished husbands, sons and brothers—the linen, the dinner, and the supper, have been their day’s work.

And on the broader way that leads to a larger neighbouring village, there have been also wayfarers. The little town that lies some three miles off down the river’s course holds a few things which cannot be procured in the village. It boasts a fair now and then, whence the head of a household brings back a calf or a heifer perhaps, and even on common days the town has a few shops that can produce articles of homely furniture, or even of bright peasant dress.

Nettina has been there this very afternoon. She is coming home as cooler shadows lengthen over the meadows and furrow the hills: she has a new wooden _conca_ on her head—the old timeworn copper one has been soldered so often, and yet always wears through and lets the water leak! In her hand she carries shoes which clash against a red earthen pot that is one of her purchases, and her large, shapely feet rise up and down off the sharp stones as fearlessly as though her way were across the cool turf of the meadow. Nettina is considered a handsome girl. She has keen dark eyes, a well-cut face, a brown skin, and black glossy hair that ripples gladly down beside her face and behind her ears, its plaits fitting round tightly into the head’s hollow above the nape of the neck; her teeth stand in beautifully even rows, large and white, and ready to be shown upon the slightest provocation to a smile. She walks well: though she must have been walking all day, she walks well, and is not tired. Her head is erect—the wooden bowl, poised on the cushion of her own knotted kerchief, only sways with the motion of her own gait. Her square shoulders scarcely give at all to the swing of her quick step, but the limbs move freely, and the body sways easily on the hips, upon one of which she holds a hand, as though to steady her step.

The last corner of the road has been doubled, and the well-known church spire with its blue painted belfry is in sight. Here the path from _La Madonna della Vittoria_ strikes the main road. A man descends it now. He should be a young man from the strength and speed of his step, but his face, and even the top part of his figure, is not visible, while his gait is of necessity stooping, for on his shoulders he bears an enormous load of hay packed into an enormous wicker pannier of coarsest network, through the holes of which long grasses press out to hang in a fringe around him. Nettina, however, seems to know, in spite of travesty, whether he be a young man or not.

‘A happy night to you, Beppino,’ she calls out, but without stopping her way.

‘And is it you, Nettina, of the walnut-grove? What, again to Ponte Novo? How many days in the week do you go to Ponte Novo?’

‘You’re an ill-educated man to speak so! But I pay no heed to you. Why should I wish, suppose you, to go to Ponte Novo? But a woman has duties which you men only remember when she forgets them!’

‘You say well—you say well! All the same the miller’s son who lives at Ponte Novo is better than the poor devils who grow the _gran turco_ up in the valley! Eh, I should like to see what you look like now?’

‘But you can’t! And it’s like your impudence to think I should look anything for you to see! I shall have no shame to tell you, when I go to say the “Yes” in church, _that_ you may count upon! So I will give you the holy night.’

And with this greeting Nettina hurries on. She has the water to fetch, and the supper to see to. She has no time for further parley. Only, as she walks, her white teeth are the better to be seen, as she thinks over the little conversation.

The sun has set. The sky is deeper and further than ever, for it is more transparent now that there is only a remembrance of the rosy glow. The solid hills meet the air that seems almost solid, too, so far away; their outlines lie peacefully upon the sky, soft browns and greens of pastures contrasting with the harsher character of rocks, and again with the softest quality of clouds. Just opposite, Monte Pilato breaks from out the quiet line of the horizon to strike up a great mass into the air, and at the foot of the valley Monte Cranio makes a mitre with its two sharp peaks, in whose clefts one can see the chestnut trees’ outline even from this distance.

The woods cluster so richly over the country that there scarcely seems room for the waving wheat to grow, for the large-leaved maize, nor the tall grass of the meadows. Below the road, some hundred feet, the river is creeping lazily, but now the rush of water over the weir warns Nettina that she is close at home, and must leave the river’s bank and climb a steep bit of path to reach her cottage on the hill’s ridge. Yet her figure scarcely stoops, nor her pace slackens, though the way is hard. To her right a little gorge cleaves the land, in which gurgles a half-parched rill, and Nettina’s lungs have strength, even as she climbs, for a merry shout to the labourer who works on the opposite side.

Now she has gained the more level road above. On her right hand, thick chestnut woods clothe a hill-side that slopes up toward the horizon; but on her left, fields, and vineyards, and meadows lie in fertile terraces one below the other, until they reach the valley’s depth where the stream, shallow sometimes and calm, then tossed and wayward, flows onward to the larger river. Chestnut woods again are upon the further slope. They grow and flourish everywhere—tall and sweeping where the ground is richest, but finding room even upon those narrowest ledges of earth for which the rock makes a little place. The woods are not very dense, nor the trees noble and stately, as in English parks and forests, but the trunks are old, and hollow sometimes, or gnarled again and sinuous and sweetly scented; the branches are curved, and graceful with a strange and pertinacious grace; large and full-veined leaves fan kindly in the breeze. Who would seek fairer and pleasanter woods wherein to pass summer days?

Now thatched and sloping roofs and whitewashed walls of cottages peep out from between the trees, and the damsel knows that she will soon be home. For there is the village which lies opposite to her own across the gorge, and little lights are already beginning to flicker from its open doors and windows. Not lamp-lights, or even rushlights; in the July days, at least, no light is needed after daylight is gone but the light of dying embers or of newly kindled sticks upon the hearth. These that she sees are the flames of the wood fires just lit for supper. And Nettina hastens forward with quicker step. There is a cool wind creeping softly about, and even the noise of the rushing water below seems to freshen the air. She has entered the hamlet. Walking upon the soft dead leaves which have been strewn over the stony way, and running up the few broken steps beneath the little _pergola_, she turns in at the cottage door.

The mother is on her knees, blowing from her sound lungs upon the struggling fire, whence the white wood smoke ascends freely. The kitchen is an odd and dingy little place, with its solitary window and blackened ceiling, where slender rafters are set widely apart, that the chestnuts, strewn over the floor above, may be dried during winter by the heat from beneath. There is no glass, moreover, to the window, but only heavy little wooden shutters; but these are not often closed, and the free air blows in by night and by day, bearing the sweet scent of carnations, that stand in a broken pot on the sill. There is no door leading into the sleeping-room—only an aperture in the wall. The pot hangs over the fire by means of a heavy chain from the centre beam. For the hearth is in the middle of the room in these Italian cottages, raised a few inches above the rest of the floor.

Rough benches stand around it, and these, with a table and a dresser at the further end, where paste is rolled out for the _maccaroni_, are all of dark walnut wood. The room is the dwelling-room as well as the kitchen—this do many little signs of rough comfort and homeliness abundantly testify. Red earthenware platters are ranged on a shelf, and several curious water-vessels, of earthenware, or metal, stand about, giving colour and quaintness to the room. On a low wooden stool without the doorstep sits a little maiden of some eight or ten years, dark and richly brown, like the greater part of Italian children; she shells beans into a platter of quaint yellow ware, and beside her, upon the low wall of the little terrace, sits another child—older by a year or two, who carries a tiny, swaddled mummy in her arms. She is no doubt the daughter of some neighbour, and is sitting here with her little charge, that she may, at least, not be scolded by the mother and worried by more babies at home.

‘Hie thee to the well, Nettina,’ says the elder woman, almost without looking up from her task, as she sees her daughter stand within the kitchen. ‘Thou hast been long at the fair. But patience! I will kindle these two sticks while thou art gone, and then we put on the _polenta_. Haste thee.’

The girl has already twisted her kerchief into a firm little cushion upon which to rest the water-vessel on her head. Then she takes the great copper _conca_ and sallies forth.

The village fountain lies hard by, and at this evening hour it is thronged with women, young and old, in quest of their nightly supply. A great chattering may be heard; the well is a trysting-place for young men and maidens, and a place of gossip for the old women: it is noisy. Nettina has ever been a favourite; proud though she be, she is fond and gentle, so that, peasant girl as she is, she has more tact and courtesy than many a high-bred lady. The girls welcome her loudly, and would fain detain her awhile for the usual exchange of confidences, but she is firm to-night in her resolve not to loiter, and only laughs at the importunate questions of companions, all eager to know if that rumour be true about the new gallant. The _conca_ is filled in a few minutes, and then lifted to its place on her head; lifted, not painfully nor clumsily, but with a movement full of that grace for which these strong and hardy girls are so specially remarkable. Watch her now as she descends the steep and stony path upon the village. Her figure—strong and beautifully measured—sways gently upon its hips, her knees are straightened slightly, and her toes are pointed that she may the better feel her way as she comes down the hill. The way is rough, and the stones roll from under her, neither dare she look to her steps by reason of the burthen on her head; yet her bare feet tread none the less firmly, nor fear to cling to the rocks. The brown column of her throat grows erect to support a shapely head from out curved and goodly shoulders, and, beneath a soft silken kerchief which she wears loosely across the top part of her figure, the breasts swell tenderly. One arm rests curved on her hip, as though to steady her gait; and, even through a sleeve of soft, stout stuff, the firm moulding of the flesh can be distinctly traced. The other arm hangs at her side, and seems to emphasize the graceful motion of her limbs.

The _polenta_ is boiling in the great pot, the beans are shelled, and the neighbour’s baby has been carried away to be unswathed and swathed again, when Tonietta, playing now in the road, shrieks out in her piping treble to say that the _signori_ of the _villa_ are about to come by on their evening walk. Nettina steps out upon the terrace, the wooden staff in her hand with which she has been stirring the pot, and even the mother is no less curious to have a peep at the blue muslin dresses, and starched frills, and elaborate-dressed hair of the gentry. They pick their way over the dirty ground with dainty shoes, no wise fitted for mountain wear. The ladies belong to a fine family of _negozianti_, who have rented the doctor’s house in the larger village. They are grand now, and glad to be stared at, for it is the eve of a great _festa_, otherwise might they be seen in the mornings, around their lodging, in attire far more slatternly than Nettina’s at the present moment.

‘_Orsù_,’ whispers the elder woman loudly to her daughter, ‘haste thee, and dish up the _polenta_. The _signori_ will eat with us to-night, who knows?’

But ere the meal is served and ready, the fine ladies have gone their way, mobbed and gazed at by many children, commented upon by many voices of the more learned ones.

Further down the village, families are already at supper, eating their _minestra_ from off wooden platters, while they lounge in the cool upon steps and balconies of rough stone.

‘A happy evening, pretty ladies! Come and eat a mouthful with us.’ Such are the courteous invitations poured out from all sides upon the passers-by. Hospitable-natured, for all their rough simplicity and their poverty, these good peasants are gracious and gentle-mannered, with never a thought of false shame. What they offer is of their best, and the gift needs no apology. Frank and primitive people, with winning and cheery ways, are these. Often have I rested with them beneath vine-trellised _pergole_, eating of their savoury food, or have sat upon a wooden bench, when youths and maidens gathered round the hearth on autumn evenings to toss and roast the chestnuts, and always have I been cared for as an honoured guest, while yet the merriment and the plain-speaking went on alike, nor did irksomeness creep in amongst them because of the presence of one guest who was not of their own caste.

But the twilight is fast deepening into night. The _signore_ have doffed their holiday clothes, doubtless, and are eating their supper by this time. Within the cottage there is scarce time to display the goods bought at the fair, scarce a moment wherein to question and marvel at the _centesimi_ which were deducted from each bargain, before the men are all there, clamouring for the supper that is so late to-night, and laughing at the yellow kerchiefs and tapes and buttons displayed to view on the kitchen dresser. All the purchases are quickly cleared away for very shame! Nettina lifts the flat baskets within doors, in which maize has been drying all day in the sun, and gathers up the golden cones that were hanging on cords along the cottage’s front; that other gold of the gourd-flowers, where they trail on the ground, changed to green an hour ago, when they shut their petals with the sunset.

Men and women close round the hearth, for supper is ready at last. ‘The minestra is good to-night,’ some one remarks; ‘the _faggioli_ are boiled to a savoury pulp, the _tagliarini_ are finely cut.’ Darkness has fallen; nine o’clock strikes. ‘Good-night, neighbours; I am weary,’ says Nettina. ‘Good-night.’

The Village Swain.

Ask Nettina what she thinks of him: pretty, proud Nettina, who can tread so stately a measure at the village _fête_, and can throw so scornful a glance at the man who has been too frivolous for her well-ordered mind! Well, maybe she is a bad one to choose for a fair opinion, for whether he please her or no she will toss her head, and answer you only with a gruff ‘_Cosa me ne fasso?_’ which, being interpreted from our dialect, means, What is he to me? So, better than that, ask our village pet, our dear little cosy, most comfortable, and convenient of flirts—Bianca del Prato; she will tell you truth! Yes; though with her lips—curling, smiling, rosy lips—she only simper, ‘he is not amiss,’ yet does not the creeping crimson colour say as clearly as any words, and would not the two brown eyes say so too, if only they were not cast down, ‘The village swain? He is charming; he is beautiful! Life would be nothing without him! And the red kerchief that I wore at the fair is lovely only because he told me my lips could shame the colour even of _that_.’ And yet he is not Bianca’s betrothed. Prepare to be shocked, oh righteous damsels! He is only one of the village swains—only ‘a young man like every other’—only a youth whose name and whose voice she knows well, the fire of whose banter she has stood bravely, the glance of whose eyes she has blushed beneath, nothing more. But where would be the use of the summer sun, thinks Bianca, if one might only look pretty for one’s own _gallante_!

There are three village beauties—you have seen them all. There are _four_ village beaux—of the very first water! So much the better for the girls, _they_ think! Pietro Mazzacane shall serve us for a type.

If, from the church, you take the straight road that has led you before to the home of Marrina, the sempstress, and if, instead of following your shadow, you turn to its right, and cross the river upon those odd old stepping-stones, if you do this of an evening after work hours, and climb the opposite hill till you reach the hamlet in front of you, maybe you may find Pietro smoking a clay pipe on the doorstep, whilst he devours a goodly bowl of the home _minestra_. He is a tall man, not heavily built, not even very broad-shouldered; as he lounges, one leg bent, one arm upraised behind his head, consolation’s emblem in clay between his lips, as he appears now, propping his manly form against the grey stone of the cottage wall, you might scarcely believe him to be strong or even a good labourer. His crisp black hair vies with the tendrils of his own vines in curly, wayward beauty; his dark, deep eyes tell of fire that can swiftly be roused, of love tales that can sweetly be told; his lips are ruddy, his limbs have the subtle shape which should be theirs. All this you will allow: even of his yellow skin you will graciously say ‘it harmonises with the rest.’ But still you doubt that that man can ever labour with the stern strength that labour demands: he does not look like it. And you are right. Put him to till _your_ ground, to dig _your_ trenches, to plant _your_ potatoes, and his long lazy limbs will achieve not a whit more than you gave them credit for, though his clay pipe will work busier than ever, and his siestas be the more frequent as also his merry jokes and his friendly conversations.

But do not judge our Pietro’s powers from _your_ trenches. Get up some day, when the steaming land bids men know how brazen will be the mid-day’s heat—get up when Pietro, when Nettina, and when Bianca get up: at three o’clock in the morning. The sky is grey. Perhaps there is not a cloud, and yet it is grey with a solemn greyness, and one would scarcely dare to hope for the rosy young light that will steal over it before long to flush it slowly into warm and fulsome life.

The mountains seem very near; their peaks and cones look very tall as they stand out of the morning mists that creep around their girth and wind themselves away into the hollows of the hills. Perhaps you find it almost cold. So does not Pietro. Only the sack in which he is to carry down a load from the mountain is wound round his shoulders above his linen shirt, but the keen exercise stands in place of covering, for an hour’s hearty lung-labour has brought him out upon the cone of Monte Marzo, some five hundred feet above the placid valley of his home. Bianca has driven the cows to pasture upon the slopes just below, but the village swain has only time for one shout in far-off greeting now; it is his _own_ business that he is about, and his own corn must not rot, nor his own land lie fallow for want of a good day’s swing of the pickaxe. What say you now? Are not his muscles tough, and is that arm not mighty that hurls the _zappa_ above his head and brings it down again into the stiff clay to dig up his field?

Look around you off this mountain-top. Behind you lies Monte Stella, before you the range of the Polcevera hills, to your right Antola with her great stretching shoulder and heavy-browed summit; below you are valleys, where meadows lie and waters flow and fall and trickle; and everywhere on high hills and descending slopes there is cultivation. It is no lazy race of men that has notched those mountain-sides with terraces the better to train the vines towards the sun, that has planted them with corn and maize, with peas and beans and potatoes, with fruit trees of every kind, that has trained the gourds and the vines, that has utilised every strip and corner of land upon the steeps, that has quarried the stone, and fed and tended the silk-worms. ‘_Per Bacco_, the Lord Himself could do no more,’ Pietro would tell you as he shoulders his huge pickaxe and, beneath the chestnut wood hard by, gathers and crowds into his sack no mean load of the first fallen leaves to strew beneath the cattle in cattle-sheds. One does not go down the mountain empty-handed, even after a hard day’s work, and no one could say that Pietro does not show to advantage running down the steep with faggots on his shoulders and over his head—running to keep his balance on the rough and rapid incline. Though Bianca would laugh if you found anything to admire in him at such a moment! ‘A young man not amiss, I grant you, but with a load of _foglia_ on his head—_Dio_, what a taste!’

No, Bianca likes him better on the days when, he being somebody else’s brother working with her own father, she can go with ‘somebody else’ to take the meal to them at midday; better still on the days when he is threshing with all the neighbours on her father’s threshing-floor, and comes to eat a _cena_ of her own preparing in her own home; best of all, when there is a fair at Ponte Novo or Bossola, and she, who is going to buy _conche_, can walk by his side, who is going to buy cattle.

Yes, those are fine days! One goes to see a friend the evening before, and gets one’s hair plaited in a beautiful _resca di pesce_ for the morrow’s adventure. [It does not get tossed as you might fancy; the sleep of the just is sweet and sound.] Then to rise with the daybreak, to don one’s best _bordato_ dress, to fold one’s yellow kerchief, and tie one’s heavy shoes, that all ‘goes without saying’ for a girl. That would be done for mere pride’s sake, whether one’s _gallante_ lives in Genoa, as Bianca’s does, or no.

And is it not the merest chance that Pietro, sauntering up the hill with two or three other young fellows abreast, all of them with hands in their pockets, and pipes in their mouths, and carnation in their soft felt hats, is it not the funniest thing that Pietro should just meet ‘_Bianca bella_’ upon the bend of the rising ground, where the town first comes to sight, and just have been making a joke about her to Giovanni, too? Well, well, at all events, Pietro has a very bright red scarf to gird up his loins, and a very specially handsome carnation, and quite a remarkable blue cravat, besides wearing his hat a little more to one side than the rest. He looks quite as well as if he had been dressed in Genoa; one cannot be expected not to see that, though one has a lover in the town! And Pietro knows that Bianca _has_ seen it, and is as pleased as he need be.

Surely no man ever had his way with the girls better than Pietro! Though Bianca picks up a friend at Cerisola, and there is a great deal of talk about woollen stuffs, our swain still fancies even the female rubbish is trimmed and fitted to his special ear. Oh, blessed and invariable male content! A pretty girl in front who cannot fail to admire the best-looking man about, a glass of sour _monferrato_ at the first village, and a pipe in your mouth—Paradise can offer nothing better! Excepting a good bargain, and for the better chance of that, all those other three good things are abandoned when once our Pietro gets into the thick of the cattle market. That poor pale little brindled heifer means success or failure, perhaps for the whole year, to our modest land and farm-owner. No wonder that knuckles come down bravely on the little three-legged table of the _osteria_ where Pietro sits face to face over wine with the seller; no wonder that oaths are frequent, and words run high! Is it not a question of two whole francs? Nevertheless, they split the difference, and make up the quarrel till it needs must be opened afresh over the game of bowls, whither buyers and sellers soon carry every grievance.

As Pietro stands swinging his arm for the fling—handling the bowl or stooping for his aim, as he saunters about among the company or drinks his glass at the open-air bar—in all or each of these poses he is an object of admiration to many even more than to Bianca del Prato, who has seen him grow tall ever since the day, ten years ago, when he switched the cherry-bough back into her face! An object of admiration, and, though he is a simple-hearted fellow enough, to none more than to himself. Is he not young and healthy—what better can he do? And no doubt he is right! Though Bobbio can perhaps produce better and Cerisola several as good, our Pietro is a good enough example of his kind. He is not very religious; he will laugh at the priests to their face when they pass in procession, and make fun of their Latin, but he will bend his knee and doff his hat and wedge his person just within the church-door at benediction time, or when the bell sounds at the elevation, as a good Catholic should: what man of sense does more? And at a bargain he will hold his own to the last, and come off triumphant if it be only to one _centesimo_; what better praise can one give to a man’s honesty? Surely, Pietro Mazzacane is as good as you could wish for a village swain!

The Love-letter.

There are three of the village girls who are prettier than its other girls. One of them is red-haired and buxom, with pink cheeks and white arms—she is the most admired by townsfolk: village folk have another taste. Nettina, from the walnut-grove, carries the palm with them—she has a figure that is grand in its every line, and when she dances on the green on a _festa_ night, she does not bound and frolic with uncurbed merriment, but moves stately through the ring, and has no mind for any foolish jest with men that are from the cities. Nettina is a very proud and modest maid—she cares for no new fashions of dress, she is thrifty and patient, and when she walks up the steep from the church to her father’s cottage she can bear the floursacks on her shoulders or the dry leaf on her head without show of weariness or stain. ‘What a fine chip of a woman,’ say the village suitors! But Nettina looks neither to right nor to left till a fitting offer be made and a trusty mediator ready to negotiate—so—to meet coming down the mountain or at the well of an evening or upon the piazza at Ave Maria and at the fair—Bianca even before Nettina is the pet of our village. She is grey-eyed and smooth-tongued, with long hair and lithe figure, not proud nor hasty, but good-tempered and merry, with ready jest, when the evening’s ‘chaff’ has hit the hardest. Moreover, she can deftly spin the distaff and weave linen on the hand-loom: Bianca is San Matteo’s second belle.

The daylight is gone, but the clearness of the summer’s night is as good as the sun. Supper has been cooked and eaten at home; the hearth is swept, and though the Angelus has finished sounding awhile ago, and resting-time is near, our Bianca sallies out into the white evening to do a commission that has been on her mind all day. The Signor Cappellano shall earn four _soldi_ to-night, and who knows if he shall not earn some more on the day of the wedding, for Pietro Gambari is rich, and every priest shall have his due. Already she begins to dream of that pretty day in the mellow autumn, and of the silk dress, which surely such a promising lover will not fail to bestow for the marriage, even besides the gold which it is her right to expect! And so many _confetti_ for the children! Bianca is rash. She is going to negotiate a little for herself, without the help, as yet, of the inevitable mediator. But only a little, to the extent of answering a love-letter! If the suitor be true and worthy, he will find the mediator to send to her father’s house.

There is an early moon. It hangs in the clear sky just above the church spire, and floods the _piazzetta_ with grey light. The leaves of the walnut tree near by shiver gently, and the black cypresses in the burying-ground look very ghostly, but far off the moonlight only makes things lovelier. Everything is a little mystified in its treacherous beams, only the mountain’s outline looks more simply clear than even in daylight, when white vapours are prone to stray upon the border. Monte Bruno’s three cones stand, in even row, against the southern sky, and the moon is so bright that you can see the large chestnut that grows in one of the curves. Mon Pilato rears a tall mass into the nearer distance. The Cappellano’s cottage stands quite in the shadow of the oratory of San Gian-Battista, and there is even no light in the window this evening; but ghosts are few in the pious valleys of the Scrivia—Bianca has no fears.

‘Are you at home, _Frà Giuseppe_?’ she calls from below.

‘Who is it wants me at this hour of night?’ growls the under priest, as he comes out upon the stone balcony beneath his porch? ‘And is it you, _Bianca bella_? Come up, come up only!’ Even a priest is appeased by the sight of a pretty girl. ‘Who would have thought of _your_ coming to visit an old man like me?’

The Cappellano knows as well as another what is likely to be the errand of a damsel who seeks him after working hours! But he is not in canonicals, and would not be averse to a little amusement on his own account before the love-letter business begins.

‘Come in, _Bianca bella_, I have two mushrooms in oil on the hearth, that, if I don’t mistake, you will thank me right prettily for when you have eaten!’

‘_O bella!_’ cries the girl laughing, ‘_Bella come il fondo della padella_’ (pretty as the bottom of the frying-pan), ‘as the proverb says. You don’t take me in with that kind of fun. I come on business.’

But even while she speaks Bianca has seated herself on the bench beside the hearth, and is proving the merits of the mushrooms.

‘How goes it, Ninetta?’ says she the while to the old servant. You have a fine time of it with this man, I can take my oath. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll have nothing to do with men.’

Master and maid burst into a loud laugh.

‘I suppose it’s not to see the colour of my ink that you’ve come again to-night, then, you little liar.’

The Cappellano makes as though to pinch her cheek, but thinks better of it, for the girls of this village are very proud.

‘Well, well, I have a new bottle of beautiful red! Oh, what _funghi_, eh? Come into my study. I never do business in the kitchen. Ninetta has the long tongue; and a love-letter, why, it’s as delicate a matter as the confessional!’

‘_Vossignoria_ can easily jest, because you are but a priest, who knows nothing of these things’—Bianca blushes and is pleased as she says this—‘but indeed it is of no love that I speak to-night, and that you might have known me better than to suppose!’

More laughing; nobody believes a word that anybody else says! More chattering, and a little good, sound gossip; then the Cappellano leads the way to his study. It is not very different from the kitchen. Instead of a hearth in the middle of the floor, there is an old, rough-hewn table; instead of bright copper and earthenware vessels upon the walls, there are strangely-coloured maps of the two hemispheres. Two or three books bound in white calf—breviaries perhaps—lean to one or other side of the bookcase shelves; in the table’s midst is an ink-stand with a sponge soaked into it, a sand-pot, and a steel pen. The Cappellano sits before these implements, takes a sheet of pink paper from a drawer, dips the pen in the ink, shakes it, writes the date, and awaits further orders of Bianca, who stands smiling to herself in a corner.

She has a blooming, winsome face, grey eyes that are soft and shady, and crisply waving hair; she has full lips, too, and lovely rows of white gleaming teeth, and she laughs as she pulls a letter from her pocket.

‘This is the one which he wrote to me,’ she continues. ‘Perhaps you may like to see it, that you may know the style that will fit him best.’

‘No, no! my daughter; I have written many a love-letter, and can trust to my own sense,’ grumbles the _scrivano_, as he sets pens and paper in order, for he has his own well-worn phrases ready flowing to hand, and would be greatly discomfited at having to invent any new ones. He puts on his spectacles, smoothes the fair sheet of paper, and, dipping his pen in the ink, again glances up at the girl for instructions. She meanwhile stands awkwardly before him, smiling to herself, and ejaculating beneath her breath, as she twirls her apron mechanically round finger and thumb.

‘But I never said it was a love-letter,’ she says at last, laughing again.

‘Eh, well, well, my daughter. A letter to a gallant, then? What matter? it’s all the same thing. Tell me his name, and whether you mean to have him or no, and then leave the rest to me.’

‘But no, _Signor Cappellano_,’ remonstrates the damsel eagerly; ‘it is not just so. You must understand the affair.’ And she comes closer to the table, for Bianca wants to have a finger in the matter herself.

‘You see,’ she says, ‘the young man is rich and fine, they tell me, and a good match for me, a poor _contadina_: I don’t want to send him quite away. But then, I don’t just know either if he will suit me or no! Now you, who know the Latin, and are fine and wise, you can put it grandly, what I mean.’

‘Yes, yes, my daughter, surely; so tell me what to write first.’

‘Well, first you shall put,’ and Bianca plays again with her apron, ‘You shall put—that I have received his letter,’ she blurts forth, as though struck with a good and sudden thought.

The fine steel pen proceeds to work, and makes a few flourishes on the pink paper, while the girl looks on, eager and intent.

‘That have I written,’ says the _scrivano_ at last. ‘What next?’

‘And next, next! You shall put that he does too much honour to a poor peasant girl such as I.’ Again the pen moves warily over the paper, and this sentence takes long to indite, for it can be inflated with many a fine word and sentiment; but in time the _scrivano_ looks up for fresh matter. The girl is sorely perplexed, indeed.

‘But, _vossignoria_, who knows Latin,’ says she again, ‘can you not put together a fine letter?’

‘That can I do, my daughter; but do you wish me to say he shall come and see you or no?’

‘Well, you will understand, _vossignoria_, this is about how it is. Pietro Gambari is a rich young man, and I am only a _contadina_. For me, I should not mind being a miller’s wife, but it is not enough that the man tells me I am _graziosa_, and would give me earrings.’

‘The Virgin forbid!’ ejaculates _Frà Giuseppe_.

‘Well, that’s what I say, and so I spoke up to him, “Signor Pietro, if you wish to know of me,” said I “you can ask Pasquale, the baker, at Ponte, and for me I will inform myself of you.” And that I have done surely, but Pasquale has heard no word of this fine youth, so when he lets it be written to me whether I go to the fair at Damigiano or no, I wish to say, “Signor Pietro, it may happen I go and it may happen I stay at home,” and who knows but that may bring him to his senses! Oh, but you who know the Latin will understand better than a poor girl like me!’

‘Surely, surely, _figlia mia_,’ replies the Cappellano, returning to his flourishes on the paper, ‘we will say all that and more.’ Yet, in truth, he is somewhat puzzled at the prospect of something outside of the elegant ready-made phrases that have served the parish for sentiment during the last twelve years. Bianca begins to grow suspicious after a few dozen lines.

‘You understand,’ she says, ‘he must come, and he must not think I want him to come. So I shall go on the arm of Pasquale, and if he comes I shall leave those two to arrange the business as well as they can. Not another smile from me till I see the gold of his gifts to me and know his position! I am an honest girl, and no fool! And who knows but it might please your honour to tell him,’ adds she, as though struck by an after-thought, ‘that Paolo of our village is speaking to the _manente_ about me! It would be but a white lie, for it was true a while ago, and I could tell it quickly in confession!’

‘Oh, for that, no matter; but it is whether he would believe it, my daughter!’ replied _Frà Giuseppe_. Nevertheless, something he writes down. Poor credulous Bianca!

‘I want naught else,’ says she now, thinking of her pence.

But the priest means to earn something more yet out of this weary letter.

‘You have said nothing, hitherto,’ he complains! ‘Poor young man! He won’t know if you mean to have him or no! One must give him at least to understand if you mean to look favourably on his suit.’

‘But if I don’t know myself?’

‘Eh, eh, _per Bacco_; what is to be done then?’

There is a long pause. The _scrivano’s_ pen glides cunningly over the sheet: it forms capital letters, and small letters, and flourishes; it reaches the bottom of the page, and then he takes the sand-box to sprinkle it over. Bianca has looked on gloomily. She has been watching her little earnings ebb sadly away in all those lines, and strokes, and dots, and yet it seems as though she were to get no good out of this epistle. She is very sore and angry.

‘Is there anything more?’ says the little man, at last, in a provokingly mild tone.

‘No, _per Bacco_, there is no more! Is not that enough?’ she mutters crossly.

‘But I have said no word as to whether you will have him or no!’

‘Eh, Holy Virgin! Say what you will! I care not! For the rest, so long as you make it fine, he will not understand much of what you mean, unless he is more of an ass than I take him for. Give here,’ she concludes, petulantly, ‘till I put my cross.’

And the letter is sanded once more, as Bianca pulls out her silken netted purse.

‘How much?’ demands she; ‘and are you sure the affair will lead to a good end?’

‘The Virgin will see to your right, child, but twenty _soldi_ are not too much for this. I say it with a clean conscience!’

‘_Dio!_ what a bold heart you have to rob a poor girl so! And if Signor Pietro does not come after all, and if I am forced to content myself with a peasant?’

‘_Eh, anima mia_, that will not be my fault!’

‘But it will be the fault of your letter! Oh, these men, when I could have written it so well myself! But I can tell you, you may keep your fine scrawl many a day before I give you a franc for it. Ten _soldi_, come!’

‘My child, you dream! Ten _soldi_! I might have made two _Spiriti Santi_ in the time. Impossible! Eighteen.’

‘Nevermore,’ declares Bianca, staunchly. ‘Before I pay you eighteen _soldi_ I take the letter to some one who knows how to read, and I make myself be told if you have said what I required.’

The poor _scrivano_ begins to get frightened. What would this bode? He might never write a letter again. ‘Make it fifteen _soldi_,’ he pleads.

And long and hotly they wrangle ere the price can be fixed between them, but at length a compromise is effected. _Frà Giuseppe_ is to put up with twelve _soldi_ now, and to have a hand in the marriage ceremony, if the letter fulfil its purpose. What more could justice demand? The document is folded and sealed. Bianca exchanges it for the dirty coppers, and with a hasty leave-taking makes her way across the stream and up the rugged path to the thatched house, under the chestnuts. Neither Pietro Gambari, nor _soldi_, nor Cappellano, trouble her slumbers much in spite of all apparent excitement. Even a white lie rests lightly on a conscience of eighteen years old, that gets up at four in the morning.

La Cresima.

The Confirmation Day.

The cherries are over; neither large, black nor small bright ones are on the trees now, and the wood-strawberries were forgotten long ago. The grapes begin to flush purple-red over their pale green skins: soon they will be ready for the vintage. But the grapes are not havoc for the village children, and if it were not for many another kind of fruit that grows on trees, and can, happily, not be made into wine, it would be a weary time till the walnut harvest came round! Heaven be praised, there are large purple plums and larger yellow plums and little blue plums that may all be climbed for, letting alone the peaches, and apricots, and figs, and the large pears, that are ripe enough now for the taste of any simple-minded village child!

And summer is play-time. Nobody thinks of the girls till winter is well in, and then it is only one or two out of the whole village gang whose mothers will spare them to learn reading of the _Signor Prevosto_ of an evening, or knitting and darning of _Ninetta del Cappellano_ in the forenoon.

But whatever is done in the bleak months, we have not long passed the dog days now, and no mother gives a thought to any child but the swaddled puppet who hangs at her breast, or the tall damsel who can weave at the handloom and fetch back purchases from town or fair. So Virginia had naught else to do all the days of the summer but be up and down, with the rest of the village children, amid the hamlets and through the woods, across meadows and streams. Her mother is Maddalena, the wife of Pietro the _pedone_, but she has six children, and four of them are girls, who are of an age to help in the house and the fields. Virginia thanks the Virgin that she has been of more use out of the way than anywhere else!

Till last week nobody thought of her; she was one of the village torments, neither more nor less: one of the children who shout at festivals, and stare and wonder at mass when a newcomer enters the church; one of those village inflictions who are always up other people’s fruit trees, yet never get properly punished; one of that dark-eyed, walnut-hued gang, whose feet are always shoeless, whose hair is always rough, whose garments are always in rags; one of the rest, in fact, to share and share alike, excepting that when ‘the rest’ happen to be all boys it isn’t much Virginia gets but a cuff here and there, and not much that she gives, for the matter of that, but a good blow back again! That was how Beppo came by his black eye yesterday, perhaps, and Virginia by that ugly rent in her apron!

Well, till last week, nobody thought of Virginia; but last Monday, when the _pedone_ went to Ponte Novo with the letters, he was accompanied by the pretty Nettina, who is Virginia’s eldest sister, and in Ponte Novo Nettina bought a piece of stuff, for which she bargained many a long hour, on and off, and which was just enough of a remnant to make the child a new frock. And it was no flinsy print material either, but a bit of woollen fabric, for is not Virginia’s father the postman, and must not his child look more fitly dressed than a mere poorest _contadina_ when she goes to take _la Cresima_ from the Archbishop?

Yes, truly this is the great event to which we look forward, and we have been thinking of it ever since the San Giovanni, when it was given out in church. No wonder that the mother has been saving her _soldi_ very zealously, for after the _Cresima_ Virginia must make her _prima communione_, and Pietro’s wife would suffer a good deal of privation rather than not make a fitting show with each of her girls on such an event. Even the child herself grumbles at no loss of bird-nesting or fruit-stealing when it comes to such a grave matter as making a better figure than anyone else! She is only nine years old, and knows no more of the mighty problems that she will have to believe ere the week is out, than does any other little girl of the same age who has run wild all her life among the brambles. But the Archbishop does not come round very often, and many of the children must needs be confirmed as young.

So Marrina, the sempstress, sets to work upon the little lithe figure, and, though she has plenty to do with all the other confirmation children, she will make a grown-up little gown, that shall fit to the childish form as the mother’s fits to full and ripe proportions—a little gown that will set in at the waist and fall down to the ankles, with beautiful trimming on the sleeves, and buttons up the front: henceforth Virginia will be a woman. Then to vie with the new frock Virginia has a pair of new shoes, a little black apron, and a transparent veil arranged over the tightly-plaited hair and falling over the proud little childish face. What finer costume could any town-child boast?

The great day is here. It is August—an August so hot and so dry that even the sturdy _contadini_ have been murmuring at such heat for harvesting. The wheat has been gathered in, and the vines upon their trellises stand out brighter than ever against the shorn hillsides. Those damsels who have care of the church were at work all yesterday; they swept, and washed, and garnished, and then they adorned the sanctuary with those choicest of adornments that only come out on the best of all the _feste_. Above the great picture of Rachel at the Well there are draperies of amber damask, and the high altar is profusely laden with every description of artificial flower, with tinsel stars and hearts and gaudy streamers. ‘Truly it will look well when the wax candles are alight,’ says Nettina, whose work are the paper flowers! Upon the side altars hang gorgeous embroideries, and around the pictures and the organ-loft more of the orthodox crimson damask.

It is evening: six o’clock. He will soon be here. For he is to arrive to-night, and to address the flock briefly from the church steps, before he retires to rest his portly form under the Parroco’s humble roof. The _Cresima_ will be given to-morrow morning at seven.

Caterina, the Parroco’s servant, is in a fever of flurry and nervousness, for _he_ is the Archbishop, and he brings two _Cappellani_ with him! Besides which there will be all the neighbouring clergy to dinner to-morrow, at mid-day! _Bontà di Dio!_ The bells are at work merrily—so merrily that no one can hear the first of the popguns that shall announce the approach of his Holiness. Six of the handsomest village swains have gone up the mountain to meet him. Swains of the village whence he comes, will bear him in sedan chair to the confines of the parish, but on San Matteo’s frontier it will be San Matteo’s duty to provide for the progress of the guest. So six of our best grown lads have gone up the road as far as the turn where, if you went up with them, you would have a view of valleys and mountains that stretch as far away as to the sea. The Signor Prevosto is nervous. He stands upon the church porch in canonicals and snaps at _Frà Giuseppe_, who, also in canonicals, offers curious suggestions as to means and manners.

‘Here are baskets and enough of plucked flowers,’ says he, ‘but no one is ready to shower them before his Holiness! Pick me out two clean girls from among you to do this work!’

There are many ‘clean’—even pretty—girls among the village damsels, much prettier girls than those daughters of townfolk in _villeggiatura_, but the _contadine_ are all too bashful, even whilst longing for so prominent a post, and it is only just as the pop-guns go off again, and the bells cease jangling because the great man is close by, that two maidens are found, who, being children of Maso, the baker, feel themselves worthy of so mighty an office. ‘_Eccolo, eccolo!_’ The piazza is full of people, and with one voice they raise the shout. His shoes with the bright steel buckles rest against the foot-board of a lowly sedan chair! His purple stockings have not been too grand to be donned for ‘us lowly peasants!’ His broad, red face beams on the company, and his sacerdotal hat crowns all, as the baker’s girls strew their gorse and daisies! Truly, the village swains have been honoured in bearing so goodly a burden! They rest, and mop their hot brows as _l’Arcivescovo_ descends to greet the people, and, ascending the church steps, prepares to give them his friendly address.

_Dio!_ how short it is! One has barely time to note the folds of his garments, the shape of his cuffs, or the turn of his hat! But he is tired and hungry, _povero sant’ uomo_! And does not the whole village know that Caterina has a supper prepared that would tempt the Lord himself to forget his duty? All the priests, big and little, file off through the piazza and through the gateway; they go past the oratory and under the _campanile_, and up into the Prevosto’s garden. The Archbishop is very fat; he has to be helped up the broken stone steps that lead to the piazzetta, where vines hang and climb on the _pergola_, where gourds ripen in the sun, and the fountain trickles and the cherries lie drying in flat baskets. The Prevosto makes many excuses for his lowly fare and lowlier habitation; but is it not the will of the Holy Church that he should have no better? The great man and his chaplains eat their supper bravely, nevertheless, whilst the villagers gather in knots to talk them over; then they all go to bed until the daybreak of the morrow.

Virginia wakes with the greyest of the dawn. It is a fine day for her—one that will never come again till the day she is married and then—are there not graver responsibilities therewith? The ‘remnant’ has been enough to make a gown as quaint as any little maiden could desire, but this little maiden has a fear lest it should be too quaint, lest the girls of the walnut-grove should eclipse her! New shoes, a new kerchief, and the lace veil go far, however, to restore her complacency.

The family get under way, and set off towards the church, Virginia walking two paces in front of the rest, as befits so great a personage. Upon the piazza she must fall into the ranks of children of her own parish, for many other parishes have sent candidates to this _Cresima_. So they enter. The organ-loft is thronged with parents and relations, and other spectators have climbed to the gallery which encircles the roof; the nave is exclusively reserved for the priests and their prey. Behind and around a barricade covered with crimson damask, the candidates are ranged in methodically-moving ranks, while the bishop and his priests stand in the midst, ready to perform upon each advancing boy or girl. The organ sounds, it plays merry waltzes and pathetic love-songs, with now and then a warlike march. ‘_Il nostro Arcivescovo_’ stands and mutters low, whilst he dabs each newly-presented cheek with oil from his sacred phial, and anoints each separate ear. Then the chaplain wipes the oil off again, and for each the deed has been done. ‘What a mercy it didn’t drop upon my dress,’ thinks Virginia, and fans herself with her first fan, and feels her new earrings. How nice it is to be a _figlia di prima communione_, but alas, how many more there are still to have the oil, and how long it will be before we can eat plums again and climb for apricots!

At last the great day is drawing to its close. Everybody has amused themselves well. There was so much fine music, you might almost fancy you were at the opera—from what we’ve heard tell of it! And so much beautiful damask and false flowers and incense! Paradise could not much excel such a place, especially as everyone had their best things on!

‘Did you see Marrina? Not pure wool, that! And Tomasina—well, hers was a real silk stripe in the material. But Tomasina is proud! I wouldn’t be proud like that—I’d as soon have a _bordato_ gown!’ says one. ‘And the holy man’s sermon! That did make one laugh! He doesn’t know much about us, that’s evident! Would have made the prevosto out to be a saint!’ continues another.

‘The Prevosto knows better than to come over us with such nonsense! As if he were the Madonna’s own friend! Patience, they’ve got to be so in church! And of course it’s only right a priest should talk fine when he gets into the pulpit or the confessional! Where would our poor souls be otherwise?’ objects a third.

Everybody has had their dinner. The Archbishop and the priests ate Catterina’s mushrooms and _risotto_ and _polpette_, while Virginia had real holiday _ravioli_, with plenty of honour and glory for condiment. To-morrow mother Maddalena will have enough to do thinking of her family as a whole, but to-day Virginia is the child _par excellence_.

After dinner there is more congregating, more admiring of garments; then more church, when the great man sings vespers in a splendid cope, and Virginia still keeps on her frock, if not her veil, and rests content that she looks as well as little Bianca of the village on the hill. But now it is all over. The fine trappings are put away—the church’s damasks stored in the press of the Sacristy, and Virginia’s frock in an old oaken chest at home. The Arcivescovo is gone, and the walnuts will soon be ripe, with the chestnut harvest coming quickly on. Virginia has her rags on again and is up the trees, but she has not forgotten her _vestito di lana_, nor how _la Cresima_ has made a woman of her.

In Villeggiatura. Town Folk in the Country.

_La Signora Pareto_ lives in town—Via degl’Uffiziali, No. 4. She lives at the top of 149 steps, on the sixth floor of a very new and very pink house in the most recent suburbs of the city. It takes such a long time and, when one has only one maid-servant, and is blessed with six children, time is a precious thing—it takes such a long time and, for a lady of la Signora Pareto’s goodly proportions, it takes so many more long breaths than she can, in wisdom, spare to get up those said hundred and forty-nine steps, that, it may safely be stated, neither mamma nor children go out for a walk more than once a month. What would you have? Children would wear their very souls to rags if the good Lord weren’t wiser than to leave souls in people’s own keeping, and you couldn’t let folk see them in plain things any more than you can let them wear out their best ones: that is only natural!

So it comes to be just about once in a month that _la Signora Pareto_ thinks it is time to have the children’s faces washed and their short hair, that was shaved last summer, brushed up in a ridge on their crowns, and their hats with the bright flowers and feathers put on, while she herself dons silken and trailing garments for a walk in the lime-scented _Acquasola_. Who would believe this to be the same Signora Pareto who, with heel-trodden slippers and loosened gown, stirs the _polenta_, and fans the fire, and shrilly scolds the children on the top floor of No. 4 Via degl’Uffiziali? And who would recognise in the primly-walking and stiffly-dressed boys and girls of the public gardens those scantily-attired mortals who hunt the house-top above the sixth floor, and peril their necks on dangerous parapets, and furtively feel for small spoil in the kitchen, and get whipped for venial sins in theft and fibbing?

The lady mother walks with portly, swaying frame and upright head, that black tresses profusely adorn; behind her trail yards of green silk in the gravel’s dust, and on her broad bosom, mock gold and stones glitter, for alas, she is not of the peasant women, who fear aught but the true metal! And the children plod primly two-and-two, with all that tells of childhood carefully hidden from the much-revered gaze of the world, and too proud of furbelowed frocks to think of any other enjoyment, to borrow any youthful glee from the sweet-scented acacias or the flowering laburnum and purple Judas-blossoms.

No wonder that not much of country pink flushes the cheeks of the poor town-bred babies who get so little fresh, free air; no wonder that from time to time the town-bred mother, who thinks more of outward show than of any other human advantage, begins to note the pallid hue on her offsprings’ faces, begins to long for a bit of rough life, where they can rejoice in heaven’s pure air without new frocks, and where her own battered slippers and torn skirts will be good enough to breathe a mouthful of honest wind in, when the wind blows around homely meadows and cottages, where the great world’s criticism does not, happily, penetrate.

_La Signora Pareto_ has a brother-in-law who is a great _negoziante_; he is rich, richer far than herself—which is a trial when one is in town, for appearances must be kept up and the brother-in-law’s wife has to be vied with! But when the time comes for going _in villeggiatura_ then those riches in the family are an advantage, because there is a little house up in the Apennines, some mile or two from Busalla, that belongs to the brother-in-law, and which one may have for very little money, if a little squabbling and haggling be added thereto.

So one day at the end of July the family from the sixth floor in Via degl’Uffiziali makes a move. The maid-of-all-work is sent home—in the country one does not only half, but all, the cooking oneself, and has a village girl in to help! The good papa takes charge of numbers four, five, and six, because his arms are the strongest; the shrill-voiced mamma attempts to keep three elder boys in order, whose spirits are quite too much for them at the prospect, first of a journey, and then of green trees, and fruit to plunder! One kisses the neighbours all the way down the staircase—inmates of pianos five, four, &c.—one reaches the station, one takes many a second-class ticket, half and whole. After an hour’s slow progress, sitting in a railway carriage, with the din of children in the ears, and, in the nostrils, the smell of truffles and fish and such things as cannot be procured in the country, one descends at last on the platform of a little station, and lifts out the joyful half-dozen of one’s progeny!

How green the trees are, how fresh the breeze, even along the dusty highway, that would lead across the mountains of the Giove, were one not minded to turn aside and follow the torrent’s course to left! Paolo and Checchino, and even the little Emilia, feel it blow pleasantly, indeed, upon their almost bare heads that were short-shaven again yesterday for the season of recess! They caper gladly along the road, while father and mother exchange greetings and compliments with fruit-sellers and barbers in the town’s little street, with peasant men and women as they strike out into the free country beyond.

The chestnut leaves are broad and full on the boughs of trees to the road’s right hand, the river runs idly to left, and beyond the river more turf springs and more chestnuts grow upon it. Woods flourish, with meadows, and fields, and vineyards. After the village of Ponte is past—with the bridge over the stream whence the carriage-road begins to run to left of it—when the last of the houses, that have been built for summer visitors, is behind, papa and mamma Pareto have a rougher and stonier way along which to drive their little flock—for the brother-in-law’s cottage lies up the side valley of _la Valle Calda_. ‘_Madonna_, what a heat!’ complains the town lady, loosening the scarf around her throat! And even the children’s strength begins to ebb into fretfulness, while the papa trudges along wearily in front with babies two and three. It is three miles from Busalla to the parish church of the village, and town heat has not been apt to fit anyone for work. ‘_Andiamo_, Nina, thou art truly the laziest of all, because thou art tall! Fie and for shame!’ scolds the mother to her eldest-born girl.

But the tall campanile is in sight at last, and everybody plucks up courage to take and give friendly greetings courteously. The Prevosto comes out on the _piazza_ with his serving-maid behind; the Cappellano descends the rugged steps of his dwelling to give a welcome. Neither priest is in canonicals—the one has been tilling the soil, and the other pruning the vines—but the family of Pareto are no sticklers for etiquette when once out of town. Compliments and greetings flow graciously, words and jokes fly swiftly; the children are admired, the village news is told. Then the party moves onward towards its destination, but escorted now and strengthened by gathering friends.

The sun is setting above the tree-tops of the little deep, dark dell beneath the church: it is night before parents and children are well installed in the black and white cottage that stands in the midst of open meadows, having maize fields around it, and a fence about its modest garden. The family has come by an afternoon train for the cool’s sake, and it is time to go to bed before the well has even been visited hard by, or any of the familiar nooks; indeed, the children are asleep almost before the fire has been lit for them to have their supper, and the sharp words of the mother, who is ever threatening punishments that have no room in her heart, fall but lightly on their ears.

The morning sun creeps softly down the side of tall Monte Mazzo opposite. When the Pareto family gets up next morning, the cottage lies yet in shade, as do the meadows also and our own chestnut woods above the well, and even the _campanile_, with everything that is on this side the torrent. ‘One must rise early to enjoy the Creator,’ says the mother, and the children are not prone to quarrel with her advice in these country days! With garments that already are faded and soon will be torn as well, with white-toed shoes and heads bare to the sun and the breezes, they scour the country betimes to visit their favourite haunts, to spoil the fruit trees that are in season, and to coax scrap and bit from neighbourly cauldrons and granaries. Nobody gives much thought to them all day. They are safe, for everybody knows them, and will take a turn at looking after them, safe as the peasant children themselves, of whom they are part and parcel now that town pride and strivings are left behind.

_La Signora Pareto_ has gossip enough to do herself this first day. There is no need to hire any girl for a help _this_ week, for there are neighbours and to spare who will gladly give a hand for the sake of a bit of city news! They must see once again the fine dress which the lady wore yesternight when she arrived! ‘Oh, but that is nothing! On the day of the Assumption, at mass and procession, you shall see what you shall see,’ boasts the town bird, and yet at the present moment her dress is more slatternly by far than that of the peasant women who throng her kitchen. They wear skirts of dark homespun linen, bright cotton kerchiefs, and aprons, but her garments are of threadbare woollen stuff and soiled, while a loose black bodice hangs carelessly upon her shoulders in place of the folded square, and her hair is still in the fashionable coils of last night, but rough now and disordered.

Caterina, the parsonage housekeeper, calls in now with a supply of eggs and vegetables to help out the first day’s dinner. She thinks but slightly of _la Signora Pareto’s_ grandeur as she looks on the stained and trailing skirts that are deemed good enough for the country—for Caterina is a strict and thrifty woman. But when the day of the Assumption comes, and the lady of the cottage comes to mass, then even the priest’s servant is forced to admit that her costume is one ‘truly of luxury!’ For the silk dress with the train that Marrina, the village sempstress, declared would have reached right over to America, where the emigrants go—the violet silk and the gold ornaments, and the French cashmere shawl, have all been thought worthy of so grand an occasion! Nina, the firstborn, has her hat and feathers on, and her white frilled petticoat, whilst even the boys have been promoted to cleanliness.

The day is bright even amid this dazzling summer brightness. Spite of the heat, meadows are fresh and the wooded turf, because of many rills that water the valley. Orchis and yellow lady’s-slipper and broom have come in place of the ragged robins and the buttercups, and upon the open land over the hills the little pink heather blossom will soon be abloom. The river winds slowly, the mountains make a dark, dented line upon the calm sky, all around, the chestnut woods stir in the breeze, and droop their boughs upon the green grass.

The stars on the Virgin’s blue robe glitter in the sunlight as the procession winds up across the fields, by the well, and by the cottage of the town family, to come back again along the river path into the church. And _la Signora Pareto_ is proud to walk behind the Holy Madonna, for she is well-dressed, and people stare even more at _her_ garments than at the Virgin’s own, which they have seen many times. ‘It is even more worth while to don one’s finery here than in town,’ thinks the lady, for in town there is always a fear it may pass unnoticed in the crowd! But all the same one must do one’s economy in the country. For what else does one come but to economise, and to rejoice in the Creator, as _la Signora Pareto_ says? So to-morrow the soiled grey skirts will be on again, the children will be shoeless and ragged, and we shall eat _minestra_ of beans in place of _ravioli_ for dinner.

But the cool air fans freshly all the same upon the children’s cheeks, meadows are soft and fragrant that lie around the black-and-white house—the garden grows peas and beans and gourds and lettuce beneath the fruit trees, and this is matter of interest to everybody. The vines trail wildly across the kitchen window, and boys and girls think it fine fun to blow the sulphur upon them that keeps off the fell disease. Who cares whether children’s clothes are rent and threadbare, since roses are coming to their cheeks in the wild, free life and the good air of this Apennine _villeggiatura_?

CONCLUSION.

Il Corpus Domini.

The Procession.

A June day’s dawn breaks white over the land, and in its wake comes the sun, glorious to shine where dew-drops have lain cool through the short summer night. They lie still on plucked flowers and herbage in the town market of S. Domenico, though the sun rose half an hour ago, and they lie thicker on soft green turf and gently stirring blossoms, beneath the breezy chestnut woods of Apennine or Riviera mountains.

And the fair fine weather gladdens many a heart to-day, for it is the feast of the Corpus Domini. Whether in country cottages or in city streets—those small and darker streets where dwell the working people, who yet can be moved by a feast day—in homes that stand beneath a cool green shade, as in flats that have but the sadder shade from tall, town houses opposite—all rise early on this hot June morning, because after mass there is the great procession. Many folk, young and old, poor and gentle, donned holiday dress to see the carnival of Martedì Grasso and, of these, all are, perhaps, not left to wear their best clothes again for this other pageant that is of the Church.

But Rosina, the fair _fioraja_, still combs her long black hair and smiles to show her fine white teeth, and, from her room beside the camellia-beds of the Peschiere, she comes forth adorned for the day. And many others walk beside her in the procession, who stood beside her, perhaps, to see the blessing of the palms at S. Lorenzo, and knelt in divers churches before the _Santo Sepolcro_.

Maddalena, the little servant wench, walks behind the great cross in crisply-smoothed _pezzotto_ and ear-drops that were new for the sister’s festival of the first communion. She is proud to be so near the procession’s heart, and glances along the ranks to see the crimson banners floating aloft, and the Virgin’s images, to marvel at the great throng of priests, where the Archbishop bears the Host beneath gaudy panoply. Yet Maddalena cannot see the whole of the great sight so well as can _la padrona_, who sits on a convenient balcony of the Via Nuova, and sprinkles flowers upon the crowd, while she listens to compliments from the rich silk mercer at her side, and secretly admires that very dress which her little maid has so often assured her is becoming.

Not even _la Pettinatrice_, who has secured a side window through hair-dressing acquaintance, can see the great silver ark that holds the ashes of S. John, so closely as can _la Dè Maroni_, whose plaits she has greased this morning, or _la Contessa Capramonte_, who sits on a family terrace, with fair coils twisted by Marrina’s own hands, and silken draperies purchased at the shop of fat Signor Giordano, gazing placidly from a plebeian ground-floor opposite. For these, on their balconies, are above the heads of the crowd, and close where the procession must pass. Sprinkling their gorse-bloom and camellias, they can look along the winding stream of the people, and see the companies of friars and monks and Jesuits, the ranks of municipal orders, gorgeous in civic dress, the blue-robed children of the Virgin, the crosses and banners and saints, till the shaven crowns of officiating priests are just below them, and rich vestments glitter, and incense from acolytes’ censers floats around the Archbishop’s panoply, ere it is wafted to the very windows where they kneel.

But, for all the grandeur and the throng, perhaps the town-folk have not the best of it. At Bogliasco, where fisher-folk live, bells have been ringing for the Corpus Domini as well, and Paolo has lounged about the church door, smoking pipes with Maso, while the fat fisherwife and Giannino and Nicoletta walked in the procession. At Ruta, on the hill, old Giovanni, the _manente_, has knelt to the passing Host also, and Maria has chattered whisperingly to the neighbours.

Though hot it has been, indeed, beneath the frail olive foliage and beside the shining blue sea at Camogli, the priests have not failed to go forth in their muffling copes under the panoply, chaunting the office and bearing the Host. Nor has Lucrezia, the lace-weaver, forgotten to carry the swaddled _bambino_ to see the procession at Santa Margherita, while pop-guns were fired and men played at bowls on the high road.

Even Teresa—the thrifty housewife at Portofino Castle—has found time, amid manifold duties, to attend this most delicate of feasts, and has gone so far as to leave the premises in charge of the household drudge, while she follows the old _marchese_ to the pageant of Corpus Domini.

These all prayed their prayers in stifling churches, and knelt by dusty waysides as the sacred Host went by, but, beneath the shady woods of the Apennines, cooler breezes have stirred the broad chestnut leaves upon this joyful June afternoon.

The parish priest has risen betimes, for the _Signor Cappellano_ can only preach at second mass, and the sermons are many to be preached, the masses many to be sung on this greatest of holidays. Caterina, the spare serving maid, was all day yesterday baking the communion wafers, but even she finds time to don holiday garb and pace holiday paces to-day. Everybody is not at the same morning mass, but everybody comes to vespers at three of the afternoon, and everybody walks in the procession.

That tall, strong wench, who is village story-teller in chief—_Rosa la bruna_—walks first in the file, and bears the great cross that is silver-ornamented, while Nettina and others come behind with the candles. And everyone has on her dress of gay print or of stout woollen stuff, with golden ear-drops and freshly-smoothed veil.

She of the love-letter, is neither last nor least, the soft-eyed Bianca, whose gallant follows after with crimson banner! And the town lady is there too—that merchant’s wife who rents the cottage in the fields, and whose children run rougher, amid country breezes, than the very peasants themselves: she wears the purple silk dress, with the long train and trimming of notoriety, while upon her ample bosom rests the gold chain, and across her fair tresses the black veil that is to distinguish her from the girls round about. She is proud to be thus gorgeous, and envied in the female crowd, proud that she can so vastly outshine even the portly dame who comes after—her whom they call the priest’s cousin.

But Marrina, the sempstress, will not walk in procession, for she is short and stout, and there is wayfaring enough to be done in the world, says she! So, from the low seat of a rough stone wall, she sees the pageant go by. She nods scornfully to Rosa with the big cross—for Rosa is a curt-speaking girl—and sympathetically to Nettina with the small crucifix, who should have been the leader, thinks she, for Nettina is a free-and-easy one, more to the mind of this proud old lady. Then for a moment Marrina kneels painfully at the wayside, because the panoply passes, borne up by the miller and three farmers in red cotton robes, and beneath it walks the parish priest slowly, with stiffly gorgeous cope about his shoulders and clumsy hands that bear aloft the Sacred Host. And secretly, as she prays, Marrina chuckles, for well she knows the priest loves not to pace, closely-robed, in procession on a hot June afternoon! ‘But it is his duty,’ says the sempstress to herself gladly, as it is the fat _Cappellano’s_ duty to uphold the vestments of his chief, in company with a second priest on the other side.

And, when the mumbling and panoplied trio have gone by, Marrina rises to her feet again, to wait for the Virgin’s blue-robed image, and to laugh at the staggering steps of Giovanni and his comrades as they carry Heaven’s Queen on their shoulders: to scoff also at the clumsiness of Pietro, who strives vainly to adjust her crown with his stick! Then, scolding little Virginia, the confirmation-heroine, for her loud laughter with romping companions in the procession’s very midst, she, laughing herself, adds her ambling gait to the pageant’s outskirts, and climbs the church steps once more.

For the procession is over. Village boys, shrieking with delight, have fired the pop-guns in its honour; the bells have ceased their jangle. The village bride has been admired, whose home is new beneath the cherry trees: the village swain has whisperingly begged a promise of the village belle for the dance later on in the meadows. Bianca has brought the affair of the love-letter to a fortunate close on this very church porch; Caterina rests from scolding the priest. A glamour of coming night begins to creep down from the mountains upon the valley, and, though still the river flows and still Mon Pilato stands against the twilight, our tale is told, our procession is finished. Town folk and country folk have all passed away in its wake.

THE END.

LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

Transcriber's Notes

Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved as much as possible. Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.