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I tasted a sip or two of a flask which the contadini sent us for trial, the rich result of the process I had witnessed in the barrel.
These mountains close the valley to south-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and more celestial region. Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as we rolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olive trees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges.
The contadini the peasants outside the gates even though they were only just outside it, cared nothing at all about the matter: another specialty of the social peculiarities of the peninsula. The Cardinal Legate, restrained by the professional decorum of his cloth, said nothing save among his quite safe intimates; but, perhaps, like the sailor's parrot, he only thought the more.
Coming out of this wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers, you meet market carts and contadini returning from the city. Then you cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river out of Malory. And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream.
Yet she dreaded his return. What might he have to tell her? Now that she was here by the sea she felt how impossible it was for Maurice to have been delayed upon the shore. For there was no one here. The fishermen were up in the village. The contadini had long since left their work. No one passed upon the road. There was nothing, there could have been nothing to keep a man here.
"Nay, you will surely like to be called when the contadini come carrying their torches," said Nello; "you would not miss the country-folk of the Mugello and the Casentino, of whom your favourite Leonardo would make a hundred grotesque sketches." "No," said Piero, resolutely, "I will see nothing till the car of the Zecca comes.
There was a cattle-fair on the day we were in the town; the place was full of contadini, and the roads were thronged with cattle being driven in for sale. The lambs were slung on donkeys' backs in couples, confined in sacks with their heads out of the mouths, and one lively little black fellow escaped and caused much excitement before he was caught and reimprisoned.
I tasted a sip or two of a flask which the contadini sent us for trial, the rich result of the process I had witnessed in the barrel.
Lucrezia Gabbi came out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite, along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that looked towards Etna and the sea.
For a full half-hour they stood in the glaring sun, while Gaspare and Amedeo solemnly tried on aprons over their suits in the midst of a concourse of attentive contadini. In vain did Maurice say: "That's a pretty one. I should take that one." Some defect was always discoverable.
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