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Here, under the shadow of the monastery, booths and benches stand in rows, arrayed with the produce of the country-villages, shoes, rude implements of husbandry, the coarse woven fabrics of the contadini, hats with cockades and rosettes, feather brooms and brushes, and household things, with here and there the tawdry pinchbeck ware of a peddler of jewelry, and little quadretti of Madonna and saints.
The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald green beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliage tints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth. A fine race of contadini, with large, heroically graceful forms, and beautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent on ancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil.
When there are three or four brown-breasted contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you will not find anything in Rome more <i>sketchable</i>. If you stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water- colours you will never reach St. John Lateran.
The village of Chiusure is inhabited by labourers. The contadini are poor: a dower, for instance, of fifty lire is thought something: whereas near Genoa, upon the leasehold system, a farmer may sometimes provide a dower of twenty thousand lire. The country produces grain of different sorts, excellent oil, and timber. It also yields a tolerable red wine.
One can imagine him going out for his walks in the streets and lanes, becoming known to beggars, shopkeepers, children, country people; talking amiably over the walls to the contadini and coming back to his rooms or his villa to sit before the piano, with his white hair brushed up and his thick orderly moustache, "to make a little music for myself."
How often has this intermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and Brancaleoni, by Borgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its contadini are robust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of feature. No wonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from, sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, and Milan.
"Only myself," answered Donatello, "and Tomaso, who has been butler since my grandfather's time, and old Stella, who goes sweeping and dusting about the chambers, and Girolamo, the cook, who has but an idle life of it. He shall send you up a chicken forthwith. But, first of all, I must summon one of the contadini from the farmhouse yonder, to take your horse to the stable."
The contadini rough, ignorant folk, signore say she still walks in the garden at moonrise, waiting for the husband and son who never came; and the women who go to wash their linen in the lake will not come back that way at night for fear of seeing her dead eyes peering at them through the bars of the gate." "Ah, that is very interesting," Jean said appreciatively.
Round the walls stood a throng of gazers, and in the middle of the floor the dancers performed vigorously, dancing now a polka, now a waltz, now a mazurka, now an elaborate country dance in which sixteen or twenty people took part, now a tarantella, called by many of the contadini "La Fasola."
In despite of himself, Maurice obeyed her. He wanted not to look, but he could not help looking. The engine, still whistling, crept out from the embrace of the lemon-trees, with the dingy line of carriages behind it. At most of the windows there were heads of people looking out. Third class he saw soldiers, contadini. Second class no one. Now the first-class carriages were coming.
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