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Updated: August 29, 2024
That agricultural festivals were serviceable for husbandmen, pastoral feasts for shepherds and goat-herds, hunting commemorations like that of Saint Hubert, for those who hunted. His knowledge of Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, of mediaeval England and modern Brittany helped him with many apt illustrations.
"Afraid of the damp," muttered Pen to himself; and then he smiled up in the face of the fiercer-looking of the two goat-herds as the man placed a cake of coarse-looking bread in his hands and afterwards turned out from the bag a couple of large onions, to which he added a small bullock's horn whose opening was stopped with a ball of goatskin.
Thanks to the goat-herds, the lads were well provisioned for a day; but at the same time, and again thanks to their hosts of the past night, they were sadly crippled for their task.
The coming of the two goat-herds soon proved that they were hospitably bent, and the lads agreed between themselves that there were far worse breakfasts than black-bread cake and warm goat's-milk. This ended, a difficult task had to be mastered, and that was to try and obtain information such as would enable the two questioners to learn the whereabouts of the British troops.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral aloft under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing would induce me to set down here.
There must be cottages somewhere shepherds' or goat-herds' where as soon as the people understand that we are not French they might give me some black-bread and an onion or two." The young soldier laughed a soft, low, mocking kind of laugh. "Black-bread and an onion! How queer it seems! Why, there was a time when I wouldn't have touched such stuff, while now it sounds like a feast.
She had a face like the moon, and great round eyes; within her cloak, on the bosom of her white dress, she held a man-child. He, they passed their sacred word, lifted in his mother's arms and turned open-handed towards them. Luca, Biagio, and Astorre, goat-herds all and honest lads, fell on their faces with one accord; with one voice they cried, "Madonna, Madonna, Madonna! pray for us sinners!"
Better, verily, to live among anchorites and goat-herds, than with our gilded, false, over-rouged populace though it call itself 'good society. Though it call itself 'nobility. But there all is false and foul, above all the blood thanks to old evil diseases and worse curers.
"It was not a brace of goat-herds last night, Excellency, but a roomful of brigands and their trulls in the Golden Fish. The worst company in Verona, Excellency the most brazen, the most case-hardened. But the story is the same from their mouths as from the lads'; not a detail is wanting; not one point gives the lie to another. Excellency, I would bow to your wit in any case but this.
The two lads started off light-hearted and hopeful, for if they could trust the goat-herds, whose information seemed to be perfectly correct, a day's journey downward to the river in the valley, though seeming far distant, must bring them pretty near the goal they sought in other words, the headquarters of the army that had crossed over from Portugal into Spain to drive back the French usurper, the task having been given to England's most trusted General, Wellesley, who was in time to come always to be better known as Wellington.
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