She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought
they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they
didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if
in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be
addressing _them_, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with
his employment;--very, very calmly, _piano_, _piano_, gently, languidly,
filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon
outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of
Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and
happily it still survives in some numbers,--the peasant who, for all his
rags and tatters, has manners that will often put one's own to shame,
and, with a _simpatia_ like second-sight, is before one's wishes, in his
eagerness to serve and please. And there is the new type, which we know
to our disgust, and unhappily it multiplies like vermin,--the peasant
who has lent his ear to the social democrat, and, his heart envenomed by
class hatred, meets your civility with black glances and the behaviour
of a churl in the sulks.

So, though her voice was sweet to hear, and though, standing there in
the warm penumbra of the olive orchard, tall and erect and graceful, in
her bright frock, she made a charming picture, and though she offered a
silver lira as a prize, the men merely stared at her churlishly, and
went on with their work--languidly, sluggishly, as men who deemed the
necessity to work an outrage, and weren't going to condone it by working
with anything like a will.

Now, John Blanchemain, as I have previously mentioned, was an
unselfconscious sort of fellow. In his unselfconsciousness, forgetting
several trifles that might properly have weighed with him, (forgetting