commonly seen in them; and the measured lop of the bill-hook and,
by and by, the click as a bough breaks and the lazy crash as it
falls over on to the ground, are as pleasing to the ear as is the
bough-bestrewn herbage to the eye.

To what height and to what slender boughs do not these hardy
climbers trust themselves. It is said that the coming man is to be
toeless. I will venture for it that he will not be toeless if
these chestnut-pruning men and women have much to do with his
development. Let the race prune chestnuts for a couple of hundred
generations or so, and it will have little trouble with its toes.
Of course, the pruners fall sometimes, but very rarely. I remember
in the Val Mastallone seeing a votive picture of a poor lady in a
short petticoat and trousers trimmed with red round the bottom who
was falling head foremost from the top of a high tree, whose leaves
she had been picking, and was being saved by the intervention of
two saints who caught her upon two gridirons. Such accidents,
however, and, I should think, such interventions, are exceedingly
rare, and as a rule the peasants venture freely into places which
in England no one but a sailor or a steeple-jack would attempt.

And so we left this part of Italy, wishing that more Hugo de
Montboissiers had committed more crimes and had had to expiate them
by building more sanctuaries.



CHAPTER XI--Lanzo