ground was baked hard; but there was still a chance of rain, and the
peasants were anxious not to miss it. Knowing this kind of labour, I
looked on from my vine-wreathed arbour with admiration, but without envy.

I asked whether he had not children to work for him.

"All dead--and health to you!" he replied, shaking his white head
dolefully.

And no grandchildren?

"All Americans (emigrants)."

He spoke in dreamy fashion of years long ago when he, too, had
travelled, sailing to Africa for corals, to Holland and France; yes, and
to England also. But our dockyards and cities had faded from his mind;
he remembered only our men.

"_Che bella gioventu--che bella gioventu!_" ("a sturdy brood"), he kept
on repeating. "And lately," he added, "America has been discovered." He
toiled fourteen hours a day, and he was 83 years old.

Apart from that creature of fiction, the peasant _in fabula_ whom we all
know, I can find little to admire in this whole class of men, whose talk
and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing save
the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying tasks
and rewards. None save a Cincinnatus or Garibaldi can be ennobled by the
spade. In spleenful moments, it seems to me that the most depraved of
city-dwellers has flashes of enthusiasm and self-abnegation never
experienced by this shifty, retrogressive and ungenerous brood, which