Caris was thus content. He had health and strength, though sometimes he had a fever-chill from new-turned soil and sometimes a frost-chill from going out on an empty stomach before the sun had broken the deep shadows of the night. But from these maladies all outdoor labourers suffer, and he was young, and they soon passed. He had been the only son of his mother; and this fact had saved him from conscription. As if she had lived long enough when she had rendered him this service, she died just as he had fulfilled his twenty-third year; and without her the stone hut seemed for awhile lonely; he had to make his fire, and boil or roast his chestnuts, and mend holes in his shirts, and make his own rye loaves; but he soon got used to this, and when in Maremma he always worked with a gang, and was fed and lodged--badly, indeed, but regularly--at the huge stone burn which served such purposes on the vast tenuta where the long lines of husbandmen toiled from dusk of dawn to dusk of eve under the eye and lash of their overseer; and when on his native slopes of Genistrello he was always welcome to join the charcoal-burners' rough company or the woodsmen's scanty supper, and seldom passed, or had need to pass, his leisure hours alone. And these were very few. His mother had been a violent-tempered woman, ruling him with a rod of iron, as she had ruled her husband before him; a woman loud of tongue, stern of temper, dreaded for miles around as a witch and an evil-eye; and although the silence and solitude which reigned in the cabin after her death oppressed him painfully at first, he soon grew used to these, and found the comfort of them. He brought a dog with him after his winter in Maremma which followed on his mother's loss--a white dog of the Maremma breed, and he and the dog kept house together in the lonely woods in fellowship and peace. Caris was gentle and could never beat or kick a beast as others of his kind do; and the oxen he drove knew this. He felt more akin to them and to the dogs than he did to the men with whom he worked. He could not have expressed or explained this, but he felt it.