But now that times had changed, and there was no war service except conscription, they had become averse to paying any rental at all, and looked not only on their holding as their own, but on the timber, the grass, the heather, the rushes, and all that was around them as their own. When they tilled their small croft, they worked for their own benefit, but grumbled even at doing that. They were brigands in blood and instinct. The first of their forefathers who had settled there had been a refugee from justice for the robbing and murder of a priest in Rome; and they were never at ease save when thieving. They had no notion of time or of its reckonings; but they declared that their family was as old as the woods themselves, and there was nothing to disprove their assertions. They were, in reality, not more than squatters, as their forefathers had been; but they thought themselves the lawful lords of the soil. They would cringe and beg, and even work when it suited them, but they had the old scornful Roman pride in their veins, and vowed vengeance on any who offended it. The woods might be the Gandolfo’s or the Pope’s for aught they cared; they laid their hands on everything they wanted. There were not more than a dozen such families scattered over the fifty miles of forest; but every one of these was against the foreigner; would have been equally against him whatever he might have done, if he had been St Michael’s self, as Caterina and Muriella sometimes thought that he was. They had always been poor, but they had enjoyed thieving, drinking, reiving, sinning as they chose. He wished to make them less poor, but he strove also to make them more honest. They did not want to learn thrift, or cleanliness, or common sense. They only wanted to be filthy, and lazy, and corrupt, and thievish, in the immemorial way transmitted from their fathers. They wanted no new-fangled virtues. Any wrong they did, such as kniving a neighbour or lifting a calf, was put up in a bundle, as they put up weeds to burn, and was thrust away till Easter, when the priest washed it clean, as once a year their women washed their shirts in running water. That was the use of priests and women. To the people of this volcanic and historic soil the new-comer, Il Ministro as he was called, was accursed as ‘the northerner’: a northerner whether from Bologna or Milano, whether from Russia or Poland, made no difference to them; they did not know one of those names from another; everybody at the back of their mountains beyond the barrier of Monte Amiata sent the snow, and the bad winds, and meant the North to them. He was like a bad wind to them. The very good-will which he bore them was more offence than would have seemed to them his enmity, since the latter they would have understood; the former seemed to them only a deep-laid duplicity to entrap them to their ruin.