After his burial I began my search for the woman whose face I had seen in the crowd. My mother never asked me whence I came or where I went. The death of Phoebus had destroyed the trembling joy with which she had seen me return to her: happiness came to her too late. When grief has sat long by one hearth, it is impossible to warm the ashes of joy again: they are cold and dead for ever. My time passed sadly; a terrible calmness had succeeded to the gayety and noise of my life; a frightful silence had replaced the frenzied shouts, the boisterous laughter, of the people: sometimes it seemed to me that I had died, not Phoebus. The constant hope of finding the woman I had seen but once occupied me always. I roamed the country without ceasing, always with that single hope before me. Days became weeks: I wandered miserably, like a dog without master or home. One day I saw her. Having on my shoulder my _girella_, which gave me a pretext for straying along the river-side, I came to that part of Etruria where (so I had used to learn from the school-books in my childhood) the Etruscans in ancient times drew up in order of battle to receive Fabius. The country is pretty about there, or at least it seemed so to me. The oak woods descend to the edge of the Tiber: from them one sees the snow of the Apennines; the little towns of Giove and Penna are white on the Umbrian hills; in the low fields the vine and the olive and the maize and the wheat grow together. Here one finds our Lagherello, which I had heard scholars say is no other than the Lake Vadimon of which Pliny speaks. Of that I know nothing: it is a poor little pool now, filled with rushes, peopled with frogs. By the side of this pool I saw her again: she looked at me. Like a madman I plunged into the water, but the reeds and the lilies entangled me in their meshes: the long grasses and water-weeds were netted into an impenetrable mass. I stood there up to my waist in water, incapable of movement, like the poor cattle of which Pliny tells, who used to mistake all this verdure for dry land, and so drifted out into the middle of the lake. She looked at me, laughed a little, and disappeared. Before sunset I had learned who she was from a peasant who came there to cut the reeds.