I experienced an indescribable feeling of delight in rambling alone through this romantic scenery on a hot summer's day, beneath a perfectly cloudless sky, without a breath of wind to rustle the leaves of the shady trees, amidst a solitude like that of the desert, and a silence unbroken save by the chirping of the birds and the chattering of the cicala, or at intervals, perchance, the distant shepherd's pipe, or the wild barbaric chant of the mountaineer. With what rapture, I remember, would I step from crag to crag, trampling the bush and bramble under my feet, and startling away the green lizards in my path! Quaffing the beauties of nature at every step, the dreamy influence of the balmy atmosphere intensifying my feelings for the beautiful to an abnormal degree. It was on one of these sultry days during my rambles that I was taking shelter from the burning sun under the shade of a wide-spreading oak, reclining lazily on the soft moss, and listening to the chirping of the grass-hoppers, when my ear was attracted by the sound of the bleating of goats, and shortly afterwards I heard the voices of two peasants which seemed familiar to me. They were discoursing together in the dialect of their own village, a very different lingo from the pure Tuscan, and perfectly unintelligible to one lately coming from Rome, yet a prolonged stay in these parts rendered it familiar to me. I recognised the voices as belonging, one of them to a goatherd who supplied me with milk in the morning, the other to a peasant who possessed a vineyard, a small barrel of whose wine I had bought the day before. "Ohe! Antonio," cried Guiseppe, the goatherd, to his friend, "so I hear you have sold a _quarteruolo_ of wine to the Signor Inglese (the English gentleman) who lives on the hill." "Well, Compar,"[8] said his friend, "and what of that?" "I suppose you made him pay well for it, eh?" demanded the goatherd. "Well," answered Antonio, "I make my friends pay sixteen pauls the _quarteruolo_, but he, being an Englishman, I charged double." "What!" exclaimed the goatherd, "thirty-two pauls for a _quarteruolo_!" "Ay, and he paid me money down without haggling about the price, like one of our '_paini_.'[9] These Englishmen are real gentlemen--they let themselves be cheated without wincing. Those are the sort of men I like to deal with. I was quite angry with myself afterwards at not having asked four times the sum; he would be sure to have paid me." "_Accidente!_ what a swindler!" exclaimed Guiseppe. "Well, they tell me these English roll in wealth; that gold is as common in their country as beans here. They say the streets are paved with it. How I should like to go to those parts, and come back with my pockets filled with the gold that these idiots throw away like dross. I wouldn't fatigue myself all day long in the mountains for a piece of '_maritozza_'[10] or a dish of '_polenta_.'"[11]