High mass over, the crowd was speedily sucked in by the various houses, and the most important part of the day’s business, the feasting, began. My landlord took us to the house of one of his friends, a keen sportsman who had just returned from the low-lands of the Maremma to settle again in his native place. The phrase “Nature’s gentleman,” has grown too commonplace for use nowadays; but it is the only expression which gives an exact description of our host. He was a tall, finely-built man, small-flanked, broad-chested, with grey, bushy hair, thinnish brown face, aquiline nose, bright intelligent brown eyes, and a peculiar grace in every movement. One of his two daughters (hard-working girls, both of them) had all his classical ease of motion, and a winning suavity and urbanity of voice and manner, that made one envy the clowns she was addressing. The blood of some superior race seemed to reveal itself also in the fine figure, clean-cut features, and wide intelligent grey eyes shaded by thick black hair, of the youngest son. Our host told us stories of the Maremma. He had once been a thriving farmer there, so he said, but American competition was proving too much for Italian agriculture, burdened as this last is with heavy taxes; and in the last years of his stay there it had not paid him even to reap the crops: he had let them lie rotting on the ground. He told us, too, of the terrible fever, and the terrible remedies by which it used to be combated. He had had as many as fifty leeches on the pit of his stomach at once, in one bad attack. Then he and my landlord began to relate tales of the experiences of their common shooting expeditions in past times, and our host fell on an incident of quite mediæval colouring. He was travelling once with a friend and his wife, he said, in the days before railroads. His friend was taken ill on the road, and on their arrival at the inn where they intended to pass the night, asked for some broth. “Certainly not,” was the answer; “no broth on Friday or Saturday at my house, however ill you are.” So the poor man said, Well, he would go to bed, and see what rest would do for him. To his horror he found he was to be separated from his wife, who was assigned a room on the opposite side of the inn. He rebelled, saying he was ill and wanted her care; but mine host was inexorable; to-day was Friday, he repeated, and on that day it was the rule, in his house, that the men should sleep on one side and the women on the other.