And when, the rough white cloth being spread in the visitor’s honour, the family cluster round the mediæval oil-lamp that makes a little ruddy blot in the darkness beyond, we are more than ever struck at the wonderful ease and good-breeding displayed in word and movement by these peasants who do the hardest work and live the roughest of lives. The women especially have something indescribably lady-like about them, as they sit eating contentedly, perhaps without any plate, or pass from one to another one of the pocket-knives which are the only cutting implements on the table; or, it may be, question “my man,” as to the length of time that will be needed on the morrow to gather in the olives from a certain part of the _podere_. The more one has to do with these Tuscan peasants the more constrained does one feel to adopt the cant phrase, and call them emphatically Nature’s aristocracy. A TUSCAN FARMHOUSE OF all my experiences among the Tuscan peasants of the Pistoiese, none, perhaps, was more thoroughly characteristic than a three days’ visit at a farm-house just above the village I was staying in. I had just returned from the woods with my hammock, and was feeling rather listless in the absence of my peasant companion, when the farmer’s wife, who happened to be in the village that day, said to me, half joking, half in earnest:— “Come home with me to the Cavi, Signorina; come and sleep there to-night.” I jumped at the proposal, borrowed a big kerchief from my landlady, put a few things into it in the most approved peasant fashion, and we started off together. I had already been to this farm with some friends for a picnic. On that day the people were threshing and treading the straw; and the stone-paved _aia_ or threshing-floor before the house was bright with the corn, and resonant with the sound of the flail. Then, when the sun’s rays were less strong—for the peasants only thresh in the bright sunlight—two cows and a donkey were produced, and led round and round, knee-deep in the straw, to break it up for their winter food. I had been much struck at the time by the extreme primitiveness of the labour, though I could not help confessing that the swinging flails, yellow corn, and lazily moving animals formed a very much more picturesque contrast to the low grey stone house, and the blackness of its three open doorways, than any threshing-machine could have done. Nothing of the kind was going on, however, when my hostess and I emerged from the chestnut woods on this cool September evening. The farmer, just back from his digging in the fields,—there are no ploughs,—was taking a meditative walk in front of the house.