clattering along in groups, joined in
singing the strange tuneless songs, memories of Saracen days, which
Vanno had heard on his first mountain walk. The old men did not sing.
They climbed stolidly, with heads and shoulders bent, yet not as if
discouraged by the thought of the long, steep way before them before
they could rest at home. They had the air of taking life as it was,
entirely for granted.

The darkness was bleached with a sheen of stars, and the pulsing beams
that shot across the sky from the lighthouses of Cap Ferrat and Antibes.
Here and there, too, an electric lamp dangled from a wire over the mule
path, and revealed a flash of white teeth in a dark face or struck a
glint from a pair of deep Italian eyes. But they were the eyes and the
teeth of young men, or of girls climbing with baskets of washing on
their heads. The old men looked down, watching their own footsteps; and
their stooping figures were vague and shadowy as ships that pass in the
night, not to be recognized if seen again by daylight. Now and then a
little old woman stumbled up the path, driving a donkey which tripped
daintily along in silent primness, under a load of fresh-cut olive
branches. The sound of the tiny feet on the stones and the swish of
olive leaves against the wall added to the poetry of the night for
Vanno, though he reflected that it was all commonplace enough to the
donkeys and the women, who were as important as he in the scheme of
things. After all, it was but a question of thinking!

Boys coming up from some late errand, played at being soldiers, and
sprang out at each other from behind jutting corners of rock, imitating
the firing of guns, or uttering explosive cries.

Vanno felt a great kindness for all the world, and especially for these
people who--almost all of them--had the blood of Italy in their veins.
He remembered the cure's saying with a smile that even now, if all
Italians were banished from the French coast between Cannes and Mentone,
the Riviera would be emptied of more than half its inhabitants; and it
gave him a warm feeling in his heart to be surrounded by people of his
own blood, at this moment of his great happiness. He would have liked to
give these men something to make them happy also, for he knew that they
were poor, and that those who were most fortunate were those who worked
hardest. Each shadowy figure, as it passed on its way up the mountain,
gave out a faint odour, not disagreeable or dirty,