diom.

It was from none of these, however, that I got my first clue, but from
the boatman who took me out at sunset for the idle, lovely hour that I
love best in Italy and which her name always brings before me.
Rafaello was a big, burned creature, beautiful as Antinoeus and as
simple and faithful as a dog. He took a huge delight in teaching me
all the quaint terms of his fisher dialect, and many a deep argument
have we held, I gazing into the burning sulphur of the clouds, he with
mobile features flashing and classic brown fingers never still, while
he expounded to me his strange, half pagan, half Christian fatalism.
He was of the South, "well toward the Boot Heel, signore," but Love,
the master mariner, had driven him out of his course and brought him
within fifty miles of Rome to court a fickle beauty of the hills,
whose brother had come down for the wood-cutting and was friendly to
his suit.

"These marsh people are a poor sort," said Rafaello contemptuously.
"Not that I would take a wife from them, God forbid! Here they have
great tracts, with buffalo and wild pig--yes, I have seen them myself,
rooting through the wild oak--but have they the brains to invite the
foreign _signori_ to hunt there and earn fortunes by it? No. Have they
even strength to cut their own timber? Again, no. They lie and shiver
with malaria. Not that they are not a little better now," he admitted,
shifting the sail so that we looked toward the headlands of Sardinia,
a cloud of lateens drifting like gnats between, "now they are
ploughing on the plains, the boats are out, the bullocks are busy, and
the wind is putting a little strength into the poor creatures. I swear
the best man among them is an old woman I took across in my _felucca_
to pleasure my girl's brother--she tended him once when he chopped
through his foot near her hut just on the edge of the hills. Seventy
years, or nearly, and tough and wiry yet, and can help neatly with a
boat. And money laid by, too, but is she idle? Never. She spins her
hemp and weaves osiers into baskets and changes them for goats' hams.
That with _polenta_ keeps her all winter--and well, too. She is very
close. The money, no one knows where it came from."

[Illustration: SHE SPINS HER HEMP AND WEAVES OSIERS INTO BASKETS AND
CHANGES THEM FOR GOATS' HAMS]

Thus Rafaello babbled on, steering cleverly and suddenly into one of
the vast, unhealthy lagoons that shelter so many of the winged winter
visitors of