epherds when they were near enough for her to see
them. As she had left Eboli, she had seen one, driving a flock of sheep
along the high road, and she had wondered whether there were many of his
kind. He was a magnificently handsome young fellow of two or three and
twenty, dressed in loose brown velveteens, with a belted jacket and a
spotless shirt, strong, well-made shoes, leathern gaiters, and a flat
cap, and he carried the traditional hatchet of the southern shepherd. He
strode along with a light and easy gait, and looked more like a young
gentleman in a rather eccentric but well-made shooting-dress, than like
a herdsman. But he was from Eboli itself, and a native would have told
her that the people of Eboli were "exceedingly fanatic about dress." The
men and the clothes she now saw were very different; tall, grim figures
in vast and often ragged brown cloaks that reached almost to their feet;
small, battered, pointed hats; rough, muddy hose that should have once
been white; shoes that loaded their steps like lead; and they moved
slowly, with bent heads, rough, long-unshaven faces, eyes too hollow,
horny hands too lean--wild, half-fed creatures, worse off than the
flocks they drove, by all the degrees of the inverse ratio between man,
who needs man's help, and beast, that needs only nature.

There was that same grimness--there is no other word--in the faces of
almost all the people Veronica now met, as the road wound higher and
then descended through Oliveto, the first of the mountain villages.
There was in them all the look of men and women who know that the
struggle is hopeless, but who will not, or cannot, die and be at rest.
There was the expression of those who will no longer make any effort
except for the bare, hard bread that keeps them above ground, and who,
having toiled through the terrible daylight that is their cruel
task-master, lie down as they are, when work is done, to forget daylight
and life if they can, in a mercifully heavy sleep. But before their
bones are half rested, the pitiless day is upon them, and drives them
out to labour again till they are stupid with weariness and only not
faint enough to faint and forget.

The people sometimes stood still and stared at the young princess as she
drove by, with the old priest beside her. But the majority went on,
indifferent and far beyond anything like interest or curiosity. Only the
shepherds' great cur dogs, of all breeds and colours, but always big a