autiful, something
men would be glad of, if only I could be where they would care for it."

"We do care," said the girl gently.

"Oh, in a way. That is not what I mean," said the boy, with a little
impatience which daily grew on him more, for the associates of his life.
"You all care; you all sing; it is as the finches do in the fields,
without knowing at all what it is that you do. You are all like birds.
You pipe--pipe--pipe, as you eat, as you work, as you play. But what
music do we ever have in the churches? Who amongst you really likes all
that music when I play it off the old scores that Gigi says were written
by such great men, any better than you like the tinkling of the
mandolines when you dance in the threshing barns? I am sure you all like
the mandolines best. I know nothing here. I do not even know whether
what I do is worth much or nothing. I think if I could hear great music
once--if I could go to Florence----"

"To Florence?" echoed Palma.

* * *

The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without seeing one
league beyond the fields of his labour, and the village that he is
registered at, married at, and buried at, and which is the very apex of
the earth to him. Women will spin and plait and hoe and glean within
half a dozen miles of some great city whose name is an art glory in the
mouths of scholars, and never will have seen it, never once perhaps,
from their birth down to their grave. A few miles of vine-bordered
roads, a breadth of corn-land, a rounded hill, a little red roof under a
mulberry tree, a church tower with a saint upon the roof, and a bell
that sounds over the walnut-trees--these are their world: they know and
want to know no other.

A narrow life, no doubt, yet not without much to be said for it. Without
unrest, without curiosity, without envy; clinging like a plant to the
soil; and no more willing to wander than the vinestakes which they
thrust into the earth.

To those who have put a girdle round the earth with their footsteps, the
whole world seems much smaller than does the hamlet or farm of his
affections to the peasant:--and how much poorer! The vague, dreamful
wonder of an untravelled distance--of an untracked horizon--has after
all more romance in it than lies in the whole globe run over in a year.

Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon without a
wish that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas
was our