staves, and their flocks went before them.  Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,—­“Ah, lords! is not this a miserable country?  The people are poor and the air is cold.  It is an unhappy land!” And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused.  We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country.  If the air was cold, it was also pure.

We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city.  He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless.  He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.

The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities.  There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many.  Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza.  The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it.  The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it.  Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been our landmark in the ascent.

Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife’s invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen—­welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes and black with figs.  Again came from the women here the wail of the shepherds:  “Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?” and I began to doubt whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether fabulous.  They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came in.