Nothing could
persuade the master of the house but that I was a very poor man who
needed sleep, and so good and generous was this old man that my
protests seemed to him nothing but the excuses and shame of poverty.
He asked me where I was going. I said, 'To Rome.' He came out with a
lantern to the stable, and showed me there a manger full of hay,
indicating that I might sleep in it... His candle flashed upon the
great silent oxen standing in rows; their enormous horns, three times
the length of what we know in England, filled me with wonder ... Well!
(may it count to me as gain!), rather than seem to offend him I lay
down in that manger, though I had no more desire to sleep than has the
flittermouse in our Sussex gloamings; also I was careful to offer no
money, for that is brutality. When he had left me I took the
opportunity for a little rest, and lay on my back in the hay
wide-awake and staring at darkness.
The great oxen champed and champed their food with a regular sound; I
remembered the steerage in a liner, the noise of the sea and the
regular screw, for this it exactly resembled. I considered in the
darkness the noble aspect of these beasts as I had seen them in the
lantern light, and I determined when I got to Rome to buy two such
horns, and to bring them to England and have them mounted for drinking
horns - great drinking horns, a yard deep - and to get an engraver to
engrave a motto for each. On the first I would have -
King Alfred was in Wantage born
He drank out of a ram's horn.
Here is a better man than he,
Who drinks deeper, as you see.
Thus my friends drinking out of it should lift up their hearts and no
longer be oppressed with humility. But on the second I determined for
a rousing Latin thing, such as men shouted round camp fires in the
year 888 or thereabouts; so, the imagination fairly set going and
taking wood-cock's flight, snipe-fashion, zigzag and devil-may-care-
for-the-rules, this seemed to suit me -
_Salve, cornu cornuum!
Cornutorum vis Boum.
Munus excellent Deum!
Gregis o praesidium!
Sitis desiderium!
Dignum cornuum cornu
Romae memor salve tu!
Tibi cornuum cornuto - _
LECTOR. That means nothing.
AUCTOR. Shut up!
_Tibi cornuum cornuto
Tibi clamo, te saluto
Salve cornu cornuum!
Fortunatam da Domunt!_
And after this cogitation and musing I got up quietly, so as not to
offend the peasant: and I crept out, and so upwards on to the crest of
the hill.
But when, after several miles of climbing, I neared the summit, it was
already beginning to be light. The bareness and desert grey of the
distance I had crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only the
Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the northward, was more gentle, and
softened the scene with distant woods.
