I Followed The Railway For A Little While And At Last Crossed It, Penetrated Through A Thick Brushwood, Forded A Nasty Little Stream, And Found Myself Again On The Main Road, Wishing Heartily I Had Never Left It.

It was still at least seven miles to Lugano, and though all the way was downhill, yet fatigue threatened me.

These short cuts over marshy land and through difficult thickets are not short cuts at all, and I was just wondering whether, although it was already evening, I dared not rest a while, when there appeared at a turn in the road a little pink house with a yard all shaded over by a vast tree; there was also a trellis making a roof over a plain bench and table, and on the trellis grew vines.

'Into such houses,' I thought, 'the gods walk when they come down and talk with men, and such houses are the scenes of adventures. I will go in and rest.'

So I walked straight into the courtyard and found there a shrivelled brown-faced man with kindly eyes, who was singing a song to himself. He could talk a little French, a little English, and his own Italian language. He had been to America and to Paris; he was full of memories; and when I had listened to these and asked for food and drink, and said I was extremely poor and would have to bargain, he made a kind of litany of 'I will not cheat you; I am an honest man; I also am poor,' and so forth.

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