The Driver Was Asleep, His Head On The Shady
Side.
The devil tempted me, and without one struggle against
temptation, nay with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped up
behind, and putting my head also on the shady side (there were soft
sacks for a bed) I very soon was pleasantly asleep.
We lay side by side for hour after hour, and the day rose on to noon;
the sun beat upon our feet, but our heads were in the shade and we
slept heavily a good and honest sleep: he thinking that he was alone,
but I knowing that I was in company (a far preferable thing), and I
was right and he was wrong. And the heat grew, and sleep came out of
that hot sun more surely than it does out of the night air in the
north. But no dreams wander under the noon.
From time to time one or the other of us would open our eyes drowsily
and wonder, but sleep was heavy on us both, and our minds were sunk in
calm like old hulls in the dark depths of the sea where there are no
storms.
We neither of us really woke until, at the bottom of the hill which
rises into Acquapendente, the oxen stopped. This halt woke us up;
first me and then my companion. He looked at me a moment and laughed.
He seemed to have thought all this while that I was some country
friend of his who had taken a lift; and I, for my part, had made more
or less certain that he was a good fellow who would do me no harm.
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