Not at all thirsty, thank you."
"We have seen you drink without being thirsty. Just one glass," they
pleaded. "It will make you live a hundred years."
"No. Let us talk about something else."
"No? Then what shall we tell our mother? That we brought you here, and
that you were afraid of a little mouthful of acqua santa? We thought you
had more courage. We thought you could strangle a lion."
"Something will happen," I said, as I drained that glass.
Nothing happened for a few hours.
Two days' rest is working wonders....
I profit by the occasion of this slight indisposition to glance
backwards - and forwards.
I am here, at Alatri, on the 22 June: so much is beyond contestation.
A later page of that old diary of dates. August 31: Palombara. Well I
remember the hot walk to Palombara!
August 3: Mons Lucretilis, that classical mountain from whose summit I
gazed at the distant Velino which overtops like a crystal of amethyst
all the other peaks. This was during one of my two visits to Licenza.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have
noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing
so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely
commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking
almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in
whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral - aloft
under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my
two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who
told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing
would induce me to set down here.
